ed in only first-rate works of art, Leslie
used to take round the guests and make us admire the Raphaels and
Correggios. Inserted in the walls on each side of the mantel-piece, like
tiles, were several of Turner's original oil and water-color drawings,
which that supreme artist had designed to illustrate Rogers's "Poems"
and "Italy." Long before Ruskin made those sketches world-famous in his
"Modern Painters," I have heard Leslie point out their beauties with as
fine an enthusiasm. He used to say that they purified the whole
atmosphere round St. James Place!

Procter had a genuine regard for Count d'Orsay, and he pointed him out
to me one day sitting in the window of his club, near Gore House,
looking out on Piccadilly. The count seemed a little past his prime, but
was still the handsomest man in London. Procter described him as a
brilliant person, of special ability, and by no means a mere dandy.

I first saw Procter's friend, John Forster, the biographer of Goldsmith
and Dickens, in his pleasant rooms, No. 58 Lincoln's Inn Fields. He was
then in his prime, and looked brimful of energy. His age might have been
forty, or a trifle onward from that mile-stone, and his whole manner
announced a determination to assert that nobody need prompt _him_. His
voice rang loud and clear, up stairs and down, everywhere throughout his
premises. When he walked over the uncarpeted floor, you _heard_ him
walk, and he meant you should. When _he_ spoke, nobody required an
ear-trumpet; the deaf never lost a syllable of his manly utterances.
Procter and he were in the same Commission, and were on excellent terms,
the younger officer always regarding the elder with a kind of leonine
deference.

It was to John Forster these charming lines were addressed by Barry
Cornwall, when the poet sent his old friend a present of Shakespeare's
Works. A more exquisite compliment was never conveyed in verse so modest
and so perfect in simple grace:--

"I do not know a man who better reads
Or weighs the great thoughts of the book I send,--
Better than he whom I have called my friend
For twenty years and upwards. He who feeds
Upon Shakesperian pastures never needs
The humbler food which springs from plains below;
Yet may he love the little flowers that blow,
And him excuse who for their beauty pleads.

"Take then my Shakespeare to some sylvan nook;
And pray thee, in the name of Days of old,
Good-will and fri