LANDOR'S
WORKS
828
1
L261
1876
v.1
A 734,112
DUPL

PROPERTY OF THE
University
Md
Libraris
1817
ARTES SCIENTIA VERITAS

75-4477

THE WORKS AND LIFE
GENERAL
University o
MICHIGAN
OF
WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR
FIRST VOLUME
THE LIFE
LONDON
CHAPMAN AND HALL, 193 PICCADILLY
1876
LONDON:
ROBSON AND SONS, PRINTERS, PANCRAS ROAD, N.W.

WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR
A BIOGRAPHY
BY JOHN FORSTER
IN EIGHT BOOKS
LONDON
CHAPMAN AND HALL, 193 PICCADILLY
1876
728
6261
1876

PREFACE.
DURING the later years of his residence in England,
Landor prepared a Collection of his Writings to which
he had given careful revision, and in which the Ima-
ginary Conversations were classified and arranged in the
order he had most desired to see them printed in. This
Collection he placed in my hands on going abroad for
the last time; with instruction that if it should be pub-
lished in any form after his death, the subjoined letter
should accompany it by way of Dedication:
My dear Friend, Temperance Societies rose up
'soon after the construction of Gin-Palaces. Our litera-
ture may take perhaps a similar turn; for it is accus-
tomed to take rapid and opposite ones. In that case
'you may live to superintend such Edition or Selection
from my Writings as may be called for after my death.
I place them in your hands with the more pleasure,
since you have thought them not unworthy of your
notice, and even your study, among the labours of our
'Greatest Authors, our Patriots in the best times.
The world is indebted to you for a knowledge of their
'characters and their works: I shall be contented to be
(
iv
PREFACE.
as long forgotten, if I arise with the same advantages
' at last.
Yours very affectionately,
WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR.'
Acting on this permission, it was proposed to print
a Selection only; and by the plan of carefully abridg-
ing each dialogue rather than wholly omitting any,
the number and variety in the subjects would have
remained to show the greatest marvel of Landor's re-
markable achievement. But after much progress in
this, its profoundly unsatisfactory result compelled me
to lay it aside. When the necessary reductions had
been made, stores of wisdom and of wit undoubtedly
were left; everywhere there were striking aphorisms,
concise and penetrating observations, exquisite criti-
cism, surpassing strength as well as loveliness of lan-
guage; but what had most given life to each Conver-
sation was gone. The proper setting for its jewels of
speech or thought, the vividness of character, the sub-
tlety of imagination, seemed to be no longer there.
A remark made in my Life was thus put to the
proof. In this it was said that though Landor's five-
act dramas were only dialogues in verse, his prose dia-
logues were one-act dramas; and that, however freely
his talkers might borrow their opinions from himself,
the dramatic conditions incident to their talk were
never in any case lost sight of. Applicable to nearly
all the Imaginary Conversations, the remark applies
yet more forcibly to those other prose works overflow-
ing most with beauties apparently isolated; and which
PREFACE.
V
are here, also by the author's wish, printed in closer
sequence and connection than formerly with the Dia-
logues, to which, however differing in form, they essen-
tially belong. Take from them only such beauties, and
you do not bring with you from the Pentameron the
rich Italian colour, or from Pericles and Aspasia the
faultless Greek simplicity, or from Shakespeare's Ex-
amination what makes the book unique. In the last
there is a charm which consists in the fact that its hero,
not yet the author of the wonderful plays, is merely the
lad who is to grow into that greatest of men; but
this is in the nature of a secret known to the reader
only, and, everybody else in the book being whimsically
unconscious of it, including the youth himself, it is not
to be enjoyed but by reading the whole.
For these and other reasons the intended Selections
from Landor's Writings have been abandoned, and the
Edition which accompanies this revised Life will under
every head comprise the completed work, with the au-
thor's last revision. There will be omission only of
such parts of the poetical writings as he had himself
deliberately rejected. It will open with the Dialogues
of Greeks and Romans; and Shakespeare's Examination
for Deer-Stealing will complete that volume. Then will
follow the Conversations of Sovereigns and Statesmen,
which Landor had himself so brought together; and
with them the five Dialogues of Boccaccio and Petrarca,
first published as the Pentameron. The next volume
will contain the First Series of Conversations of Literary
Men; and its successor, the Second Series; together with
I
vi
PREFACE.
two subjects having always such close connection in
Landor's thoughts that he intended at one time to have
issued them apart from the rest, the Dialogues of Fa-
mous Women, and the Letters of Pericles and Aspasia.
A volume of Miscellaneous Conversations will finish this
collection of his important prose writings. But there
will be a volume of Imaginary Scenes and Conversations in
Verse, so entitled by himself, which will include his
tragedies as well as his minor dramatic pieces; and
into another and final volume, under the name he gave
to it of Earliest and Latest Leaves from the Old Tree, will
fall all his minor pieces in verse and prose, and the
whole of his poems not in the dramatic form. That
will complete the Edition, and to the prose portion
there will be a careful Index.
Of the form in which the Biography of Landor ac-
companies this new Edition of his Works, I crave per-
mission to state that the pains and care bestowed
upon its revision have not been less than were given
to the composition of it. While every objection to the
form in which it originally appeared that seemed to be
reasonable has been considered and as far as possible
remedied, nothing material has been omitted. The
condensation has been effected by leaving out letters
and extracts from Landor's writings, but everything
characteristic in the matter thus put aside has been re-
tained in substance or narrative; and with some con-
fidence I now dismiss the book as an honest and faith-
ful picture of a man who took distinguished rank among
PREFACE.
vii
the greatest of his contemporaries, and is as likely as
the best to hold his place with many future generations
of Englishmen.
Palace-Gate House, Kensington.
The date of the very interesting communication
which follows, from my friend Mr. Charles Reade, re-
veals how long this work has been waiting the result
of my attempted substitution of Selections for the Com-
pleted Works, in the Edition that was to accompany it.
Mr. Reade's anecdotes of his father did not reach me
until the Biography had been printed in its present
shape; but happily they corroborate in all respects its
account of Landor's school days, and their vivacity and
worth make them a valuable addition to the volume.
J. F.
2 Albert-terrace, Knightsbridge, October 5th, 1872.
This is the little gossip I promised you. Valeat quantum.
My late father told these and many other Rugby stories with a great
deal of gusto and point. I wish I had listened more seriously. However,
in these few I have recollected the very phrases of Doctor James and of
Landor, whose youthful genius made a great impression on my father, him-
self a man above the common.
Yours very sincerely,
CHARLES READE.
My father, John Reade of Ipsden, Oxon, was sent to Rugby
at eight years of age.
Next day, in the afternoon, a much bigger boy espied him,
and said, 'Hy, you new boy, I want you.'
It was to carry a casting-net. Little Reade found it rather
heavy.
<
Master Landor cast the net several times in a certain water,
and caught nothing. Thereupon he blamed his attendant. You
are the cause of this,' said he. 'I begin to fear you are a boy
of ill omen' (sic).
viii
PREFACE.
He cast again, and drew a blank.
'Decidedly,' said Master Landor, 'you are a boy of ill omen.
'However,' says he, 'we won't lay it on the Fates till we have
' tried all mortal means. Sapiens dominabitur astris. We must
'poach a little.'
6
،
Accordingly he proceeded to a forbidden preserve. At the
gate stood a butcher, contemplating heifers at feed.
'I say, butcher, let me fish the brook there.'
'Well, sir, 't ain't mine.'
'Then what objection can you possibly have?'
'Why, master, I ha'n't no objection; but you see~'
'Much obliged,' says this smart boy, and entered the field
directly, cast in the brook, but caught nothing.
'Reade,' said he, 'this is not to be borne. You are a boy
• of too ill omen.
Now here is a favourite hole: if I catch no-
thing in it, I shall yield to your evil Destiny; but I warn you
'I shall make you carry the net home, and I shall flick you all
• the
my handkerchief.'
way with my
Little Reade looked very rueful at that. The net, even when
dry, had seemed mortal heavy to him, and he began to calculate.
how much more it would weigh when wet and dirty.
The net was cast-a good circle-drawn steadily to land,
and lo! struggling in its meshes a pike of really unusual size.
Master Landor raised a shout of triumph, then instantly re-
membering his partner, he turned to Master Reade. • Welcome
'to Rugby, sir, welcome! You are a boy of excellent omen.
I'll carry the net home, and you shall sup off this fish; it is
'the joint production of my skill and your favourable Star.'
Next day there was a complaint against him for fishing out
of bounds.
'Mr. X. (the butcher) gave me leave,' said he, quietly.
There were seven boys in the school of the name of Hill.
The boys wanted a half-holiday, and came to Landor. 'Write
'to old James for one,' said they. Landor consented, and wrote
a copy of verses, wherein he compared Rugby to Rome, because
it was built on Seven Hills.
'Ah,' said the Doctor, 'I don't ask you who wrote this, for
I
PREFACE.
ix
'there is only one of you with the brains to do it. Half-holi-
'day? Yes.'
One day in full school Master Landor had an apple of sin-
gular size and beauty. He had his Livy in one hand and this
apple in the other, and read and read, and munched and
munched, till the sound struck the Doctor. He espied the de-
linquent, and ordered him to bring that apple to him. He put
it on his desk coram populo; and then, half relenting, said,
There, sir. Now, if you want that again, you had better go
C
' and sit down and make me a short line on the occasion.'
'O, I can do that and stand here,' says Master Landor.
'Do it, then.'
The boy thought a minute, and soon obliged him with a
pentameter:
'Esuriens doctor dulcia poma rapit.'
'Hum?' says Doctor James.
'And pray, sir, what do you
mean by E-su-riens doctor?'
'The gor-man-dising doctor.'
'Take it, sir: you are too hard for me; you are too hard for
me,' said the Doctor, delighted with his pupil.
This Doctor James was an enthusiast. My father told me
he heard a class construing a fine passage of Lucretius to him,
and no doubt making mincemeat of the author; for presently the
Doctor roared out, 'Ye don't taste him, sir; ye don't taste him!'
and instantly construed the passage finely, and, in his ardour,
went on beyond the limits of the lesson. Observing which too
late, he turned the whole school out into the playground. Get
along,' said he; 'I have rescued one Poet out of your jaws.'
(
•
CONTENTS.
BOOK FIRST.
1775-1797. ÆT. 1-22. pp. 1-51.
WARWICK, RUGBY, OXFORD, AND SWANSEA.
1. Introductory
II. The Landors and the Savages
III. Birth and Childish Days
iv. At Rugby School
v. At Ashbourne
vi. At Trinity-college, Oxford
VII. First published Book .
VIII. A Fair Intercessor
IX. A Moral Epistle
•
x. Retreat to Wales
pp. 1-3
•
3-6
6-9
9-20
20-25
25-34
34-37
37-42
•
42-44
44-5
BOOK SECOND.
1797-1805. ET. 22-30. pp. 52-102.
FIRST WRITINGS AND EARLIEST FRIENDS.
1. Gebir, and some Opinions of it
52-62
11. Doctor Parr and the Critics
III. Mr. Serjeant Rough
·
iv. Writing for Newspapers
v. At Paris in 1802
62-73
73-80
80-85
85-90
vi. Again writing Poetry .
90-94
VII. Succession to the Family Estates.
94-102
זי
CONTENTS.
xi
BOOK THIRD.
1805-1814. ET. 30-39. pp. 103-185.
AT BATH AND CLIFTON, IN SPAIN, AND AT LLANTHONY.
1. Life at Bath
II. Robert Southey.
III. In Spain .
pp. 103-108
108-114
*
114-120
•
IV. Letters to Southey
v. The Tragedy of Count Julian
vi. In Possession of Llanthony Abbey
VII. Marriage and Life at Llanthony.
VIII. Public Affairs
IX. Private Disputes
x. Departure from England
BOOK FOURTH.
•
120-130
130-141
•
141-149
149-161
161-173
173-181
181-185
1815-1821. ET. 40-46. pp. 186-226.
FIRST SIX YEARS IN ITALY AT COMO, PISA, AND PISTOIA.
1. From Tours to Milan
II. At Como, Pisa, and Pistoia
111. On the way to Florence
IV. Retrospect and Prospect: a new Literary Under-
taking.
BOOK FIFTH.
1822-1828. ET. 47-53. PP. 227-316.
THE IMAGINARY CONVERSATIONS.
1. The Manuscript on its way
II. A Publisher found
III. What the Book contained
IV. How the Book was received
v. Correspondence with Southey
VI. Family Letters.
VII. Additional Dialogues.
BOOK SIXTH.
1829-1835. ET. 54-60. pp. 317-369.
AT FIESOLE.
1. Closing Years in the Palazzo Medici
11. Mother's Death.
(
186-191
191-204
204-208
208-226
227-236
236-241
241-262
262-267
267-276
276-288
288-316
317-323
323-328
xii
CONTENTS.
III. The Villa Gherardescha
IV. England revisited
v. Again in Italy: old Pictures and new Friends
VI. Examination of Shakespeare for Deer-stealing
. Pericles and Aspasia .
VIII. Self-banishment from Fiesole
BOOK SEVENTH.
1836-1857. ET. 61-82. pp. 370-515.
pp. 328-335
335-341
341-354
354-359
359-363
363-369
TWENTY-ONE YEARS AT BATH.
I. New and old Friendships
370-378
II. The Pentameron of Boccaccio and Petrarca
378-387
III. Writing Plays .
387-404
IV. Visits and Visitors
404-412
v. Death of Southey
412-419
VI. Last Series of Conversations
419-428
VII. A Friend not literary.
428-435
and Hellenics
VIII. Reviews, Collected Works, Poemata et Inscriptiones,
IX. Summer Holidays and Guests at Home
x. Deaths of old Friends
XI. Fruits gathered from an old Tree
XII. Silent Companions
490-506
XIII. Last Days in Bath, and final Departure from England 506-515
BOOK EIGHTH.
1858-1864. ET. 83-89. pp. 516-546.
·
435-449
•
449-464
•
465-472
472-490
LAST SIX YEARS IN ITALY.
1. In his old Home
516-521
II. At Siena
521-524
III. In Florence
524-531
iv. Five unpublished Scenes, being the last Imaginary
Conversations
531-538
v. The Close
539-546
INDEX
547-560
C

WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR
A BIOGRAPHY IN EIGHT BOOKS
Br JOHN FORSTER

page
14. Dele comma at end of line 20.
CORRIGENDA.
185. Insert exactly a month after the occurrence' at end of the word 'October' in line 1.
186. Omit 'now' from the last line of the first paragraph.
281. There is an error at line 7 from the top of the page. Noble's Ruff was sold to Lord
Uxbridge, as stated; but of Carwardine Spring, which was part of the old Lan-
dor property adjoining the parish of Colton, Lord Anson was the purchaser.
287. Line 12 from the top. Ackelon should be Ackelom
เ
288. In third line of Section vii. 'notice' should be account'
315. Tenth line from bottom of page, 'Lucius' should be 'Lucian'
328. Insert semicolon after Decameron in the sixth line of Section iii.
330. Line 17 from bottom, 'Farmer' should be 'Farman'
2
THE LIFE OF LANDOR.
BOOK FIRST.
1775-1797. ÆT. 1-22.
WARWICK, RUGBY, OXFORD, AND SWANSEA.
1. Introductory. II. The Landors and the Savages. III. Birth and Child-
ish Days. Iv. At Rugby School. V. At Ashbourne. VI. At Trinity
College, Oxford. VII. First published Book. VIII. A fair Intercessor.
IX. A Moral Epistle. x. Retreat to Wales.
I. INTRODUCTORY.
I AM not insensible to what is generally taken to be expressed,
in literature as in many other things, by great popularity. The
writer whom crowds of readers wait upon has deserved his fol-
lowing, for good or for ill; and the desire to read without the
trouble of thinking, which railways have largely encouraged and
to which many modern reputations are due, has not prevented
the growth of other reputations that will outlive the contempo-
raries who conferred them.
But with this popular literature which in some form always
exists, changing its form with the age, there has existed at all
times a literature less immediately attractive, but safer from ca-
price or vicissitude; and finding its audiences, fit however few,
the same through many ages. England has been very fortunate
in it. Its principal masters have been the men who from time
to time have purified, enlarged, and refixed the language; who
B
2
Book I.
WARWICK, RUGBY, OXFORD, SWANSEA.
have gathered to it new possessions, extending its power and
variety; but whose relation for the most part to contemporary
readers, far from that of the petted or popular favourite, has
been rather that of the thoughtful to the little thinking, or
the learned to the little knowing. They have been too wise for
the foolish, and too difficult for the idle. They have left un-
satisfied the eager wish for the merely pleasurable on whose gra-
tification popularity so much depends; and they have never had
for their audiences those multitudes of readers who cannot wait
to consider and enjoy. Taking rank with this rare class is the
writer, WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR, of whom I am about to give
some account.
