with rum-and-water tear-drops in his eyes, and a complication of punchy smells in his mouth!  He was better than a comedy to us, having marvellous ways of tying his pocket-handkerchief round his neck at dinner-time in a kind of jolly embarrassment, and then forgetting what he had done with it; also of singing songs to wrong tunes, and calling land objects by sea names, and never knowing what o’clock it was, but taking midnight for seven in the evening; with many other sailor oddities, all full of honesty, manliness, and good temper.  We took him to Drury Lane Theatre to see Much Ado About Nothing.  But I never could find out what he meant by turning round, after he had watched the first two scenes with great attention, and inquiring “whether it was a Polish piece.” ...

On the 4th of April I am going to preside at a public dinner for the benefit of the printers; and if you were a guest at that table, wouldn’t I smite you on the shoulder, harder than ever I rapped the well-beloved back of Washington Irving at the City Hotel in New York!

You were asking me—­I love to say asking, as if we could talk together—­about Maclise.  He is such a discursive fellow, and so eccentric in his might, that on a mental review of his pictures I can hardly tell you of them as leading to any one strong purpose.  But the annual Exhibition of the Royal Academy comes off in May, and then I will endeavor to give you some notion of him.  He is a tremendous creature, and might do anything.  But, like all tremendous creatures, he takes his own way, and flies off at unexpected breaches in the conventional wall.

You know H——­’s Book, I daresay.  Ah!  I saw a scene of mingled comicality and seriousness at his funeral some weeks ago, which has choked me at dinner-time ever since.  C——­ and I went as mourners; and as he lived, poor fellow, five miles out of town, I drove C——­ down.  It was such a day as I hope, for the credit of nature, is seldom seen in any parts but these,—­muddy, foggy, wet, dark, cold, and unutterably wretched in every possible respect.  Now, C——­ has enormous whiskers, which straggle all down his throat in such weather, and stick out in front of him, like a partially unravelled bird’s-nest; so that he looks queer enough at the best, but when he is very wet, and in a state between jollity (he is always very jolly with me) and the deepest gravity (going to a funeral, you know), it is utterly impossible to resist him; especially as he makes the strangest remarks the mind of man can conceive, without any intention of being funny, but rather meaning to be philosophical.  I really cried with an irresistible sense of his comicality all the way; but when he was dressed out in a black cloak and a very long black hat-band by an undertaker (who, as he whispered me with tears in his eyes—­for he had known H——­ many years—­was “a character, and he would like to sketch him"), I thought I should have