Page:My Life in Two Hemispheres, volume 2.djvu/277

 and force, and gives the idea of a much less powerful man than he is. But he is gracious and winning in a high degree. After dinner we adjourned to a singularly agreeable smokingroom, lined with encaustic-tiles, and cooled with ferns and creeping plants. The talk fell first upon Palmerston, whose death filled the newspapers. Browning and Forster agreed with a suggestion of mine, that the tone of the London Press about him was false and altogether misleading. He was not, Browning said, what they represented him to be, and no human soul believed that he was. I spoke of the Pall Mall Gazette as an experiment in journalism which ought to succeed. It substituted for the heavy joints and coarse vegetables of the daily Press an intellectual menu of small pleasant plats delicately cooked and daintily served. Browning agreed that it was the perfection of a paper for people who wanted to know what was going on in the world as a man might learn it at a club, or over a dinner-table; not as it was furnished by reading-rooms or news agencies. Forster said he had not yet seen the journal, but the extracts he read in other papers did not attract him. I asked Forster who was mimicking Fonblanque in the Examiner? Why, Fonblanque himself, he said. He was a man of feeble organisation, who had kept himself alive for many years, by careful regimen and general watchfulness, and he could not refrain from his old pursuits. Browning said his own father who was a careful liver, had reached eighty-five, and was still vigorous and alert. The conversation went off to Wordsworth. I said Carlyle considered Wordsworth the best talker in England. Browning said he was certainly not at all so in latter years; he spoke little, and only on subjects that interested himself, without respect to the taste of his audience. The first time he met Wordsworth was at dinner, Savage Landor also was present, and both poets invited him to take wine with them after the kindly fashion of that day; and never was a youngster so intoxicated with delight. I said to Forster that the portrait of Savage Landor in his memoir of him had the look of a wild animal, the mouth ready to snap at you, and in the eyes there seemed to lurk a savage reserve of brooding discontent. If the Ten Commandments were written in Francis Homer's face, a majority of the seven