aragement of
his friend's ability and keenness. I recall his earnest but restrained
indignation one day, when some person compared Hazlitt with a diffusive
modern writer of notes on the theatre, and I remember with what
contempt, in his sweet forgivable way, the old man spoke of much that
passes nowadays for criticism. He said Hazlitt was exactly the opposite
of Lord Chesterfield, who advised his son, if he could not get at a
thing in a straight line, to try the serpentine one. There were no
crooked pathways in Hazlitt's intellect. His style is brilliant, but
never cloyed with ornamentation. Hazlitt's paper on Gifford was thought
by Procter to be as pungent a bit of writing as had appeared in his day,
and he quoted this paragraph as a sample of its biting justice: "Mr.
Gifford is admirably qualified for the situation he has held for many
years as editor of the 'Quarterly' by a happy combination of defects,
natural and acquired." In one of his letters to me Procter writes, "I
despair of the age that has forgotten to read Hazlitt."

Procter was a delightful prose writer, as well as a charming poet.
Having met in old magazines and annuals several of his essays and
stories, and admiring their style and spirit, I induced him, after much
persuasion, to collect and publish in America his prose works. The
result was a couple of volumes, which were brought out in Boston in
1853. In them there are perhaps no "thoughts that wander through
eternity," but they abound in fancies which the reader will recognize as
agile

"Daughters of the earth and sun."

In them there is nothing loud or painful, and whoever really loves "a
good book," and knows it to be such on trial, will find Barry Cornwall's
"Essays and Tales in Prose" most delectable reading. "Imparadised," as
Milton hath the word, on a summer hillside, or tented by the cool salt
wave, no better afternoon literature can be selected. One will never
meet with distorted metaphor or tawdry rhetoric in Barry's thoughtful
pages, but will find a calm philosophy and a beautiful faith, very
precious and profitable in these days of doubt and insecurity of
intellect. There is a respite and a sympathy in this fine spirit, and so
I commend him heartily in times so full of turmoil and suspicion as
these. One of the stories in the first volume of these prose writings,
called "The Man-Hunter," is quite equal in power to any of the graphic
pieces of a similar character ever written by De Q