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MEMOIR.

Of all the brilliant company in the midst of whom Laman Blanchard was a beloved and honoured presence, only Mr. Robert Browning, Mr. R. H. Horne, Mr. John Forster, Mr. and Mrs. S. C. Hall, and George Cruikshank are now alive. The rest lie in their graves. Lord Lytton, Charles Dickens, William Godwin, Douglas Jerrold, Leigh Hunt, Count d'Orsay, Emerson Tennent, Justice Talfourd, Procter, Keeley, Macready, Frank Stone, Thackeray, Albany Fonblanque, W. Jerdan, and N. A. Vigors, have gone to their rest; each leaving some mark on their time, and some assurances of a fame that will travel down the centuries. Among Blanchard's female friends the brilliant and unfortunate L. E. L. stands first; and faded notes are lying about my desk from Miss Jewsbury, the sprightly and gifted Louisa Stuart Costello, Louisa

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Sheridan (afterwards Lady Wyatt), Lady Stepney, Lady Blessington, Mrs. S. C. Hall, Mrs. Hofland, and Mrs. Thomson, whose many popular novels have passed already out of the public mind. All the gentle hands that filled this mass of letterpaper are cold. The literary company of Laman Blanchard's time is a memory of a happy and delightful past. Many of the names that were musical in the world's ear some thirty years ago slumber unpronounced and unremembered in the sharp conflict of our present railroad pace of life; but they will be revived when the time shall have come to write the history of literary England during the first half of the nineteenth century, and among the first will stand the poet, essayist, and journalist, the disjecta membra of whose busy career I now submit to the reader.

Samuel Laman Blanchard was born at Great Yarmouth, in Norfolk, on May 15, 1804. He was the son of Samuel Blanchard, a respected and flourishing freeman of the borough,' and Mary Laman; and on the mother's side was connected with the Suckling family, from whom Nelson's descended on the maternal side. In his early youth his father

1 In 1830, on revisiting his native place, Laman Blanchard was presented with the freedom of the city.

removed to London, and placed him at St. Olave's School in Southwark, where he was remembered as a brilliant pupil. But his father had fallen on evil days in the course of young Laman's boyhood, so that when the lad was nearing man's estate it became necessary for him to depend for his living on his own exertions. He found congenial employment for a time as a reader in a printing-office. He was an enthusiastic student of Shakspeare and Byron ; and in his boyhood gave rich promises of the deep and tender poetic faculty—akin to that of Lamb,— which afterward shone, even through the prosaic toil of a journalist's life. It was while he was yet a boy that he became the friend of Douglas Jerrold, then struggling, like himself, on the confines of literature. The two young men became inseparable, and together dreamed of volunteering to fight at Lord Byron's side in Greece; but although they never got in those days far beyond Holborn, they began together another fight, in which for a long series of years they advanced in parallel ways to fame and modest fortune. Blanchard's earliest friends were men of mark and of strong mind. His bright fancy, fastidious taste, almost womanly sensibility, and poetic temperament, drew him towards companions more or less similarly gifted. Kenny

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