have decreed.[1] The enjoyment of an agreeable, well-bred society is something like passing over a good road through a well-ordered country: delightful in the passage but no overturns to be remembered. And so I remember nothing of K.'s dinner but that I sat opposite to his picture, which the punter has, in spite of the original's superb head and intellectual eye, made to look so of the earth earthy, that some one said to him, "You should not let that picture hang there: it makes one doubt the immortality of the soul;" and that I sat next Proctor. He is so well known to you as "Barly Cornwall," that you have perhaps forgotten that is merely his nom-de guerre. He was one of the intimate friends of Charles Lamb, and spoke of him in just the way that we, who look upon him with something of the tenderness that we do upon the departed members of our own household, would like to hear him spoken of. Proctor made inquiries about the diffusion of English literature in America, and showed a modest surprise at hearing how well he was known among us.
- ↑ I have hesitated whether to transcribe the above passage from my private journal. Its transcription is a slight infringement of the rule I have prescribed to myself. The gentleman in question was our companion and friend on the Continent, and besides that leaving him out would be leaving out of our travelling web the golden thread, it pleased—my vanity, it may be—to prove how, on the very threshold of his acquaintance, we discerned the treasures within.