It is not my intention to speak otherwise than frankly of his
character and of his books. Though I place him in the first rank
as a writer of English prose, though he was also a genuine poet,
and there is hardly exaggeration in the saying of one of his
American admirers, that, excepting Shakespeare, no other writer
has furnished us with so many or so delicate aphorisms of hu-
man nature, his faults lie more upon the surface than is usual
with writers of this high order. It was unfortunate for him in
his early years that self-control was not necessarily forced upon
a temperament which had peculiar need of it; and its absence
in later time affected both his books and his life disastrously.
He was not subject to even the ordinary influences and restraints
of a professional writer. To him literature was neither the spi-
ritual calling for which it was prized by Wordsworth, nor the
lucrative employment for which it was valued by Scott. Landor
wrote without any other aim than to please himself, or satisfy
the impulse as it rose. Writing was in that sense an indulgence
to which no limits were put, and wherein no laws of govern-
ment were admitted. If merely a thing pleased him, it was pre-
eminent and excellent above all things; what for the moment
most gratified his will or pleasure he was eager to avouch wisest
and best, as in the thing that satisfied neither he could find
suddenly all opposite qualities; and though a certain counter-
poise to this was in his own nature, his opinions generally being
wise and true, and his sympathies almost always generous and
* Professor Lowell.
1775-1797.
3
THE LANDORS AND THE SAVAGES.
noble, it led him frequently into contradictions and extravagance
that have deprived him of a portion of his fame.
6
II. THE LANDORS AND THE Savages.
Landor's father was a physician. 'It was, I believe, not un-
usual,' his brother Robert writes to me, speaking of ninety or
a hundred years ago, 'for even the eldest sons of private gentle-
men to engage in some profession during their father's lifetime,
' if their fathers were not old. The regular army could afford
'but little room for them. Perhaps the greatest number were
' educated in your profession, as best qualifying them to manage
'the business of after-life. But some preferred medicine. Our
'father took his degree at Worcester-college, Oxford, and suc-
'ceeded Sir Charles Shuckborough, an old Warwickshire baronet.
'A still older baronet many years after, who lived in the adjoin-
ing parish to Ipsley-court, was first Doctor and then Sir Charles
'Throckmorton. The different branches of the medical profes-
'sion were kept much more distinct a hundred years ago than
at present. After the death of his father and his own succes-
'sion to the two Warwickshire estates, our father resigned his
'practice, and lived part of the year at Ipsley-court and part at
'Warwick.'
At Warwick was born Doctor Walter Landor's most famous
son, the first issue of his second marriage. Of the six children
born to his first marriage, with the daughter and heiress of Mr.
Wright of Warwick, all but one died in childhood; and this
daughter, on whom had been settled the bulk of her mother's for-
tune, married a Staffordshire cousin, Humphrey Arden of Long-
croft. Doctor Landor's second wife was Elizabeth Savage, eldest
daughter and co-heiress with her three sisters of Charles Savage,
the head of an old Warwickshire family, the bulk of whose pro-
perty, however, had been transferred to a younger branch who
bore the name of Norris. The paternal fortune, not very large
even before it was divided, the eldest daughter shared with her
three sisters; but after her marriage to Doctor Landor, two estates
in Warwickshire, Ipsley-court and Tachbrooke (clearbrook), were
bequeathed to her by the representatives of the Norris branch
4
Book I.
WARWICK, RUGBY, OXFORD, SWANSEA.
of her family, two great-uncles, very wealthy London merchants;
and so much of the original land of the Savages of Tachbrooke was
thus restored to them. A condition of strict entail to the eldest
son accompanied the bequest, as if the object were to revive so
far the consideration and condition of the old family; and, Doctor
Landor's paternal estates in Staffordshire being in like manner
entailed, there remained for the younger children that might be
born to his second marriage, apart from any possible bequests
from other relatives or prudent savings by their mother, only
the succession to a smaller estate in Buckinghamshire left equally
to her and her three sisters by the same Mr. Norris, after expiry
of the life-interest in it of another descendant from the same
family, the Countess of Conyngham. This estate was called
Hughenden-manor, and is now the property of Mr. Disraeli.
Yet well-born as Walter Savage Landor thus was, on the side
of both parents, no title can be established for such claim to
high consideration or remote antiquity, on the part of either, as
from time to time has been put forth in biographical notices of
him, and even in his own writings. For here the reflection has
to be made, strange in its application to such a man,-that,
possessing few equals in those intellectual qualities which he
was also not indisposed to estimate highly enough, he was not
less eager to claim a position where many thousands of his con-
temporaries equalled, and many hundreds surpassed him. I had
on one occasion the greatest difficulty in restraining him from
sending a challenge to Lord John Russell for some fancied slight
to the memory of Sir Arnold Savage, speaker of Henry the
Seventh's first House of Commons; yet any connection beyond
the name could not with safety have been assumed. When he
says in one of his Imaginary Conversations that his estates were
sufficient for the legal qualification of three Roman knights, he
is probably not far from the truth; but it is much more doubt-
ful whether any one of his forefathers of either family possessed
in land an income equal to his own before it was squandered by
him. Between the two classes of the untitled gentry of England,
his family by both father and mother held a place of which any
man might have been proud; but it was not exactly all he
claimed for it. To the rank of those powerful commoners of a
1775-1797.
5
THE LANDORS AND THE SAVAGES.
former age who were not less than the noblest either in name or
influence, it did not belong; but it ranked with the highest and
oldest among that class of private gentlemen who stood between
these and the yeomanry, —men of small but independent for-
tunes, equally respectable, and educated not less well; and,
during several generations, the property of both Landors and
Savages had thus been held and handed down by their eldest
children. There is pleasant allusion to these matters, and to his
brother's occasional weakness respecting them, in one of Mr.
Robert Landor's letters.
6
'
C
'It seems that the family was seven hundred years old, and
'several notices of my brother's death repeat the same tale. We
may go back about half-way, but no farther. Some of us en-
'joyed provincial honours and offices; and Walter believed that
' a certain Arnold Savage was the speaker of the House of Com-
mons of that name. One of my churchwardens had a sister
' with whom I searched the parish registers for certain ancestors
' of hers. Finding only parish officers, not one of whom rose
'higher than a yeoman, the lady, who was indeed very hand-
some, assured me that they were descended from Julius Cæsar
quite directly; and was much pleased on learning from me
'that this Julius was descended from Iulus, the son of Æneas,
the son of Venus: and thus I could account for beauty in her-
'self, both divine and imperishable. She was forty; and I gained
'the character, soon lost again, of extreme politeness. I related
'this anecdote to my brother, who could not apply it.
In a
'translation of Rabelais published about fourteen years ago, I
'found the word Landor* applied to such fools as were supreme
among all other fools; and a long note was required to enumer-
ate their varieties. Till then I did not believe that any language
'could contain so many opprobrious terms, so whimsical and con-
temptuous. The last time that my brother was at Birlingham
• I tried to read the long list of them, but was interrupted by
'such loud screams as must sometimes have shaken both your
library and mine. There was not only astonishment but de-
light in his laughter. When I suggested that probably our an-
*The word 'landore,' the reader need hardly be told, is not a fan-
tastic name, but the old French word for a heavy fellow.
C
<
6
WARWICK, RUGBY, OXFORD, SWANSEA.
Book I.
'cestor was the greatest fool among all those who accompanied
the Conqueror, and thus acquired the highest place and name,
'he accepted the priority. But then he might have reserved for
'himself the power to escape. For it appears that our name
'originally was Del-a-La'nd (De la Laundes); and my brother
Henry has in his keeping some old writings conveying an es-
When it was that so
(
6
'tate signed and sealed in that name.
many Norman names gained English terminations, as must have
'been the case, the heralds know best.'
III. BIRTH AND CHILDISH DAYS.
The family identity of fools and Landors does not seem long
to have survived the laughter of Rabelais. Some of the name
did good service in the civil wars of Charles and Cromwell; and
Staffordshire had a stout whig Landor for its high-sheriff in the
reign of William the deliverer, whose grandson, falling off from
that allegiance, stood up as stoutly for the Jacobites, and whose
great-grandson was the leading physician in Warwick, when, on
the 30th January 1775, in the best house of the town, facing to
the street but overshadowed at the back by old chestnuts and
elms, the eldest child of himself and Elizabeth Savage of Tach-
brooke, christened Walter and Savage, was born. The other
children of the marriage may at once be named. They were
Charles, Henry, and Robert; Elizabeth, Mary Anne, and Ellen :
born respectively in 1777, 1780, and 1781; in 1776, 1778, and
1783. The three daughters died unmarried; Charles and Ro-
bert entered the Church, after taking their degrees at Oxford;
and Henry, who had been at Rugby with Walter and Charles,
and desired to have gone like them to Oxford, had, upon his
brother Robert obtaining a scholarship to that university from
Bromsgrove-school, to yield to his father's doubt whether his
income could properly support all three sons at college, and him-
self to enter the office of a London conveyancer.
It was the elder brother's misfortune, in his youthful days,
that he alone should have wanted the healthful restraints which
the others underwent of necessity. No care with a view to a
1775-1797.
7
BIRTH AND CHILDISH DAYS.
profession had any need to find a place in his thoughts. He
stood first in the entail of the family estates; and if he could
confine his desires within such limit, and live meanwhile on his
father's allowance, he had simply to qualify himself for improv-
ing or wasting them. This he too well knew; and though his
father, as he observed in Walter the development of unusual in-
tellectual promise, would eagerly have imposed upon him corre-
sponding duties and obligations, the attempt only led to disagree-
ments, and the unsettled wayward habit was never afterwards
reclaimed.
Of Landor's infancy or childhood there is no record more au-
thentic than such expressions as he now and then himself let
drop in old age. Writing in 1853 from the house in which he
was born, and which his sister Elizabeth occupied till her death
in the following year, when the last witness of his childish days
passed away, he mentions having picked up from the gravel-walk
the first two mulberries that had fallen; a thing he remembered
to have done just seventy-five years before. There is now before
me another letter of his to the same dear relative, in which,
speaking of a visit he has just paid to her in Warwick, he de-
scribes the joy with which he had seen again the house that
was the principal home of his childhood, with its dear old
mulberry-trees, its grand cedars, the chestnut-wood with the
church appearing through it, a cistus that she had planted for
him, and the fig-tree at the window on whose leaves, when last
he saw
them, soft rain was dropping, and from which one little
bird was chirping to tell another that there was shelter under
them. Tachbrooke alternated with Warwick in these child-
memories. From his seventh year he had associations with its
garden; and when near his eightieth year he directed the then
owner of Tachbrooke, his brother Henry, to the exact spot where
he would find the particular apple-tree of one of their boyish ad-
ventures, close upon the nut-walk, and just of the same size and
appearance as it was seventy years ago.' To this old place he
was indeed especially attached, and his allusions to it were in-
cessant. It was the scene of his earliest games and sports, where
his 'heedless childhood played, a stranger then to pain;' where
his boyhood too soon had run through its few happy days; and
6
8
Book I.
WARWICK, RUGBY, OXFORD, SWANSEA.
where often he wished that he might find his final rest. These
are expressions continually applied to it in letters to members
of his family, while his memory still could go back even be-
yond his seventh year. To his brother Henry in 1852 he ex-
claimed: 'Dear old Tachbrooke! It is the only locality for which
'I feel any affection. Well do I remember it from my third or
'fourth year; and the red filberts 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 cat apricots with you again, I
'shall not now cry for the kernel.'
As soon as he could quit the nursery he had been sent to a
school at Knowle, ten miles from Warwick; and even of this
time, when he had reached the age of about four years and a half,
his letters have a recollection which is worth preserving. Writ-
ing to his sister Ellen from Florence at the close of 1831, he
says: 'I remember when I went to Knowle an old woman com-
'ing from Balsal-Temple to little Treherne for a guinea, which
' he paid her yearly. She was one hundred and two when I was
'four and a half; so that it is in the range of possibility that she
might have seen people who had seen not only Milton, but
Shakespeare, Bacon, Spenser, and Raleigh. I myself have con-
' versed with a man, not remarkably old, who had conversed with
'Pope, Warburton, and Fielding.'
6
6
Another incident of a year and a half's later date he recalled
when writing to Southey in 1811 of his Lanthony estate in the
Vale of Ewias, and its infinite variety of flowers-those beauti-
'ful and peaceful tribes' he so often wished that he knew more
about. They always meet one in the same place, at the same
season; and years have no more effect on their placid counten-
ances than on so many of the most favoured gods. I remem-
'ber a little privet which I planted when I was about six years
old, and which I considered the next of kin to me after my
'mother and elder sister. Whenever I returned from school or
college, for the attachment was not stifled in that sink, I felt
something like uneasiness till I had seen and measured it. There
' is no small delight in having a friend in the world to whom
one dare repeat such folly.' With a delight that may perhaps
be measured by the surpassing beauty of the lines in which it
C
•
1775-1797.
9
AT RUGBY SCHOOL.
is expressed, he repeated the folly in later years to a wider audi-
ence:
' And 't is 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 my breath upon its bank
And not reproached me; the ever-sacred cup
Of the pure lily hath between my hands
Felt safe, unsoiled, nor lost one grain of gold.'
Varied at the same time with these enjoyments of youth were
its other commoner occurrences, which bring to most of us a fore-
taste of the later troubles. All the trials he ever underwent, he
would tell you, were as nothing to his sufferings over grammar
and arithmetic, of the last of which he remained ignorant all his
life, according to the process in use.' But it was a worse cala-
mity, a deep lower than the lowest, that awaited him in dancing;
so that when he came to have a son of his own present age, he
had gloomily to prophesy that he bid fair to be a worse dancer
than he had himself been, for quite vainly had he striven to im-
press upon him the dreadful truth that all other miseries and
misfortunes of life put together were nothing to this.
IV. AT RUGBY SCHOOL.
From Knowle, when about ten years old, Landor was trans-
ferred to Rugby; at that time under Doctor James, a scholar of
fair repute, who did something to redeem the school from the
effects of the long and dull mastership that preceded his. Many
stories are told of Landor here, and some that in his old age ob-
tained sanction from himself, which must nevertheless be pro-
nounced apocryphal.
He is said to have been without a rival in boxing, leaping, and
all sports allowed or forbidden; to have been the boldest rider
and most adventurous despiser of school-bounds in whom the
Rugbeans of that day took pride; and to have astonished equally
the townspeople, the schoolboys, and the masters by a reckless
defiance of authority. That he defied authority, here as in most
other places, is certain enough; but the methods and modes de-
10
Book I.
WARWICK, RUGBY, OXFORD, SWANSEA.
scribed are not those he is likely to have used. The picture of
him on horseback out of bounds, galloping beyond the reach of
pedestrian authority, bears small resemblance to the studious wil-
ful boy, both shy and impetuous,-not indeed backward in the
ordinary sports of the school, but in boxing not more than the
equal of any of his three brothers, of whom none were in a re-
markable degree pugnacious or skilful, and in riding certainly in-
ferior to them all. Charles more especially, the brother next to
himself, was his admitted superior in athletic exercises; and
Rugby recollections have doubtless given to Walter many of
the exploits of this younger brother, always fonder of country
sports, and to whom the language quoted would be more applic-
able though still extravagant. Charles had a larger and finer
presence, both as boy and man, and to the last was an admir-
able horseman. Walter was of strong build, but never in early
or later life rode well; and though he took part in cricket, foot-
ball, and other games, and was even famous for the skill with
which he threw a net in fishing, he was at all times disposed
rather to walk by the river-side with a book than to engage in
such trials of strength and activity. In one of his letters he re-
marks both of school and college days that he oftener stuck in
the middle of a Greek verse than of a brake; and he writes on
one occasion to Southey much in the style of an inexpert horse-
man: ‘I was very fond of riding when I was young, but I found
that it produces a rapidity in the creation of thought which
'makes us forget what we are doing. His brother Robert tells
me that he never followed the hounds at Rugby or any where
else, and that when he kept three horses he never mounted one
of them; they were only for his carriage. Average-sized as he
was, he was the least, though not the weakest, of the four bro-
thers; well-shaped, but not in youth so good-looking as those
who knew him only in after-days would imagine.
For a moment I recall the well-remembered figure and face,
as they first became known to me thirty years ago.'
* Landor
*The first two books of this biography were written in the winter of
1865, and, up to the close of the fourth book, the work was printed off in
the summer of 1867. Its completion was delayed until 1869, the year of
publication.
1775-1797.
11
AT RUGBY SCHOOL.
was then upwards of sixty, and looked that age to the full.
