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A ^■, ''A A,f,' .'A'^'^'O'^ -^ A "^, A : -:^ Q , A . ; A ,A ''/yf^}nA^Z'/^^ "^^^^PvM ^a'aaCaAA . ■ /^/^r^A^ No. 145 25 Cts. Copyright, 1885, by Hakpkk & Bkothees August 5, 1887 Subscription Price per Year, 52 Ninnbers, $15 Entered at the Poat-OfiBce at New York, as Second-class Mail Matter ©nglisl) Men of tctuxs EDITED BY JOHN MORLEY L A^ N D O R BY SIDNEY COLYIN, M.A. Books you may hold readily in your hand are the mtfsi useful, after' all Pr. Johnson NEW yORE HAKPER & BROTBERS, PUBLISHERS ' 18 87 HARPER'S HANDY SERIES. Latest Issues. No. CENTS. 109. C ASHE L Byron's Profession. A Novel. By George B. Shaw. . 25 110. Britta. a Shetland Romance. By George Temple. Illustrated. 25 111. A Child of thk Revolution. A Novel. By the Author of " The AteUer du Lys." Illustrated ^ 25 112. A Strange Inheritance. A Novel. By F. M. F. Skene 25 113. LocKSLEY Hall Sixty Years After, Etc. By Alfred, Lord Tennyson , , 25 114. Regimental Legends. By John Strange Winter 25 115. Yeast. A Problem. 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Pope Leslie Stephen. Sir Philip Sidney i2mo, Cloth, 75 cents per volume. Byron John Nichol. Locke Thomas Fowler. Wordsworth F. Myers. Dryden G. Saintsbury. Landor Sidney Colvin. De Quincey David Masson. Lamb Alfred Ainger. Bentley R. C. Jebb. Dickens A. W. Ward. Gray E. W. Gosse. Swift Leslie Stephen. Sterne H. D. Traill. Macaulay J. Cotter Morison. Fielding Austin Dobson. Sheridan Mrs. Oliphant. Addison W. J. Courthope. Bacon .R. W. Church. Coleridge H. D. Traill. J. A. Symonds. Published by HARPER & BROTHERS, New York. K^~ Any of the above works will be sent by jnatl, postage prepaid, to any part of the United States, on receipt o/ the price. PBEFATORY NOTE. The standard and indisper.sable authority on the life of Lander is the work of the late Mr. John Forster, viz, : 1. Forster, John : "Walter Savage Landor, a Biography, London, Chapman and Hall; first edition in 2 vols., 1869; second edition, abridged, forming vol. i. of the collected " Life and Works of Walter Savage Landor" in 8 vols., 1876. Mr. Forster was appointed by Landor himself as his literary exec- utor ; he had command of all the necessary materials for his task, and his book is written with knowledge, industry, affection, and loy- alty of purpose. But it is cumbrous in comment, inconclusive in criticism, and vague on vital points, especially on points of bibliog- raphy, which in the case of Landor are frequently both interesting and obscure. The student of Landor must supplement the work of Mr. Forster from other sources, of which the principal are the fol- lowing : 2. Hunt, J. E. Leigh, Lord Byron and his Contemporaries. Lon- don, 1827. 3. Blessington, Marguerite, Countess of, The Idler in Italy, 2 vols. London, 1839. Lady Blessington's first impressions of Lan- dor are reported in vol. ii. of the above ; her correspondence with him, and an Imaginary Conversation by Landor not else- where reprinted, will be found in 4. Madden, R. R., The Literary Life and Correspondence of the Countess of Blessington, 3 vols. London, 1855. 5. The New Spirit of the Age, edited by R. H. Home. 2 vols. London, 1844. The article on Landor in vol. i. of the above is by Miss Barrett, afterwards Mrs. Browning, supplemented by the editor. 6. Emerson, R. W., English Traits. London, 1856, vi PREFATORY NOTE. 7. Field, Kate, Last Days of Walter Savage Landor, a series of three articles in the Atlantic Monthly Magazine for 1866. 8. Robinson, H. Crabbe, Diary, Reminiscences, and Correspondence of, edited by Thomas Sadler, 3 vols. London, 1869. 9. Dickens, Charles : A short article on Forster's " Biography " in All the Year Round for 1869, supplementing with some strik- ing physiognomic touches the picture of Landor drawn by the same hand in "Bleak House" (see below, p. 178). 10. Linton, Mrs. E. Lynn : Reminiscences of Walter Savage Landor, in Eraser's Magazine for July, 1870 ; by far the best account of the period of Landor's life to which it refers. 11. Houghton, Lord : Monographs. London, 1873. I forbear to enumerate the various articles on Landor and his works which I have consulted in reviews and magazines between the dates 1798 and 1870; several of the most important are mentioned in the text. In addition to the materials which exist in print, 1 have had the advantage of access to some unpublished. To Mr. Robert Browning in particular my thanks are due for his great kindness in allowing me to make use of the collection of books and manuscripts left him by Landor, including Landor's own annotated copies of some of his rarest writings, and a considerable body of his occasional jot- tings and correspondence. Mr, Augustus J. C. Hare was also good enough to put into my hands a number of letters written by Landor to his father and to himself. To Lord Houghton I am indebted for help of various kinds, and to Mr. Swinburne for his most friendly pains in looking through the sheets of my work, and for many valu- able suggestions and corrections. CONTENTS. CHAPTER I. PAQB Birth and Parentage — School — College . . . .1 CHAPTER II. Experiments in Life and Poetry — Gebir . . .18 CHAPTER III. More Experiments and Marriage — Bath — Spain — Llanthony — Count Julian 41 CHAPTER IV. Life at Tours^-Como — Pisa — Idyllia Heroica . . ■ ^^. CHAPTER V. Life at Florence — The Imaginary Conversations . . 98 CHAPTER VI. Fiesole and England — The Examination op Shakspeare — Pericles and Aspasia — The Pentameron . . .133 viii CONTENTS. CHAPTER Vn. . PAGE Life at Bath — Dramas — Hellenics — Last Fruit — Dry Sticks, 171 CHAPTER Vin. Second Exile and Last Days — Heroic Idyls — Death . . 203 CHAPTER IX. Conclusion . . o 217 L ANDO R. CHAPTER. I. BIRTH AND PARENTAGE SCHOOL COLLEGE. [1775— 1794.] Few men have ever impressed their peers so much, or the general public so little, as Walter Savage Landor. Of all celebrated authors, he has hitherto been one of the least popular. Nevertheless he is among the most strik- ing figures in the history of English literature; striking alike by his character and his powers. Personally, Landor exercised the spell of genius upon every one who came near him. His gifts, attainments, impetuosities, his origi- nality, his force, his charm, were all of the same conspic- uous and imposing kind. Not to know what is to be known of so remarkable a man is evidently to be a loser. Not to be familiar with the works of so noble a writer is to be much more of a loser still. The place occupied by Landor among English men of letters is a place apart. He wrote on many subjects and in many forms, and was strong both in imagination and in criticism. He was equally master of Latin and English', and equally at home in prose and verse. He cannot prop- 1* 2 LANDOR. [chap. erly be associated with any given school, or, indeed, with any given epoch, of our literature, as epochs are usually counted, but stands alone, alike by the character of his mind and by the tenour and circumstances of his life. It is not easy to realize that a veteran who survived to receive the homage of Mr. Swinburne can have been twenty-five years old at the death of Cowper, and forty- nine at the death of Byron. Such, however, was the case of Landor. It is less than seventeen years since he died, and less than eighteen since he published his last book ; his first book had been published before Buonaparte was consul. His literary activity extended, to be precise, over a period of sixty -eight years (1*795 — 1863). Neither was his career more remarkable for its duration than for its proud and consistent independence. It was Landor's strength as well as his weakness that he was all his life a law to himself, writing in conformity with no standards and in pursuit of no ideals but his own. So strong, indeed, was this instinct of originality in Landor that he declines to fall in with the thoughts or to repeat the words of others even when to do so would be most natural. Though an insatiable and retentive reader, in his own writing he does not choose to deal in the friendly and commodious currency of quotation, allusion, and reminiscence. Everything he says must be his own, and nothing but his own. On the other hand, it is no part of Landor's originality to provoke attention, as many even of illustrious writers have done, by emphasis or singularity of style. Arbitrary and vehement beyond other men in many of his thoughts, in their utterance he is always sober and decorous. He delivers himself of whatever is in his mind with an air, to borrow an expression of his own, " majestically sedate." Again, although in saying I.] BIRTH AND PARENTAGE. 3 what lie chooses to say, Landor is one of the clearest and most direct of writers, it is his pleasure to leave much unsaid of that which makes ordinary writing easy and effective. He is so anxious to avoid saying what is su- perfluous that he does not always say what is necessary. As soon as he has given adequate expression to any idea, he leaves it and passes on to the next, forgetting some- times to make clear to the reader the connexion of his ideas with one another. These qualities of unbending originality, of lofty self- control, and of deliberate parsimony in utterance, are evidently not the qualities to carry the world by storm. Neither did Landor expect to carry the world by storm. He wrote less for the sake of pleasing others than himself. He addressed a scanty audience w^hile he lived, but looked forward with confidence to one that should be more nu- merous in the future, although not very numerous even then. " I shall dine late ; but the dining-room will be well-lighted, the guests few and select." In the meantime Landor contented himself with the applause he had, and considering whence that applause came, he had, indeed, good reason to be content. His early poem of Gebir was the delight first of Southey and afterwards of Shelley, who at college used to declaim it with an enthusiasm which disconcerted his friends, and which years did not diminish. The admiration of Southey for Landor's poetry led the way to an ardent and lasting friendship between the two men. By Wordsworth Landor was regarded less warmly than by Southey, yet with a respect which he ex- tended to scarcely any other writer of his time. Hazlitt, who loved Wordsworth little and Southey less, and on whose dearest predilections Landor unsparingly tram- pled, nevertheless acknowledged the force of his genius. 4 LANDOR. [chap. Charles Lamb was at one time as great a reader and quoter of Gehir as Shelley himself, and at another could not dismiss from his mind or lips the simple cadences of one of Landor's elegies. De Quincey declared that his Count Julian was a creation worthy to take rank beside the Prometheus of ^schylus, or Milton's Satan. As the suc- cessive volumes of his Imaginary Conversations appeared, they seemed to some of the best minds of the time to con- tain masterpieces almost unprecedented not only of Eng- lish composition, but of insight, imagery, and reflection. The society of their author was sousjht and cherished bv the most distinguished of his countrymen. The members of the scholar family of Hare, and those of the warrior family of Napier, were among his warmest admirers and closest friends. Coming down to a generation of which the survivors are still with us, Dickens, Carlyle, Emerson, Lord Houghton, Robert and Elizabeth Browning have been among those who have delighted to honour him ; and the list might be brought down so as to include names of all degrees of authority and standing. While the inultitude has ignored Landor, he has been for three generations teach- ing and charming those who in their turn have taught and charmed the multitude. By his birthplace, as he loved to remem.ber, Landor was a neighbour of the greatest English poets. He was born at Warwick on the 30th of January, 1775. He was proud of his lineage, and fond of collecting evidences of its antiquity. His family had, in fact, been long one of prop- erty and position in Staffordshire. He believed that it had originally borne the name of Del-a La'nd or De la Laundes, and that its descent could be traced back for seven hundred years ; for about half that time, said his less credulous or less imaginative brother. AVhat is cer- I.] BIRTH AND PARENTAGE. 