human character,--by giving him an insight into the details of society,
in their least artificial form,--in short, by mixing him up, thus early,
with the world, its business and its pleasures, his London life but
contributed its share in forming that wonderful combination which his
mind afterwards exhibited, of the imaginative and the practical--the
heroic and the humorous--of the keenest and most dissecting views of
real life, with the grandest and most spiritualised conceptions of ideal
grandeur.

To the same period, perhaps, another predominant characteristic of his
maturer mind and writings may be traced. In this anticipated experience
of the world which his early mixture with its crowd gave him, it is but
little probable that many of the more favourable specimens of human
kind should have fallen under his notice. On the contrary, it is but too
likely that some of the lightest and least estimable of both sexes may
have been among the models, on which, at an age when impressions sink
deepest, his earliest judgments of human nature were formed. Hence,
probably, those contemptuous and debasing views of humanity with which
he was so often led to alloy his noblest tributes to the loveliness and
majesty of general nature. Hence the contrast that appeared between the
fruits of his imagination and of his experience,--between those dreams,
full of beauty and kindliness, with which the one teemed at his bidding,
and the dark, desolating bitterness that overflowed when he drew from
the other.

Unpromising, however, as was his youth of the high destiny that awaited
him, there was one unfailing characteristic of the imaginative order of
minds--his love of solitude--which very early gave signs of those habits
of self-study and introspection by which alone the "diamond quarries" of
genius are worked and brought to light. When but a boy, at Harrow, he