He was not above the middle stature, but had a stout stalwart
presence, walked without a stoop, and in his general aspect, par-
ticularly the set and carriage of his head, was decidedly of what
is called a distinguished bearing. His hair was already silvered
gray, and had retired far upward from his forehead, which, wide
and full but retreating, could never in the earlier time have been
seen to such advantage. What at first was noticeable, however,
in the broad white massive head, were the full yet strangely-lifted
eyebrows; and they were not immediately attractive. They might
have meant only pride or self-will in its most arrogant form, but
for what was visible in the rest of the face. In the large gray
eyes there was a depth of composed expression that even startled
by its contrast to the eager restlessness looking out from the sur-
face of them; and in the same variety and quickness of transi-
tion the mouth was extremely striking. The lips that seemed
compressed with unalterable will would in a moment relax to a
softness more than feminine; and a sweeter smile it was impos-
sible to conceive. What was best in his character, whether for
strength or gentleness, had left its traces here. It was altoge-
ther a face on which power was visibly impressed, but without
the resolution and purpose that generally accompany it; and
one could well imagine that while yet in extreme youth, and be-
fore life had written its ineffaceable record, the individual fea-
tures might have had as little promise as they seem to bear in a
portrait of him now before me belonging to his brother Henry, and
taken in his thirtieth year. The eye is fine; but black hair covers
all the forehead, and you recognise the face of the later time quite
without its fulness, power, and animation. The stubbornness is
there, without the softness; the self-will, untamed by any experi-
ence; plenty of energy, but a want of emotion. The nose was
never particularly good; and the lifted brow, flatness of cheek
and jaw, wide upper lip, retreating mouth and chin, and heavy
neck, peculiarities necessarily prominent in youth, in age contri-
buted only to a certain lion-look he liked to be reminded of, and
would confirm with a loud long laugh hardly less than leonine.
Higher and higher went peal after peal, in continuous and in-
creasing volleys, until regions of sound were reached very far be-
yond ordinary human lungs.
12
Book I.
WARWICK, RUGBY, OXFORD, SWANSEA.
With this accompaniment I have heard him relate one Rugby
anecdote that is certainly authentic. Throwing his net one morn-
ing in a stream to which access on some previous occasion had
been refused to him, the farmer who owned the land came down
upon him suddenly; angry words were exchanged; and Landor,
complying quite unexpectedly with a peremptory demand for his
fishing apparatus, flung the net over the farmer's head with such
faultless precision as completely to entangle in its meshes his en-
raged adversary, and reduce him to easy submission. Nor did
he less riotously laugh at the relation of one of his many differ-
ences with the head-master in his later years at the school, when
he would entangle him as suddenly in questions of longs and
shorts; and the Doctor, going afterwards good-naturedly to visit.
him in his private room, would knock vainly for admission at
the bolted study-door, from within which Landor, affecting to
discredit the reality of the visit or the voice, and claiming there
his right to protest against all intrusion of the profane, would
devoutly ejaculate, Avaunt, Satan!
Among his school-fellows was Butler, afterwards head-master
of Shrewsbury and bishop of Lichfield: but Landor had the re-
putation in the school of being the best classic. The excellence
of his Latin verses was a tradition at Rugby for half a century
after he left; and one of the fags of his time, a peer's son, has
described the respectful awe with which he read one day on the
slate, in the handwriting of Doctor James himself, 'Play-day for
'Landor's Latin verses.' His familiarity with Greek was less con-
spicuous, that language having become his more especial study
only in later years; and there is doubtless some truth in the play-
ful allusion of one of his letters written when he was eighty-four.
'I have forgotten my Greek, of which I had formerly as much
as boys of fifteen have now. Butler, afterwards bishop of Lich-
field, and myself, were the first at Rugby, or, I believe, any
' other school, who attempted a Greek verse.
Latin I still pos-
sess a small store of.'* But what would seem most to have
marked itself out as peculiar in his mastery of both Greek and
Latin, even so early as his Rugby days, was less what masters
could teach him, than what Nature herself had given him. This
* Letter to Lady Sawle, 8th February 1858.
1775-1797.
13
AT RUGBY SCHOOL.
:
was a character and habit of mind resembling closely that of the
ancient writers; ways of seeing and thinking nearly akin to
theirs the power, sudden as thought itself, of giving visual shape
to objects of thought; and with all this, intense energy of feel-
ing, and a restless activity of imagination, eager to reproduce.
themselves in similar forms of vivid and picturesque expression.
It was this that gave originality to his style, even while he most
appeared to be modelling himself upon antiquity. He had the
Greek love of the clear, serene, and graceful, of the orderly and
symmetrical; he had the Greek preference for impulsive rather
than reflective forms of imagination; and he had the sense of
material grandeur, and the eager sympathy with domestic as well
as public life, peculiar to the Latin genius. In this way, to the
last, he was more himself of the antique Roman or Greek than of
a critical student of either tongue; although the marvellous facil-
ity with which he had been writing Latin verse from his youth,
gave him always a power over that language which might well
supply the place of more severe requirements of scholarship. Very
largely also, during all his life, had the power contributed to his
own enjoyment; and it is in this view, rather than in the light
of tasks or lessons, we have to speak of his classical attainments
even so far back as his boyhood. Such acquaintance with pars-
ing, syntax, and prosody as the Rugby exercises at that time
called for, cost him of course no effort; and long before he had
formally qualified for the rank, he was practically the first Latinist
in the school. His tutor was Doctor Sleath, the late prebend of
St. Paul's; but though this good man had some influence over
him, it was exerted in vain to induce him to compete for a prize
poem. 'I never would contend at school,' he wrote in one of his
last letters to Southey, 'with any one for anything. I formed the
same resolution when I went to college, and I have kept it.'
With something of the shyness that avoided competition, there
was more of the pride that would acknowledge no competitor;
and he was, in truth, never well disposed to anything systematised
either in pursuits or studies. What he did best and worst, he
did, in his earliest as his latest life, for the satisfaction of his
own will or pleasure.
The subject thus adverted to will frequently recur, and frank
*
14
Book I.
WARWICK, RUGBY, OXFORD, SWANSEA.
confession of my want of qualification to speak of it critically
must accompany all remarks of my own. I will yet venture to
say of his Latin verse, which he wrote as abundantly as English
and of which he had himself the higher opinion, that I believe
more of the pleasure of original poetry to be derivable from it
than from any other modern Latinity; and though here and
there it seems to me to be somewhat difficult in construction, it
has never anything of the schoolmaster's expletives or phrases,
but, in that as in other respects, may be read as if a Roman him-
self had written it. Nor is it less certainly to be said of his
Greek, that, though he more rarely composed in that language,
he had the sense inseparable from a poet and scholar of the vast
superiority of its literature, and derived from it an influence that
in his own original writing became strikingly visible. He is one
of the dozen men in a generation who can be said to have read
Plato through in his own tongue; and when he had passed his
eighty-fifth year he read in the original Greek the whole of the
Odyssey. I will add a remark from one of his brother's letters:
'At school and college he had gained superiority over his com-
panions, and, seventy years ago, very little Greek was sufficient,
' for such distinction. There are better scholars passing from our
'public schools now than were then the fellows of my college
'who had taken their master's degree. But Walter increased his
'Latin all his life long, because he had pleasure in it. He had
' also a fondness for the derivation of words: reading the Port-
Royal Grammar twice through, and Ainsworth's Latin Dic-
tionary once. But it was not till after he had left England, and
'was preparing to qualify himself for the Imaginary Conversa-
'tions and Pericles and Aspasia, that he applied his thoughts
thoroughly to Greek literature; and even then his reading was
very confined. His friends must regret his estimate of Plato
especially. But there was no deception, no false pretence, in
his criticisms. He did not affect more scholarship than he pos-
'sessed but because his contemporaries had once been inferior
'to him, he believed that they must ever remain at the same dist-
ance from him; that they must be inferior still; and hence the
appearance of too much pretension. Compared with such scholars
as the universities are producing now he was a very idle stu-
6
6
6
6
1775-1797.
15
AT RUGBY SCHOOL.
'dent, idle indeed. You will accept these opinions of mine as
'worth hardly a moment's consideration, unless they are con-
'firmed by your own; for I am now, and ever have been, as ill
qualified to estimate Walter as he was to estimate Plato. Parr
once described him to me as a most excellent Latin scholar with
6
6
some creditable knowledge of Greek; and I believe that not
much more could be said fifty years later. Nor did he pretend
' to more.'
(
Of any taste as yet developed in him for particular branches.
of English reading or study, there is no trace; but one of his
letters to Southey in 1811 tells us of his first literary purchase:
'The two first books I ever bought were at the stall of an old
woman at Rugby. They happened to be Baker's Chronicle
' and Drayton's Polyolbion. I was very fond of both because
they were bought by me. They were my own; and if I did
'not read them attentively, my money would have been thrown
'away, and I must have thought and confessed myself injudi-
'cious. I have read neither since, and I never shall possess
‘either again. It is melancholy to think with how much more
fondness and pride the writers of those days contemplated
'whatever was belonging to Old England. People now in prais-
ing any scene or event snarl all the while, and attack their
neighbours for not praising. They feel a consciousness that
'the foundations of our greatness are impaired, and have occa-
'sioned a thousand little cracks and crevices to let in the cold
air upon our comforts. Ah, Nassau and Oliver!-Quis vobis
' tertius hæres?' Certainly neither Sidmouth nor Castlereagh,
Southey himself would have answered; and the mere tone of
the question is some proof that to have read attentively,' at this
time of life, two such hearty old lovers of their country as Baker
and Drayton, had left a wholesome impression on this Rugby
boy.
<
6
On the same form with him and Butler, all four having en-
tered at about the same time, were Henry Cary and Walter
Birch, both of them Landor's contemporaries at Oxford also.
Writing from Florence to Mr. Robert Lytton at nearly the close
of his eighty-fifth year, he says: 'Do not despise Cary's Dante.
'It is wonderful how he could have turned the rhymes of Dante
16
Book I.
WARWICK, RUGBY, OXFORD, SWANSEA.
<
C
4
C
C
(
into unrhymed verse with any harmony: he has done it. Poor
Cary! I remember him at Rugby and Oxford. He was the friend
' of my friend Walter Birch whom I fought at Rugby, and who
thrashed me well. He was a year older, and a better boxer:
we were intimate ever afterwards, till his death.' 'Birch and I
thought ourselves men when we were only boys,' is the remark
of another of his letters; but it made us the more manly when
'we grew up.' Many proofs remain of this intimacy, which,
a few years after Landor's brief residence at Oxford, his brother
Robert closely shared on coming into residence at Worcester-
college: Birch having by that time obtained a fellowship at
Magdalen, and deservedly high repute among the most distin-
guished men in the other colleges. Birch's elder brother was
second master at Rugby; and Landor often generously spoke of
Walter himself as having been the best Rugby scholar, as well
as the boy with whom he had formed his closest and indeed his
only real friendship. 'I see this morning,' he wrote to me in
1854, that Routh, the president of Magdalen, is dead. He was
' made president just before I entered the university. The first
· scholar admitted to his college after the election was my friend
'Walter Birch, the best scholar at Rugby, not excepting Butler.
'We used to walk together in Addison's walk along the Cher-
'well. From Rugby we had often gone to Bilton, one mile off,
a small estate bought by Addison, where his only daughter, an
'old fat woman of weak intellect, was then living, and lived a
good while after,-three or four years. Surely I must have
'assisted in another life!'
6
C
Beyond such glimpses as these there is little more to relate
of his Rugby days. Though he had not many intimacies in the
school, he was generally popular and respected, and used his
influence often to save the younger boys from undue harshness
or violence. This is mentioned in some recent recollections by
one who was with him at Rugby; and an illustration may be
added from a letter of his brother Henry's, when both had passed
their seventieth year: 'Do you think I ever forgot your kind-
ness to me at Rugby, in threatening another boy who ill-used
* me if he again persisted in similar conduct? Or your gift of
money to me at that time, when I verily believe you had not
1775-1797.
17
AT RUGBY SCHOOL.
A like inter-
' another shilling left for your own indulgences?
ference on behalf of another school-fellow of his own standing,
with whom otherwise he had little in common, led to an inti-
macy that should be mentioned here; not for anything it adds
to our knowledge of his school-days, but because it brought
pleasant associations to his later life. Between him and Fleet-
wood Parkhurst, son of an old Worcestershire squire descended
from the Fleetwoods and Dormers, there was a discordance of
taste and temper in most things: yet their connection survived
the Rugby time; they met frequently after their school-days;
they visited each other's families; Parkhurst was the only Rugby
boy who went with him to the same college at Oxford; and
on occasions they travelled together until quite thrown asunder
by a quarrel, which nevertheless in no respect abated the affec-
tion already conceived for his son's friend by the elder Mr.
Parkhurst, and continued through the old squire's life. At
Ripple-court on the banks of the Severn, the family house,
there was for years no happier guest; and when nearly half a
century had passed, and Fleetwood's youngest sister had wedded
a public man of distinction to be named later in this narrative,
Landor reminded her of days still gratefully remembered.
• Where Malvern's verdant ridges gleam
Beneath the morning ray,
Look eastward: see Sabrina's stream
Roll rapidly away.
The lord of these domains was one
Who loved me like an only son.'
Remaining at Rugby till he was past his fifteenth year, he
had meanwhile been joined there by his younger brothers Charles
and Henry; and in a letter to the latter written in 1847 we get
our first glimpse of their father Doctor Landor, at this early time.
Naming some communication received from the head of the
Lawley family, he says Lord Wenlock had reminded him that
their families had been intimate for sixty years, but that his own
memory carries him farther back. It is sixty-five years since
'Sir Robert Lawley stood godfather to our brother Robert. I
was at Canwell (so was Charles) with my father when I was
' about eleven years old. We went coursing, for we rode our
C
18
Book I.
WARWICK, RUGBY, OXFORD, SWANSEA.
، ،،
ponies. One morning we went into the stable, and Sir Robert
'said to my father, stopping in a certain spot, "Landor, how
many bottles of port have we drank together just about
""" here?"
“Better talk of dozens, Sir Robert," said my father.
'He and his father must have known my grandfather, for he
quoted as a saying of his father's that my grandfather was an
'honest dog for a Jacobite, and screamed with laughter as he said
• it.'
It was but a year after this incident that young Walter
had a visitor who might have seemed not wholly unconnected
with those dozens of port, and to have brought him unsought
and premature instalment of his entailed estates of inheritance.
The alarm was a false one, this particular legacy going to his
younger brothers; but the reader will appreciate the quiet hum-
our with which one of them, who received from his father no
better portion, tells the tale.
6
"Though followed,' writes Mr. Robert Landor,' by two younger
brothers as soon as they could be received at Rugby, there re-
'mains nothing worth recording till he was twelve years old;
when a violent fit of the gout-gout which might have quali-
'fied him for an alderman-restored him to his mother's care at
'Warwick. Never was there a more impatient sufferer; and his
imprecations, divided equally between the gout and his nurses,
were heard afar. It is also strange that there never was any
' return of this disorder. Our father suffered from it, and all
'three of the younger brothers; but though Walter's appetite
'much surpassed the best of ours (or the worst), he escaped it
during more than seventy years. However active at dinner, he
was always temperate after it; and I never saw the smallest
'sign of excess, though he greatly enjoyed three or four glasses
' of light wine. He remained at Rugby till fifteen or sixteen,
´and gained the character of more than common scholarship by
'his Latin verses especially. However violent his temper might
' have been, I think that he was liked as well as respected by
'his school-fellows; for some of them, whom I knew many years
later, always remembered him with pleasure.'
(
6
But, before finally quitting Rugby, an event of importance in
a poet's life is to be recorded. While still in the school, and not
more than fourteen, he had written his first original verses; made
1775-1797.
19
AT RUGBY SCHOOL.
upon a cousin's marriage, at her own request; with a certain so-
briety of tone, as well as absence of commonplace in the metre,
not usual in so young a beginner, and otherwise not worse or
better than such things commonly are. But more interesting
than the verses themselves is the letter I find with them in his
papers, indorsed by himself 'Miss Norris,' addressed to 'Mr.
'Landor, at Rugby,' and written from his father's house in War-
wick. The writer, who was of the family from whom his mother
derived the estates of Ipsley and Tachbrooke, had obtained some
influence over him, and uses it to confirm what was best in his
tastes and temper by the endeavour to correct what was worst
in both. 'I cannot help,' she writes, 'admiring your way of
employing your leisure. . . . I think you are much in the right
'to make the most learned your friends and companions; but
permit me to say, that though I think a proper spirit commend-
' able and even necessary at times, yet, in my opinion, it is better
to submit sometimes to those under whose authority we are,
even when we think they are in fault, than to run the risk of
'being esteemed arrogant and self-sufficient.' She was writing
on the 23d of September 1790, little more than a year after the
fall of the Bastille; and the revolt against authority she rebukes
with such wise tenderness, has relation to one of the many differ-
ences between the scholar and his master which had occurred at
this time. Landor was afterwards so willing to forget these en-
counters, and to recall nothing of the old doctor not kindly and
grateful, that the allusion to them now shall be brief.
"
He seems to have thought, when in the school, that Dr.
James either would not or could not appreciate what he did in
Latin verse, and that when he was driven to take special notice
of it, he took the worst, and not the best, for the purpose. Thus,
when told very graciously on one occasion to copy out fairly in
the play-book verses by himself of which he thought indiffer-
ently, Landor, in making the copy, put private additions to it of
several lines, with a coarse allusion beginning, 'Hæc sunt malo-
rum pessima carminum quæ Landor unquam scripsit,' &c. This
offence was forgiven; but it was followed by another of which
the circumstances were such as to render it impossible that he
should continue longer in the school. The right at first was on
(
20
Book I.
WARWICK, RUGBY, OXFORD, SWANSEA.