6 tain is that some of the Staffordshire Landors had made themselves heard of in the wars of King and Parliament. A whig Landor had been high sheriff of the county at the Revolution of 1688; his grandson, on the other hand, was a marked man for his leanings towards the house of Stuart. A son of this Jacobite Landor being head of the family in the latter part of the last century, was at the same time engaged in the practice of medicine at War- wick. This Dr. Landor was Walter Savage Landor's father. Of Dr. Landor the accounts which have reached us are not sufficient to convey any very definite image. His memory survives only as that of a polished, sociable, agreeable, some- what choleric gentleman, more accomplished and better •^iducated, as his profession required, than most of those with whom he associated, but otherwise dining, coursing, telling his story and drinking his bottle without particular distinction among the rest. Lepidus, doctus, liberalise pro- bus, amicis jucundissimus — these are the titles selected for his epitaph by his sons Walter and Robert, both of them men exact in weighing words. Dr. Landor was twice mar- ried, first to a Miss Wright of Warwick, and after her death to Elizabeth Savage, of the AVarwickshire family of the Savages of Tachbrook. By his first wife he had six children, all of whom, however, died in infancy except one daughter. By his second wife he had three sons and four daughters ; and of this second family Walter Savage Landor was the eldest born. Both the first and the second wives of Dr. Landor were heiresses in their degree. The fortune of the first devolved by settlement upon her sur- viving daughter, who was in due time married to a cousin, Humphrey Arden of Longcroft. The family of the sec- ond, that of the Savages of Tachbrook, was of better cer* 6 LANDOR. [chap. tificd antiquity and distinction than his own, though the proofs by which Walter Savage Lan dor used to associate with it certain historical personages bearing the same name were of a somewhat shadowy nature. The father of Eliza- beth Savage had been lineally the head of his house ; but the paternal inheritance which she divided with her three sisters was not considerable — the family estates having passed, it seems, into the hands of two of her grand- uncles, men of business in London. By these there was be- queathed to her, after her marriage with Dr. Landor, prop- erty to the value of nearly eighty thousand pounds, con- sisting of the two estates of Ipsley Court and Tachbrook in Warwickshire, the former on the borders of Worcester- shire, the latter close to Leamington, together with a share of the reversionary interest in a third estate — that of Hughenden Manor in Buckinghamshire — of which the name has since become familiar to us from other associ- ations. The Warwickshire properties thus left to Mrs. Landor, as well as Dr. Landor's own family property in Staffordshire, were strictly entailed upon the eldest male issue of the marriage ; so that to these united possessions Walter Savage Landor was born heir. No one, it should seem, ever entered life under happier conditions. To the gifts of breeding and of fortune there were added at his birth the gifts of genius and of strength. But there had been evil godmothers beside the cradle as well as good, and in the composition of this powerful nat- ure pride, anger, and precipitancy had been too largely mixed, to the prejudice of a noble intellect and tender heart, and to the disturbance of all his relations with his fellow-men. Of his childhood no minute record has come down to us. It seems to have been marked by neither the precocities nor the infirmities of genius. Indeed, al- I.] BIRTH AND PARENTAGE. 7 though in after-life Landor used often to complain of ail- ments, of serious infirmities he knew little all his days. His mother, whose love for her children was solicitous and prudent rather than passionate or very tender, only once had occasion for anxiety as to the health of her eldest born. This was when he was seized, in his twelfth year, with a violent attack, not of any childish malady, but of gout ; an attack which the boy endured, it is said, with clamor- ous resentment and impatience; and which never after- wards returned. He had been sent as a child of only four-and-a-half to a school at Knowle, ten miles from home. Here he stayed five years or more, until he was old enough to go to Rug- by. His holidays were spent between his father's profes- sional abode in the town of Warwick and one or other of the two country houses on the Savage estates — Ipsley Court and Tachbrook. To these homes of his boyhood Landor was accustomed all his life to look back with the most affectionate remembrance. He had a retentive mem- ory for places, and a great love of trees and flowers. The mulberries, cedars, and fig-trees of the Warwick garden, the nut-walk and apricots of Tachbrook, afforded him joys which he never afterwards forgot. Of Warwick he writes, in his seventy-eighth year, that he has just picked up from the gravel walk the two first mulberries that have fallen, a thing he remembers having done just seventy years before ; and of Tachbrook, in his seventy-seventh, " Well do I re- member it from my third or fourth year ; and the red fil- bert at the top of the garden, and the apricots from the barn wall, and Aunt Nancy cracking the stones for me. If I should ever eat apricots with you again, I shall not now cry for the kernel." For Ipsley and its encircling stream the pleasantest expression of Landor's affection is 8 LANDOK. [chap. contained in some unpublished verses, which may find their place here, although they refer to a later period of his youth : " I hope in vain to see again Ipsley's peninsular domain. In youth 'twas there I used to scare A whirring bird or scampering hare, And leave my book within a nook Where alders lean above the brook, To walk beyond the third mill-pond. And meet a maiden, fair and fond, Expecting me beneath a tree Of shade for two but not for three. Ah ! my old yew, far out of view. Why must I bid you both adieu ?" This love of trees, flowers, and places, went along in the boy with a love of books. He was proficient in school exercises, all except arithmetic, an art which, " according to the method in use," he never succeeded in mastering. At Rugby, where he went at ten, he was soon among the best Latin scholars; and he has recorded his delight over the first purchase of English books he made with his own money ; the books in question being Drayton's Polyolhion and Baker's Chronicle. He tells elsewhere how the writer who first awoke in him the love of poetry was Cowper. He seems from the first to have been a greedy reader, even to the injury of his power of sleep. " I do not remem- ber," he writes among his unpublished jottings, " that I ever slept five hours consecutively, rarely four, even in boyhood. I was much of a reader of night, and was once flogged for sleeping at the evening lesson, which I had learnt, but having mastered it, I dozed." This bookish boy was at the same time physically strong and active, though not particularly dexterous. Dancing, I I.] SCHOOL. 9 to his own great chagrin, he could never learn, and on horseback his head was too full of thoughts to allow him much to mind his riding. At boxing, cricket, and foot- ball he could hold his own well. But the sport he loved was fishing with a cast-net ; at this he was really skilful, and apt in the pursuit to break bounds and get into trou- ble. One day he was reported for having flung his net over, and victoriously held captive, a farmer who tried to interfere with his pastime ; another day, for having ex- torted a nominal permission to fish where he had no sort of business from a passing batcher, who had no sort of authority to give it. A fag, whose unlucky star he had chosen all one afternoon to regard as the cause of his bad sport, remembered all his life Landor's sudden change of demeanour, and his own poignant relief, when the taking of a big fish convinced him that the said star was not unlucky after all. Like many imaginative boys to whose summer musings the pools and shallows of English lowland streams have seemed as full of romance as Eurotas or Scamander, he loved nothing so well as to wander by the brook-side, sometimes with a sporting, but sometimes also with a studious intent. He recalls these pleasures in a retrospec- tive poem of his later years. On Swift joining Avon near Rugby*: " In youth how often at thy side I wander'd ; What golden hours, hours numberless, were squander'd Among thy sedges, while sometimes I meditated native rhymes, And sometimes stumbled upon Latian feet ; There, where soft mole-built seat Invited me, I noted down What must full surely win the crown ; But first impatiently vain efforts made On broken pencil with a broken blade." 10 LANDOR. [chap. Again, one of the most happily turned of all Landor's^ Latin poems expresses his regret that his eldest son, born in Ital}^, will never learn to know and love the English streams which had been the delight of his own youth. And once more, he records how the subject of that most perfect of dramatic dialogues, Leofric and Godiva, had first occupied him as a boy. He had written a little poem on the subject as he sat by the square pool at Rugby — " May the peppermint still be growing on the bank in that place !" — and he remembers the immoderate laughter with which his attempt was received by the friend to whom he confided it, and his own earnestness in beseeching that friend not to tell the lads — " so heart-strickenly and des- perately was I ashamed." Landor, it thus appears, had acquired in his earliest school days the power and the habit, which remained with him until almost the hour of his death, of writing, verses for his own pleasure both in Latin and English. As re- gards Latin, he is the one known instance in which the traditional classical education of our schools took full effect, and was carried out to its furthest practical conse- quences. Not only did Latin become in boyhood and remain to the last a second mother tongue to him ; his ideal of behaviour at the same time modelled itself on the ancient Roman, and that not alone in things convenient. Not content with taking Cato or Scipio or Brutus for his examples, when he was offended he instinctively betook himself to the weapons of Catulhis and Martial. Now a schoolboy's alcaics and hendecasyllabics may be never so well turned, but if their substance is both coarse and sav- age, and if moreover they are directed against that school- boy's master, the result can hardly be to his advantage. And thus it fell out with Landor. He might easily have I.] SCHOOL. . 11 been the pride of the school, for whatever were his faults of temper, his brilliant scholarship could not fail to recom- mend him to his teachers, nor his ready kindness towards the weak, his high spirit and sense of honour to his com- panions. He was pugnacious, but only against the strong. " You remember," he writes, in some verses addressed seventy years later to an old school companion — " You remember that I fought Never with any but an older lad, And never lost but two fights in thirteen." Neither would it much have stood in Landor's way that his lofty ideas of what was due to himself made him re- fuse, at school as afterwards, to compete against others for prizes or distinctions of any kind. What did stand in his way was his hot and resentful impatience alike of contradiction and of authority. Each half-holiday of the school was by a customary fiction supposed to be given as a reward for the copy of verses declared to be the best of the day, and, with or without reason, Landor conceived that the head master — Dr. James — had systematically grudged this recognition to verses of his. When at last play-day was given for a copy of Landor's, the boy added in transcribing it a rude postscript, to the effect that it was the worst he had ever written. In other controver- sies that from time to time occurred between master and scholar, there were not wanting kindlier and more humor- ous passages than this. But at last there arose a quarrel over a Latin quantity, in which Landor was quite right at the outset, but by his impracticable violence put himself hopelessly in the wrong — complicating matters not only with fierce retorts, but with such verses as made authority's very hair stand on end. This was in his sixteenth year, 12 LANDOR. [chap. when he was within five of being head of the school. The upshot was that the head master wrote to Dr. Landor, with many expressions of regret, requesting that his son Walter might be removed, lest he should find himself un- der the necessity of expelling him as one not only rebel- lious himself, but a promoter of rebellion in others. . Signs of the same defiant spirit had not been wanting in his home life. The seeds seeiii to have been already sown of an estrangement, never afterwards altogether healed, between himself and his father. In politics Dr. Landor had been originally a zealous Whig; but he was one of those Whigs for whom the French Revolution was too much. During that crisis he was swept along the stream of alarm and indignation w^hich found both voice and nourishment in the furious eloquence of Burke ; and when the party at last broke in two he went with those who deserted Fox and became the fervent followers of Pitt. The boyish politics of young Landor were of a very different stamp. He was already, what he remained to the end of his days, an ardent republican and foe to kings. The French Revolution had little to do with making or unmaking his sentiments on these points. His earliest admiration was for Washington, his earliest and fiercest aversion for Greorge HL And he had no idea of keeping his opinions to himself, but would insist on broaching them, nt) matter what the place or company. The young rebel one day cried out in his mother's room that he wish- ed the French would invade England, and assist us in hanging George the Third between two such rascals as the Archbishops of Canterbury and York ; whereupon that ex- cellent lady was seen to rise, box his ears from behind his chair, and then hastily make off upon her high-heeled shoes for fear of consequences. Again, we hear of his flinging I.] SCHOOL. 