t!" With that hearty exclamation of disgust pulling up a brilliant
two-pound perch, the glory of the day! Next week's _Punch_ had a
pleasant comic sketch of this petty incident, thereby immortalised by
the famous "bottled leech."

It always struck me that Tenniel and he were a well-matched pair, in
kindliness, cleverness, and good looks; and I never can think of one
without the other--_arcades ambo; par nobile fratrum_.

Thackeray lived to have his full revenge of Dr. Birch, in our day the
reigning tyrant of Charterhouse; and Russell well deserved his
castigation both by pen and pencil.

Let me also give a brace of home sketches of Longfellow. I have had two
principal interviews with him in his beautiful home at Cambridge,
Massachusetts, at the wide interval between those visits of twenty-five
years. Of the first of these I record a few words from my American MS.
journal in 1851, adding some unwritten thoughts and recollections. On
April 16th, then, in the year just named, Longfellow wrote to me
cordially, and with much kindly appreciation, and soon after, calling on
me at Boston, took me off in his carriage over the flooded lowlands to
the ancient (for America) University of Cambridge, where the Queen
Anne-like colleges are nestled in fine old elms. He treated me, of
course, most hospitably, and had asked several friends to meet the
traveller; but one, a chief guest, was otherwise engaged, and so I
missed Lowell, to my great disappointment. It is not my "form" to detail
private conversation, nor to describe the Lares and Penates of sacred
domesticity; but I may reveal generally that I spent several golden
hours of intellectual communion with the Abbott Laurences, Ticknor,
Fields, Prescott, and Everett--illustrious names, which will
sufficiently indicate the reception they gave me. At this time of day I
cannot remember the thousand "winged speeches" that flew about that
genial board, and, as I failed, from conscientious motives, to record
them in my journal, I will not invent, after thirty-four years have
passed over my memory, with their crowds of other words and fancies. Be
this enough: I recollect to have asked Longfellow why he wrote
Excelsi_or_, and not the more grammatical Excelsi_us_, as the title to
one of his most famous poems. The reason is a curious one; he wrote
those stirring verses, by request, on the motto for the New York
coat-of-arms, which is legended not quite accurately, Excelsi_or_. And
when, in