Landor's side: for Dr. James had strongly insisted on, and the other
as firmly had declined, the correction of an alleged false quan-
tity found really not to exist. But, apart from the right or the
wrong, an expression rudely used by the pupil was very sharply
resented by the master, and only one result became possible.
'When between fifteen and sixteen,' writes Mr. Robert Landor,
'he was not expelled from Rugby, but removed, as the less dis-
'creditable punishment, at the head master's suggestion. There
was nothing unusual or disgraceful in the particular transgres-
sion, but a fierce defiance of all authority and a refusal to ask
forgiveness.'*
(
C
Yet not so should we part from his Rugby days. He has
himself given a picture of one of the latest of them appealing to
kindlier remembrance. Sitting by the square pool not long be-
fore he left, he had written a little poem on Godiva; and in a
note to his imaginary conversation on the charming old Warwick-
shire story, he not only relates how the schoolfellow to whom he
showed his earlier effort laughed at him, and how earnestly he
had to entreat and implore him not to tell the other lads,' but
he repeats the verses, with which, as he transcribes them in
his Italian home, there comes back to him the very air of the
schoolboy spot in which first they were written, and fervently
he wishes that the peppermint may still be growing on the bank
by the Rugby pool. It is a pretty picture, and the lines them-
selves are of a kind to haunt the memory.
'In every hour, in every mood,
O lady, it is sweet and good
To bathe the soul in prayer;
And at the close of such a day,
When we have ceased to bless and pray,
To dream on thy long hair.'
V. AT ASHBOURNE.
Rugby had nevertheless given pretty nearly all in the way
of scholarship she had to give to Landor, when he was thus,
though still too young for the university, compelled to bid her
* See his own account, quoted from a letter to myself, at the end of
the second book.
f
1775-1797.
21
AT ASHBOURNE.
adieu. An intermediate place between school and college it was
necessary to provide; 'and,' writes Mr. Robert Landor, at six-
'teen he was consigned to the tuition of a clergyman living in
'Derbyshire who had no other pupil, and who seemed well quali-
'fied for the office by patience and gentleness. Walter always
'spoke of him with respect; but though by no means ignorant,
'the tutor had very little more scholarship than the pupil, and
'his Latin verses were hardly so good as Walter's.' This was
Mr. Langley, vicar of Ashbourne, the charming country village
Landor has so prettily described in his delightful conversation
of Walton and Cotton; where he takes occasion also to render
tribute not alone to Langley himself, but to the elegant and gene-
rous Sleath at Rugby, and to the saintly Benwell at Oxford. In a
letter to myself, written hardly eleven years ago, he makes ano-
ther allusion to the days thus passed in Derbyshire between sixty
and seventy years before, which may be worth preserving. My
❝ old tutor at Ashbourne, poor dear Langley, had seen Pope when
'he came to visit Oxford from Lord Harcourt's at Nuneham.
Dr. Harrington, of Oceana's family, dined at Allen's, where he
← did not meet Pope, but did meet Fielding. Pope, I believe,
was then dead. Harrington was almost a boy, fourteen or
• fifteen years old. He sat at dinner by his father, and Fielding
on the other side. Warburton was there, and with great pomp-
L
¿
<
osity made a speech eulogistic of Allen, who had said a few
'words, modest and unimportant. "Gentlemen," said Warbur-
"ton, "many of us have enjoyed the benefits of a university
"education, but which among us can speak so wisely and judi-
"ciously?" Fielding turned his face round to Harrington, and
said pretty loudly, "Hark to that sycophantic son of a of
a parson!" I doubt whether the double genitive case was ever
so justly, however inelegantly, employed.'+ When recollections
* Other similar allusions were frequent; as in a letter to me of 1851.
'It is exactly sixty years since I saw Chatsworth. I was at that time under
a private tutor at Ashbourne, having just left Rugby, and being a little
'too young for Oxford."
+ I permit myself to add, as every way very characteristic of the writer,
then on the eve of his eightieth year, the closing lines of this letter of my
old friend. He was waiting at the time the visit I generally paid him on
his birthday. In the twentieth year of the British Republic some old
22
Book I.
WARWICK, RUGBY, OXFORD, SWANSEA.
such as these came back to Landor, he might be pardoned the
exclamation we have lately heard from him, that surely he must
have assisted in another life! Born in the year when the Eng-
lish colonies in America rebelled; living through all the revolu-
tions in France, and the astonishing career of the great Napo-
leon; a sympathiser with the defeated Paoli and the victorious
Garibaldi; contemporary with Cowper and Burns, yet the sur-
vivor of Keats, Wordsworth, and Byron, of Shelley, Scott, and
Southey; living while Gibbon's first volume and Macaulay's last
were published; to whom Pitt and Fox, and even Burke, had
been familiar, as were Peel and Russell; who might have heard
Mirabeau attempting to save the French monarchy, and Mr.
Gladstone predicting the disruption of the American republic;
it would seem strange that a single life should be large enough
for such experiences, if their very number and variety did not
suggest the exaggeration of importance that each in its turn is
too apt to receive from us all, and impress us rather with the
wisdom of the saying of the greatest of poets that
'We are such stuff
As dreams are made of; and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.'
When the two years at Ashbourne were passed, they had
left some profitable as well as pleasant remembrances. He dated
from this time his better acquaintance with some of the Greek
writers, especially Sophocles and Pindar; he turned several
things of Cowley into Latin Sapphics and Alcaics; he wrote a
few English pieces; and he translated into verse the Jephthah of
Buchanan, a poem afterwards destroyed, but of which he had
himself so high an opinion that he said he could not have im-
man may recount tales of you and me. He will not be a very old man, if
public affairs are managed another year as they have been this last.
'FORSTER! Come hither, I pray, to the Fast of our Anglican Martyr.
Turbot our Church has allowed, and perhaps (not without dispensation)
Pheasant: then strawberry-cream, green-gages, and apricot-jelly,
Oranges housewives call pot, and red-rinded nuts of Avella,
Filberts we name them at home,-happy they who have teeth for the
crackers!
Blest, but in lower degree, whose steel-armed right hand overcomes them!.
I, with more envy than spite, look on and sip sadly my claret.'
1775-1797.
23
AT ASHBOURNE.
proved it even after he wrote Gebir. Judging from his first
published volume, I should strongly have doubted this; for he
was still within the trammels of Pope's versification, and, though
in conception often original, in execution was still imitative; if
indisputable evidence of the higher character given gradually to
his own style by the mere effort of translating, were not also
before me.
There was indeed but one stride to be taken to
Gebir, which appeared within three years after the volume re-
ferred to; and the reader will probably admit, at that portion
of my narrative, that a more remarkable advance in power was
never made, and rarely such an achievement in literature by a
man so young. But let me show also here, by example of a
poem written at Ashbourne,* in what different ways the same
subject was treated now, and in the days that were so soon to
follow of his greater maturity of mind. It is the difference be-
tween a Pope translation and a Greek original.
MEDEA AT CORINTH (1791).
'So, when Medea, on her native strand,
Beheld the Argo lessen from the land;
The tender pledges of her love she bore,
Frantic, and raised them high above the shore.
"Thus, thus may Jason, faithless as he flies,
Faithless, and heedless of Medea's cries,
Behold his babes, oppose the adverse gales,
And turn to Colchis those retiring sails."
She spake in vain: then maddened with despair
Tore her pale cheeks and undulating hair.
Then, O, unmindful of all former joys,
Threw from her breast her inoffensive boys;
Their tender limbs and writhing fibres tore,
And whirled around the coast the inexpiable gore!'
THE SAME SUBJECT (a few years later).
Stay! spare him! save the last!..
I will invoke the Eumenides no more-
I will forgive thee-bless thee-bend to thee
In all thy wishes! do but thou, Medea,
Tell me, one lives!" "And shall I, too, deceive?"
Cries from the fiery car an angry voice;
In a note to one of its lines on the misfortunes of the king of France
he remarks, that when this was written Louis had only returned to Paris
' after his flight,' which was in 1791; and to the fate which afterwards be-
fell the king he applies a passage from the Electra of Sophocles.
24
Book I.
WARWICK, RUGBY, OXFORD, SWANSEA.
And swifter than two falling stars descend
Two breathless bodies,-warm, soft, motionless
As flowers in stillest noon before the sun,
They lie three paces from him. Such they lie,
As when he left them sleeping side by side,
A mother's arm round each, a mother's cheeks
Between them, flusht with happiness and love.
He was more changed than they were,-doomed to show
Thee and the stranger, how defaced and scarred
Grief hunts us down the precipice of years!'
Poets of the highest originality take their point of departure
from an imitative stage, and Landor in those earlier verses shows
no exemption from the rule. But from the first the influence of
his classical studies and temperament is more than ordinarily
manifest, and the completeness and rapidity with which it formed
his original style is worthy of remark. A splendid instance is
in this second version of the Medea, and another more extraordi-
nary presents itself in a translation of one of the most famous
episodes in Virgil, which I have found in scraps of his hand-
writing of the date of 1794, and with the opening lines of which
I shall close this section.
The shell assuaged his sorrow: thee he sang,
Sweet wife! thee with him on the shore alone,
At rising dawn, at parting day, sang thee.
The mouth of Tænarus, the gates of Dis,
Groves dark with dread, he entered; he approacht
The Manes and their awful king, and hearts
That knew not pity yet for human prayer.
Roused at his song, the Shades of Erebus
Rose from their lowest, most remote, abodes,
Faint Shades, and Spirits semblances of life;
Numberless as o'er woodland wilds the birds
That wintery evening drives or mountain storm;
Mothers and husbands, unsubstantial crests
Of high-souled heroes, boys, unmarried maids,
And youths on biers before their parents' eyes.
The deep black ooze and rough unsightly reed
Of slow Cocytus's unyielding pool
And Styx confines them, flowing ninefold round.
The halls and inmost Tartarus of Death,
And (the blue adders twisting in their hair)
The Furies, were astounded. On he stept,
And Cerberus held agape his triple jaws:
On stept the Bard... Ixion's wheel stood still.'
Few ancient pieces have been chosen oftener by translators
1775-1797.
25
AT TRINITY-COLLEGE, OXFORD.
as a ground of competition; yet, from Dryden to Wordsworth,
there is no one who has excelled, if any has equalled, this trans-
lation by a youth of nineteen. But to me the lines are interest-
ing especially for their illustration of the growth of his own
genius. If I had met with them anywhere, not knowing the
lines of Virgil, I should have supposed them to be an original
poem of the writer's later life. He has nevertheless not passed
the imitative stage. His own thoughts have to find their style,
and their written character is yet to come.
VI. AT TRINITY-COLLEGE, OXxford.
At eighteen years of age Landor entered as a commoner in
Trinity-college, Oxford. It was the memorable year of 1793,
which had opened at Paris with the execution of Louis Seize.
Of the excitement that prevailed, and the conflicting passions that
were raging everywhere; grief on the one hand at the downfall
of ancient institutions, exultation on the other at supposed tri-
umphs of justice and reason; it is needless to speak. To the
young,* it was natural to believe that a new world was opening;
and the glorious visions that attended it descended largely, it
may well be imagined, on the students at both universities. As
Wordsworth says for himself, Society became his glittering bride,
and airy hopes his children. I cannot find, however, that Lan-
dor was at any time much excited in this way. The American
rebellion was oftener in his thoughts than the French revolution.
He was a Jacobin, but so would have been if Robespierre and
Danton had not been. He reasoned little; but his instincts were
all against authority, or what took to him the form of its abuse.
With exulting satisfaction he saw the resistance and conquests
of democracy; but pantisocracy, and golden days to come on
earth, were not in his hopes or expectation. He rather rejoiced
in the prospect of a fierce continued struggle; his present ideal
was that of an armed republic changing the face of the world;
* Bliss was it in the dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very Heaven!'
Wordsworth in Coleridge's Ode:
the same words, with change of 'the' for 'that' in the first line, reappeared
in his own Prelude.
26
Book I.
WARWICK, RUGBY, OXFORD, SWANSEA.
and as the outbreak of the revolution had not made him repub-
lican, neither did its excesses cure him of that malady. He
gloried to the last in avowing his preference for a republic;
though he would also date his hatred of the French, which he
maintained with almost equal consistency, from the day when.
they killed their queen. Mr. Shandy might have connected all
this with his birth on the anniversary of Charles I.'s execution.
(
He remained at Oxford little more than a year and a half,
between 1793 and 1794, and used to call the hours passed with
Walter Birch in the Magdalen walk by the half-hidden Cherwell
(the road of which Addison was so fond) the pleasantest he could
remember, as well as the most profitable. Of his studies there
is little to be said. For a portion of the time he certainly read
hard, but the results he kept to himself; for here, as at Rugby,
he declined everything in the shape of competition. Though I
' wrote better Latin verses than any undergraduate or graduate
' in the University,' he wrote to Dr. Davy, in 1857, I could
never be persuaded, by my tutor or friends, to contend for any
' prize whatever. I showed my compositions to Birch of Mag-
'dalen, my old friend at Rugby; and to Cary, translator of Dante;
'to none else.' It is at the same time unquestionable that his
extraordinary talents, and skill in both the ancient languages,
had impressed greatly his tutor Benwell, and the president and
fellows of Trinity; and I have heard him say frequently that
Benwell (dear good Benwell') shed tears when his favourite
pupil was obliged to quit the college. But the Universities then,
with far less inducement to study than now, had even fewer re-
straints than at present exist for youths unable to restrain them- .
selves; the license generally allowed left a man equally free to
use, abuse, or waste his powers; and we have only to wonder
how so many lads of fortune, let completely loose at that critical
time, could manage to get on in after-life with any kind of credit.
I hardly remember an allusion by Landor to the examination-
halls or lecture-rooms, except that in the latter, one day, Justin
was given them to construe, and that though indignant at the
choice of such an author, he was reconciled on finding there the
story of the Phocæans, which he straightway began to turn into
English blank verse, a measure he had not before attempted.
1775-1797.
27
AT TRINITY-COLLEGE, Oxford.
A stronger interest had been awakened in him by the pass-
ing incidents of the day. The summer of 1794, when Landor's
Oxford residence was about to draw to its close, was one of un-
exampled excitement, and some notice must be taken of the
other than classical subjects in which his ardent temper engaged
him. The Scotch judges had transported Muir and Palmer and
Gerrard as felons, for desiring parliamentary reform; the Eng-
lish judges were expected to hang Holcroft and Horne Tooke as
traitors, for 'corresponding' with the same desire; and by all this
Landor was stung into writing a satire, making himself inter-
locutor with a clerical friend. He listens to the other's warning:
'Hush! why complain? of treason have a care;
You hear of Holcroft and of Tooke-beware!"
and indignantly rejoins:
'Before a tyrant Juvenal display'd
Truth's hated form and Satire's flaming blade;
With hand unshaken bore her mirror-shield:
Vice gazed and trembled-shriek'd and left the field.
Shall I dissemble, then?'
following up his question by vigorous denunciation of the war
with France, and impassioned appeal to Poland, then once more
awakening. But the friend again interposes :
'Mistaken youth! the milder plan pursue,
To love what statesmen and what monarchs do.
Hence no political, no civil strife,
Thy death will hasten, or torment thy life.
In the same steps the greatest men have trod,
Far our superiors.'
To which Landor:
'I believe in God.
This only reason, courtly priest! I give.
Go, cease to moralise: learn first to live.'
From three other poems of this date, none of them being
elsewhere now accessible, very brief extracts may also be per-
mitted. The first illustrates the war against liberty by picturing
a desolated French village restored by the arms of the Republic;
and in the form of the verse, never again used by him, but since
familiarised to us by one of the laureate's masterpieces, there is
great beauty.
28
Book I.
WARWICK, RUGBY, OXFORD, SWANSEA.
'Twas evening calm, when village maids
With Gallia's tuneful sons advance
To frolic in the jovial dance,
Mid purple vines and olive shades. .
Smoke fills the air, and dims the day:
No more the vine of matted green
Or thin-leaved olive now are seen,
Or bird upon the trembling spray. . . .'
The second paints a Sunday morning in May.
'O, peaceful day of pious leisure!
O, what will mark you as you run?
Will Melancholy, or will Pleasure,
Will gloomy clouds, or golden sun?'
The third is an 'Ode to General Washington,' in which are
lines that not many boys of nineteen have before or since ex-
celled, in strength of expression or dignity of sentiment.
• Exulting on unwearied wings
Above where incense clouds the court of kings,
Arise, immortal Muse, arise!
Beyond the confines of the Atlantic waves,
O'er cities free from despots, free from slaves,
Go, seek the tepid calm of purer skies. .
And even thou to Nature's law
Wilt bend, with reverence and majestic awe,
As now to thee thy Country bends:
Yet, O my Washington! the fatal hour
Deprives thee only of an active power,
Nor with thy victories thy triumph ends. . . .
If the rumours that went abroad through Oxford of Landor's
fierce and uncompromising opinions had rested only on pieces
such as these, he might fairly have challenged the truth of epi-
thets thrown against him by assailants; but unhappily his tongue
was under less instinctive control than his pen, and, there being
students of his own college who held opinions in the other ex-
treme with as little disposition to withhold expression of them,
the result was not favourable to peace in the halls of Trinity.