13 an impetuous taunt across the table at a bishop who was dining w^ith his father, and who had spoken sKghtingly of the scholarship of Porson. Nevertheless it must not be supposed that Landor, even in the rawest and most com- bative days of his youth, was at any time merely ill-condi- tioned in his behaviour. He was never without friends in whom the signs both of power and tenderness which broke through his unruly ways inspired the warmest interest and affection. Such friends included at this time the most promising of his schoolmates, more than one charming girl companion of his own family or their acquaintances, and several seniors of various orders and conditions. His principal school friends were Henry Cary, afterwards trans- lator of Dante, and Walter Birch, an accomplished scholar who became an Oxford tutor, and ended his days at a country living in Essex. Girls of his own age or older found something attractive in the proud and stubborn boy, who for all his awkwardness and headlong temper was chivalrous to them, could turn the prettiest verses, and no doubt even in speech showed already some rudi- ments of that genius for the art of compliment which dis- tinguished him beyond all men in later life. Thus we find him towards his twentieth year in the habit of receiv- ing from Dorothea Lyttelton, the beautiful orphan heiress of estates contiguous to his home, advice conveyed in terms betokening the closest intimacy and kindness. Among his elders he attached to himself as friends char- acters so opposite as " the elegant and generous Dr. Sleath," one of his Rugby masters, with whom he was never on any but the kindest terms; Mr. Parkhurst of Ripple, a country squire, and father of one of his school- mates; and the famous Dr. Parr, at that time and for many years perpetual curate of Hatton, near Warwick. 14 LANDOR. [chap. This singular personage, in spite of many grotesque pom- j)osities of speech, and some of character, commanded re- spect alike by his learning and his love of liberty. He was a pillar of advanced Whig opinions, and a friend of most of the chief men of that party. To the study where Parr lived ensconced with his legendary wig and pipe, and whence, in the lisping utterance that suited so quaintly with his sesquipedalian vocabulary, he fulminated against Pitt and laid down the law on Latin from amid piles of books and clouds of tobacco - smoke, the young Landor was wont to resort in search of company more congenial than that of the orthodox clergy and la>vyers who fre- quented his father's house. In speaking of these friendships of Landor's youth we have somewhat anticipated the order of events. To return to the date of his removal from Rugby : he was next placed under the charge of a Dr. Langley, at the village, celebrated for the charms of its scenery, of Ashbourne, in Derbyshire. Here again he showed how strong an at- tachment he was capable of inspiring in, and returning towards, a gentle and friendly senior. In his dialogue of Izaak Walton, Cotton, and Oldways, Dr. Langley is im- mortalized in the character of the " good parson of Ash- bourne ;" " he wants nothing, yet he keeps the grammar school, and is read}'^ to receive as private tutor any young gentleman in preparation for Oxford or Cambridge, but only one. They live like princes, converse like friends, and part like lovers." In a note to the same dialogue, as well as several times elsewhere, Landor explicitly declares his gratitude for the "parental kindness" of Dr. Langley and his wife, as also that which he bore all his life to two others "of his teachers, the above mentioned Dr. Sleath at Rugby, and " the saintly Benvvell " at Oxford. I.] COLLEGE. 15 In this kind household Landor passed nearly two years. In Latin it appears that he had not much to learn from the good vicar, but he turned his time to account in read- ing the Greek writers, especially Sophocles and Pindar, in translating some of Buchanan into English, and some of Cowley into Latin verse, besides other poetical efforts in both languages. His English verses at this time show him not yet emancipated from the established precedents of the eighteenth century. It is not until a year or two later that we find him abandoning, in narrative poetry, the trim monotony of the rhyming couplet for a blank verse of more massive structure and statelier march than any which had been written since Milton. At eighteen Landor left Ashbourne and went into resi- dence at Trinity College, Oxford. His abilities made their impression at the university in spite of himself ; but he still would not be persuaded to compete for any sort of distinction. " I showed my compositions to Birch of Magdalen, my old friend at Rugby, and to Cary, translator of Dante, and to none else." Landor's reputation for talents which he would not put forth was accompanied by a reputation for opinions which he would not conceal. The agitation of political parties was at its height. The latter course of the Revolution had alienated the majority even of those who had sympathized with it at first, and the few Englishmen who did not share the general horror were marked men. Among those few there w-ere at Ox- ford in these days two undergraduates, SoutKey of Balliol, and Landor of Trinity. The two were not known to each other until afterwards; but they both made themselves conspicuous by appearing in hall and elsewhere with their hair unpowdered, a fashion which about 1793 — 1794 was a direct advertisement of revolutionary sentiments. " Take 16 LANDOR. [chap. care," said Landor's tutor to bim ; " they will stone you for a republican." No such consequences in fact resulted, but Landor became notorious in the university. He was known not only as a Jacobin, but as a " mad Jacobin." *' His Jacobinism," says Sonthey, looking back to his own feelings in those days, " would have made me seek his ac- quaintance, but for his madness." The impression thus left on Southey's mind was probably due less to the warmth of Landor's revolutionary sentiments and lan- guage, than to the notoriety of the freak which, before long, brought him for the second time into violent and fu- tile collision with authority. One evening he invited his friends to wine. He had been out shooting in the morn- ing, and had his gun, powder, and shot in the next room. Opposite were the rooms of a Tory undergraduate, " a man," according to Landor's account, " universally laughed at and despised ; and it unfortunately happened that he had a party on the same day, consisting of servitors and other raffs of every description." The two parties began exchanging taunts ; then those opposite closed the shut- ters, and being on the outside, Landor proposed, by way of a practical joke, to send a charge of shot into them. His friends applauded, and he fired. The owner of the shut- ters naturally complained, and an inquiry was instituted to ascertain who was the offender. Landor's defiant mood at this point played him an ill turn, in that it prompted him, instead of frankly stating the facts, to refuse all in- formation. Part of his motive in this course, as he him- self afterwards explained, was his unwillingness to add to the causes of displeasure which he was conscious of having already given to his father. He could not have followed a more injudicious course. The president was compelled to push the inquiry and to inflict punishment. This he I.] COLLEGE. 17 seems to have done as leniently and considerately as pos- sible; and when sentence of rustication was pronounced, it was with the expressed hope, on the part of all the col- lege authorities but one, that its victim would soon return to do them honour. Strangely enough, it seems also to have been hoped that a return to his home would bring about a better understanding between young Landor and his father. But so far from this being the case, his bear- ing after the freak, more even than the freak itself, to- gether with his subsequent step of giving up his college rooms, exasperated Dr. Landor ; passionate words were ex- changed; and the son turned his back on his father's house, as he declared and believed, " for ever." 2 CHAPTER II. EXPERIMENTS IN LIFE AND POETRY — GEBIR. [1794—1804.] From Warwick Lander went at first to London, where he took a lodging in Beaumont Street, Portland Place. Here he worked hard for several months at French and Italian, having formed the design of leaving England and taking up his abode in Italy. His Italian studies made him an ardent admirer of Alfieri, whom he always afterwards counted it an event to have met once at this time in a bookseller's shop. During these months he also brought out his first book, " The Poems of Walter Savage Landor ; printed for T. Cadell, jun. and W. Davies (successors to John Cadell) in the Strand, 1795." This small volume is now very rare, having been, like several of Landor's writings, withdrawn from sale by its author within a few weeks of publication. It contained a num- ber of poems and epigrams in English, besides a collection of Latin verses and a prose Defensio vindicating the use of that language by the moderns. The principal English pieces are a poem in three cantos on the Birth of Poesy ^ an Apology for Satire^ a tale of Pyramus and Thisbe, im- itated from Ovid, an Epistle of Abelard to Eloisa, all in the rhymed heroic couplet, an ode To Washington in the style of Gray, and a short poem in the metre since made CHAP. II.] EXPERIMENTS IN LIFE AND POETRY. 19 popular by In Memoriam^ called French Villagers. Lan- dor already shows indications of a manner more vigorous and personal tban that of the current poetry of the day, but in diction as well as in the choice of metrical forms he is still under the rule of eighteenth century conven- tions, and writes of nymphs and swains, Bellona and the Zephyrs. At Oxford, where the rumour of his talents and the notoriety of his escapade were still fresh, his little volume seems to have made an impression, and to have been in demand as long as it remained in circulation. Another literary venture made by Landor during these months in London did not, like the last, bear his name. This was a satire against Pitt, in the form of a Moral Epistle in heroic verse, addressed to Earl Stanhope, with a prose preface in which the republican poet condoles with the republican peer on his possession of hereditary honours. While the young Landor was thus engaged with poetry and politics in London, the good offices of friends, and foremost among them of the fair Dorothea Lyttelton and her uncles, had been employed in seeking to reconcile him with his family. Several propositions as to his future mode of life were successively made and dropped — one beino" that he should be offered a commission then va- cant in the Warwickshire Militia. This scheme, howev- er, never came to Landor's knowledge, having fallen to the ground when it was ascertained that the other gentlemen of the corps would resign rather than serve with a com- rade of his opinions. The arrangement ultimately made was that he should receive an allowance of a hundred and fifty pounds a year, and be free to live as he liked, it being understood that the idea of a retreat to Italy was given up, and that he was welcome to free quarters at his father's 20 LANDOR. [chap. house whenever he pleased. If this allowance seems small, it must be remembered that Dr. Landor's family property in Staffordshire was worth something under a thousand pounds a year ; while there were six younger children for whom Mrs. Landor, her estates being strictly entailed upon her eldest son, held herself bound to make provision out of her income during her life. To her careful and impartial justice towards all her children there exists abundant testimony, including that of Walter him- self, whose feelings towards his mother were at all times those of unclouded gratitude and affection. Matters having been thus arranged, Landor left London, and, with the exception of occasional visits to his family, led during the next three years a life of seclusion in South "Wales. He took up his residence on the coast, of which the natural charms were not then defiled as they are now by the agglomerations and exhalations of the mining and smelting industries. Having his headquarters generally at Swansea, sometimes at Tenby, and sometimes taking excursions into remoter parts of the Principality, he filled the chief part of his time with strenuous reading and meditation. His reminiscences of the occupations of these days are preserved in sundry passages both of prose and rhyme. Thus, contrasting the tenour of his own youth with that of Moore's — *' Alone I spent my earlier hour, While thou wert in the roseate bower, And raised to thee was every eye, And every song won every sigh. One servant and one chest of books Follow'd me into mountain nooks, Where, shelter'd from the sun and breeze, Lay Pindar and Thucydides." IT.] EXPERIMENTS IN LIFE AND POETRY. , 21 Among all the ancient and modern writers whom Landor- read and pondered at this time, those who had most share in forming his mind seem to have been Pindar and Milton. What he admired, he says, in Pindar, was his " proud complacency and scornful strength. If I could resemble him in nothing else, I was resolved to be as compendious and as exclusive." But the strongest spell was that laid upon him by Milton, for whom, alike as a poet, hero, and republican seer and prophet, he now first conceived the enthusiastic reverence which afterwards inspired some of his noblest writing. " My prejudices in favour of ancient literature began to wear away on reading Paradise Lost, and even the great hexameter sounded to me tinkling when I had recited aloud, in my solitary