"Into his private life we feel that, under present circumstances, it would be indelicate, as well as out of place, to enter. Surrounded as he was with all the blessings which the domestic relations can bestow, beloved by his intimates, caressed by the gifted and the good, Eliot Warburton lived the centre of a radiating circle of happiness. His personal qualities were of no common order. His society was eagerly sought after. With a fastidious lassitude of air, and an apparent disinclination to exertion, he possessed remarkable force of thought and fluency of diction; and it was no uncommon thing to see him, when he had begun to relate passages from his experience in foreign countries, or adventures in his own, the centre of a gradually increasing audience, amidst which he sat, improvisating a sort of romantic recitation, until he was completely carried away on the current of his own eloquence, and lost every sense of where he was or what he was doing, in the enthusiasm he had fanned up and saw reflected around him. This power was a peculiar gift; and he loved to exercise it. In this form many of his happiest effusions have been given utterance to; and every body who has heard him at such inspired moments has felt regret that the brilliant bursts which so delighted him, should have been stamped upon no more retentive tablets than the ears of ordinary listeners. "Of this amiable, refined and gifted individual, we are afraid to speak as warmly as our heart would dictate. Before us lie the few hasty lines--but not too hurried to be the channel of a parting kindness--scrawled to us on the first day of this year--the last day the writer was ever to pass in England. They are, perhaps, amongst the latest words he ever wrote. 'I am off,' they run 'for the West Indies to-morrow. _But I have accomplished your affair._' Oh, vanity of human purpose! Man proposes--God disposes. We were next to hear of him, standing on the deck of the burning vessel in the Atlantic, alone with the captain, after every other soul had disappeared, surveying--we feel convinced, with a courage of a lion--the awful twofold death close before him, and which he had in probability deliberately preferred to an early relinquishment of his companions to their fate. It is a fine picture--one that shall every hang framed with his image in our memory; helping us to believe that "'-----Lycidas our sorrow is not dead. Sunk though he be beneath the watery flood,'-- But that he hath mounted to a higher sphere-- "'Through the dear might of Him that walked the waves.'" AUTHOR OF "THE FOOL OF QUALITY."