Halleck, with that familiar roll of the hat, “the lady hesitated, dropped her eyes, and replied, ‘Mr. Halleck, I do not know which of them it was, but I know it was one of them.’ And so,” said Halleck, “I took some pains to inquire, and I found out that the lecture was not about either of the Sydney Smiths, but a lecture on Sir Philip Sydney.”
Halleck’s admiration of the genius of Byron was such as only a poet can appreciate. “You know,” said he, “that Shakespeare has said, in King John,
‘To gild refined gold, to paint the lily,
To throw a perfume on the violet,
To smooth the ice, or add another hue
Unto the rainbow, or with taper-light
To seek the beauteous eye of Heaven to garnish,
la wasteful and ridiculous excess;’
but Byron has gilt refined gold and added a perfume to the violet; he has thrown a charm over the sculptures of ancient Greece and Rome: in the dying gladiator, he recalls the thoughts of ‘his young barbarians there at play upon the banks of the far-off Danube;’ and again, too, ‘the goddess lives in stone;’ what a line that is! and over all the structures on the castellated Rhine, over Italy, Spain, and ancient and modern Europe, he has added a charm to art, and thrown a perfume on the violets of history, without ‘wasteful or ridiculous excess.’ When you go to Rome, when you travel up the Rhine, take Childe Harold with you.”
If Halleck did not have a great admiration of publishers and booksellers, perhaps it sprang from the tuition of his commercial life. He said to me one day, “The best part of my life was spent in a count-
