“Old Mrs. Proctor told me a good story lately which may amuse you. She was breakfasting with Rogers. Thackeray and Kinglake were there among others. So was Abraham Hayward, who began abusing Houghton (then Monkton Milnes), a great favorite of hers. Kinglake tried in vain to divert or stop him. At last Mrs. P. in a pause broke out with, ‘Mr. Hayward, for the first time in my life I wish I were a man that I might call you out and make you, for the first time in your life, a gentleman!’ She is as young as ever and as jealous of her lovers, tolerating no rivals. “I am to meet Doña Emilia next Friday at dinner, and shall take upon myself to give her your kindest regards. I fear she is not very well, but she is so fond of London that it will be better for her than a course of the waters at Wiesbaden. I shall be very glad to see her again. I last met her in London four years ago.... By the way, I saw Don Palo (Francisco) Giher at Oxford whither I went to help Holmes on with his gown. It was a pleasant surprise to me when he rushed forward with both hands outstretched in the Master’s drawing-room at Balliol and began at me in Spanish. As the window was behind him I could not see his face and did not at once recognize him. My Spanish naturally creaked a little on its hinges after such long disuse, but, with that _hidalquia_ which is common to all his race, he told somebody afterwards that I spoke the most exquisite Castilian! Even at twenty I shouldn’t have believed--and at sixty-seven! “I have been whirling round like a marble on the van of a windmill and am worn as smooth. I roll off on the slightest incline. But I can lie still on the lap of an old friendship such as ours. Good-by and God bless you.” When Lowell went abroad in the spring of 1886 he had been asked to give the address in November at the 250th anniversary of the founding of Harvard University. The thought of it harassed him during the summer. “I am distressed with the thought of that abominable address,” he wrote near the end of July. “I have not yet accepted and would decline could I give any better reason than that I have nothing to say. Nobody ever thinks _that_ of any importance! What have I done to have this fly thrust into my pot of ointment which grows more precious every day by diminution like the Sibyl’s leaves?” And after his return to Deerfoot Farm late in September, when he could not avoid his destiny, he wrote: “I am in direful dumps about my address,--the muse obstinately dumb.” Once more, 6 October, he wrote: “I have been mulling over my address and to-day mean to break into it in earnest by blocking out an exordium. It doesn’t take hold of me, and I always feared it wouldn’t. It isn’t exactly in my line. To fill so large a bowl as an hour I shall have to draw on the cow with the iron tail,--and pumping is an exercise that always wearies me beyond most.”