University of Virginia Library

120. LETTER CXX.

Breakfasted with Mr. Procter (known better as
Barry Cornwall). I gave a partial description of this
most delightful of poets in a former letter. In the
dazzling circle of rank and talent with which he was
surrounded at Lady Blessington's, however, it was
difficult to see so shrinkingly modest a man to advantage,
and with the exception of the keen gray eye, living
with thought and feeling. I should hardly have recognised
him at home for the same person.

Mr. Procter is a barrister; and his “whereabout”
is more like that of a lord chancellor than a poet
proper. With the address he had given me at parting,
I drove to a large house in Bedford square; and, not
accustomed to find the children of the Muses waited
on by servants in livery, I made up my mind as I
walked up the broad staircase, that I was blundering
upon some Mr. Procter of the exchange, whose respect
for his poetical namesake, I hoped would smooth
my apology for the intrusion. Buried in a deep morocco
chair, in a large library, notwithstanding, I found
the poet himself — choice old pictures, filling every
nook between the book-shelves, tables covered with
novels and annuals, rolls of prints, busts and drawings
in all the corners; and, more important for the nonce,
a breakfast table at the poet's elbow, spicily set forth,
not with flowers or ambrosia, the canonical food of
rhymers, but with cold hams and ducks, hot rolls and
butter, coffee-pot and tea-urn — as sensible a breakfast,
in short, as the most unpoetical of men could desire.

Procter is indebted to his poetry for a very charming
wife, the daughter of Basil Montagu, well known
as a collector of choice literature, and the friend and
patron of literary men. The exquisite beauty of the
Dramatic Sketches interested this lovely woman in his
favor before she knew him, and far from worldly-wise
as an attachment so grounded would seem, I never
saw two people with a more habitual air of happiness.
I thought of his touching song,

and looked at them with an irrepressible feeling of
envy. A beautiful girl, of eight or nine years, the
“golden-tressed Adelaide,” delicate, gentle and pensive,
as if she was born on the lip of Castaly, and
knew she was a poet's child, completed the picture of
happiness.

The conversation ran upon various authors, whom
Proctor had known intimately. Hazlitt, Charles
Lamb, Keats, Shelley, and others, and of all he gave
me interesting particulars, which I could not well repeat
in a public letter. The account of Hazlitt's
death-bed, which appeared in one of the magazines,
he said was wholly untrue. This extraordinary writer
was the most reckless of men in money matters, but
he had a host of admiring friends who knew his character,
and were always ready to assist him. He was
a great admirer of the picturesque in women. He
was one evening at the theatre with Procter, and
pointed out to him an Amazonian female, strangely
dressed in black velvet and lace, but with no beauty
that would please an ordinary eye. “Look at her!”
said Hazlitt, “isn't she fine? — isn't she magnificent?
Did you ever see anything more Titianesque?”[31]

After breakfast, Procter took me into a small closet
adjoining his library, in which he usually writes.
There was just room in it for a desk and two chairs,
and around were piled in true poetical confusion, his
favorite books, miniature likenesses of authors, manuscripts,
and all the interesting lumber of a true poet's
corner. From a drawer, very much thrust out of the
way, he drew a volume of his own, into which he proceeded
to write my name — a collection of songs, published
since I have been in Europe, which I had never
seen. I seized upon a worn copy of the Dramatic
Sketches, which I found crossed and interlined in
every direction. “Don't look at them,” said Procter,
“they are wretched things, which should never have
been printed, or at least with a world of correction.
You see how I have mended them; and, some day,
perhaps, I will publish a corrected edition, since I can

not get them back.” He took the book from my
hand, and opened to “The Broken Heart,” certainly
the most highly-finished and exquisite piece of pathos
in the language, and read it to me with his alterations.
It was to “gild refined gold and paint the lily.” I
would recommend to the lovers of Barry Cornwall, to
keep their original copy, beautifully as he has polished
his lines anew.

On a blank leaf of the same copy of the Dramatic
Sketches, I found some indistinct writing in pencil.
“Oh! don't read that,” said Procter, “the book was
given me some years ago by a friend at whose house
Coleridge had been staying, for the sake of the criticisms
that great man did me the honor to write at the
end.” I insisted on reading them, however, and his
wife calling him out presently, I succeeded in copying
them in his absence. He seemed a little annoyed, but
on my promising to make no use of them in England,
he allowed me to retain them. They are as follows:

“Barry Cornwall is a poet, me saltem judice, and in that
sense of the word in which I apply it to Charles Lamb and
W. Wordsworth. There are poems of great merit, the authors
of which I should not yet feel impelled so to designate.

“The faults of these poems are no less things of hope
than the beauties. Both are just what they ought to be: i. e.
now.

“If B. C. be faithful to his genius, it in due time will warn
him that as poetry is the identity of all other knowledge, so
a poet can not be a great poet, but as being likewise and inclusively
an historian and a naturalist in the light as well as
the life of philosophy. All other men's worlds are his chaos.

“Hints — Not to permit delicacy and exquisiteness to seduce
into effeminacy.

“Not to permit beauties by repetition to become mannerism.

“To be jealous of fragmentary composition as epicurism
of genius — apple-pie made all of quinces.

“Item. That dramatic poetry must be poetry hid in
thought and passion, not thought or passion hid in the dregs
of poetry.

“Lastly, to be economic and withholding in similes, figures,
etc. They will all find their place sooner or later, each in the
luminary of a sphere of its own. There can be no galaxy in
poetry, because it is language, ergo successive, ergo every the
smallest star must be seen singly.

“There are not five metrists in the kingdom whose works
are known by me, to whom I could have held myself allowed
to speak so plainly; but B. C. is a man of genius, and it depends
on himself (competence protecting him from gnauing and
distracting cares) to become a rightful poet — i. e. a great man.

“Oh, for such a man; worldly prudence is transfigured into
the high spiritual duty. How generous is self-interest in
him whose true self is all that is good and hopeful in all ages
as far as the language of Spenser, Shakspere, and Milton, is
the mother tongue.

“A map of the road to Paradise drawn in Purgatory on
the confines of Hell, by S. T. C. July 30, 1819.”

I took my leave of this true poet after half a day
passed in his company, with the impression that he
makes upon every one — of a man whose sincerity and
kind-heartedness were the most prominent traits in his
character. Simple in his language and feelings, a
fond father, an affectionate husband, a business-man
of the closest habits of industry — one reads his
strange imaginations, and passionate, high-wrought,
and even sublimated poetry, and is in doubt at which
most to wonder — the man as he is, or the poet as we
know him in his books.