ne of Guelphs in it--fair, blue-eyed,
shallow-brained, commonplace, yet with a simple kind of heartiness and
truth that make one somewhat good-natured towards them."

"I must see Dickens before I leave England," he wrote, commenting upon
the various tales he heard of him from henchmen and critics; but he
never did see him, nor Thackeray either, whom he perhaps wished still
more to meet. Thackeray visited America while we were abroad; and when
Dickens came to Boston to read, my father was dead. Nor did he see
Bulwer, an apostrophe by whom he quotes: "Oh, that somebody would invent
a new sin, that I might go in for it!" Tennyson he saw, but did not
speak with him. He sat at table, on one occasion, with Macaulay,
and remarked upon the superiority over his portraits of his actual
appearance. He made the acquaintance, which ripened into friendship,
in Italy, of Robert Browning and his wife, and of Coventry Patmore, the
author of "The Angel in the House," a poem which he greatly liked. But,
upon the whole, he came in contact with the higher class of literary
men in England less than with others, whom he was less likely to find
sympathetic.

One afternoon, when I had accompanied him to the consulate, there
entered a tall, active man, very well dressed, with black, thick-curling
hair and keen, blue eyes. He seemed under thirty years of age, but had
the self-confident manner of a man of the world, and a great
briskness of demeanor and speech. He sat down and began to tell of his
experiences; he had been all over the world, and knew everything about
the world's affairs, even the secrets of courts and the coming movements
of international politics. He was a striking, handsome, indomitable
figure, and aggressively American. When he went away, he left with my
father a book which he had written, with an engraved portrait of
the author for frontispiece. This volume, faded and shelf-worn, but
apparently unread, bound in the execrable taste of a generation and a
half ago, I recently found among my father's volumes. It bore on the
title-page the dashing signature of George Francis Train. Train saw
things in the large--in their cosmic relations; from us he was going
forth to make a fortune compared with which that of Monte Cristo would
be a trifle. He did make fortunes, I believe; but there seems to have
been in his blood a little too much of the elixir of life--more than he
could thoroughly digest. His development was arrested, or was c