walks on the sea-shore, the haughty appeal of Satan and the repentance of Eve." Here, from a letter written long after to Lady Blessington, is another retrospective glimpse of his life in those days. " I lived," he writes, " chiefly among woods, which are now killed with copper works, and took my walks over sandy sea-coast deserts, then covered with low roses and thousands of nameless flowers and plants, trodden by the naked feet of the Welsh peasantry, and trackless. These creatures were somewhat between me and the ani- mals, and were as useful to the landscape as masses of weed or stranded boats." Never were his spirits better, he writes in the same connexion, although he did not exchange twelve sentences with men. It is clear that Landor here exaggerates in some degree the loneliness of his life. If he did not exchange twelve sentences with men, he at all events found occasion for more extended parley with the other sex. He was, in fact, by no means as much a stranger to the roseate bower as th(^ verses above quoted might lead us to suppose. Thes^ 22 LANDOR. [chap. days of solitary rambles and higli communings, " Studies intense of strong and stern delight" — the line is his own — were also to. Landor days of romance. The earliest heroine of his devotions during his life in Wales was call- ed in the language of poetry lone, and in that of daily life Jones. To her succeeded, but without, it would seem, altogether supplanting her, a second and far more serious flame. This was a blithe Irish lady, who conceived a devoted passion for the haughty and studious youth, and whom her poet called lanthe. lanthe stands for Jane, and the full name of the lady was Sophia Jane Swift — af- terwards Countess de Molande. I find the history of these names lone and lanthe, which fill so considerable a place in Landor's early poetry, set down as follows in one of those autobiographical jottings in verse which he did not think it worth while to publish, but which are character- istic as illustrating his energetic and deliberate way of turning; trifles into verse : *' Sometimes, as boys will do, I play'd at love, Noi' feai"'d cold weather, nor withdrew in hot ; And two who were my playmates at that hour, Hearing me call'd a poet, in some doubt Challenged me to adapt their names to song, lone was the first ; her name is heard Among the hills of Cambria, north and south, But there of shorter stature, like herself ; I placed a comely vowel at its close, And drove an ugly sibilant away. ***** lanthe, who came later, smiled and said, I have two names and will be praised hi both ; Sophia is not quite enough for me, And you have simply named it, and but once. Now call the other up — ***** il] experiments in life and POETRr. 23 I went, and planted in a fresh parterre lanthe ; it was blooming, when a youth Leapt o'er the hedge, and snatching at the stem Broke off the label from my favourite flower, And stuck it on a sorrier of his own." The sally in the last lines is curious. Both Shelley and Byron have made English readers familiar with the name lanthe. So far as I can learn, it had not appeared in English poetry at all until it was introduced by Landor, except in Dryden's translation of the story of Iphis and lanthe from Ovid. It was in 1813 that both Byron chose it as a fancy name for Lady Ann Harley, in the dedica- tion of Childe Harold, and Shelley as a real name to be given to his infant daughter. The "youth" of the above extract can hardly be any other than Byron, whom Landor neither liked nor much admired, and whom he considered, as we thus perceive, to have borrowed this beautiful name lanthe from his own early poetry. Upon the whole, the life led by Landor at twenty, and for the years next following, was one well suited to the training of a poet. He nourished his mind resolutely upon the noblest sustenance, making his own all that was best in the literatures of ancient and modern Europe — ex- cept, indeed, in the literature of Germany, which had been then barely discovered in England by a few explorers like Scott, Coleridge, and William Taylor of Norwich, and to which Landor neither now nor afterwards felt himself at- tracted. He haunted, moreover, with the keenest enjoy- ment of its scenery, a region hardly less romantic or less impressive than that which was inspiring at the same time the youth of Wordsworth. If he was inclined to trifle with the most serious of things, love, that is a fault by which the quality of a man's life suffers, but not neces- 24 LAXDOR. [chap. sarily the quality of his song ; and experiences both more transient and more reckless than his have made of a Burns or a Heine the exponents of the passion for all generations. Landor, however, was not destined to be one of the master poets either of nature, like Wordsworth, or of pas- sion, like Burns or Heine. All his life he gave proof, in poetry, of remarkable and versatile capacity, but of no overmastering vocation. So little sure, indeed, in youth was he of his own vocation, that his first important poem, Gehir, was suggested by an accident and prefaced with an apology. The history of Gehir is this : Landor had made friends at Tenby with the family of Lord Aylmer, and one of the young ladies of that family, his especial and close friend Rose Aylmer, lent him a history of romance by one Clara Reeve. At the end of this book he found a sketch of a tale, nominally Arabian, which struck his imagination as having in it something of a shadowy, antique grandeur — magnificum quid sub crepusculo anti- quitatis, as he afterwards defined the quality — and out of which he presently constructed the following story : Gebir (whence Gibraltar), a prince of Spain, in fulfilment of a vow binding him to avenge hereditary wrongs, makes war against Charoba, a young queen of Egypt, Charoba seeks counsel of her nurse, the sorceress Dalica, who devises suc- cour through her magic arts. An interview next takes place between Charoba and the invader, v^hen their enmity changes into mutual love. Gebir hereupon directs his army to restore and colonize a ruined city which had been founded in the country of Charoba by one of his ances- tors ; and the work is begun and carried on until it is sud- denly undone by magic. Meanwhile the brother of Gebir, Tamar, a shepherd-prince, whose task it is to tend thX) II.] GEBIR. 25 flocks of the invading host, has in his turn fallen in love with an ocean nymph, who had encountered and beaten him in wrestling. Gebir persuades Tamar to let him try a fall with the nymph, and throwing her, learns from her, first promising that she shall have the hand of Tamar for her reward, the rites to be performed in order that his city may rise unimpeded. In the fulfilment of these rites Gebir visits- the under-world, and beholds the shades of his ancestors. After his return it is agreed that he shall be wedded to Charoba. Tamar also and his nymph are to be united ; their marriage takes place first, and the nymph, warning her husband of calamities about to befall in Egypt, persuades him to depart with her, and after leading him in review past all the shores of the Mediter- ranean, unfolds to him a vision of the glory awaiting his descendants in the lands between the Rhine and the Garonne. Then follows the marriage of Gebir and Cha- roba, which they and their respective hosts intend to be the seal of a great reconciliation. But, inasmuch as "women communicate their fears more willingly than their love," Charoba has never avowed her change of heart to Dalica, who believes the marriage to be only a stratagem devised by the queen to get Gebir within her power. Ac- cordingly she gives the bridegroom, to put on during the ceremony, a poisoned garment which she has obtained from her sister, a .sorceress stronger than herself. The poison takes effect, and the poem ends with the death of Gebir in the arms of the despairing Charoba, and in view of the assembled hosts. Such is the plot, shadowy in truth and somewhat cha- otic, of Landor's first considerable poem. In his preface he declares the work to be " the fruit of Idleness and Ig- norance; for had I been a botanist or a mineralogist, it C 2* 26 LANDOR. [chap. had never been written." We ouglit, however, to qualify these careless words of the preface, by remembering those of the poem itself, in which he invokes the spirit of Shak speare, and tells how — panting in the play-hour of my youth, I drank of Avon, too, a dangerous draught That roused within the feverish thirst of song." 4 Having determined to write Gebir, Landor hesitated for some time whether to do so in Latin or in English, and had even composed some portions in the former language before he finally decided in favour of the latter. And then, when he had written his first draft of the poem in English, he lost the manuscript, and only recovered it after a considerable time. Here is his account of the matter as he recollected it in old age : " Sixty the years since Fidler bore My grouse-bag up the Bala moor ; Above the lakes, along the lea, Where gleams the darkly yellow Dee ; Through crags, o'er cliffs, I carried there My verses with paternal care. But left them, and went home again To wing the birds upon the plain. With heavier luggage half forgot, For many months they follow'd not. When over Tawey's sands they came, Brighter flew up my winter flame,- And each old cricket sang alert With joy that they had come unhurt." When he had recovered the manuscript of his poem, Landor next proceeded to condense it. He cuts out, he tells us, nearly half of what he had written. The poem as so abridged is, for its length, probably the most " com- pendious and exclusive" which exists. The narrative is II.] GEBIR. 27 packed into a space where it has no room to develope it- self at ease. The transitions from one theme to another are effected with more than Pindaric abruptness, and the difficulty of the poem is further increased by the occur- rence of grammatical constructions borrowed from the Latin, and scarcely intelligible to those ignorant of that language. It is only after considerable study that the reader succeeds in taking in Gebir as a whole, however much he may from the first be impressed by the power of particular passages. Next to the abruptness and the con- densation of Gebir, its most striking qualities are breadth and vividness of imagination. Taken severally, and with- out regard to their sequence and connexion, these colossal figures and supernatural actions are presented with master- ly reality and force. As regards style and language, Lan- dor shows that he has not been studying the great masters in vain. He has discarded Bellona and the Zephyrs, and calls things by their proper names, admitting no height- ening of language that is not the natural expression of heightened thought. For loftiness of thought and lan- guage together, there are passages in Gehir that will bear comparison with Milton. There are lines too that for majesty of rhythm will bear the same comparison ; but majestic as Landor's blank verse often is, it is always too regular; it exhibits none of the Miltonic variety, none of the inventions in violation or suspension of ordinary met- rical law, by which that great master draws unexampled tones from his instrument. Here, indeed, was a contrast to the fashionable poetry of the hour, to the dulcet inanities of Hayley and of Miss Seward. Gehir appeared just at the mid -point of time between the complaint of Blake concerning the truancy of the Muses from England, 28 LANDOR. [chap. " The languid strings do scarcely move, The sound is forced, the notes are few," and the thanksgiving of Keats, " fine sounds are floating; wild About the earth." Of the fine sounds that heralded to modern ears the re- vival of English poetry, Gehir will always remain for stu- dents one of the most distinctive. The Lyrical Ballads, the joint venture of Coleridge and Wordsworth, which ap- peared in the same year as Gehir, began with the Ancient Mariner, a work of even more vivid and haunting, if also more unearthly, imagery, and ended with the Lines writ- ten on revisiting Tintern Abbey, which conveyed the first notes of a far deeper spiritual message. But nowhere in the works of Wordsworth or Coleridge do we find any- thing resembling Landor's peculiar qualities of haughty splendour and massive concentration. The message, such as it is, of Gebir is mainly political and philanthropic. The tragic end of the hero and his bride is designed to point a moral against the enterprises of hatred and ambi- tion, the happy fates of Tamar and the nymph to illus- trate the reward that awaits the peaceful. The progeny whom the latter pair see in a vision celebrating the tri- umphs of liberty are intended to symbolize the people of revolutionary France. The passage describing their fes- tivity, cancelled in subsequent editions, is one of the best in the original poem, and its concluding image may serve to illustrate both the style and the versification of Gebir at least as well as other passages more commonly quoted, like the shell, the meeting of the prince and Charoba, or the bath of Charoba. II.] GEBIR. 