Even among those of Landor's own way of thinking in the Uni-
versity, there were many who seem purposely to have kept aloof
from him; not because he was a Jacobin, but because he was a
'mad' Jacobin; though it is not at all clear that the epithet
might not have meant a more sensible Jacobinism than was
1775-1797.
29
AT TRINITY-COLLEGE, OXFORD.
(
popular in the particular quarters it proceeded from. 'At Ox-
ford,' said Landor, recalling this time in his old age, 'I was
' about the first student who wore his hair without powder. Take
C
(
C
care, said my tutor, they will stone you for a republican. The
Whigs (not the Wigs) were then unpopular; but I stuck to my
plain hair and queue tied with black ribbon.' As minister Roland,
just before, had refused to go to court in either knee-buckles
or shoe-buckles, Landor declined to go in powder into hall;
and under influence of the same example, a youth at Balliol,
six months older than Landor, had taken such fierce dislike to
old ceremonies and usage that he too had resisted every attempt
of the college barber to dress or powder him, and had gone into
hall in flowing locks; yet the remark upon the madness of Lan-
dor's Jacobinism was given by this very student of Balliol, a
few years later, as his only reason for not having now sought
Landor's acquaintance. Gebir had then appeared, and been placed
in the first rank of English poetry by the same youth, who in
the interval had himself published Joan of Arc; and upon the
name of the writer of Gebir being made known to him one day,
all this Oxford recollection flashed back upon him. 'I now re-
member,' Robert Southey wrote to his friend Humphry Davy at
Bristol, 'who the author of the Gebir is. He was a contem-
< porary of mine at Oxford, of Trinity, and notorious as a mad
'Jacobin. His Jacobinism would have made me seek his ac- v
'quaintance, but for his madness. He was obliged to leave the
University for shooting at one of the fellows through the win-
'dow.
All this I immediately recollected on getting at his
'name.' The latter recollection was not quite accurate, but the
substance of it unfortunately was true; and it is now necessary
to relate the incident which closed Landor's career at Oxford.
I again avail myself of one of Mr. Robert Landor's letters to
'At eighteen he entered as a commoner in Trinity-college,
Oxford, and was rusticated after a year's residence. Again, as at
Rugby, there was no greater offence than might have been over-
'looked if the general character had been less ungovernable. He
' had fired his fowling-piece into the window of some one whom
he hated for his Toryism. Refusing to make any concession, he
was rusticated during one year; but he was almost requested
(
me.
30
Book I.
WARWICK, RUGBY, OXFORD, SWANSEA.
' to return at the year's end, for his abilities were justly estim-
'ated.' These words have full confirmation in a more detailed ac-
count written a few months later by Landor himself to his most
intimate friend at the University, which by a singular accident
has survived until now. But a few prefatory words are needed
to explain what it will also necessarily communicate of Landor's
present relations with his father; and the reader will understand
why I make as brief as possible this unavoidable allusion.
All who knew Doctor Landor adopt the same tone in speaking
of him. What is remembered of him by his sons is identical
with what I have been able to gather from other sources. The
slightest symptom of arrogance or vanity none can recollect in
him. He disputed no one's pretensions, and was always silent
about his own. With much more than the average amount of
sense and learning common to country gentlemen of that time,
he made no comparisons, but took his place among them uncon-
scious of any difference that might have placed him far above
them. Social and hospitable, he never thought of rivalry. Lan-
dor himself used to say of him, that no other person ever equalled
the simple pleasantry with which his anecdotes were related; and
these had such a charm that his sons were accustomed to provoke
their repetition by little artifices, though they could anticipate
almost every word. Mentioning this in one of his letters, Mr.
Robert Landor continues: As a magistrate he had a large ac-
'quaintance among the senior barristers, and I have often met
' at his table Mr. Romilly (Sir Samuel), with other men of both
parties, for he was very liberal in opinion. But I do not think
' that my brother Walter was ever present. He hated law and
lawyers, then, almost as much as he despised the church and
' its ministers at all times; and the gentlemanly manners by
' which he was distinguished thirty years later, had then no ex-
istence.' This indicates sufficiently a source of disagreement
between father and son, in which their only point of agreement,
an excessive warmth of temper common to both, had frequent
occasion of exercise. With whom the wrong must have lain in
such quarrels would hardly admit of doubt, even if no memory
had survived to acquit Doctor Landor, not only of the faintest
trace of arrogance to his children, but of all contemptuous depre-

1775-1797.
31
AT TRINITY-COLLEGE, OXFORD.
ciation of other people, and indeed of anything like pride. On
this, therefore, nothing farther will be said beyond such state-
ment as the facts render necessary.
But, delicate as the ground is on which I find myself thus
early, it would be a wrong to the excellent person from whom I
have derived so many interesting recollections, not to say at once,
that if he had less frankly complied with my urgent and reiter-
ated request for the actual truth of his brother's earlier history,
the memoir could not have been undertaken at all. My personal
knowledge extended only to Landor's later life; and recollections
derived exclusively from himself I found to be too often incom-
patible with the statements of others to be used with perfect
safety. (Not that Landor would at any time consciously have.
practised deception. The absence of it in his nature in regard
to such learning as he possessed, noticed already by his brother,
extended to every part of his life. Never was any man so little
of a hypocrite; for it was not until he had grossly deceived him-
self, that any one was in danger of being deceived by him upon
any subject whatever. But, with an imagination to the very last
incessantly and actively busy, it was not difficult that by him-
self he should be so misled; that he should not at all times be
able to distinguish between the amusement of his fancy and the
certainty of his recollection; and, without charging him with
even carelessness as to truth, that his facts should occasionally
prove to have been hardly less imaginary than his conversations.
As to all else, the most just as well as ultimately the kindest
account will be that which, in remembering these things, is care-
ful to keep equally in mind his temper and temperament, distin-
guishing what came by permission, and what was inherited from
nature. Most characters are too narrow for much variety; but
in him there was room enough for all the changes of feeling,
however unlike. My own predominant impression from our
years of intercourse, during all of which he was living alone, was
that of a man genial, joyous, kind, and of a nature large and
generous to excess but of a temper so uncontrollably impetu-
ous, and so prone to act from undisciplined impulse, that I have
been less startled upon a closer knowledge to find it said by
others, unfaltering both in admiration and tried affection for

32
Book I.
WARWICK, RUGBY, OXFORD, SWANSEA.
him, that during hardly any part of his life between nine years
and almost ninety could he live with other people in peace for
any length of time; for that, though always glad, happy, and
good-humoured for a while, he was apt gradually to become ty-
rannical where he had power, and rebellious where he had not;
and I here, therefore, candidly state so much, to be always kept
steadily in view, that hereafter there may be less danger of doing
unconsciously some injustice to others in the desire to be in all
things just to so remarkable a man.
To the youth who has just left Oxford, after the occurrence
related by his brother, and who is still short of his twentieth
year, the tone I have been using may seem to be applied pre-
maturely. But already his character is formed; even as his
handwriting in the letter written seventy years ago, and now
lying before me, is absolutely identical in form, freedom, and
decisiveness of outline with his writing of seventy years later.
(And just as, in the later time, when anything painful had occurred
to him he would fling it aside, and forget it in the composition
of a dialogue or poem of which he would set aside the imaginary
profits for the benefit of somebody or something in distress, he
has already, in the interval of five months between his rustica-
tion and this letter to Walter Birch (which is dated from 38
Beaumont-street, Portland-place, on the 12th of April 1795), with
the same happy power of forgetting what it was not pleasant to
remember, gone from his father's house to London, brought out
in a volume The Poems of Walter Savage Landor,* devoting all
its profits to the benefit of a 'distressed clergyman,' and, together
with his statement of the circumstances which had driven him
from Trinity-college, is now sending this volume of his poems!
'I thought I could not have a better opportunity of addressing
'myself to you than in their company.' But he will show Birch
his folly undisguised.
'In the morning I had been a-shooting; in the evening I invited a party
to wine. In the room opposite there lived a mant universally laughed at
Printed for T. Cadell jun. and W. Davies (successors to John
Cadell), in the Strand. 1795.'
+ It will be observed that to Birch he says nothing of the man's Tory
opinions, Birch himself having a leaning that way.
1775-1797.
33
AT TRINITY-COLLEGE, OXFORD.
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
weather was warm, and the windows were open; the consequence was, that
those who were in my room began rowing those in his, who very soon re-
torted. All the time I was only a spectator. . . but my gun was lying on
another table in the room. I had in my back closet some little shot, and
I proposed, as they had closed the casements, and the shutters were on
the outside, to fire a volley. It was thought a good trick; and accordingly
I went into my bedroom and fired. Soon the president sent up a servant
to inform me that Mr. Leeds had complained of a gun being fired from the
room in which I entertained my company, but he could not tell by whom;
so that he insisted on knowing from me, and making me liable to the pun-
ishment.'
And now arises an illustration of character. In the circum-
stances stated there was manifestly no escape with honour ex-
cept by frank confession; but knowing the consequence that
must follow, its possible effect upon his father flashed suddenly
on Landor, and, with the swift transition to extremes which was
a part of his nature, he thought it on the instant worth any
sacrifice not to imbitter past hope those home disagreements of
which ordinarily he was careless enough. His eager desire of
the moment, not to give his father any new cause of complaint,
shut out everything but the one opportunity of evasion, which
he hurriedly seized. He assured the president that no gun was
fired from the rooms in which his company were (he had fired it
from the bedroom); and as his questioner could not identify
any person, he did not recognise it as his own duty to reply to
a vague charge. Doctor Chapman then sent for the men who
had been in Landor's room, who, knowing he was not likely
himself to make any concession, gave discrepant answers: on
which the president sent for Landor again; told him he had
received such contradictory evidence that he was determined to
persevere till he found out the truth; and suggested that Landor
should enable him to deal leniently by stating frankly what
had occurred. Landor thought himself, on the other hand, un-
der no obligation to reply to a charge that could not be proved,
although it might be just; the Doctor had therefore no alterna-
tive but to proceed; and the various contradictions being com-
pared, the guilt was of course easily established. Landor adds,
very characteristically :
The president knew very well the circumstances in which I stood;
D
34
Book I.
WARWICK, RUGBY, OXFORD, SWANSEA.
and I really think that he would not have rusticated me, if he had not
thought that by going home I should be reconciled the more soon to my
father. He wrote a letter for this purpose, and expressed his wishes to
me on parting that I should return again to college, and assured me that
the whole affair should be forgotten.'
The expected reconciliation, however, did not follow. The
sacrifice which the son imagined he had made was to the father
very naturally an aggravation of offence, and was rendered worse
by the huffed and haughty tone taken up where entire and sor-
rowful submission might have seemed but small atonement.
What follows will be read with the allowance that Landor's for
ever had large and lax limitations.
'Because I sent to Oxford to give up my rooms, he imagined that I
had no intention of returning. On this he used the most violent expres-
sions; and the event is, that I have left him for ever. I have been in
London about a quarter of a year, constantly employed in studying French
and Italian.'
It was while engaged in the latter study, intending to visit
Italy, that he met Alfieri. 'The only time' (I quote one of his
letters of 1852 to myself) 'I ever saw Alfieri was just before he
'left this country for ever. I accompanied my Italian master,
Parachinetti, to a bookseller's to order the works of Alfieri and
'Metastasio, and was enthusiastic, as most young men were,
' about the French Revolution. 66
Sir," said Alfieri, “you are
<
6.66
a very young man. You are yet to learn that nothing good
ever came out of France, or ever will. The ferocious mon-
""sters are about to devour one another; and they can do
nothing better. They have always been the curse of Italy ;
""yet we too have fools among us who trust them.'
6.66
Landor remained a few weeks longer in London, having no-
thing afterwards to remember more noticeable than an accidental
meeting with the son of Egalité, who became subsequently sove-
reign of France; and while kind friends had been doing their
best to heal the difference with his father, he had himself been
chiefly and unconcernedly busy about his volume of Poems
VII. FIRST PUBLISHED Book.
Mr. Robert Landor thus adverts to his brother's first pub-
lished book in one of his letters to me: 'The first of Walter's
1775-1797.
35
FIRST PUBLISHED BOOK.
*
'publications must have appeared almost seventy years ago. A
'small volume of poems, which were withdrawn or suppressed
'without any reason that I can remember, excepting that he
' hoped to write better soon. There was nothing among them,
I think, discreditable in any way to a man barely twenty years
'old. But he seems to have wished that they should be for-
'gotten, even before the publication of Gebir two or three years
later.' The wish was a natural one, and it will be found very
shortly that Landor himself gives good reasons for it; but a book
is as hard to withdraw as to circulate, and there is no rule so
common as the rule of contrary in such things. It may be
shrewdly suspected that the Poems went farther than Gebir for
the very reason that suggested the desire to suppress them. A
letter is before me written to Landor from Oxford early in 1795
by Mr. Clarke, already a fellow of his own college of Trinity,
in which this remark is made: For myself, what can I do?
You know nescit vox missa reverti. But these little things
promote the sale of the copies of your volume in the University,
so that the booksellers here are at present out of a supply.'
..
The grave, good-natured writer, older than Landor by many
years and to whom a living had just fallen from his college, can
thus without anger refer to some lines addressed to Doctor War-
ton containing a personal attack on himself, for which the only
provocation seems to have been that he was friend to another of
the fellows of Trinity named Kett, who had been the solitary dis-
sentient from Doctor Chapman's good-humoured invitation that
Landor should come back to the college; an ill turn which Lan-
dor resented to the close of Kett's unhappy life.
There is however no trace of anger in Clarke's letter; he
thinks more of expressing his delight at the poetry and scholar-
ship of the book than of taking offence at its personalities; and
what he says of various parts of the volume, and in especial of its
fifty pages of Poematum Latinorum Libellus et Latine scribendi
Defensio, testifies now very strongly to the impression made then
upon the Oxford graduates and masters by the powers of this
unruly lad of twenty. He thinks that Catullus himself might
have been proud of the Hendecasyllabi;' wishes that courts
See post, second section of Second Book, p. 71.
(
36
Book I
WARWICK, RUGBY, OXFORD, SWANSEA.
人
​and courtiers could but be reformed by the political pieces; de-
clares that Persius never excelled the ease and concinnity of a
certain Invocation; says of a couplet for a Quaker's tankard,
'Ye lie, friend Pindar! and friend Thales!
Nothing so good as water? Ale is!
that he had seen one of the dons laughing over it heartily; and
of another at the hundred-and-thirty-third page, on Tucker's
treatise concerning civil government in opposition to Locke,
เ
'Thee, meek Episcopy! shall kings unfrock
Ere Tucker triumph over sense and Locke!'
avers that he 'saw Tucker himself overlooking page 133.' This
forgiving fellow of Trinity, in short, has only one regret in con-
nection with his assailant-that he had, owing to some misun-
derstanding about the letting of his rooms to him at his first
entering the college, lost the honour of having Landor for a
tenant: especially as, but for that, you might now have been a
resident amongst us; and with the pipe of antiquity on which
'you so sweetly play, directed upwards, you might have charmed
any uncouth inhabitant of your zenith, instead of having
'alarmed the horizon by an instrument placed at right angles
'with your shoulder.'
A word may be added of the Invocation to which the letter
refers, and which seems to me in some points noticeable still.
The treasonable turn of its last couplet is characteristic; and,
even for readers now, there is some interest in its terse summary
of the so-called poets whom the general dulness had thrown into
prominence since the deaths of Goldsmith and Gray. As yet
the voice of Cowper had but faintly been heard; Burns had still
to be naturalised in England; while Wordsworth, Coleridge,
Lamb, and Southey were only trying and sounding their instru-
ments in small publications at Bristol.
'Tho', Helicon! I seldom dream
Beside thy lovely limpid stream,
Nor glory that to me belong
Or elegance, or nerve of song,
Or Hayley's easy-ambling horse,
Or Peter Pindar's comic force,
Or Mason's fine majestic flow,
Or aught that pleases one in Crowe;
1775-1797.
37
A FAIR INTERCESSOR.
Yet thus, a saucy suppliant bard,
I court the Muse's kind regard-
"O whether, Muse! thou please to give
My humble verses long to live;
Or tell me the decrees of Fate
Have ordered them a shorter date-
I bow. Yet O, may every word
Survive, however, George the Third !"
VIII. A FAIR INTERCESSOR.
At Warwick meanwhile, as I have said, kind friends were
interceding to rescue Landor from any farther ill consequence
arising from the shot that had so startled the 'uncouth inhabit-
'ant' of Trinity; and now that we are all dead, as Sydney Smith
says, the name of one of the intercessors may be singled out.
