back in "the days that are no more,"
and dined with him at the Garrick Club on the evening before I left
London for New York in 1860, when he gave me parting words of good
advice and asked me to write to him often. Then he added, "I am very
sorry you are going away, my dear boy; but perhaps you are doing a good
thing for yourself in getting out of this God-forsaken country. If I
were twenty years younger, and enjoyed the sea as you do, I might go
with you; but, if travel puts vitality into some men and kills others, I
should be one of the killed. What is one man's food is another's
poison."

He was my senior by more than twenty years, and no man that I have known
well was more calculated to inspire love and respect among his friends.
To know him personally, after only knowing him through his writings and
his tilts with those with whom he had "a crow to pick," was a
revelation. He had the reputation of being always "spoiling for a
fight," and the most touchy, crusty, and aggressive author of his time,
surpassing in this respect even Walter Savage Landor. But, though his
trenchant pen was sometimes made to do almost savage work, it was
generally in the chivalric exposure of some abuse or in the effort to
redress some grievous wrong. Then indeed he was fired with righteous
indignation. The cause had to be a just one, however, before he did
battle in its behalf, for no bold champion of the right ever had more
sterling honesty and sincerity in his character, or more common sense
and less quixotism.

His placid and genial manner and amiable characteristics in his
every-day home-life presented a striking contrast to his irritability
and indignation under a sense of injury; for whenever he considered
himself wronged or insulted his wrath boiled up with the suddenness of a
squall at sea. He resented a slight, real or imaginary, with unusual
outspokenness and vigor, and said, "I never forgive an injury or an
insult." But in this he may have done himself injustice. Generally, he
was one of the most sympathetic and even lovable of men, and his pure
and resolute manhood appeared in its truest light to those who knew him
best.

While genial in disposition, he could not be called either mirthful or
jovial, and so could neither easily turn any unpleasant incident off
with a joke or be turned off by one. He needed a little more of the
easy-going good humor and freedom from anxiety that fat men are
popularly supposed to possess to br