29 *' What hoary form so vigorous vast bends here ? Time, Time himself thi-ows off his motley garb, Figured with monstrous men and monstrous gods, And in pure vesture enters their pure fanes, A proud partaker of their festivals. Captivity led captive, war o'erthrown. They shall o'er Europe, shall o'er earth extend Empire that seas alone and skies confine. And glory that shall strike the crystal stars," In the same spirit Buonaparte is included among the de- scendants of Tamar, and his birth foreshadowed as that of "A mortal man above all mortal praise." On the other hand George III. is introduced, with a lordly neglect of the considerations of time and space, among the ancestors of G-ebir suffering the penalty of their crimes in the nether regions. "Aroar," cries the prince to his guide — " Aroar, what wretch that nearest us ? What wretch Is that with eyebrows white, and slanting brow ?" (In conversation, it may be mentioned, Landor had an- other formula for expressing his aversion for the physical appearance of his sovereign. He had only seen him once, and " his eyes," he was accustomed to say — " his eyes looked as if they had been cut out of a vulture's gizzard.") In taking leave of Gehir^ let us only note farther the per- sonal allusions which it contains in two passages to Lan- dor's relations with his lone. One is a direct apostrophe in which he celebrates her beauties; her cheeks, her tena- ples, her lips, her eyes, her throat, which he calls love's column " Marmoreal, trophied round with golden hair." 80 LANDOR. [chap. In the other passage she is introduced among the choir of nymphs attendant upon the bride of Taraar : " Scarce the sweet-flowing music he imbibes, Or sees the peopled Ocean ; scarce he sees Spio with sparkhng eyes, or Beroe Demure, and young lone, less renown'd. Not less divine, mild-natured. Beauty form'd Her face, her heart Fidelity ; for gods Design'd a mortal, too, lone loved." Landor was at all times sensible enough of the differ- ence between his own marble and other men's stucco ; and he expected great things of Gebir. At the same time, lie published it in the manner least likely to ensure success, that is anonymously, and in pamphlet shape, through a local publisher at Warwick. Considering the reception given twenty years afterwards to the poetry of Keats and Shelley, it is no wonder that Gehir was neglected. The poem found, indeed, one admirer, and that was Southey, who read it with enthusiasm, recommended it in speech and writing to his friends, Cobbe, William Taylor, Gros- venor Bedford, the Hebers, and in the year following its publication (1799) called public attention to it in the pages of the Critical Review. Another distinguished ad- mirer, of some years later date, was De Quincey, who was accustomed to profess — although Landor scouted the pro- fession — that he also had for some time " conceited him- self " to be the sole purchaser and appreciater of Gehir. Southey's praise in the Critical Review was soon balanced by a disparaging article in the Monthly, in which the anonymous author was charged, among other things, with having too closely imitated Milton. To this Landor pre- pared a reply, written, to judge by the specimens given in Forster's Life, in just the same solid, masculine, clenching II.] EXPERIMENTS IN LIFE AND POETRY. 81 style with which we are famihar in his later prose, but withheld from publication in deference to the judicious advice of a friend. Whether the scant success of his poem really had any- thing to do with the restlessness of Landor's life and the desultoriness of his efforts during the next few years, we can hardly tell. He says himself, in his lofty way, that if even foolish men had cared for Gebir, he should have con- tinued to apply himself to poetry, since " there is some- thing of summer in the hum of insects." As it was he allowed himself to drift. He began to diversify his exile with frequent and prolonged visits to Bath, London, Brigh- ton. He tried his powers fitfully in many directions. Dr. Parr was eager to enlist his young friend in the ranks of Whig journalism, and persuaded him to place himself in relations with Robert Adair, the right-hand man in these matters of Charles James Fox; under whose guidance Lan- dor became for a while a frequenter of the reporter's gal- lery, a contributor to the Courier, and a butt for the at- tacks of the Anti-Jacobin. In scorn and denunciation of " the Execrable " — that is to say, of Pitt and of his policy — Landor could be trusted not to fail; bat in support of Fox and his, it was unsafe to count upon him too far. He was not, indeed, of the stuff of which practically effective political writers are made. While he despised party watch- words and party men, his temperament was not dispassion- ate enough for wise neutrality. His political writings, as we shall see, testify to a staunch and high devotion to the great principles of freedom and of justice, as well as to a just observation of many of the broad facts of politics and society. But in dealing with individual problems a,nd persons Landor knows no measure, and is capable neither of allowance nor abatement. In his eyes all champions of 32 LANDOR. liberty are for the time being spotless heroes ; nearly all kings, tyrants to be removed by the dagger or the rope; and, with a few shining exceptions, most practical politi- cians knaves and fools. How long Landor's connexion with the Courier lasted does not appear; but it was, at any rate, not terminated till the resignation of Pitt, and the formation of the Adding- ton Ministry in 1801. This event exasperated the Whig party, and especially Parr, whose correspondence with Lan- dor at this time consists of pompous and elaborate dia- tribes, the substance of which he entreats his young friend to recast for publication in the party sheet. Then ensued the peace of Luneville; and in the next year, 1802, the peace of Amiens. Landor, like all the world, took the op- portunity to visit Paris ; but, like himself, declined to ac- cept introductions or to pay any kind of personal homage to the victorious Consul or to his ministers. His, at least, was not one among the feeble heads, to slavery prone, upon which Wordsworth poured scorn on the same occa- sion. Landor travelled alone, made his own observations on the people and the country ; witnessed, from the illu- minated garden of the Tuileries, the young conqueror's re- ception by the multitude when he appeared at the window of the palace, and contrived, in the great review afterwards, to get a place within a few feet of him as he rode by. Of all this Landor wrote fully and unaffectedly at the time in letters, which have been preserved, to his sisters and broth- ers. Here, written ten years afterwards, and coloured by a certain measure of deliberate and, in truth, somewhat over-magniloquent rhetoric, is his account of the reflexions to which another incident of his Paris trip gave rise ; I mean his visit to the spoils of art there collected in the Louvre from the churches and galleries of Italy and of all II.] EXPERIMENTS IN LIFE AND POETRY. ^ 33 Europe. " I went," he says, " with impatient haste to be- hold these wonders of their age and of all ages succeed- ing, but no sooner had I ascended a few steps leading to them than I leaned back involuntarily against the balus- ters, and my mind was overshadowed and almost overpow- ered by these reflections : has then the stupidity of men who could not, in the whole course of their existence, have given birth to anything equal to the smallest of the works above, been the cause of their removal from the countiy of those who produced them? Kings, whose fatuity would have befitted them better to drive a herd of swine than to direct the energies of a nation ! Well, well ! I will lose for a moment the memory of their works in contemplat- ing those of greater men." The events of the last five years had had no more effect than those of the five preceding them in modifying the essential points of Landor's political creed. The portents of the Directory and Consulate had no more been able than the orgies of the Terror to disgust him with repub- licanism or to reconcile him to monarchy. He had shared, indeed, the chagrin and reprobation with which all friends of liberty looked on the subversion by revolutionary France, now that she was transformed into a conquering power, of ancient liberties outside her borders. But it was France only, and not the Revolution, that Landor held guilty. He had by this time conceived for that country and its inhabitants an aversion in which he never after- wards wavered. "A scoundrel of a Frenchman — tautology quantum scoundrel — did so and so," he wrote once to Hare, and the words convey his sentiments on the subject in a nutshell. The French are for him henceforward the most ferocious, the most inconstant, the most ungoverna- ble of human beings. "As to the cause of liberty," he 34 LANDOR. [chap. writes from Paris to his brother in 1802, "this cursed na- tion has ruined it for ever." The fault in his eyes is not nearly so much that of their new master as their own. Buonaparte is indeed no longer for Landor the mortal man above all mortal praise of Gehir, any more than the French people are the peaceful progeny of Tamar ; but he is the best ruler for such a race. "Doubtless the government of Buonaparte is the best that can be contrived for French- men. Monkeys must be chained, though it may cost them some grimaces." And again, reiterating the same idea more gravely ten years afterwards, Landor writes: "No people is so incapable of governing itself as the French, and no government is so proper for it as a despotic and a military one. A nation more restless and rapacious than any horde in Tartary can be controlled only by a Ghenghiz Khan. . . . Their emperor has acted towards them with perfect wisdom, and will leave to some future Machiavelli, if Europe should again see so consummate a politician, a name which may be added to Agathocles and Caesar Borgia. He has amused himself with a display of every character from Masaniello up to Charlemagne, but in all his pranks and vagaries he has kept one foot upon Frenchmen." This whimsical energy of dislike extends from the po- litical to the private characteristics of the French ; to their looks, their voices and manners, and even to the scenery and climate of their country. " Of all the coasts," it is declared in one of his dialogues — " of all the coasts in the universe, of the same extent, those of France for nearly their totality in three seas are the least beautiful and the least interesting." " The children, the dogs, the frogs, are more clamorous than ours; the cocks are shriller." The language of the French, as a language, Landor also thinks II.] EXPERIMENTS IN LIFE AND POETRY. 35 deplorable ; but he is too good a judge of letters to extend his contempt to their writings. He was solidly and fa- miliarly versed in the great French writers from Montaigne and Rabelais down, and though he did scant justice to Voltaire, and saw the weakness rather than the strength of the French poetical drama, he thought many of their prose writers second only, if second at all, to the best of antiquity. The style of Rousseau in particular he thought incomparable. He held also in high admiration the great French oratorical divines, and felt and valued to the full the combined pregnancy and simplicity of thought and utterance which distinguish those two pre-eminent classics in verse and prose respectively, La Fontaine and Pascal. "Do we find in Pascal anything of the lying, gasconading, vapouring Frenchmen ? On the contrary, we find, in de- spite of the most miserable language, all the sober and re- tired graces of style, all the confident ease of manliness and strength, with an honest but not abrupt simplicity which appeals to the reason, but is also admitted to the heart." To return to the history of Landor's occupations, in 1800 he had published, in the shape of an unbound quarto pamphlet of fourteen pages, a collection of short " Poems from the Arabic and Persian," written in irregular, un- rhyraed verses, principally anapaestic. An autograph note added in old age to his own copy says, " I wrote these poems after reading what had been translated from the Arabic and Persian by Sir W. Jones and Dr. Nott." In his preface Landor professes to have followed a French version of the originals, but neither such version nor such originals are known to exist ; and it may be safely infer- red that both the statement of the preface and the elabo- rate notes appended to each poem are so much niystifica^ 36 LANDOR. [chap. tion. The pamphlet is of extreme rarity, and its contents were not reprinted until 1858. I give, by way of exam- ple, the following characteristic and taking little piece with which it concludes : " Oh Rahdi, where is happiness ? Look from your arcade, the sun rises from Busrah ; Go thither, it rises from Ispahan. Alas ! it rises neither from Ispahan nor Busrah, But from an ocean impenetrable to the diver. Oh, Rahdi, the sun is happiness." To which Landor adds a note to say that " this poem re- sembles not those ridiculous quibbles which the English . in particular call epigrams, but rather, abating some little for Orientalism^ those exquisite Eidyllia, those carvings as it were on ivory or on gems, which are modestly called epigrams by the Greeks." This little publication, as was natural from its shape and character, attracted no attention, nor did Landor attempt anything in the same manner afterwards. Two years later, immediately before his expedition to Paris in 1802, he put forth another small volume under the title of "Poetry, by the author of Gebir." This contains two short narrative poems in blank verse — Chrysaor and the Phocceans, besides a few miscellaneous lyrics in Latin and English; Landor's mind was still occupied with the mythic past of Bsetic Spain ; and Chrysaor is an episode of the war between Gods and Titans, in which Gades (Cadiz) is severed from the mainland by Neptune at the request of Jove. Both in subject and in treatment it seems to foreshadow the Hyperion of Keats, except that the manner of the elder poet is more massive, more con- centrated, and proportionately less lucid than that of the u.] EXPERIMENTS IN LIFE AND POETRY. 