This was Dorothea Lyttelton, the chosen friend of Landor's
eldest sister, Elizabeth; who lived with her two rich bachelor
uncles at Studley-castle, sixteen miles from Warwick and very
near to Ipsley-court; who was known to be not only heiress to
both uncles, but already to possess in her beauty a more envi-
able dowry; whom everybody, for miles about, naturally was in
love with; and who had not yet smiled on any of those count-
less suitors, though youths of all but the highest rank were said
to be among them. The whole of the brothers Landor she of
course led captive; and a tale is told of the youngest, that when
two or three years hence she had relented and was a bride," and
he, a lad of fifteen, had gone into her presence bent upon slaying
her bridegroom in single combat with spears or bows and arrows,
she suddenly, to his extreme mortification, displaced those des-
perate thoughts by taking him in her arms and kissing him. We
may gather at least from the story what the family intimacy with
Miss Lyttelton was; and we have proof that an elder brother
C
* Almost as I write these words, the papers announce the death of this
lady's son. 'We regret to announce the decease of Sir Francis Goodricke,
Bart. at Malvern. Born in November 1797, he was the eldest son of
Francis Holyoake, Esq. of Tettenhall, in Staffordshire, and Studley-
'castle, Warwickshire, by Dorothy Elizabeth, niece and heiress of Philip
Lyttelton, Esq. of Studley-castle. He was member for Stafford in 1835;
was afterwards returned for South Staffordshire; in 1834 filled the office
of high-sheriff of Warwickshire; and in 1835 was created a baronet.'
•
"
38
Book I.
WARWICK, RUGBY, Oxford, SWANSEA.
6
had been more presuming. I ought to remember well that
'name, and little notes to my sister subscribed D. Lyttelton,'
wrote Landor to me in his eightieth year, correcting Leigh Hunt's
spelling, of the name in his book about Kensington. The estate
' of Studley-castle joined Ipsley-court, and there dwelt one whom
Lady Hertford, the best judge of beauty in the world, called
'the most lovely and graceful creature she had ever known.
Every day of the vacations I went over there. It soon was
'Walter and Dorothea; her uncles, too, called me Walter, and
' liked me heartily; and if I had then been independent, I should
' have married this lovely girl.' Tales told by hope are often
too flattering, but we have better means than usual of judging
whether it was so here. Among his papers I found a packet of
her letters carefully kept and indorsed by him, and addressed
to him at his London lodgings in Beaumont-street in those early
months of 1795; and there will be now no breach of confidence
in admitting the reader to some glimpses of them.
(
The first shows her very anxious about his sister Elizabeth,
with whom she has been passing some days after the incident
that had happened to him at college, when she talked of you to
me, and distresses herself more than you can imagine.' He had
been their constant theme. To talk about him was the only
consolation for his absence, which had diminished the happiness
of her own visit to Warwick. Never, she prays him, is he to be
so cruel to her nice little friend Elizabeth' as not to correspond
with her. The omission was promptly repaired; and in her
next letter she tells him how he had charmed his sister by
writing to her, ‘and me by the compliment of attending to my
request! She wrote to me in ecstasies.'
6
(
Then there is a question as to some promise about a bit of
ribbon he has charged her with having broken; but she will not
regret an apparent forgetfulness that has proved his remembrance
of her, and gratified her vanity by convincing her that the insig-
nificance of a bit of ribbon may derive worth from her present-
ing it to him. At once, upon having his letter, she had sent
to her 'friend citoyenne Johnstone, who is now at that metro-
'polis of dissension and aristocracy, Birmingham,' to procure
her the colours; and, would he believe it? the citoyenne has.
1775-1797.
39
A FAIR INTERCESSOR.
sent a light blue instead of a dark purple! But really it is
the ignorance that has angered her more than the delay; for,
'to say the truth, I cannot think you mean in earnest I should
'pack off two or three bits of ribbon those number of miles!
'If I am mistaken, it rests with you to rectify it; and, upon
demand, here will be the real colours to tie up for your watch-
'chain.' This demand of course came, and the bits of ribbon
went.
6
<
There is next the arrival of the Poems; which she sits up
reading till one o'clock in the morning, and then cannot 'com-
pose herself to sleep' till she has told him what 'exquisite de-
'light' they had given her; and not the printed book only, but
verses in manuscript, and lines addressed to herself! How is
she to find words to thank him; and ought she indeed to thank
him for making her inordinately vain! But what a talent it
is! and, when existing with a disposition equally happy, how
great the power it gives its possessor to oblige all whom he may
honour with the name of friend! These verses, how I could
'talk of them! What I have, I can repeat as fluently as the
' author himself, and am longing for my memory to be farther
charged.' She had only to continue to long until the next
post; which conveyed to her the proof of what her following
letter expressed in thanking him, that her wish was become a
command.
If additional evidence were wanting, however, to show in
all that has thus been quoted but the friendly familiarity of a
good-humoured girl for the brother of her friend, a year or two
younger than herself, whose cleverness she admired and whose
attentions pleased her, the other contents of that last-named let-
ter would supply it. She had been told of his intention, already
named to Walter Birch, to betake himself to Italy; and not
content with a vehement disapproval of this plan, she bestirs
herself on the instant with much zeal to prevent it.
She begins by thanking him for having taken so much trouble
to explain his situation, for to talk of himself is more interest-
ing to her than any other subject. They had already heard at
Studley of the unfortunate misunderstanding between him and
his father, and hoped it might be reconciled. But now she must
40
'Book I.
WARWICK, RUGBY, OXFORD, SWANSEA.
tell him that she is in a humour to preach a little to him. Is
he disposed to profit by a lecture? He will say she is deter-
mined to disapprove of all his schemes; but against this journey
to Italy she must loudly exclaim, as she would also against any
other as distant. There she is decided. I would have people
with superior worth and abilities stay and distinguish them-
'selves where example, in most wise and good things, is so
'much wanting. I really do not see,' she continued, proceeding
to lay all the blame on the French revolution, though as wise
and gentle a monitor might to the very close of his life have
applied the words she is using now at its beginning: 'I do not
'see why you should be so disgusted with people in general of
your own country, when to my certain knowledge you have
more than your share of friends. But this vile party political
work, which now rages through the whole world, destroys
'happiness both domestic and public, and I think we must all
soon be of one opinion as to that.'
6
6
(
In any case, however, he must not go to Italy. In a pre-
vious letter she had named her uncles to him as very much on
his side, and as having desired her to mention them to him as
his sincere friends; and now that this project has been told to
them, they are quite as eager as herself to prevent it. Hence,
what she will now propose; and see with what a delightful
energy she does it-being nothing less than determined that it
shall be!
'I have a thousand things to say to you from my uncles. They talk of
you much, and are ready to be mediators between you and your father.
Let me, then, beg of you to consider on what terms and with what induce-
ments you can be tempted to give up this voyage. Propose them to me,
and I will commit them to my uncles, one of whom will make such pro-
posals to your father as coming from themselves. I assure you they are
bent upon restoring peace and content to you; and if they can serve you,
do gratify their wish! Recollect in the course of nine months you will be
of age. You will then have it in your power to increase your income if
you do but approve of those only means to do it.
Till then, suppose my
uncle was to propose your going to Cambridge. And would you agree to
giving a security to make amends to the younger part of the family if your
father would allow you enough to support you in studying the law at the
Temple, or living independent anywhere else in England? For I find the
truth is, he cannot allow you sufficient to study the law without injuring
his younger children. Three hundred a year my uncles talk of. Now this
is really coming to the point. Not merely saying don't go, but thinking of
1775-1797.
41
A FAIR INTERCESSOR.
what you are to do if you stay. Let me entreat you, then, to tell me the
terms on which you will give up this melancholy scheme. Do lay them
down to me, and I will acquaint my uncles of them. Nay, write to one
of them yourself! Or, will you come down and stay a little while with
them, and talk over schemes and projects to restore your happiness in
England? I do hope sincerely you will take time to try if you do not find
it sufferable to stay. Give it up till you are of age merely, and then de-
termine! What can you do in Italy? I quite depend upon your making
me your confidante, and that I shall hear from you immediately. I will
attend at all times to anything that will serve you.'
There is something extremely touching in all this pretty,
persistent, feminine earnestness for the youth so wayward and
self-willed, who had yet the qualities to inspire such sisterly at-
tachment and interest as are manifest in every line she writes.
Nothing more of the correspondence is preserved; but immedi-
ately after the last letter reached Landor, he quitted London for
Tenby in South Wales, and his having accepted the proposed
mediation is to be inferred from the fact that it shortly after-
wards took place, and the arrangement ultimately made for his
living away from Warwick was founded upon it.
red
The notion as to Cambridge, and the plan for reading law at
the Temple, were rejected; but a fixed yearly sum, about half
of what his eager advocate suggested, was set apart for his use,
with the understanding that his father's house was at all times
open to him in aid of this allowance, for as much of the year as he
chose to live in it. And so for that time there was a surrender
of the flight to Italy, which had carried dismay to at least an-
other female heart, humbler though perhaps not less true than
Dorothea Lyttelton's. Hon Sir,' wrote the servant who had
nursed him in his infancy, May Health and Happiness attend
you, and may I Live to see you at the Head of that Family
'who, next to a Husband, as my Best Affections. I hope the
'providence of God will direct you in Every thing, but, O Sir,
I hope you will Never go a Broad. My hart shuders at the
'thout of your Leaving England Least I shud see you no more.
This letter, addressed to him at Tenby in the August of 1795, I
found among Landor's papers at his death with his indorsement,
· Mary Bird—my nurse.' She had married shortly before, a
4
*
'Molly Perry' was the maiden name of this old family servant, and
was the name by which very recently, in the crisis of a dangerous illness,
42
Book 1.
WARWICK, RUGBY, OXFORD, SWANSEA.
present he then sent her now forming her apology for writing
to him; and this small niche in his story may be fairly given
to so old a friend of his family, whose return of the affection
she bore them has record in a tablet placed to her memory in
Warwick church by Henry Landor.
IX. A MORAL EPISTLE.
While he had thus been waiting to decide upon his future
career, however, his letters to his interesting correspondent had
not filled up all his time. Some weeks before he quitted Lon-
don there came forth from the printing-press of Messrs. Cadell
and Davies, with no other name on the title-page, a tract of
twenty pages in verse, A Moral Epistle to Earl Stanhope, of
which, from letters addressed to him at Tenby, I lately discovered
him to have been the writer. One of its lines indeed avows the
authorship. I may not long detain the reader with it; but one
or two characteristic points should not be omitted.
The satire, as its title implies, is in the manner of Pope, whose
workmanship in some respects it cleverly reproduces. It is an
attack upon Pitt; the Republican carl being put in contrast with
the Tory minister; and its lines best worth recalling are those
that denounce the shabby public vices encouraged by Chatham's
son, as in him co-existing with private habits and indulgences,
that in the elder time, nay even in his father's time, would have
leaned too much to virtue's side, and been far too open and
generous, for connection with any kind of meanness.
Ah, Bacchus, Bacchus! round whose thyrsus twined
Tendrils and ivy playing unconfined,
How art thou altered!'
Not the less now, for the bottle in each hand, did avarice and dis-
ingenuousness flourish; not the less did spies abound; and not
safer was the confidence because given at the festive hour. One
Mr. Robert Landor, unconscious for the moment of more than eighty in-
tervening years, called to her, supposing her still to be watching at his
bed as in his infancy. Occasionally also, in letters between him and
Walter, the mention of her occurs; and in some amusing comments on
the disagreeableness of English hexameters, Robert makes exception for
'Sternhold's 104th Psalm as recited by Molly Bird.' (August 1856.)
1775-1797.
43
A MORAL EPISTLE.
can hardly imagine the lines that follow, with so much full-
grown thought and suitable expression, written by a lad of
twenty.
'Yet O the pleasures! when mid none but friends
The trusty secret where it rises ends:
At which no hireling politician storms,
No snoring rector catches, and informs!
Now, even Friendship bursts her golden band,
Kens one with caution ere she shakes one's hand.
No longer gives she that accustomed zest
Which made luxurious e'en the frugal feast;
Nor hold we converse, in these fearful days,
More than the horses in your lordship's chaise.
Yet Wine was once almighty! silent Care
Filled high the bowl, and laughed at poor Despair;
Wine threw the guinea from the miser's hand,
Wine bade his wond'ring heart with alien warmth expand.
But-honest minister or sound divine-
He lies who tells us now there's truth in wine.
For George's premier, never known to reel,
Drinks his two bottles, Bacchus! at a meal.'
There is another passage, in which the shoulder-of-mutton of
honest Marvel is hashed once more for downright Shippen, whom
Walpole has visited in the hope of corrupting:
"Boy," quoth Shippen, "pray
What will thy master dine upon to-day ?"
C
"Sir? Mutton, sir!" Speak boldly; why abasht?
Drest in what manner?"
"
Please your honour, hasht."
-all of which is excellent, though only these lines may be taken.
But an extract from a note to them is also worth giving, to show
the readiness with which Landor used his learning; how intim-
ately it was a part of himself even at this boyish time; and how
carly had begun those applications of it which habit, making
more and more easy to him, rendered finally a second nature.
Remarking that Walpole's court was infamous to a proverb,
he says, that, though comparisons would be odious, a time had
very certainly at last arrived among themselves when nearly the
whole of their worthy representatives might join the chorus in
Sophocles :
ὅδ᾽ ἐστὶν ἡμῶν ναυκράτωρ ὁ παῖς· ὅσ᾽ ἂν
οὗτος λέγῃ σοι, ταῦτά σοι χἠμεῖς φαμεν.
They might sing, in other words, This youth here is our pilot,
' and whatever he tells you we also say:' a song very unlike that
44
Book I.
WARWICK, RUGBY, OXFORD, SWANSEA.
later one in which the pilot' Pitt appeared, but in an odd kind
of way, of which Landor is wholly unconscious, seeming to pre-
figure it. He adds that Sophocles often is a satirist; that if he
had lived in England he would most surely have had his win-
dows broken for freedom of speech; and that it is a great pity,
in so immense a web of scholia as that which is entangled round
him, not to be able to distinguish the characters he seems to have
attacked. After which he gives us his opinion of the people's
representatives in his own days, and of the need that existed for
reform. So sweeping a reformer indeed was the ardent young
poet, that, not content with addressing his Epistle to Lord Stan-
hope, or with declaring repeatedly that he despises the title as
much as he admires the virtue of so distinguished a patriot, he
thinks it necessary also to prefix a prose dedication in which he
is 'bold enough to assert' that when Fortune placed on the brow
of Lord Stanhope the tinsel coronet for the civic wreath, she
must have been either more blind or more insulting than usual.
For himself, she had nothing to give, because there was nothing
he would ask. He would rather have an executioner than a
patron.
The remark no doubt expresses very exactly the feeling with
which Landor awaited at Tenby the result of the intercession with
his father.
X. RETREAT TO WALES.
In the later memory of Landor the various matters consequent
on his departure from Oxford continued to live only confusedly;
and, at the time of his letter to me in 1855, he had the belief that
Dorothea Lyttelton's intercession had obtained for him a separate
allowance of four hundred a year, though his own non-compli-
ance with certain conditions compelled him to surrender it. Her
letters will not only have shown how such errors may have found
place in his mind, but will account for sundry statements natur-
ally repeated since his death because put forth with his authority
while he lived; and in order to explain the interesting comment
which these have received from Mr. Robert Landor, of whom I
had inquired respecting them before Miss Lyttelton's letters were
found, their substance shall here be briefly stated.
1775-1797.
45
RETREAT TO WALES.
They are to this effect: That Landor, after he left Oxford,
was looking out for a profession. That bis godfather, General
Powell, with whom upon leaving Oxford he lived in London,
promised that he would obtain for his godson a commission in
the army if the young republican would keep his opinions to
himself. That Landor replied he would suppress his opinions
for no man, and declined the offer. That his father then pro-
mised him four hundred a year if he would study for the law,
and only a hundred and fifty a year if he would not. But that,
the law being less to Landor's taste than the army, after a brief
residence in London he put the Severn Sea between him and
his friends, and retired into Wales.
6
As for Landor looking out for a profession, this was certainly
never at any time the case. The earlier home disagreements and
objections turned chiefly upon this, that he as decidedly refused
as his father eagerly desired to give such a direction to his studies
as might also give purpose to his life and steadiness to his habits,
'settle him down to something,' as the saying is. But, even
by the time of the Oxford rustication, Doctor Landor had come
to see pretty clearly that his eldest son was just as likely to
qualify himself for a curacy or rectory as for a lawyer's wig, for
a bishop as for a judge, or for a quaker as for either. 'General
Powell,' Mr. Robert Landor tells me, my brother's godfather,
never did live in London, nor did my brother ever live with
him anywhere else. The general's house and constant re-
'sidence was at Warwick, till, a great many years later, he be-
came Lieutenant-governor of Gibraltar. There were five or
'six old officers at that time resident in Warwick, but none so
'familiar with my father as General Powell. He had served in
• Canada during the American war; and, enjoying an ample for-
tune, at the peace returned to Warwick, his native town, as an
' unmarried sportsman. When not otherwise engaged, he spent
his evenings with us; a cheerful, good-humoured old soldier,
'with very gentlemanly manners which never changed. . . . .
'While Walter was a boy, the old general laughed at such ex-
travagance as his wish that the French would invade England
' and assist us in hanging George the Third between two such
46
Book I.
WARWICK, RUGBY, OXFORD, SWANSEA.
