his wounds (if he has any) for public gaze. When you see Dr. Holmes,
pray tell him how much I and my wife liked his son.

"We are at the present moment rusticating at Malvern Wells. We are
on the side of a great hill (which you would call small in America),
and our intercourse is only with the flowers and bees and swallows
of the season. Sometimes we encounter a wasp, which I suppose comes
from over seas!

"The Storys are living two or three miles off, and called upon us a
few days ago. You have not seen _his_ Sibyl, which I think very
fine, and as containing a _very great_ future. But the young poets
generally disappoint us, and are too content with startling us into
admiration of their first works, and then go to sleep.

"I wish that I had, when younger, made more notes about my
contemporaries; for, being of no faction in politics, it happens
that I have known far more literary men than any other person of my
time. In counting up the names of persons known to me who were, in
some way or other, _connected_ with literature, I reckoned up more
than one hundred. But then I have had more than sixty years to do
this in. My first acquaintance of this sort was Bowles, the poet.
This was about 1805.

"Although I can scarcely write, I am able to say, in conclusion,
that I am

"Very sincerely yours,

"B.W. PROCTER."

Procter was an ardent student of the works of our older English
dramatists, and he had a special fondness for such writers as Decker,
Marlowe, Heywood, Webster, and Fletcher. Many of his own dramatic scenes
are modelled on that passionate and romantic school. He had great relish
for a good modern novel, too; and I recall the titles of several which
he recommended warmly for my perusal and republication in America. When
I first came to know him, the duties of his office as a Commissioner
obliged him to travel about the kingdom, sometimes on long journeys, and
he told me his pocket companion was a cheap reprint of Emerson's
"Essays," which he found such agreeable reading that he never left home
without it. Longfellow's "Hyperion" was another of his favorite books
during the years he was on duty.

Among the last agreeable visits I made to the old poet was one with
reference to a proposition of his own to omit several songs and other
short poems from a new issue of his works then in press. I stoutly
opposed the ign