ries) eager to
acknowledge every contemporary's merit; always kind and affable to
the young members of his calling; in his professional bargains and
mercantile dealings delicately honest and grateful; one of the most
charming masters of our lighter language; the constant friend to us and
our nation; to men of letters doubly dear, not for his wit and genius
merely, but as an exemplar of goodness, probity, and pure life:--I don't
know what sort of testimonial will be raised to him in his own country,
where generous and enthusiastic acknowledgment of American merit is
never wanting: but Irving was in our service as well as theirs; and as
they have placed a stone at Greenwich yonder in memory of that gallant
young Bellot, who shared the perils and fate of some of our Arctic
seamen, I would like to hear of some memorial raised by English writers
and friends of letters in affectionate remembrance of the dear and good
Washington Irving.

As for the other writer, whose departure many friends, some few most
dearly-loved relatives, and multitudes of admiring readers deplore, our
republic has already decreed his statue, and he must have known that he
had earned this posthumous honor. He is not a poet and man of letters
merely, but citizen, statesman, a great British worthy. Almost from the
first moment when he appears, amongst boys, amongst college students,
amongst men, he is marked, and takes rank as a great Englishman. All
sorts of successes are easy to him: as a lad he goes down into the arena
with others, and wins all the prizes to which he has a mind. A place in
the senate is straightway offered to the young man. He takes his seat
there; he speaks, when so minded, without party anger or intrigue, but
not without party faith and a sort of heroic enthusiasm for his cause.
Still he is poet and philosopher even more than orator. That he may have
leisure and means to pursue his darling studies, he absents himself for
a while, and accepts a richly-remunerative post in the East. As learned
a man may live in a cottage or a college common-room; but it always
seemed to me that ample means and recognized rank were Macaulay's as of
right. Years ago there was a wretched outcry raised because Mr. Macaulay
dated a letter from Windsor Castle, where he was staying. Immortal
gods! Was this man not a fit guest for any palace in the world? or a fit
companion for any man or woman in it? I dare say, after Austerlitz, the
old K. K. court officials