<
"
"
thieves as the archbishops of Canterbury and York.* But at
a later
age military men could not be so tolerant; and there-
fore, rather than quarrel, the general hardly ever spent his even-
ings in my father's house when Walter was there. According
'to the accounts you send me, General Powell had offered a
'commission in his regiment to Walter, which was declined.
'The general would have thought him as well qualified for the
chaplaincy. Such an offer was made to my brother Charles; but
' at that time Walter never entered the general's house, though
so near, and the general very seldom entered our father's. More
' than twenty years later I prevailed on Walter to call on General
Powell, then very old and almost dying, at Clifton. Every
trace of ill-feeling was forgotten on both sides; but I doubt
'whether, during those twenty years, they had seen each other.
There was, however, another military proposal of which my
'brother never heard one word. The Warwickshire militia, as-
'sembled at Warwick, had for its colonel the Marquis of Hert-
ford, and for its lieutenant-colonel a Colonel Packwood, also
one of my father's friends. On one occasion, when I think
'that I was present, Colonel Packwood related to my father the
' resignation of some young officer through ill-health. My father
may have hoped that the unsettled and restless habits of his
'son would perhaps be corrected, if employment could be found
'for him among many older persons from the best county fami-
'lies; and he asked Colonel Packwood whether he thought that
Lord Hertford would give Walter the vacant appointment.
'Colonel Packwood promised to report my father's wishes to
'the marquis. A few days after, when they met again, my father
' asked whether the application had been made; to which the
'colonel said that it had not been made by him; for that at the
The memory of my correspondent goes so far back as even to recall
the occasion when he and his brothers and sisters, sitting in their mother's
room, not only heard this pious wish, but saw Mrs. Landor rise immedi-
ately from her seat, and box Walter's ears from behind. They were all
terrified at Walter, wondering what he might do, when they heard their
mother's high-heeled shoes clattering quickly over the margin of the un-
carpeted oak near the door, and saw her neat little figure suddenly disap-
pear. I'd advise you, mother,' shouted Walter after her, 'not to try that
sort of thing again!'
1775-1797.
47
RETREAT TO WALES.
6
.6
mess after dinner, when talking about the vacancy, he had
mentioned my father's wish and his own belief that the mar-
quis would readily comply with it: whereupon one of the offi-
cers present immediately objected to my brother's violent and
'extreme opinions, exclaiming, "If young Walter Landor gets.
"a commission, I will resign mine;" and this resolution being
'confirmed for similar reasons by every one present, nothing
more could be done. I do not believe that Walter ever heard
of it, or the contempt which he always so loudly expressed for
the Warwickshire gentry might be accounted for.'
This last anecdote dates of course a little later than the time
now engaging us, and is inserted, as it was written, to illustrate
those exaggerated peculiarities of temperament which, unex-
plained, would make inexplicable Landor's whole career; which
gave to his opinions a tone of offence that not all the eloquent
ability he maintained them with could allay; which put him in
the wrong when the right was most upon his side, and, involv-
ing him in unmeaning quarrels, left him both in youth and age
to the loneliness and isolation of which he at once boasted and
complained. A lively lady, who both liked and admired him,
said to me in his later life that the great enjoyment of walking
out with him had only one drawback, that he was always knock-
ing somebody down. She meant this mostly by way of meta-
phor; but her objection was the same as that of his soldier-con-
temporaries, except that there was less of the metaphor in it
then. The young officers of the Warwickshire militia were in-
finitely his inferiors doubtless, and in everything might have
learned from him, as they would also gladly have been taught,
with a little help from better manners. How often has the truth
to be repeated which Burke urged on Barry, that it is the inter-
est of all of us to be at peace with our fellow-creatures far less
for their sakes than for our own, and that the only qualities to
carry us safely through life are moderation and gentleness, not
a little indulgence to others, and a great deal of distrust of our-
selves.
As to the annual allowance of 1507. finally agreed to be
given until the family estates should descend to him, Mr. Robert
Landor remarks that, besides the kind welcome at his father's
{'
48
Book E
WARWICK, RUGBY, OXFORD, SWANSEA.
f
6
house when this moderate income was expended, it had many
´ small additions as our mother could spare them through her
own self-denial in all ways. The three younger sons were
'maintained on three hundred a year, as they could live also,
as Walter did, with their father when their money was spent,
' in other words for about half the year; and our father had
'three daughters at that time utterly dependent on an entailed
' income really, though not nominally, less than 18007. a year.'
Nor can I consent to withhold any part of what is said on this
subject by Mr. Landor in another letter.
With six younger
(
6
<
6
children, for four of whom there was no provision' (Charles
being promised the rectory of Colton, of which the patronage
belonged to his father, and Henry having the bequest of a small
estate at Whitnash), 'our mother's cares were confined to her
family during many years. And when she afterwards had
less need of economy, the same early prudence was become
habitual, and there was the appearance of too much parsimony.
'But it was never for herself. Under the guidance of my brother
Henry, who managed her affairs, she would give as much to
'any of her children as was consistent with justice to the rest.
Parting all she had among them, it was sometimes easier to get
'from her a hundred pounds than ten shillings. An anxious
rather than a fond parent, she was scrupulously just. Though
secretly pleased by any commendations bestowed upon her eldest
son, she cared less about his literary reputation than about the
holes in his shoes and stockings, a very constant grievance, for
'which she thought herself in some degree responsible. If you
'feel tired of such silly trash, remember that it is intended by
me to mark the distinction between two characters so nearly
related and yet so extremely unlike. This brother Henry,
'who was the family adviser and manager, would never accept
any share in the common property, or any bequest from his
'mother or sisters, but always transferred his rights to nephews
and nieces. Here is another contrast of which I will say no
' more.'
6
6
6
C
6
6
* Miss Sophy Landor, to whom these pages are otherwise much in-
debted, makes a correction here.
property to any of his nephews.
My uncle Henry never transferred any
After the death of his sister Elizabeth
1775-1797.
49
RETREAT TO WALES.
When absent from Warwick during the next three years,
Landor seems to have lived almost wholly at Tenby or Swansea.
That this interval could not in any prudent or worldly sense
have been very profitable to him, what has been said will suffi-
ciently have shown; and a part of it, including a love adventure
that began at the former place, was probably also painful. It is.
not necessary, however, that this should be dwelt upon; and
Landor himself, with the same resolute will that could turn
aside from pain as well as pleasure, where either might have
overwhelmed another man, was able very speedily to forget it.
One thing nevertheless is to be said of these three years, that in
the course of them his mind had passed through a discipline
which from its previous studies or emotions it had failed to ac-
quire; that during them he appears to have read more steadily
and persistently than at any former time; and that he printed
at the close of them, when he had scarcely passed his twenty-
second year, a poem which has hitherto only wonderfully at-
tracted the few as it has decisively repelled the many, but which,
in my judgment, is yet sure of taking admitted rank, if not in
this in some other generation, with those few productions of the
highest class which, however wanting in completeness of struc-
ture or finish in all their parts, contain writing that will perish
only with the language.
'When I began to write Gebir,' he wrote to me in 1850, 'I
' had just read Pindar a second time, and understood him. What
I admired was what nobody else had ever noticed-his proud
complacency and scornful strength. If I could resemble him
in nothing else, I was resolved to be as compendious and
'exclusive.' But besides Pindar, he read again in these years
Homer and the Tragedians; and what for the purpose in hand
was far more important, he had finally laid Pope aside and be-
taken himself to Milton. He has described the time in one of
his Conversations. My prejudices in favour of ancient litera-
C
'he generously divided among his four nieces nearly all that she had left
'to him, but none of his nephews received anything from him until his
death. I believe he refused to receive anything from his mother, either
during her life or at her death; though he did much more for her than
any of her sons.'
C
50 ·
Book I.
WARWICK, RUGBY, OXFORD, SWANSEA.
6
ture began to wear away on 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.' In such walks for the
most part, and under such influences, Gebir was composed; and
it was probably no mere illusion of his fancy which led him to
say repeatedly in after life that he was never happier than when
thus writing it, and not exchanging twelve sentences with men.
Copper works had not as yet quite filled the woods around Swan-
sea among which he lived, and he might take his daily walks
over sandy sea-coast deserts covered only with low roses and
nameless flowers and plants, and with nothing save occasional
prints of the Welsh peasantry's naked feet to give token of the
neighbourhood of human creatures. Hardly human indeed,
in their savagery in those days, were the lower orders of the
Welsh. The English visitor might have some excuse for re-
garding them as only something a very little higher than the
animals, and as much mere adjuncts to his landscape as its
stranded boats or masses of weed.
The accident which led him to the subject I have often heard
him relate. He was on friendly terms with some of the family
of Lord Aylmer, who were staying in his neighbourhood, and
one of the young ladies lent him a book, by a now forgotten
writer of romances, from the Swansea circulating library. Clara
Reeve was the author; but Landor, confusing in his recollection
a bad romance writer with a worse of the same sex, thought it
was that sister of Mrs. Siddons and John Kemble who lived in
the small Welsh town, and wrote under the name of Anne of
Swansea. Few of my readers will have heard her name, and I
may warn them all against her books, which are mere nonsensical
imitations of Mrs. Radcliffe; but Clara Reeve had really some
merit, though not discoverable in the particular book lent to
Landor. He found it to be a history of romance, having no
kind of interest for him until he came at its close to the descrip-
tion of an Arabian tale. This arrested his fancy, and yielded
him the germ of Gebir. More than sixty years later he wrote to
me from Bath (30th November 1857), that he had just disco-
vered and sent to a lady living near him, Mrs. Paynter, also
1775-1797.
51
RETREAT TO WALES.
of that Aylmer family, a little piece called 'St. Clair' written
all those years ago for her who thus lent him the book. She was
the same Rose Aylmer on whose death, a few years later, he com-
posed the most enchanting of his minor poems.
One of his critics afterwards charged him with having stolen
his Gebir story, and merely imitated Milton in telling it. On
both points light will very shortly be thrown. He was now to
quit the levels, and rise to the heights, of English verse; and to
this extent he had profited by his recent study of Milton. But
that was the whole of his present debt to the incomparable mas-
ter; and whether, to anybody, his Muse owed anything what-
ever for the story in which she was to find herself involved,
the reader of what follows will probably think more than
doubtful.
BOOK SECOND.
1797-1805. ÆT. 22-30.
FIRST WRITINGS AND EARLIEST FRIENDS.
1. Gebir and some Opinions of it. II. Doctor Parr and the Critics.
III. Mr. Serjeant Rough. IV. Writing for the Newspapers. v. Åt
Paris in 1802. VI. Again writing Poetry. VII. Succession to the
Family Estates.
I. GEBIR AND SOME OPINIONS OF IT.
Ir is easier to laugh at a thing than to take the trouble to com-
prehend it; and when the Quarterly Review said, a good many
years ago, that Gebir was a poem it did any man credit to have
understood, there was more in the saying than its author meant.
It was not a credit he was himself entitled to.
The intention of the poem is, by means of the story of Gebir
and his brother Tamar, to rebuke the ambition of conquest, how-
ever excusable its origin, and to reward the contests of peace,
however at first unsuccessful. Gebir is an Iberian prince, sove-
reign of Bætic Spain,* whose conquest of Egypt, undertaken to
avenge the wrongs and assert the claims of his ancestors, is sus-
pended through his love for its young queen Charoba, by the
treachery of whose nurse he is nevertheless slain amid the re-
joicings of his marriage-feast. Tamar is a shepherd youth, the
keeper of his brother's herds and flocks, by whom nothing is so
eagerly desired as to conquer to his love one of the sea-nymphs,
whom at first he vainly contends with, but who, made subject
to mortal control by the superior power of his brother, yields to
the passion already inspired in her, and carries Tamar to dwell
with her for ever beyond the reach of human ambitions.
* From Gebir we are to suppose Gibraltar to be derived, after the
fashion of the Teucro Latin names in Virgil.
1797-1805.
53
GEBIR AND SOME OPINIONS OF IT.
Fanciful and wild in its progress as the Arabian tale that
suggested it, there is yet thus much purpose in the outline of
Gebir; but its merit lies apart from either intention or construc-
tion, style and treatment constituting the charm of it. It pre-
sents many splendours of imagination, in a setting of unusual
strength and range of mind. The characteristics preeminent in
it are the intellect and reflection which pervade and interfuse its
passion; the concentration yet richness of its descriptive power;
the vividness with which everything in it is presented to sight as
well as thought; the wealth of its imagery; and its marvels of
language. Everywhere as real to the eye as to the mind are its.
painted pictures, its sculptured forms, and the profusion of its
varied but always thoughtful emotion. These qualities have not
even yet had general acknowledgment; but the effect produced.
by the poem upon a few extraordinary men was such as to more
than satisfy any writer's ambition. The mark it made in Landor's
life will constantly recur; and of the manner in which his genius
affected his contemporaries, not by influencing the many, but by
exercising mastery over the few who ultimately rule the many,
no completer illustration could be given.
It is not my intention now to give any critical account of it;
but the lines for which alone I have space will exhibit the beau-
ties indicated, and show sufficiently its transcendent merit. Ob-
serve here one of those touches which are frequent in it, and
proof of high imagination: where a single epithet conveys to the
mind the full impression which the sense would receive from
detailed presentment of the objects sought to be depicted. The
'dark helm' covers the crowd of invading warriors.
'He blew his battle-horn, at which uprose
Whole nations; here, ten thousand of most might
He called aloud; and soon Charoba saw
His dark helm hover o'er the land of Nile.'
In the picture of the sea-nymph's dress are two lines—
'Her mantle showed the yellow samphire-pod,
Her girdle the dove-coloured wave serene'-
with which I may connect a characteristic trait of the writer,
who told me once that he had never hesitated more about a verse
than in determining whether the mantle or the girdle was to be
54
FIRST WRITINGS AND EARLIEST FRIENDS. Book II.
dove-coloured; his doubts having arisen, after he had written the
lines, on recollecting, from the great Lucretius, that the Roman
ladies wore a vest of the same description-teriturque thalassina
vestis Assidue, &c.
A prize to be contended for had been proposed between
Tamar and the nymph. She has nothing of equal worth to one
of his sheep to offer, but she tells him, in a passage which has
become one of the priceless possessions of English poetry, and
which it is impossible even to transcribe without something of
the pleasure that must have attended its conception :
'But I have sinuous shells of pearly hue
Within, and they that lustre have imbibed
In the sun's palace-porch, where when unyoked
His chariot-wheel stands midway in the wave:
Shake one, and it awakens; then apply
Its polisht lips to your attentive ear,
And it remembers its august abodes,
And murmurs as the ocean murmurs there.'
Nor unworthy of these are the lines wherein Gebir bids his
followers supplicate the gods, and prayers are personified, of
which Southey thought that no English poetry presented any-
thing so Homeric. It would be difficult certainly to imagine a
finer image.
'Swifter than light are they, and every face,
Though different, glows with beauty; at the throne
Of Mercy, when clouds shut it from mankind,
They fall bare-bosomed, and indignant Jove
Drops at the soothing sweetness of their voice
The thunder from his hand.'
The grandeur of nature in the Egyptian queen, 'soul dis-
'contented with capacity,' receives an illustration from her
childhood-
'Past are three summers since she first beheld
The ocean; all around the child await
Some exclamation of amazement here:
She coldly said, her long-lasht eyes abased,
Is this the mighty Ocean? is this all?'
-which Shelley, Humphrey Davy, Walter Scott, and above all
Charles Lamb, were enchanted by. The last of those lines had
a strange fascination for Lamb, who wearied his friends by con-
tinually repeating it.

1797-1805.
55
GEBIR AND SOME OPINIONS OF IT.
$
There are lines also in the description of the embassy that
carries proposals of friendship from Charoba to Gebir which
have in them a wonderful attractiveness.
Then went the victims forward crown'd with flowers,
Crown'd were tame crocodiles, and boys white-robed
Guided their creaking crests across the stream.
►
In gilded barges went the female train,
Sweet airs of music ruled the rowing palms,
Now rose they glistening and aslant reclined,
Now they descended and with one consent
Plunging, seem'd swift each other to pursue,
And now to tremble wearied o'er the wave. ...
Meantime, with pomp august and solemn, borne
On four white camels tinkling plates of gold,
Heralds before and Ethiop slaves behind.
The four ambassadors of peace proceed.
Rich carpets bear they, corn and generous wine,
The Syrian olive's cheerful gift they bear,
With stubborn goats that eye the mountain-top
Askance, and riot with reluctant horn. .
The king, who sat before his tent, descried
The dust rise redden'd from the setting sun.'
Landor's own statement in regard to the poem, in the preface
to his collected edition, should not be omitted. This tells us that
it was written in his twentieth year; that many parts were first
composed in Latin, and he doubted in which language to com-
plete it; that he had lost the manuscript, but found it afterwards
in a box of letters; and that before printing it he reduced it to
little more than half. In substance this was the account he always
gave, though the circumstances varied slightly in his memory.
