versation wandered over many subjects. He talked, of course, a great deal about America; wanted to know what was the state of our literature, how many universities we had, whether we had any poets whom we much valued, and whether we looked upon Barlow as our Homer. He certainly feels a considerable interest in America, and says he intends to visit the United States; but I doubt whether it will not be indefinitely postponed, like his proposed visit to Persia. I answered to all this as if I had spoken to a countryman, and then turned the conversation to his own poems, and particularly to his English Bards, which he has so effectually suppressed that a copy is not easily to be found. He said he wrote it when he was very young and very angry; which, he added, were 'the only circumstances under which a man would write such a satire.' . . . He gave great praise to Scott; said he was undoubtedly the first man of his time, and as extraordinary in everything as in poetry, -a lawyer, a fine scholar, endowed with an extraordinary memory, and blessed with the kindest feelings." Twenty years later he called on Lady Byron and found a gentle and saddened lover of charity in the once beautiful but imprudently prudish Annabella Milbanke.

Ticknor saw Wordsworth at Rydal in 1819, and again at Ambleside in 1835. "I was at home with them at once," he says of his first visit, "and we went out like friends together to scramble up the mountains, and enjoy the prospects and scenery. . . . It was best of all, though, to see how he is loved and respected in his family and neighborhood. . . The peasantry treated him with marked respect, the children took off their hats to him, and a poor widow in the neighborhood sent for him to come and talk to her son, who had been behaving ill."

In spite of the fact that his second visit with the family

followed close upon the death of Mrs. Wordsworth's sister, the mortal illness of Dorothy, and the sickness of Wordsworth's daughter, Ticknor was received "with entire kindness." "Wordsworth," he says, "was very agreeable. He talked about politics, in which his views are very gloomy. He holds strongly and fondly, with an affectionate feeling of veneration, to the old and established in the institutions, usages, and peculiarities of his country, and he sees them all shaken by the progress of change. His moral sensibilities are offended, his old affections are wounded, his confidence in the future is disturbed. But though he talks about it as if it were a subject that oppresses him, he talks without bitterness, and with the large and flowing eloquence which marks his whole conversation.

.. He was very curious too about our institutions in America, and their effect upon society and character, and made many shrewd as well as kind remarks about us; but is certainly not inclined to augur well of our destinies, for he goes upon the broad principle that the mass of any people cannot be trusted with the powers of government."

Southey he likewise saw on both trips, both times at Keswick. "He is certainly an extraordinary man," he says in 1819, "one of those whose character I find it difficult to comprehend, because I hardly know how such elements can be brought together, such rapidity of mind with such patient labor and wearisome exactness, so mild a disposition with so much nervous excitability, and a poetical talent so elevated with such an immense mass of minute, dull learning. He considers himself completely an author by profession, and therefore, as he told me, never writes anything which will not sell, in the hours he regularly devotes to labor. . . . After all, however, my recollections of Southey rest rather on his domestic life and his character as a man, for here

he seems to me to be truly excellent." In 1835, he says of him: "Southey was natural and kind, but evidently depressed, much altered since I saw him fifteen years ago, a little bent, and his hair quite white."

It was Scott, however, upon whom Ticknor called with the greatest feeling of reverence, as did Americans generally. He found him "in the ascendant now in Edinburgh." He continues, "I look upon him to be quite as remarkable in intercourse and conversation, as he is in any of his writings, even in his novels." He saw much of him socially in Edinburgh and, one morning, Scott proposed a walk. "He carried me round and showed me the houses of Ferguson, Blair, Hume, Smith, Robertson, Black, and several others, telling, at the same time, amusing anecdotes of these men, and bringing out a story for almost every lane and close we passed." Soon after this he visited Scott at Abbotsford and gives a fairly complete narrative of his stay, which is a parallel in many respects to those of Willis, Irving, and others.

It was Scott, too, that Edward Everett, in looking back over his European experiences from the standpoint of many years later, chose as subject for two of his Mt. Vernon Papers (1860). Everett was in Europe at the same time as Ticknor, studied at Göttingen, as did the latter, and traveled in England for his self-improvement with much the same point of view Ticknor held. His trip was likewise primarily for study, in preparation for the chair of Greek literature at Harvard, to which he had previously been appointed.

There is scarcely a better picture of Scott at Abbotsford than that which he gives in 1818. It is the portrait of a Scottish country gentleman drawn from life, a scholar yet a man of his family, surrounded by the scenes he loved

best, and warmed by his pride in his wholesome and intelligent children. Everett took walks with the family and stayed at Abbotsford for some time, as did every one who came there, and left with a genuine sense of gratitude for the kindest of hospitality. Many years later, in 1844, after the death of Sir Walter, he again visited Abbotsford and records the melancholy change that had come over it in the interval.

Among the other men of prominence who were sent abroad from Harvard in anticipation of faculty appointments, were the historian, George Bancroft, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. President Kirkland explained in Bancroft's letter of introduction that his friends had procured the means to send him abroad in order that he might "attend especially to philology, the ancient languages and Oriental literature, that he may thus be qualified to pursue theological studies to the greatest benefit, to give instruction as any opening may occur and invite, and become an accomplished philologian and biblical critic, able to expound and defend the Revelation of God." The trip was made, but the traveler's inclination was in another direction, and he devoted his life to expounding and defending instead the excellences and weaknesses of man.

Longfellow had the advantages of two such appointments, one at Bowdoin and the other at Harvard, both of them accompanied by trips abroad, the first in 1826 and the second in 1835. By far the major portion of his journeys and practically all of his writings were devoted to the continental countries. He stayed in London in 1835, and, armed with an introduction from Emerson, he called upon the Carlyles, only to find that Mr. Carlyle "has very unpolished manners and a broad Scottish accent, but such fine language and beautiful thoughts that it is truly delightful