tting

"E.B.B."

How often have I seen Kenyon and Procter chirping together over an old
quarto that had floated down from an early century, or rejoicing
together over a well-worn letter in a family portfolio of treasures!
They were a pair of veteran brothers, and there was never a flaw in
their long and loving intercourse. In a letter which Procter wrote to me
in March, 1857, he thus refers to his old friend, then lately dead:
"Everybody seems to be dying hereabouts,--one of my colleagues, one of
my relations, one of my servants, three of them in one week, the last
one in my own house. And now I seem fit for little else myself. My dear
old friend Kenyon is dead. There never was a man, take him for all in
all, with more amiable, attractive qualities. A kind friend, a good
master, a generous and judicious dispenser of his wealth, honorable,
sweet-tempered, and serene, and genial as a summer's day. It is true
that he has left me a solid mark of his friendship. I did not expect
anything; but if to like a man sincerely deserved such a mark of his
regard, I deserved it. I doubt if he has left one person who really
liked him more than I did. Yes, one--I think one--a woman.... I get old
and weak and stupid. That pleasant journey to Niagara, that dip into
your Indian summer, all such thoughts are over. I shall never see Italy;
I shall never see Paris. My future is before me,--a very limited
landscape, with scarcely one old friend left in it. I see a smallish
room, with a bow-window looking south, a bookcase full of books, three
or four drawings, and a library chair and table (once the property of my
old friend Kenyon--I am writing on the table now), and you have the
greater part of the vision before you. Is this the end of all things? I
believe it is pretty much like most scenes in the fifth act, when the
green (or black) curtain is about to drop and tell you that the play of
_Hamlet_ or of John Smith is over. But wait a little. There will be
another piece, in which John Smith the younger will figure, and quite
eclipse his old, stupid, wrinkled, useless, time-slaughtered parent. The
king is dead,--long live the king!"

Kenyon was very fond of Americans, Professor Ticknor and Mr. George S.
Hillard being especially dear to him. I remember hearing him say one day
that the "best prepared" young foreigner he had ever met, who had come
to see Europe, was Mr. Hillard. One day at his dinner-table, in the
presence of Mrs. Jameson,