George Ticknor, Life, letters and journals of George Ticknor
George Hillard, Ed.

[149] of Lord Radnor, Sir Edmund Head,¹—a remote cousin of Sir Francis,—Stephenson the great engineer, and one or two others. It was agreeable, but I took most to Sir E. Head, a man of about thirty-five, who has much pleasant literary knowledge, and who has been in Spain and studied its literature. Stephenson showed genius in his conversation, and altogether we were enticed to stay late.

April 1.—A delightful breakfast at Kenyon's. Southey and his son were there; Chorley, the biographer of Mrs. Hemans, and much given to music; and two or three others. Southey, who is in town for two or three days, is grown older since I saw him three years ago at Keswick, more than those years imply. The death of his wife,. . . . which might have been thought a relief to his sufferings on her account, has yet proved an addition to them, and he has now all the appearance of a saddened and even a broken man. Still, he talked well this morning,—though in a voice lower than ever,—and was once warmed when speaking of Wordsworth, for whom his admiration seems all but boundless. Coleridge (H. N.) says he is weary of life, and certainly he has all the appearance of it.

I made, too, this morning, a pleasant visit to the kind old Professor Smyth, of Cambridge, . . . . and arranged with him to be in Cambridge on the 14th (Easter), to pass a couple of days there; and then went to Sir Francis Doyle's, whom I found much changed, by severe and long-continued disease, but still with the same distingue, gentlemanlike air he had when I knew him three years ago.

I dined with Bates, the banker. Van De Weyer,² the Belgian Minister, was there,—an acute and pleasant person, talking English almost perfectly well,—and Murray, formerly secretary to Lord Lyndhurst, and now the Secretary of the great Ecclesiastical Commission, —a very good scholar and a very thorough Tory, who talks with some brilliancy and effect.

In the evening I had an engagement to go to Lord Holland's, who is now passing a few days at his luxurious establishment in South Street. I found there Lord Albemarle, Pozzo di Borgo, Lord Melbourne, the Sardinian Minister, Young Ellice and his beautiful. highbred wife, Allen, and some others. Pozzo di Borgo was brilliant, and Lady Holland disagreeable. Lord Holland talked about Prescott's ‘Ferdinand and Isabella,’ as did John Allen, and gave it high praise; Allen pronouncing the chapters on the ‘Constitutions of Castile and ’