MEMOIR. 



form anticipated. His exquisite regard for the details of 

 life, gave a completeness to his household, which is nowhere 

 surpassed. Fitness is the first element of beauty, and 

 every thing in his arrangement was appropriate. It was 

 hard not to sigh, when contemplating the beautiful results 

 he accomplished by taste and tact, and at comparatively 

 little pecuniary expense, to think of the sums elsewhere 

 squandered upon an insufficient and shallow splendor. 

 Yet, as beauty was, with Downing, life, and not luxury, 

 although he was, in feeling and by actual profession, the 

 Priest of Beauty, he was never a Sybarite, never sentimen- 

 tal, never weakened by the service. In the dispositions of 

 most men devoted to beauty, as artists and poets, there is 

 a vein of languor, a leaning to luxury, of which no trace 

 was even visible in him. His habits of life were singularly 

 regular. He used no tobacco, drank little wine, and was 

 no gourmand. But he was no ascetic. He loved to en- 

 tertain Sybarites, poets, and the lovers of luxury : doubt- 

 less from a consciousness that he had the magic of pleasing 

 them more than they had ever been pleased. He enjoyed 

 the pleasure of his guests. The various play of different 

 characters entertained him. Yet with all his fondness for 

 fine places, he justly estimated the tendency of their in- 

 fluence. He was not enthusiastic, he was not seduced 

 into blindness by his own preferences, but he main- 

 tained that cool and accurate estimate of things and ten- 

 dencies which always made his advice invaluable. Is there 

 any truer account of the syren influence of a superb 

 and extensive country-seat than the following from the 

 paper : " A Visit to Montgomery Place." " It is not, we 

 are sure, the spot for a man to plan campaigns of con- 

 quest, and we doubt, even, whether the scholar whose am- 

 bition it is 



