with little more than the report of what he might have been,--a humorist
as genuine, though not quite so savagely Swiftian as his brother Lord
Eldon, neither of whom had much of that commonest and best of all the
humors, called good.

The third we all know. What has he not done for every one of us? Who else
ever, except Shakespeare, so diverted mankind, entertained and
entertains a world so liberally, so wholesomely? We are fain to say, not
even Shakespeare, for his is something deeper than diversion, something
higher than pleasure, and yet who would care to split this hair?

Had any one watched him closely before and after the parting, what a
change he would see! The bright, broad laugh, the shrewd, jovial word,
the man of the Parliament House and of the world, and, next step, moody,
the light of his eye withdrawn, as if seeing things that were invisible;
his shut mouth, like a child's, so impressionable, so innocent, so sad:
he was now all within, as before he was all without; hence his brooding
look. As the snow blattered in his face, he muttered, "How it raves and
drifts! On-ding o' snaw,--ay, that's the word,--on-ding--" He was now at
his own door, "Castle Street, No.39." He opened the door, and went
straight to his den; that wondrous workshop, where, in one year, 1823,
when he was fifty-two, he wrote "Peveril of the Peak," "Quentin
Durward," and "St. Ronan's Well," besides much else. We once took the
foremost of our novelists, the greatest, we would say, since Scott, into
this room, and could not but mark the solemnizing effect of sitting
where the great magician sat so often and so long, and looking out upon
that little shabby bit of sky, and that back green where faithful Camp
lies.[1]

[Footnote 1: This favorite dog "died about January, 1809, and was buried,