37 younger. To my mind Chrysaor is Landor's finest piece of narrative writing in l^lank verse ; less monotonous in its movement than Gehir, more lofty and impassioned than any of the later "Hellenics" with which it was afterwards incorporated. At the time of its publication this poem made a deep impression upon Wordsworth.^ The Pho- cceans, on the other hand, which tells of the foundation of the colony of Massilia by emigrants of that race — a subject which had been in Landor's mind since Oxford days — is so fragmentary and so obscure as to baffle the most tenacious student. It contains, like all Landor's early poetry, im- ages both condensed and vivid, as well as weighty reflec- tions weightily expressed ; but in its sequence and inci- dents the poem is, to me at least, unintelligible. So at the time it seems to have been found by Southey, who has- tened to review this new publication by the unknown ob- ject of his previous enthusiasm, but could find little to say in its praise. Another task which occupied Landor at this time was the re-editing of Gehir^ in conjunction with his brother Robert, then at Oxford. In order to make the poem more popular, the brothers reprinted it with arguments and notes; some of the latter being intended to clear up difficulties, others to modify points concerning which, as for instance, the character of Buonaparte, the author had changed his mind. At the same time they published separately a Latin translation, which, together with a scholarly and vigorous preface in the same language, Walter had prepared express- ly at Robert's instigation by way of helping the piece into ^ In the final collected edition of Landor's writings (ISYG) Chry- saor is inadvertently printed as part of the same poem with Regene- ration^ which was written twenty years later, and with which it hag nothing at all to do. 38 LANDOR. [chap. popularity. These, it must be remembered, were the days of Vincent Bourne, Bobus Smith, Frere, Canning, and Wellesley, when the art of Latin versification was studied, practised, and enjoyed not in scholastic circles alone, but by a select public of the most distinguished Englishmen; so that there was not quite so much either of pedantry or of sim- plicity in the fraternal enterprise as appeared at first sight. At the end of the volume of " Poetry " published in 1802 there had already appeared one or two lyrics refer- ring, though not yet under that name, to the lady whom Landor afterwards called lanthe. More were appended, and this time with the name, to yet another experimental scrap of a volume in verse, having for its chief feature a tale in eight - syllable rhyme called Gunlaug and Helga, suggested by Herbert's translation from the Icelandic. This appeared in 1804 or 1805, while Robert Landor was still at Oxford, and by him, if by no one else, was duti- fully reviewed in a periodical of his own creation, the Ox- ford Review. From these years, about 1802 — 1806, dates the chief part of Landor's verses written to or about lanthe. Whether in the form of praise, of complaint, or of appeal, these verses are for the most part general in their terms, and do not enable us definitely to retrace the course of an attachment on which Landor never ceased to look back as the strongest of his life, and for the object of which he continued until her death to entertain the most chivalrous and tender friendship. Landor's verses in this class, al- though not in the first rank of love -poetry, nevertheless express much contained passion in their grave, concise way, and seldom fail to include, within the polished shell of verse, a solid and appropriate kernel, however minute, of thought. Here, in a somewhat depressed and ominous key, is a good example of the style : II.] EXPERIMENTS IN LIFE AND POETRY. 39 " I held her hand, the pledge of bliss, , Her hand that trembled and withdrew, She bent her head before my kiss — My heart was sure that hers was true. " Now I have told her I must part, She shakes my hand, she bids adieu, Nor shuns the kiss — alas, my heart ! Hers never was the heart for you." In other pieces we get a more outspoken tale of past de- lights and of the pain of present separation. The lady ■ went abroad, and the restlessness of Landor's life increased. He moved frequently between Wales, Bath, Clifton, War- wick, Oxford, and London. We find him in close corre- spondence, generally on subjects of literature or scholar ship, with his friends Gary and Birch. Another of his in- timate friends of the years just preceding these had been Rough, a young lawyer married to a daughter of Wilkes, and then of a shining promise which smouldered off later into disappointment and mediocrity. With him Landor on slight occasion or none had about this time one of his impulsive, irreconcilable quarrels. In the meantime his father's health was gradually and painfully breaking up. It was evident that Walter would soon come into posses- sion of the patrimonial portion of his inheritance. He did not wait that event to outrun his allowance. We find him buying a horse one day, a Titian another, a Hogarth on the third ; and generally beginning to assume the habits of a gentleman of property and taste. He was full at the same time of lofty schemes, literary and other. The expedition of the fleet under Nelson called forth some verses of which we cannot but regret the loss, and in which the writer seemed, to quote the friend to whom he addressed them, 40 LANDOR. [chap. ii. "•to have been inspired by the prophetic spirit ascribed to the poets of old, and to have anticipated the glorious vic- tory of Nelson, the news of which had reached me just be- fore I received them." The victory in question was the battle of Trafalgar, and between the date of this letter, November 11, 1805, and Christmas of the same year. Dr. Landor had died, and Walter had come into possession of his patrimony. CHAPTER III. MORE EXPERIMENTS AND MARRIAGE BATH SPAIN LLANTHONY — COUNT JULIAN. [1805—1814.] As soon as he was his own master, Landor proceeded to enlarge his style of living in proportion to his increased means, or rather beyond such proportion as it turned out. He continued to make Bath his headquarters, and, exter- nally at least, lived there for some time the life of any oth- er young (although, indeed, he was not now so very young) Fortunio. His political opinions were a 'source of some scandal, and it was remarked that any other man talking as Landor talked would have been called to account for it over and over again. Once or twice, indeed, it seems as if collisions had only been averted by the good oflSces of friends ; but there was something about Landor which did not encourage challenge; partly, no doubt, his obvious intrepidity, and partly, we may infer, his habitual exact- ness on the point of personal courtesy even in the midst of his most startling sallies. Perhaps, too, republicanism seemed to lose something of its odiousness in a gentleman of Landor's known standing and fortune. Common re- port exaggerated at this time his wealth and his expecta- tions, and his own prodigality in the matter of horses, carriages, servants, plate, pictures, and the like, lent conn- D 3 42 LANDOR. [chap. tenance to the exaggeration. In his personal habits, it must at the same time be noted, Landor was now, as al- ways, frugal. He drank water, or only the lightest wines, and ate fastidiously indeed, but sparely. All his life he would touch no viands but such as were both choice and choicely dressed, and he preferred to eat them alone, or in the company of one or two, regarding crowded repasts as fit only for savages. " To dine in company with more than two is a Gaulish and a German thing. I can hardly brino* myself to believe that I have eaten in concert with twenty ; so barbarous and herdlike a practice does it now appear to me, such an incentive to drink much and talk loosely — not to add, such a necessity to speak loud — - which is clownish and odious in the extreme." The speaker in the above passage is Lucullus, but the senti- ments are Landor's own. Neither does Landor seem at any time to have taken trouble about his dress ; having, indeed, in later life come to be conspicuously negligent in that particular. In these early Bath days we have to picture him to ourselves simply as a solid, massive, ener- getic presence, in society sometimes silent and abstracted, sometimes flaming with eloquence and indignation ; his figure robust and commanding, but not tall, his face prin- cipally noticeable for its bold, full, blue-grey eyes and strons", hiffh-arched brows, with dark hair fallinij* over and half concealing the forehead, and a long, stubborn upper lip, and aggressive set of the jaw, betokening truly enough the passionate temper of the man, yet in conver- sation readily breaking up into the sunniest, most genial smile. Such as he was, then, Landor was in high request for the time being in the assembly-rooms both of Bath and Clifton. These, no doubt, were the days in which, as he III.] BATH. 43 wrote long afterwards to Lady Blessington, lie suffered so much annoyance from his bad dancing. "How grievous- ly has my heart ached," such is his large way of putting it, " when others were in the full enjoyment of that rec- reation which I had no right even to partake of." Nev- ertheless, Landor was kindly looked on by the fair, and only too impetuously ready to answer sigh with sigh. His flirtations were numerous and were carried far. There is even not wanting, in his dealings with and his language concerning women during this brief period, a touch of commonplace rakishness, a shadow of vulgarity nowhere efse to be discerned in the ways of this most unvulgar of mankind. But such shadows were merely on the surface. Inwardly, Landor's letters show him ill content, and long- ing, if he only knew how to find it, for something high and steadfast in his life. He was given as much as ever to solid reading and reflection, and stirred in a moment to wholesome and manly sorrow at the loss of a friend or the breach of an old association. A Mrs. Lambe, whom he had warmly regarded from boyhood, died about this time at Warwick, and soon afterwards came the news of the sudden death in India of Rose Aylraer, the friend of Welsh days to whose casual loan Landor, as we saw, had been indebted for the first hint of Gebir. By both these losses Landor was deeply moved, by that of Rose Aylmer in especial his thoughts being for days and nights entire- ly possessed. During his vigils he wrote the first draft of the little elegy, " carved as it were in ivory or in gems/' which in its later form became famous : "Ah, what avails the sceptred race? Ah, what the form divine ? What every virtue, every grace? Eose Aylmer, all were thine. 44 LANDOR. [chap. " Rose Aylmer, whom these wakeful eyes May weep, but never see, A night of memories and of sighs I consecrate to thee." Just, natural, simple, severely and at the same time haunt- ingly melodious, however baldly or stoically they may strike the ear attuned to more high-pitched lamentations, these are the lines which made afterwards so deep an im- pression upon Charles Lamb. Tipsy or sober, it is re- ported of that impressionable spirit a few years before his death, he would always be repeating JRose Aylmer. The effect obtained by the iteration of the young girl's two beautiful names at the beginning of the fourth and fifth lines is an afterthought. In place of this simple, musical invocation, the fourth line had originally begun with a lame explanatory conjunction, "For, Aylmer," and the fifth with a commonplace adjective, *' Sweet Aylmer." In the seventh line " memories " is a correction for the allit- erative and vaguer " sorrows " of the first draft. Landor's affection for the same lost friend and companion is again expressed, we may remember, in another poem of a much later date headed Ahertawy, which furnishes a good exam- ple of his ordinary manner, part playful, part serious, and not free from slips both of taste and workmanship, in this kind of autobiographical reminiscence, and which ends with the following gravely tender lines : " Where is she now ? Call'd far away By one she dared not disobey, To those proud halls, for youth unfit, Where princes stand and judges sit. Where Ganges rolls his widest wave She dropt her blossom in the grave ; Her noble name she never changed, Nor was her nobler heart estranged." III.] BATH. 45 The losses above mentioned and others occurring in the circle of Landor's friends about this time, 1805 — 1806, prompted him to compose several pieces of the elegiac kind, both in English and Latin, v^hich he collected and published under the title Simonidea. But these elegiac pieces did not stand alone. They were accompanied by others in right of which the volume might just as well have been called Anacreontica, namely, a selection, made by lanthe, of