perience of
friendship, not by the affection of nature.

"Arthur left Cambridge on taking his degree in January 1832. He
resided from that time with the Editor in London, having been
entered on the boards of the Inner Temple. It was greatly the
desire of the Editor that he should engage himself in the study
of the law; not merely with professional views, but as a useful
discipline for a mind too much occupied with habits of thought,
which, ennobling and important as they were, could not but
separate him from the every-day business of life, and might, by
their excess, in his susceptible temperament, be productive of
considerable mischief. He had, during the previous long
vacation, read with the Editor the Institutes of Justinian, and
the two works of Heineccius which illustrate them; and he now
went through Blackstone's Commentaries, with as much of other
law-books as, in the Editor's judgment, was required for a
similar purpose. It was satisfactory at that time to perceive
that, far from showing any of that distaste to legal studies
which might have been anticipated from some parts of his
intellectual character, he entered upon them not only with great
acuteness, but considerable interest. In the month of October
1832, he began to see the practical application of legal
knowledge in the office of an eminent conveyancer, Mr. Walters
of Lincoln's Inn Fields, with whom he continued till his
departure from England in the following summer.

"It was not, however, to be expected, or even desired by any who
knew how to value him, that he should at once abandon those
habits of study which had fertilized and invigorated his mind.
But he now, from some change or other in his course of thinking,
ceased in a great measure to write poetry, and expressed to more
than one friend an intention to give it up. The instances after
his leaving Cambridge were few. The dramatic scene between
Raffaelle and Fiammetta was written in 1832; and about the same
time he had a design to translate the _Vita Nuova_ of his
favorite Dante; a work which he justly prized, as the
development of that immense genius, in a kind of autobiography,
which best prepares us for a real insight into the _Divine
Comedy_. He rendered accordingly into verse most of the sonnets
which the _Vita Nuova_ contains; but the Edit