Have no allayings of mortality.'


It is impossible not to feel that in this passage we have the
utterance of a man who had a true passion for letters. 'To see and
hear and write brave things,' this was his aim.

Scott, the editor of the London Magazine, struck by the young man's
genius, or under the influence of the strange fascination that he
exercised on every one who knew him, invited him to write a series
of articles on artistic subjects, and under a series of fanciful
pseudonym he began to contribute to the literature of his day.
Janus Weathercock, Egomet Bonmot, and Van Vinkvooms, were some of
the grotesque masks under which he choose to hide his seriousness
or to reveal his levity. A mask tells us more than a face. These
disguises intensified his personality. In an incredibly short time
he seems to have made his mark. Charles Lamb speaks of 'kind,
light-hearted Wainewright,' whose prose is 'capital.' We hear of
him entertaining Macready, John Forster, Maginn, Talfourd, Sir
Wentworth Dilke, the poet John Clare, and others, at a petit-diner.
Like Disraeli, he determined to startle the town as a dandy, and
his beautiful rings, his antique cameo breast-pin, and his pale
lemon-coloured kid gloves, were well known, and indeed were
regarded by Hazlitt as being the signs of a new manner in
literature: while his rich curly hair, fine eyes, and exquisite
white hands gave him the dangerous and delightful distinction of
being different from others. There was something in him of
Balzac's Lucien de Rubempre. At times he reminds us of Julien
Sorel. De Quincey saw him once. It was at a dinner at Charles
Lamb's. 'Amongst the company, all literary men, sat a murderer,'