love-poems addressed in English to herself, be- sides some Latin verses of so free a tenour that Landor was by-and-by ashamed of having published them. " I printed whatever was marked with a pencil by a woman who loved me, and I consulted all her caprices. I added some Latin poetry of my own, more pure in its Latinity than its sentiment. When you read the Simonidea^ pity and forgive me." Several of Landor's early writings are now excessively rare, more than one, indeed, being only known to exist in a solitary example; but of the Simoni- dea, so far as I have been able to ascertain, not even a sin- gle copy has been preserved. Soon after this, moved, it would seem, partly by his strained finances and partly by his sanguine imagination, Landor conceived the plan of alienating his paternal estate in Staffordshire, in order to acquire another yielding, or capable of being made to yield, larger returns in a wilder part of the country. He turned his thoughts first towards the lakes. Here he made a tour in the spring of 1807, found an estate which enchanted him, beside the small romantic Lake of Loweswater, and at once began negotia- tions for its purchase. These falling through, he in the next year pitched upon another and a very noble property, which was for sale in a country nearer to his own accus- tomed haunts, that, namely, of Llanthony, on the Welsh 46 LANDOR. ^ [chap. border. To his overwhelming desire to become lord of Llanthony all impediments had now to give way, with what consequences to himself and others we sh-all see. But before the complicated arrangements connected with this purchase were completed, events of great interest in Landor's life had come to pass. First, there was the begin- ning of his acquaintance with Southey. Of all English writers of that ao-e, thev were the two who most resembled each other by their science in the technical craft of letters, by their high and classical feeling for the honour and dig- nity of the English language, and by the comprehensive- ness and solidity of their reading. Ever since Southey had discovered that Landor was the author of Gehh% and Landor that Southey was its admiring critic, a precon- ceived sympathy had sprung up between the two men. Since then Southey had written Madoc, the first, and Tha~ laba^ the second of his mythological epics, and in Madoc had avowedly profited by Landor's example, both as to the way of seeing^ as he put it, for the purposes of poetry, and as to the management of his blank verse. On his tour in the lake country, Landor, who was no seeker of acquaint- ances, and indeed once boasted, in his serene w^ay, that he had never accepted a letter of introduction in his life, had missed, and expressed his regret at missing, the opportu- nity of meeting Southey. It was in Southey's native Bristol, at the lodgings of his friend Danvers, that he and Landor met for the first time in the spring of 1808. They took to each other at once, and a friendship was formed which lasted without break or abatement for thirty years. In many of their opinions Landor and Southey differed much ah'eady, and their dif- ferences were destined to increase as time w^ent on, but differences of opinion brought no shadow between them. III.] SOUTHEY. 4*7 Each seems instinctively to have recognized whatever was sterling, loyal, and magnanimous in the other's nature. Each, though this is a minor matter, heartily respected in the other the scrupulous and accomplished literary work- man. Each probably liked and had a fellow-feeling for the other's boyish exuberance of vitality and proneness to exaggeration and denunciation. For it is to be noted that Landor's intimacies were almost always with men of em- phatic and declamatory eloquence like his own. Parr, the most honoured friend of his youth, Southey and Francis Hare, the most cherished of his manhood, were all three Olympian talkers in their degree. But Landor and his kindred Olympians, it seems, understood each otiier, and knew how to thunder and lio-hten without collision. These last, as it happens, are the very words afterwards used by Southey in preparing a common friend for the kind of per- sonage he would meet in Landor. " He does more than any of the gods of all my mythologies, for his very words are thunder and lightning, such is the power and splendour with which they burst out. But all is perfectly natural ; there is no trick about him, no preaching, no playing off." If we thus have Southey's testimony at once to the im- pressiveness and to the integrity of Landor's personality, we have Landor's to "the genial voice and radiant eye" of Southey, besides a hundred other expressions of affection for his person and admiration for his character and his powers. With the immediate result of his own and Landor's first conversation Southey could not fail to be gratified. He had been forced of late to abandon his most cherished task, the continuance of his series of mythologic epics. The plain reason was that he could not afford to spend time on work so little remunerative. Landor, when Southey told 48 LANDOR. [chap. him this, was in an instant all generosity and delicacy, beg- ging to be allowed to print future productions of the kind at his o-wn expense — " as many as you will write, and as many copies as you please." In all this there was not the least taint of patronage or condescension on the part of the magnificent young squire and scholar towards the struggling, although already distinguished, man of letters, his senior by only a year. Landor was as incapable of as- suming superiority on any grounds but those of character and intellect as of enduring such assumption in others. Southey, as it turned out, only made practical use of his friend's offer to the extent of allowing him to buy a con- siderable number of copies of Kehama when that work ap- peared. But the encouragement was everything to him, and had for its consequence that Kehama, already begun and dropped, was industriously resumed and finished, and followed in due course by Roderick, the manuscript of either poem being dutifully sent off in successive instal- ments as it was written for Landor to read and criticise. At the same time an active and intimate correspondence sprung up between the two men, and in after-years sup- plied, indeed, the chief aliment of their friendship, their meetings being, from the force of circumstances, rare. The next event in Landor's life was his sudden and brief appearance as a man of action on the theatre of European war. Napoleon Buonaparte had just carried into effect the infamous plot which he had conceived in order to make himself master of Spain and Portugal. But before his brother Joseph had time to be proclaimed king at Madrid, all Spain was up in arms. Against the French armies of occupation there sprang up from one end of the country to the other first a tumultuary and then an organized re- sistance. So swift, efficient, and unanimous a rising had III.] SPAIN. 49 nowhere else been witnessed. A people, it seemed, had at last been found with manhood enough in their veins to refuse the yoke of France, and in the hearts of all friends of liberty despair began to give way to hope. How much of anarchical self-seeking and distracted, pusillanimous intrigue in reality lay latent in these patriot bosoms was little suspected in the enthusiasm of the hour. In Eng- land especially, the Spaniards were passionately acclaimed as a race of heroes, on whose victory depended the very salvation of the world. Instant help, both in men and money, was despatched to the insurgents by the English Government. Poets and orators extolled their deeds ; vol- unteers pressed to join their standards. While Words- worth, Southey, and Coleridge, from the seclusion of their lakes and mountains, did their utmost to swell the tide of popular emotion, Landor on his part was not content with words. One evening at Brighton he found himself "preaching a crusade" to an audience of two Irish gentle- men, who caught his ardour, and the three determined to start for Spain without more ado. Early in August they set sail from Falmouth for Corunna, which was the seat of an English mission under Stuart, afterwards ambassador in Paris. From Corunna Landor addressed a letter to the provincial government, enclosing a gift of ten thousand reals for the relief of the inhabitants of Venturada, a town burnt by the French, and at the same time proclaiming that he would equip at his own cost, and accompany to the field, all volunteers up to the number of a thousand who might choose to join him. Both gift and proclama- tion were thankfully acknowledged; a body of volunteers was promptly organized ; and Landor marched with them through Leon and Gallicia to join the Spanish army under Blake in the mountains of Biscay. In the meantime his 3* 50 LANDOR. [chap. incurably jealous and inflammable spirit of pride, inflam- mable especially in contact with those in oflice or authori- ty, had caught fire at a depreciatory phrase dropped by the English envoy, Stuart, at one of the meetings of the Junta. Stuart's expression had not really referred to Lan- dor at all, but he chose to apply it to himself, and on his march accordingly indited and made public an indignant letter of remonstrance. To the groundless disgust which Landor had thus con- ceived and vented at a fancied sligjit, was soon added that with which he was more reasonably inspired by the in- competence and sloth of the Spanish general, Blake. He remained with the army of the North for several idle weeks in the neighbourhood of Reynosa and Aguilar. He was very desirous of seeing Madrid, but denied himself the excursion for fear of missing a battle, which after all was never fought. It was not until after the end of Septem- ber, when the convention between Sir Hew Dalrymple and Junot had been signed in Portugal, and when Blake's army broke up its quarters at Reynosa, that Landor, his band of volunteers having apparently melted away in the meanwhile, separated himself from the Spanish forces and returned suddenly to England. He narrowly escaped be- ing taken prisoner in the endeavour to travel by way of Bilbao, which had then just been re-entered by the French under Ney. The thanks of the supreme Junta for his services were in course of time conveyed to him at home, together with the title and commission of an honorary colonel in the Spanish army. Landor had departed leaving his countrymen in a frenzy of enthusiasm. He found them on his return in a frenzy of indignation and disgust. The military compromise just effected in Portugal was denounced by popular clamour in III.] SPAIN. 51 terms of immeasiired fury, and not by popular clamour only. Men of letters and of thought are habitually too much given to declaiming at their ease against the delin- quencies of men of action and affairs. The inevitable fric- tion of practical politics generates heat enough already, and the office of the political thinker and critic should be to supply not heat but light. The difficulties which attend his own unmolested task, the task of seeking after and proclaiming salutary truths, should teach him to make allowance for the far more urgent difficulties which beset the politician, the man obliged, amid the clash of interests and temptations, to practise from hand to mouth, and at his peril, the most uncertain and at the same time the most indispensable of the experimental arts. The early years of this century in England may not have been years remarkable for wise or consistent statesmanship ; they were certainly remarkable for the frantic vituperation of those in power by those who looked on. The writers of the Lake school were at this time as loud and as little reasonable in their outcries as any group of men in the kingdom, and Southey was the loudest of them all. His letters, and especially his letters to Landor, on the public questions of the hour, can hardly be read even now with- out a twinge of humiliation at the spectacle of a man of his knowledge, sincerity, and candour giving way to so idle a fury of misjudgment and malediction. Landor, on his part, is moderate by comparison, and has a better hold both of facts and principles, although he is ready to go great lengths with his friend in condemnation of the Eng- lish ministers and commanders. Li the succeeding winter and spring nothing but Spain was in men's minds or conversation. After the victory aiid death of Sir John Moore at Corunna in January, 1809, 52 ' LANDOR. [chap. Landor was for a while on the point of sailing for that country as a volunteer for the second time. Eventually, however, he forbore, private affairs in connexion with his new property at f^lanthony helping among other things to A| detain him. In order to effect this purchase Landor had required as much as 20,000/. over and above the sum real- ized by the sale of his Staffordshire estate. For this pur- pose he made up his mind to sell Tacb brook, the smaller of the two properties in Warwickshire destined to devolve to him at the death of his mother. Her consent was nec- essary to this step, as well as that of his brothers, and an act of parliament authorizing the breach of the entail. All these matters, together with some minor arrangements protecting the interests of Mrs. Landor and her other chil- dren by charges on the new estate, and the like, were got through in the summer of this year (1809).