Crabb Robinson, stung by her in a tender place, his boastful
iterative monologues on Weimar and on Goethe, said that of all men
Procter ought to escape purgatory after death, having tasted its
fulness here through living so many years with Mrs. Procter; "the
husbands of the talkative have great reward hereafter," said
Rudyard Kipling's Lama. And I have been told by those who knew the
pair that there was truth as well as irritation in the taunt. "A
graceful Preface to 'Eothen,'" wrote to me a now famous lady who as
a girl had known Mrs. Procter well, "made friendly company
yesterday to a lonely meal, and brought back memories of Mr.
Kinglake's kind spoiling of a raw young woman, and of the wit, the
egregious vanity, the coarseness, the kindness, of that hard old
worldling our Lady of Bitterness." In the presence of one man,
Tennyson, she laid aside her shrewishness: "talking with Alfred
Tennyson lifts me out of the earth earthy; a visit to Farringford
is like a retreat to the religious." A celebrity in London for
fifty years, she died, witty and vigorous to the last, in 1888.
"You and I and Mr. Kinglake," she says to Lord Houghton, "are all
that are left of the goodly band that used to come to St. John's
Wood; Eliot Warburton, Motley, Adelaide, Count de Verg, Chorley,
Sir Edwin Landseer, my husband." "I never could write a book," she
tells him in another letter, "and one strong reason for not doing
so was the idea of some few seeing how poor it was. Venables was
one of the few; I need not say that you were one, and Kinglake."

Kinglake was called to the Chancery Bar, and practised apparently
with no great success. He believed that his reputation as a writer
stood in his way. When, in 1845, poor Hood's friends were helping