7.

Procter's conversation was full of endless delight to his friends. His
"asides" were sometimes full of exquisite touches. I remember one
evening when Carlyle was present and rattling on against American
institutions, half comic and half serious, Procter, who sat near me,
kept up a constant underbreath of commentary, taking exactly the other
side. Carlyle was full of horse-play over the character of George
Washington, whom he never vouchsafed to call anything but George. He
said our first President was a good surveyor, and knew how to measure
timber, and that was about all. Procter kept whispering to me all the
while Carlyle was discoursing, and going over Washington's fine traits
to the disparagement of everything Carlyle was laying down as gospel. I
was listening to both these distinguished men at the same time, and it
was one of the most curious experiences in conversation I ever happened
to enjoy.

I was once present when a loud-voiced person of quality, ignorant and
supercilious, was inveighing against the want of taste commonly
exhibited by artists when they chose their wives, saying they almost
always selected inferior women. Procter, sitting next to me, put his
hand on my shoulder, and, with a look expressive of ludicrous pity and
contempt for the idiotic speaker, whispered, "And yet Vandyck married
the daughter of Earl Gower, poor fellow!" The mock solemnity of
Procter's manner was irresistible. It had a wink in it that really
embodied the genius of fun and sarcasm.

Talking of the ocean with him one day, he revealed this curious fact:
although he is the author of one of the most stirring and popular
sea-songs in the language,--

"The sea, the sea, the open sea!"--

he said he had rarely been upon the tossing element, having a great fear
of being made ill by it. I think he told me he had never dared to cross
the Channel even, and so had never seen Paris. He said, like many
others, he delighted to gaze upon the waters from a safe place on land,
but had a horror of living on it even for a few hours. I recalled to his
recollection his own lines,--

"I'm on the sea! I'm on the sea!
I am where I would ever be,"--

and he shook his head, and laughingly declared I must have misquoted his
words, or that Dibdin had written the piece and put "Barry Cornwall's"
signature to it. We had, I remember, a great deal of fun over the
poetical lies, as he called them, which bards in all ages had
perpetrate