* Early in the autumn of the same year we find Landor established in temporary quarters on his new property. It was a wild and striking country that he had chosen for his future home. Most readers are probably familiar with the dis- tant aspect of those mountains, whose sombre masses and sweeping outlines arrest the eye of the spectator looking westward over the Welsh marches from the summit of the Malvern hills. These are the Black or Hatterill moun- tains of Monmouthshire and Brecknockshire. Of all their recesses the most secluded and most romantic, although not the most remote, is the valley of Ewias, within which stands the ruined priory of Llanthony.^ This valley winds * Pronounce Llanthony ; said to be short for Llandevi Nanthodeni, ?'.e., church of St. David by the water of Hodeni. The early history of this famous border priory is better known than that of almost any other foundation of the same kind ; see the articles of Mr. Rob- erts in Archceologia Cambrensis^ vol. i., No. 3, and of Mr. Freeman, in.] • LLANTHONY. 53 for some twelve miles between two high continuous ridges, of which the sides are now flowing and now precipitous, here broken into wooded dingles, here receding into grassy amphitheatres, and there heaped with the copse -grown ruins of ancient landslips. Along its bed there races or loiters according to the weather — and it is a climate noto- rious for rain — the stream Hodeni, Honddu, or Hondy. The opening of the valley is towards the south, and was blocked in ancient times with thickets and morasses, so that its only approach was over one or other of its lofty lateral ridges. In those days the scene was wont to lay upon the few who ever entered it the spell of solitude and penitential awe. It was said that St. David had for ?. time dwelt here as a hermit. In the reiscn of William Rufus a certain knight having found his way into the valley during the chase, the call fell upon him to do the like ; the fame of his conversion reached the court ; he was joined by a second seeker after the holy life, then by others; gifts and wealth poured in upon them ; they were enrolled as a broth- erhood of the order of St. Augustine, and built themselves a priory in the midst of the valley, on a level field half a furlong above the stream. Its ruins are still standing dark and venerable amid the verdure of the valley, a rambling assemblage of truncated towers, disroofed presbytery, shat- tered aisles, and modernized outbuildings. The remains of the prior's lodgings, together with that one of the two western towers to which they are contiguous, are fitted up, the ancient sanctities all forgotten, as a bailiff's house and inn. The avocations of dairy, scullery, and larder are car- ried on beneath the shelter of the other tower, while the ibid., 3rd series, vol. i. ; also a sketch by the present writer in the Portfolio, January, 1881, from which last two or three sentences are repeated in the text. 54 LAN DOR. [cH^r. wild rose and snapdragon wave from the crevices over- head, and the pigeons flit and nestle among the shaftless openings. Such as Llanthony Priory is now, such, making allow- ance for some partial dilapidations which neither he nor his successors took enough care to prevent, it in all essen- tials was when Landor took it over from its former owner in the spring of 1809, and along with it the fine estate to which it owes its name. The property is some eight miles long, and includes for that distance the whole sweep of the vale of Ewias. The valley farms contain rich pasturage and fairly productive corn-lands, while the eastern ridge is covered with grass, and the western with richly heathered moor. The moors yield tolerable shooting, and the Hondy is famous for its trout. But it was not for the sake of shooting or fishing that Landor came to Llanthony. He was, indeed, devoted to animals, but not in the ordinary English sense of being devoted to the pastime of killing them. One of the points by which observers used after- wards to be most struck in Landor was the infinite affec- tion and mutual confidence which subsisted between him and his pets of the dumb creation, both dogs and others, with whom the serenity of iiis relations used to remain perfectly undisturbed throughout his most explosive dem- onstrations against the delinquencies of his own species. But his sympathies for animals were not confined to pets. In early days he had plied both gun and rod, but by this time or soon afterwards he seems to have quite given them up. Even in youth he had suffered acute remorse on one day finding a partridge, which he had bagged over night and supposed dead, still alive in the morning. Cruelty was for him the chief — " if not indeed," as he once put it, " the only" — sin, and cruelty to animals was at least as bad as III.] LLANTHONY. 55 cruelty to men. Anglings in later life, he once wrote of as " that sin." In a letter to his sister he writes more tol- erantly, and with a touch of his peculiar charm, of field sports in general : " Let men do these things if they will. Perhaps there is no harm in it; perhaps it makes them no crueller than they would be otherwise. But it is hard to take away what we cannot give, and life is a pleasant thing — -at least to birds. No doubt the young ones say tender things to one another, and even the old ones do not dream of death." If Landor was thus little of a sportsman, there was another province of a country gentleman's pursuits into which he could enter with all his heart, and that was plant- ing. He loved trees as he loved flowers, not with any scientific or practical knowledge, but with a poet's keen- ness ot perception, heightened by a peculiar vein of reflect- ive and imaginative association. He could, not bear either the unnecessary plucking of the one or felling of the other. " Ah," he represents himself in one of his dialogues as ex- claiming i.t the sight of two fallen pines in Lombardy — "... Ah, Don Pepino! old trees in their living state are the only things that money cannot command. Rivers leave their beds, run into cities, and traverse mountains for it ; obelisks and arches, palaces and temples, amphitheatres and pyramids, rise up like exhalations at its bidding; even the free spirit of Man, the only thing great on earth, crouches and cowers in its presence. It passes away and van- ishes before venerable trees. What a sweet odour is here ! whence comes it? sweeter it appears to me and stronger than the pine it- self." The interlocutor, Don Pepino, explains that the odoui proceeds from a neighbouring linden, and that the lin- den, «i very old and large one, is doomed ; whereupon Lan- dor - 56 LANDOR. [chap. " Don Pepino ! the French, who abhor whatever is old and what- ever is great, have spared it ; the Austrians, who sell their fortresses and their armies, nay, sometimes their daughters, have not sold it : must it fall ? . . . " How many fond and how many lively thoughts have been nurt- ured under this tree ! how many kind hearts have beaten here ! Its branches are not so numerous as the couples they have invited to sit beside it, nor its blossoms and leaves as the expressions of tender- ness it has witnessed. What appeals to the pure all-seeing heavens ! what similitudes to the everlasting mountains ! what protestations of eternal truth and constancy from those who now are earth ; they, and their shrouds, and their coffins !" The passage in which Landor has best expressed his feeling about flowers is one of verse, and one of the few in his writings which are well known, though not so well as by its unmatched delicacy and grave, unobtrusive sweet- ness it deserves : " When hath wind or ram • Borne hard upon weak plants that wanted me, And I (however they might bluster round) Walkt ofiE ? 'Twere most ungrateful : for sweet scents Are the swift vehicles of still sweeter thoughts, And nurse and pillow the dull memory That would let drop without them her best stores. They bring me tales of youth and tones of love, And* 'tis and ever was my wish and way To let all flowers live freely, and all die (Whene'er their Genius bids their souls depart) Among their kindred in their native place. I never pluck the rose; the violet's head Hath shaken with ray breath upon its bank And not reproacht it ; the ever-sacred cup Of the pure lily hath between my hands Felt safe, unsoil'd, nor lost one grain of gold." " I love these beautiful and peaceful tribes," Lanaoi sayg elsewhere, with special reference to the flowers of LiaD- III.] LLANTHONY. 57 thony ; " they always meet one in the same place at the same season ; and years have no more effect on their placid countenances than on so many of the most favoured gods." Such are the exquisite tendernesses of feeling and imagi- nation which go together in Landor with his masterful en- ergy and strength. With these tastes and predilections, then, and in his lordly, imaginative, sanguinely unpractical manner, Landor entered upon his new career as the beneficent landowner of a neglected and backward neighbourhood. He would have the priory restored, and for that purpose portions of the existing ruins were taken down, and their stones carefully numbered. He would raise a new mansion for himself and his heirs, and he set the builders to work accordingly upon a site a quarter of a mile above the ruins. Com- munications in the district were by rough bridle-paths and fords, and Landor set gangs of men about the construction of roads and bridges. Agriculture was miserably primi- tive ; he imported sheep from Segovia, and applied to Southey and other friends for tenants who should intro- duce and teach improved methods of cultivation. The inhabitants were drunken, impoverished, and morose ; he was bent upon reclaiming and civilizing them. The woods had suffered from neglect or malice ; he would clothe the sides of the valley with cedars of Lebanon. With that object he bought two thousand cones, calculated to yield a hundred seeds each, intending to do ten times as much afterwards, and exulting in the thought of the two million cedar-trees which he would thus leave for the shelter and the delight of posterity. While all these great operations were in progress, Landor was not a permanent resident, but only a frequent visitor, on his estate, inhabiting for a few weeks at a time E 58 LANDOR. [chap. the rooms in the church tower, and living in the intervals principally at Bath. Here, in the early spring of 1811, he met a young lady at a ball, and as soon as he had set eyes on her exclaimed, in the true Landorian manner, " By heaven ! that's the nicest girl in the room, and I'll marry her." And marry her he did ; the adventure quickly end- ing in that irreversible manner, instead of, as others as rashly begun had ended, in protestations, misumlerstand- ings, and retreat. Mr. Forster appositely contrasts Lan- dor's reckless action with his weighty and magnificent words concerning marriage : " Death itself to the reflect- ing mind is less serious than marriage. The elder plant is cut down that the younger may have room to flourish : a few tears drop into the loosened soil, and buds and blos- soms spring over it. Death is not even a blow, is not even a pulsation ; it is a pause. But marriage unrolls the awful lot of numberless generations. Health, Genius, Honour, are the words inscribed on some ; on others are Disease, Fatuity, and Infamy." But it was Landor's fate to be thus wise only for others; wise on paper; wise after the event ; wise, in a word, in every and any manner except such as could conduce to his own welfare. His marriage was not a happy one. His bride, Julia Thuillier, was the portionless daughter of an unprosperous banker at Ban- bury, said to be descended from an old Swiss family. Landor, with his moods of lofty absence and pre-occupa- tion, and with the tumultuous and disconcerting nature, sometimes, of his descents into the region of reality, must at best have been a trying companion to live with. Never- theless it would seem as though a woman capable of shar-- ing his thoughts, and of managing him in his fits of pas- sion, as his wiser friends were accustomed to manage him in later years, by yielding to the storm at first, until his Ill] MAKRIAGE. 69 own sense of humour would be aroused and it would dis- perse itself in peals of laughter, might have had an envia- ble, if not an easy, life with one so great-minded and so fundamentally kind and courteous. Mrs. Landor seems to have had none of the gifts of the domestic artist ; she was not one of those fine spirits who study to create, out of the circumstances and characters with which they have to deal, the best attainable ideal of a home ; but a common- place provincial beauty enough, although lively and agree- able in her way. "God forbid," in conversation once growled Landor, who was habitually reticent on his private troubles, " that I should do otherwise than declare that she always was agreeable — to every one but me." She was sixteen years or more younger than her husband; a fact of which, when differences occurred, she seems to have been not slow to remind him ; and there is impartial evidence to show that, in some at least of the disputes which led to breaches more or less permanent between them, the immediately offending tongue was not the hus- band's but the wife's. He himself once breaks out, in commenting on Milton's line, "Because thou hast hearken'd to the voice of thy wife," "there are very few who have not done this, h