Neither the biographer nor the critic finds it easy to get a good grip on a personal or literary career so little marked by salient features as that of Procter. The lives of few individuals have rolled on more evenly than his did for the round eighty years which made its term. Not of high or of low birth, rich or poor, feeble or vigorous in health, a man of the world or a recluse, ardent or cold in emotions, his figure is strangely wanting in light and shade. As a poet and a thinker his character is equally evasive. His verse can rarely be pronounced decidedly feeble or commonplace, and never lofty or thrilling. He will be remembered by two or three short poems tender in fancy and soft in finish. Inquirers who are tempted by these to explore the rest of his productions will find them readable, but not memorable, and will wonder at learning that a tragedy of Procter's attained a success on the London stage denied to either of Tennyson's. The poet will go down to posterity under an assumed name, that under which he was almost exclusively known to readers of his own day. Thus buried under an anonym, and gravitating at all points toward mediocrity, it is odd that so much interest should centre in his life and works as we actually find to exist. This interest may be mainly ascribed to his surroundings. Like Rogers, he shines by reflected light. He numbered among his friends or acquaintances, in varied shades of intimacy, almost every celebrity in British literature during two generations. To these were added leading representatives of the fine arts, music and the drama--Mendelssohn, Lawrence, Landseer, Turner, the Kembles, Edmund Kean. It was a notable visiting-list that embraced all the Lake school, Byron, Dickens, Thackeray, the two Lyttons, Scott, Sydney Smith and a number of others as incongruous in time and tenets. Good taste, amiability, the means and disposition to entertain, would have sufficed, with the aid of less of intellectual and imaginative power than Procter possessed, to keep him in good companionship with men like these, who felt the need of a common professional rallying-point in the metropolis. He avoided collision with any of their crotchets and idiosyncrasies. His antipathies were few, and what he had he was generally successful in repressing. De Quincey seems to have been lowest in his estimation. The genial Elia and the fiery Hazlitt divided his especial and lasting attachment.