What a statue gallery of posturing friends we all have in
our memory! The old Professor himself sometimes visited the house after
it had changed hands. Of course, my recollections are not to be wholly
trusted, but I always think I see his likeness in a profile face to be
found among the illustrations of Rees's Cyclopaedia. (See Plates, Vol.
IV., Plate 2, Painting, Diversities of the Human Face, Fig. 4.)
And now let us return to our chief picture. In the days of my earliest
remembrance, a row of tall Lombardy poplars mounted guard on the western
side of the old mansion. Whether, like the cypress, these trees suggest
the idea of the funeral torch or the monumental spire, whether their
tremulous leaves make wits afraid by sympathy with their nervous thrills,
whether the faint balsamic smell of their foliage and their closely
swathed limbs have in them vague hints of dead Pharaohs stiffened in
their cerements, I will guess; but they always seemed to me to give an of
sepulchral sadness to the house before which stood sentries. Not so with
the row of elms which you may see leading up towards the western
entrance. I think the patriarch of them all went over in the great gale
of 1815; I know I used to shake the youngest of them with my hands, stout
as it is now, with a trunk that would defy the bully of Crotona, or the
strong man whose liaison with the Lady Delilah proved so disastrous.
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