ood from him that it was probable he should call at
Rydal before his return to his own country. I need not say to you I
shall be glad, truly glad, to see him both for his own sake, and as so
nearly connected with you. My absence from home lately was not of more
than three weeks. I took the journey to London solely to pay my respects
to the Queen upon my appointment to the Laureateship upon the decease of
my friend Mr. Southey. The weather was very cold, and I caught an
inflammation in one of my eyes, which rendered my stay in the south very
uncomfortable. I nevertheless did, in respect to the object of my
journey, all that was required. The reception given me by the Queen at
her ball was most gracious. Mrs. Everett, the wife of your minister,
among many others, was a witness to it, without knowing who I was. It
moved her to the shedding of tears. This effect was in part produced, I
suppose, by American habits of feeling, as pertaining to a republican
government. To see a grey-haired man of seventy-five years of age,
kneeling down in a large assembly to kiss the hand of a young woman, is
a sight for which institutions essentially democratic do not prepare a
spectator of either sex, and must naturally place the opinions upon
which a republic is founded, and the sentiments which support it, in
strong contrast with a government based and upheld as ours is. I am not,
therefore, surprised that Mrs. Everett was moved, as she herself
described to persons of my acquaintance, among others to Mr. Rogers the
poet. By the by, of this gentleman, now I believe in his eighty-third
year, I saw more than of any other person except my host, Mr. Moxon,
while I was in London. He is singularly fresh and strong for his years,
and his mental faculties (with the exception of his memory a little) not
at all impaired. It is remarkable that he and the Rev. W. Bowles were
both distinguished as poets when I was a school-boy, and they have
survived almost all their eminent contemporaries, several of whom came
into notice long after them. Since they became known, Burns, Cowper,
Mason the author of 'Caractacus' and friend of Gray, have died. Thomas
Warton, Laureate, then Byron, Shelley, Keats, and a good deal later[208]
Scott, Coleridge, Crabbe, Southey, Lamb, the Ettrick Shepherd, Cary the
translator of Dante, Crowe the author of 'Lewesdon Hill,' and others of
more or less distinction, have disappeared. And now of English poets,
advanced in life, I cann