‘_March 16, 1819._—Mr Hinds and Mr Thirlwall are here.... My mother has, I know, sometimes suspected that a man’s abilities are to be judged of in an _inverse ratio_ to his Cambridge honours; but I believe that rule is really not without exception, for Mr Thirlwall is certainly no dunce, although, as I have been informed, he attained high honours at Cambridge at an earlier age than anybody except, I believe, Porson. In the course of their first interview Charles heard enough from him to induce him to believe that Mr Thirlwall had studied Greek and Hebrew in good earnest, not merely for _prizes_; also, that he had read Mr Niebuhr’s Roman History proved him to possess no trifling knowledge of German; and, as he expressed a wish to improve himself in the language, Charles ventured to invite him to come to us on a Tuesday evening, whenever he was not otherwise engaged, seeing that many Germans were in the habit of calling on that day. Mr Thirlwall has never missed any Tuesday evening since, except the _moccoli_ night and one other when it rained dogs and cats. He comes at eight o’clock, and never stirs to go away till everybody else has wished good night, often at almost twelve o’clock. It is impossible for any one to behave more like a man of sense and a gentleman than he has always done—ready and eager to converse with anybody that is at leisure to speak to him, but never looking fidgety when by necessity left to himself; always seeming animated and attentive, whether listening to music, or trying to make out what people say in German, or looking at one of Goethe’s songs in the book, while it is sung. And so there are a great many reasons for our being _very much_ pleased with Mr Thirlwall; yet I rather suspect him of being very cold, and very dry; and although he seeks, and seeks with general success, to understand everything, and in every possible way increase his stock of ideas, I doubt the possibility of his understanding anything that is to be _felt_ rather than _explained_, and that cannot be reduced to a system. I was led to this result by some most extraordinary questions that he asked Charles about _Faust_ (which he had borrowed of us, and which he greatly admired nevertheless, attempting a translation of one of my favourite passages, which, however, I had not pointed out to him as being such), and also by his great fondness for the poems of Wordsworth, two volumes of which he insisted on lending to Charles. These books he accompanied with a note, in which he laid great stress upon the necessity of reading the author’s _prose essays on his own poems_, in order to be enabled to relish the latter. Yet Mr Thirlwall speaks of Dante in a manner that would seem to prove a thorough taste for his poetry, as well as that he has really and truly studied it; for he said to me that he thought no person who had taken the trouble to understand the whole of the _Divina Commedia_ would doubt about