countenance small and refined, though sensuous. His eyes were dark,
brilliant, and expressive. He, like the old poet Rogers, made a
feature of giving breakfasts to chosen friends, and as he had the
whole social world to choose from, and unfailing good taste, his
breakfasts were well worth attending. They were real breakfasts--so
far as the hour was concerned--not lunches or early dinners in
masquerade; but wine was served at them, and Milnes was very
hospitable and had an Anacreontic or Omar touch in him. To breakfast
with him, therefore, meant--unless you were singularly abstemious and
strong-minded--to discount the remaining meals of the day. But the
amount of good cheer that an Englishman can carry and seem not
obscured by it surprises an American. A bottle or so of hock of a
morning will make most Americans feel that business, for the rest of
that day, is an iridescent dream; but an Englishman does not seem to
be burdened by it--at any rate, he did not fifty years ago.

[IMAGE: RICHARD MONCKTON MILNES]

Another hearty companion was Bryan Waller Procter, who, for literary
uses, anagrammed his name into Barry Cornwall, and made it famous,
fifty years ago, as that of the best song-writer in contemporary
England. But he had made a literary reputation before the epoch of his
songs; there were four or five dramatic and narrative poems to his
credit published during the first quarter of the last century. Procter
was, indeed, already a veteran in 1854, having been born in 1787, and
bred to the bar, to which he was admitted in 1831. But he spent the
active thirty years of his life in the discharge of that function
which seems often sought by respectable Englishmen-commissioner of
lunacy. He sent my father a small volume containing the Songs, and
some fragments; they fully deserved their reputation. The fragments