Pleasures of Memory. The volume failed to attract the public. Others which followed shared a similar fate. One of these called Italy the result of a visit he had paid to that country, deserved a better future in the estimation of its writer, who resolved to present it to the public in a more attractive form. He burned its unsold copies, spent two years in revising and enlarging it, had it illustrated by Goodall and Turner at great expense, and republished it. His outlay, his labour, and his belief in the venture were repaid by the sales of the book; chiefly owing to its beautiful engravings, for as Lady Blessington said the book "would have been dished were it not for the plates."

By this time he had established himself in a delightful house in St. James's Street, Westminster, overlooking the Green Park. Decorated by Flaxman and Stothard, hung with valuable pictures, filled with antique furniture, with statues and bronzes collected in his travels it was a veritable museum. On his death these sold for fifty thousand pounds, probably but an eighth of the sum they would now fetch. In this house which foreigners and Americans visiting London were anxious to see, he entertained at his famous breakfasts the most distinguished men and women of the time. Here it was that Lord Byron met and made friends with Tom Moore. Here Mary Somerville-a writer on science whose paper on "The Magnetic Properties of

the Violet Rays of the Solar Spectrum," presented to the Royal Society, gained her the honour of having her bust by Chantrey placed in its great room-met Macaulay, who in an incessant and overwhelming flow of words swept her interrupting observations aside. Here Edwin Landseer shouted stories of his dogs into the ear-trumpet of Harriet Martineau. Here Fanny Kemble was introduced to Lady Holland; and Alfred Tennyson to Mrs. Norton; here Disraeli appeared in fantastic attire adorned with many rings and hung with glittering chains. It was at his hospitable table William Macready donned his most gentlemanly airs and excited Bulwer to write for the stage. Here also D'Orsay uttered the impromptus made weeks previously, to find occasion for which he had carefully steered the conversation; here Lord Brougham barefacedly denied having sent from the country an account of his accidental death that he might learn the opinions expressed in the obituary notices; here Richard Monckton Milnes told his strange experiences of foreign travel; here Wordsworth on meeting Moore "took much pains to impress upon us how mistaken were those who set much value on Continental fame," the latter being popular abroad where the former was almost unknown; and here in Wordsworth's absence after the manner of friends, the corpulent and Rev. Sydney Smith read some of the poet's sonnets with punning words and parodies that nearly suffocated with laughter

all who heard him, after which he drove part of the way home with Lady Chatterton who was returning to her milliner a bonnet which he took from its box and "insisted on putting it on the top of his head as we drove through the park to the great amusement of the passers-by."

With a thin, long, keen face, unearthly in its pallor, wrinkled, and lit with piercing eyes under bushy brows, this cadaverous-looking host sat among his youthful, plump, noisy and happy guests like Death at the feast of life. With an attentive ear he listened to the wit, the epigrams, the stories he had prompted, occasionally contributing some biting sarcasms in his low, even voice. That a man so kindly in disposition, so generous to the distressed, should indulge in vitriolic words often surprised their hearers, to whom with a sardonic twinkle of the eye he explained, "I have a very weak voice, and if I did not say ill-natured things no one would hear what I said." That he was at heart ever mindful of his friend's interests, ever willing to aid them in trouble, none knew better than Thomas Campbell, a poet not free from the pressure of that poverty which formerly was the penalty of the inspired, who said to one who complained of Rogers and his stinging tongue, "Borrow five hundred pounds of him and he will never say a word against you until you want to repay him."

The poet just mentioned, Thomas Campbell, had

reached his sixtieth year on the Queen's accession, and survived it barely by seven years. Morbidly anxious for praise, sentimental, awkward in his movements, vacillating, confused, timid, too eager to exhilarate his spirits at the expense of his reason, he stumbled through life producing verses that occasionally were beautiful, editing magazines that were not always successful, writing biographies, delighting in society for which he was unsuited, and eternally contracting debts by the way. At his death June 15, 1844, Lady Morgan in confiding a recollection of him to her diary, gives us a picture of the man which brings him vitally before us. "Another gone. Poor Campbell," she wrote. "Oh for the day I first saw him led in by Sir Thomas Lawrence, up the great dining-room of the Priory, Stanmore, in the middle of one of the great Saturday dinners. I was seated between Lord Aberdeen and Manners Sutton-the latter gave Campbell his seat beside me-opposite to us was Lord Erskine and the Duchess of Gordon. Campbell was awkward, but went on taking his soup as if he was eating haggis in the Highlands; but when he put his knife in the salt-cellar to help himself to salt, every eyeglass was up, and the first poet of the age was voted the vulgarest of men. His coup de grâce however was in the evening, when he took the unapproachable Marquis of Aberdeen by the buttonhole that joined his star. Oh my stars. I thought we should all die

of it, knowing the extreme fastidiousness of the posses

sor of the star.

Next morning he went about asking

everyone if they could

bit of a portmanteau?'

take him into town with a wee

Lady Asgill, the most charm

ing of coquettes, gave a place in her carriage to the man who by a line could give her immortality."

There was another poet who, the shadow of his exuberant self, still fluttered about the scenes of his former social triumphs. This was Tom Moore the Irish bard who was in his fifty-ninth year when the Queen came to the throne. Never before had verses such as his, without depth of thought or high inspiration, but superficial, melodious, and sentimental, brought a man such social success, such splendid remuneration. For a modern Troubadour in a tightened waist and a satin stock he had been welcomed to all the great houses of the day, flattered and caressed by beautiful and distinguished women, and had received twelve thousand eight hundred and ten pounds for his Irish Melodies, and three thousand for his Lalla Rookh, to mention only two instances of the payments he received. Though now bald, his few remaining ringlets turning grey, his round face somewhat flabby, he retained his cock-sparrow air, the former eager desire to please remained in his dimming eyes, the old expression varying from mirth to pathos lingered in his plain features. And still placing on his knee the small harp he had carried with him under his