to her husband in 1820. He was then sixty-nine, and she a
young girl of twenty years old. He was eighty or ninety years
old when he died, and she survived as his widow for many years.
Something came up on the subject of longevity which induced
me to refer to this story and ask Lord Coleridge if it were
true. We were then riding out together; "Yes," said he, "there,"
pointing to a dwelling-place in full sight, "is the house
where she lived."

His Lordship asked me about an American Judge with whom he
had some acquaintance. I told him that I thought his reputation
was rather that of a jurist than a Judge. "Oh, yes," said
he, "a jurist is a man who knows something about the law of
every country but his own."

Lord Coleridge had a good reputation as a story-teller. It
was pleasant to get an auditor who seemed to like to hear
the stories which have got rather too commonplace to be worth
telling over here. He had a great admiration for President
Lincoln, and was eager to hear anything anybody had to tell
of him. I told him the famous story of Lincoln's reply to
the man who had left with him his poem to read, when he gave
it back. "If anybody likes that sort of thing, it's just
the sort of thing they'd like." I overheard his Lordship,
as he circulated about the room, a little while afterward,
repeating the story to various listeners.

He thought Matthew Arnold the greatest living Englishman.
He spoke with great respect of Carlyle. He said: "Emerson
was an imitator of Carlyle, and got his thoughts from him."
I could not stand that. It seemed to me that he had probably
never read a page of Emerson in his life, and had got his
notion from some writer for a magazine, before either of these
great men was well known. I took the liberty of saying, with
some emphasis, "Emerson was a far profounder and saner intellect
than Carlyle." To which he said, "Why, what do you say?"
I repeated what I had said, and he received the statement
with great politeness, but, of course, without assent.

During this summer I paid a visit to Moyle's Court, near
Southampton, formerly owned by Lady Alice Lisle, whose daughter
married Leonard Hoar, President of Harvard College. Leonard
Hoar was the brother of my ancestor, John Hoar of Concord,
and the son of Charles Hoar, Sheriff of Gloucester. There
is a statement in an old account of some Puritan worthies
that I have seen, to the effect that John Hoar and Leonard
married sisters.