with me, I think, and not with
what I read). I had become moody and fantastical for want of solid
wholesome mental occupation, and the excess of imaginative stimulus in
my life, and was possessed with a wild desire for an existence of lonely
independence, which seemed to my exaggerated notions the only one fitted
to the intellectual development in which alone I conceived happiness to
consist. Mrs. Jameson's "Diary of an Ennuyee," which I now read for the
first time, added to this desire for isolation and independence such a
passionate longing to go to Italy, that my brain was literally filled
with chimerical projects of settling in the south of Europe, and there
leading a solitary life of literary labor, which, together with the fame
I hoped to achieve by it, seemed to me the only worthy purpose of
existence. While under the immediate spell of her fascinating book, it
was of course very delightful to me to make Mrs. Jameson's acquaintance,
which I did at the house of our friends, Mr. and Mrs. Basil Montagu.
They were the friends of Coleridge, Hazlitt, Charles Lamb, Proctor
(Barry Cornwall, who married Mrs. Montagu's daughter), and were
themselves individually as remarkable, if not as celebrated, as many of
their more famous friends. Basil Montagu was the son of the Earl of
Sandwich and the beautiful Miss Wray, whose German lover murdered her at
the theatre by shooting her in her private box, and then blew his own
brains out. Mr. Montagu inherited ability, eccentricity, and personal
beauty, from his parents. His only literary productions that I am
acquainted with were a notice of Bacon and his works, which he published
in a small pamphlet volume, and another volume of extracts from some of
the fine prose writers of the seventeenth century. I have a general
impression that his personal intercourse gave a far better idea of his
intellectual ability than anything that he achieved either in his
profession or in letters.

His conversation was extremely vivid and sparkling, and the quaint
eccentricity of his manner added to the impression of originality which
he produced upon one. Very unlike the common run of people as he was,
however, he was far less so than his wife, who certainly was one of the
most striking and remarkable persons I have known. Her appearance was
extraordinary: she was much above middle height, with a beautiful figure
and face, the outline of which was of classical purity and severity,
while her whole carr