Writing to me in 1857 of Aurora Leigh,* he exclaims: What
loads I carted off from Gebir in order to give it proportion, yet
nearly all would have liked it better with incorrectness;' and
in a letter to Southey, forty years earlier, he had written: 'As'
(
(
* I am reading a poem,' he says, 'full of thought and fascinating with
fancy Mrs. Browning's Aurora Leigh. In many pages, and particularly
126 and 127, there is the wild imagination of Shakespeare. I have not yet
read much farther. I had no idea that any one in this age was capable of
'so much poetry. I am half drunk with it. Never did I think I should
have a good hearty draught of poetry again: the distemper had got into
'the vineyard that produced it. Here are indeed, even here, some flies
upon the surface, as there always will be upon what is sweet and strong.
'I know not yet what the story is. Few possess the power of construction.'

56
FIRST WRITINGS AND EARLIEST FRIENDS. Book II.
'to Gebir, I am certain that I rejected what almost every man
would call the best part. I am afraid that I have boiled away
'too much, and that something of a native flavour has been lost
' in procuring a stronger and more austere one. There can be
little doubt that condensation may be carried too far, and pro-
bably was so in this instance; but though it is possible that
some stop was thus put to the popularity of a poem where, as
Coleridge said of it, the eminences were so excessively bright
and the ground so dark around and between them, Landor is
yet in a greater measure to be accounted fortunate, that thus
early he could exercise the power invaluable to a poet, and which
even to the best arrives often too late, of selection and compres-
sion. Only by such rare masters, one or two in a century, has
our language been permanently enriched; and there is hardly a
page of Gebir that does not yield accession to its glories. A very
few more single lines of picturesque beauty are all that I can add;
and I may be forgiven for directing special admiration to the
intense dramatic force and suddenness of allusion, in the last, to
the transformation of Phineus into marble by the Gorgon shield
of Perseus.
'And the long moonbeam on the hard wet sand
Lay like a jasper column half uprear'd. . .'
In smiling meads how sweet the brook's repose
To the rough ocean and red restless sands!'
'The fierce hyena frighted from the walls
Bristled his rising back, his teeth unsheath'd,
Drew the long growl and with slow foot retired.'
Fears, like the needle verging to the pole,
Tremble and tremble into certainty.'
'Now, entering the still harbour, every surge
Runs with a louder murmur up their keel,
And the slack cordage rattles round the mast.'
"... the feast
Was like the feast of Cepheus, when the sword
Of Phineus, white with wonder, shook restrain'd,
And the hilt rattled in his marble hand.'
Mr. Robert Landor thus describes this first important publi-
cation by his brother. 'Of Gebir he had the highest expectations,
and yet it was intrusted to a very small bookseller at Warwick,
1797-1805.
57
GEBIR AND SOME OPINIONS OF IT.
' in the form of a sixpenny pamphlet, without any one to correct
the press. Excepting to some personal friends, it remained quite
unknown till an article appeared, written by Southey, in the
Critical Review, full of generous commendation. This was the
'beginning of their friendship. A few literary men only, Shelley,
'Reginald Heber, and, I think, Coleridge, read the poem even
'then; and hardly a hundred copies were sold, till a much better
edition, with a Latin translation, was published at Oxford un-
'der my superintendence. I discharged the office of editor quite
unassisted by the author, who always seems to have felt a ner-
vous bashfulness which transferred his works to the care of
'other people. Bashfulness, doubtful of their success, not of their
' merits.'
This remark explains the brief preface to the poem in which
was thrown down so characteristically the measure of its author's
expectations. After describing it as principally written in Wales,
and the fruit of idleness and ignorance, for had he been a bot-
'anist or mineralogist it never had been written,' he mentions
the Arabian tale he had taken the hint of its story from, speaks
of the few English writers who had succeeded in blank verse,
distinguishing above all the poet of our republic;' and closes
by saying: 'I am aware how much I myself stand in need of
'favour. I demand some little from Justice: I entreat much
'more from Candour. If there are now in England ten men of
'taste and genius who will applaud my poem, I declare myself
fully content. I will call for a division; I shall count a majority.'
(
The late Mr. De Quincey grudged him even the ten. He pro-
tested there were only two, and that he had for some time vainly
'conceited' himself to be the sole purchaser and reader. Landor
remarked upon this with amusing warmth in one of his letters
to me in 1853: It must have been under the influence of his
'favourite drug that he fancied Southey telling him he believed
they were the only two who had read Gebir. Mr. De Quincey
was not acquainted with Southey until very many years after
he had written a noble panegyric on the poem inserted in
the Critical Review in 1798. He did not know me until long
after but he had in that year recommended the poem to
Charles Wynne, who told me so; and to the two Hebers; and
(
་
58
FIRST WRITINGS AND EARLIEST FRIENDS. Book II.
6
'to Coleridge, who praised it highly until he was present when
Southey read or repeated parts of it before a large company,
' after which, if ever he mentioned it at all, it was slightingly.
Mr. De Quincey appears to have had another dream, too, of a
' conversation with Southey in which they agreed that I imitated
'Valerius Flaccus, whose poem I never had opened, but have
' looked into lately, and find it intolerable to get through beyond
• 200 lines.* These dreams and the records of them will pass
away; but "exoriare aliquis nostris ex ossibus ultor." I think
'I know who this will be, and I expect no earlier vindication.'
Not in the year of its publication, but in the September of
the year following, Southey's notice appeared in the Critical
Review. It was thin and colourless; but the tone was suffici-
ently laudatory. An outline of the story was given; such pass-
ages as 'the Shell' were quoted, with the remark that the reader
who did not instantly perceive their beauty must have a soul
blind to the world of poetry; other passages were characterised
as more Homeric than anything in modern poetical writing; and
while, of the faults of the poem, those of an ill-chosen story and
of a frequent absence of perspicuity in the language were pointed
out as the most conspicuous, it was said of its beauties that they
were of the first order, and that every circumstance was displayed
with a force and accuracy which painting could not exceed. He
had already been speaking of the poem in the same strain to his
private friends. To Cottle he wrote: There is a poem called
Gebir, of which I know not whether my review of it in the
· Critical be yet printed; but in that review you will find some
' of the most exquisite poetry in the language. . . . I would go a
'hundred miles to see the (anonymous) author.' To Grosvenor
Bedford in the following month he wrote: There is a poem
'called Gebir, written by God knows who, sold for a shilling;
it has miraculous beauties.' Of William Taylor of Norwich, a
few days later, he asked if he had seen the poem; called it the
6
(
* That this was not altogether a dream, however, is presumable from
the fact that Southey, in a notice in the Annual Review of Landor's Poetry
by the Author of Gebir, to be presently mentioned, used this very com-
parison; and probably De Quincey derived his impression, not from the
conversation, but from the review.
1797-1805.
59
GEBIR AND SOME OPINIONS OF IT.
"
miraculous work of a madman; said it was like a picture in
whose obscure colouring no plan was discoverable, but in whose
every distinct touch the master-hand was visible; and compared
its intelligible passages to flashes of lightning at midnight. After
a few months he started for Lisbon to visit his uncle Hill, and
before going wrote to Coleridge: 'I take with me for the voyage.
your poems, the Lyrics, the Lyrical Ballads, and Gebir,-these
'make all my library. I like Gebir more and more; if you ever
'meet its author, tell him I took it with me on a journey.' De-
tained on the point of sailing by westerly winds at Falmouth,
he wrote to his brother the sea-captain that his time had been
passed in walking on the beach sighing for north-easters, admir-
ing the sea-anemonies, and reading Gebir. On arrival at Lisbon
he wrote again to Coleridge, advising him once more to read
Gebir; he grows upon me.' He was now himself writing
Thalaba, and in the preface mentions the great improvement to
his own verse in vividness and strength which he was sensible
of having at this time derived from the frequent perusal of the
poem that had so impressed him. After his return, in another
letter to Coleridge, he alludes to the circumstance of their friend
Humphrey Davy having fallen stark mad with a play called the
Conspiracy of Gowrie, which was by Rough, and a mere copy of
that wonderful original, Gebir. This was in July 1801; at which
date also he was writing to Davy himself the letter before
quoted,* which notices his first acquaintance with Landor's name,
and his recollection of him at Oxford: 'How could you compare
this man's book with Rough's? The lucid, passages of Gebir
are all palpable to the eye; they are the master-touches of a
painter; there is power in them, and passion, and thought, and
'knowledge.' The other he regarded as imitations merely, with
a leading dash of Gebir through the whole.
<
This was not substantially unjust, though harshly expressed;
but Rough nevertheless was a clever and noteworthy person,
whose admiration Landor was glad to have for his own poem,
and to repay in a generous fashion by no niggard praise of the
poem written in imitation of it. They were for some time on
very friendly terms; and some letters of Rough's between the
Ante, sixth section of First Book, p. 29.
60
Book II.
FIRST WRITINGS AND EARLIEST FRIENDS.
date of 1800 and 1802 are preserved among Landor's papers.
But even among his own acquaintance, Gebir was not so fortu-
nate as to find only friends.
At his father's house, in the two years between his retreat to
Wales and the publication of his poem, Landor had been a fre-
quent visitor; and during the seven unsettled years that followed
before Doctor Landor's death, when neither pursuit nor place,
nor indeed persons, attracted him for many months together, he
was made welcome whenever he returned to Warwick; but to his
father's especial friends, there can be little doubt, he was at all
times less accommodating than he might have been. One of
them was Miss Seward, a Staffordshire bluestocking so cele-
brated in those days that no less a person than Walter Scott be-
came one of her editors; and her he flatly refused to meet only
a few months before Gebir appeared. The lively lady remem-
bered the slight, and took revenge characteristically in the re-
mark of one of her letters, that nobody but the author of such a
poem as Gebir could have written the review of it in the Cri-
tical. Southey (whom she thought a greater poet than Words-
worth or Coleridge, and was fond of comparing to Milton) tried
to propitiate Landor's wrath and protect his fair friend's memory
when this unlucky letter came to light; but he was not success-
ful. Landor replied with characteristic heat, that, though his
father and his aunts were intimate with her, he had refused to
meet her, notwithstanding her praise of very indifferent verses
which he had written at seventeen: 'I am not surprised she
'liked them better than Gebir. They were more like her own.
In reply to her courtesy, I said what she never should have
heard, “that I preferred a pretty woman to a literary one."
This letter was written in 1811, before I was born; and a quar-
ter of a century later, as I well remember, one of the first of his
letters addressed to myself contained an entire battery of the
epigrams which he had now fired off against Miss Seward and
her friends, and had thought worth preserving all those years.
One of the friends was the Mr. Fellowes who seems to have
told her first of the supposed identity of the poet and his critic,
very cavalierly,' as Southey wrote to his friend. 'This Fel-
'lowes,' Landor replied, 'is a person I often met at Parr's. I
(
1797-1805.
61
GEBIR AND SOME OPINIONS OF IT.
<
C
(
never knew that he spoke cavalierly except to his wife. I
never exchanged a syllable with him. At Parr's I converse
only with Parr.' Somewhat unconsciously a characteristic trait
is here let drop, of which there is accurate illustration in one
of his brother's letters. Referring to what was certainly true of
Landor to the last, that, with noble bursts of energy in his talk,
his temperament disqualified him for anything like sustained
reasoning, and he instinctively turned away from discussion or
argument, his brother had mentioned having seen him in his
youth rush from the table of one of his own political friends,
provoked by some slight contradiction that appeared disrespect-
ful, when in truth there was no disrespect, but only a slight dif-
ference, threatening controversy. 'It was from Dr. Parr's table,'
Mr. Robert Landor replied to my farther inquiry, 'that he rushed
so furiously; but not in anger with the Doctor, whom he al-
ways liked, and with whom he never quarrelled. His anger
was provoked by a Warwick physician whom he met there—a
Dr. Winthrop-who felt astonished at the offence he had given.
A very feeble reasoner who could govern his temper might be
sure of victory over one, ten times his superior, who could not.
Some slight interruption, even a smile, was provocation enough,
if there were many witnesses present at the controversy, to de-
'cide it.' His own assertion that at Parr's he never conversed
but with Parr is made quite intelligible to us by this comment.
Yet his intercourse with the old liberty-loving scholar and divine
was very much the happiest, and far from the least profitable,
of this period of his life; and it continued, without abatement of
regard on either side, for many years.
6
C
Before account is given of it, one more opinion of Gebir shall
be interposed. It anticipates my narrative by a few years, but
expresses with singular vividness the fascination with which the
poem seized from time to time on minds of the highest order, the
attention thereby directed to its author from men whose notice
constituted fame, and the degree of compensation so afforded by
the few for the persistent neglect and dislike of the many.
Four years before Gebir appeared Shelley was born, and its
influence over him at more than one period of his life is recorded
by his wife in her edition of his poems. When he was at Ox-
62
FIRST WRITINGS AND EARLIEST FRIENDS. Book II.
ford in 1811, we are told by the friend and fellow-collegian who
was most intimate with him there, he would at times read no-
thing else; and Mr. Hogg relates that on the frequent occasions
when he found him so occupied, it was hopeless to draw his at-
tention away. There was something in the poem which in a
peculiar manner caught his fancy. He would read it aloud to
others, or to himself, with a tiresome pertinacity. One morning
his friend went into his rooms to tell him something of import-
ance, but he would attend to nothing but Gebir; whereupon
Hogg describes himself with a young impatience snatching the
book' out of the obstinate fellow's hand,' and throwing it through
the open window into the quadrangle; but unavailingly; for, as
it fell upon the grass-plat and was brought presently back by the
servant, again Shelley became absorbed in it, and the something
of importance had to wait to another time. 'I related this in-
'cident at Florence,' adds Mr. Hogg, 'some years afterwards, and
´ after the death of my poor friend, to the highly-gifted author.
'He heard it with his hearty, cordial, genial laugh. "Well,
you must allow it is something to have produced what could
please one fellow-creature, and offend another, so much."**
Nothing has been said of Gebir better than that; and when
correct adjustment can be made of the relative values of praise
and censure received by it, from those it so greatly pleased and
those it so much offended, its place may at last be accurately
ascertained.
:
6.66
6.66
II. DOCTOR PARR AND THE CRITICS.
In the first article written by Sydney Smith in the Edinburgh
Review he reproachfully called attention to the fact that by far
the most learned man of his dayt was languishing on a little pal-
try curacy in Warwickshire. This was Doctor Parr, whose name
at the beginning of the century, little as it is now remembered
* Life of Shelley, i. 201. 'I regret,' Mr. Hogg concludes, 'that these
' two intellectual persons were not acquainted with each other. If I could
'confer a real benefit upon a friend, I would procure for him, if it were
possible, the friendship of Walter Savage Landor.'
† Porson was then dead. While he lived Parr would say, 'The first
Greek scholar is Porson, and the third Elmsley; I won't say who the
'second is.'
1797-1805.
63
DOCTOR PARR AND THE CRITICS.
(
where learning and literature are in question, was held in un-
deniable respect by the first scholars in Europe. Parr never
indeed stood higher in esteem than at the time of the publication
of Gebir, to the admiration of whose ardent writer he presented
a threefold claim. To the skilled Latin student he was the
author of the Preface to Bellendenus; to the eager politician he
was the friend of Fox and Grey; to the young adventurer in
literature he had the charm of association with a greater Doctor
Samuel, the chief of English men of letters, who had lately
passed away. Sir,' said Johnson to Bennet Langton, in one of
those conversations which Boswell's wonderful book had just
then given to the world, 'Parr is a fair man. I do not know
' when I have had an occasion of such free controversy.' They
had talked upon the liberty of the press; and Johnson, stamping
unconsciously in the heat of the argument, had stopped suddenly
on seeing Parr give a great stamp. 'Why did you stamp, Doc-
'tor Parr?' he asked. Sir,' replied Parr, because you stamped;
' and I was resolved not to give you the advantage even of a
stamp in the argument.' This was good Johnsonian give-and-
take, and would certainly not lower his namesake in Johnson's
opinion; but it must be added that the trick of stamping re-
mained too much with the lesser Samuel, who also practised
afterwards pompous oracular ways, and dealt greatly in sonorous
words, apparently derived from the same source. But, not-
withstanding much pretentious and preposterous writing, what
was most prominent in Parr's character was neither assumed nor
commonplace. Johnson said it was a pity that such a man and
such a scholar should be a Whig; and, considering that with
the dispensers of church patronage in those days the most mode-
rate forms of Whiggism were but other forms of Atheism, Deism,
Socinianism, or any of the rest of the Isms that to a clergyman
meant infamy and poverty, a more judicious choice of opinions.
might undoubtedly have been made. But in his way Parr was
quite as sincere a man as Johnson, and opinions were as little
a matter of mere choosing to the one as to the other.
Up to the time of the French Revolution Doctor Landor had
himself been a Whig, as all Warwickshire had reason to know;
for it was he who brought forward Sir Robert Lawley and Mr.
64
Book II.
FIRST WRITINGS AND EARLIEST FRIENDS.
Ladbroke at the election which broke down Lord Warwick's pre-
dominance in the county. But when the split in the party came,
and Burke carried over the deserters from Fox, Doctor Landor cast
in his lot with them, and became also Pitt's vehement supporter.
His son Walter, on the other hand, went as far as he could in
the opposite extreme, and would doubtless have gone to the other
side of England for the pleasure of greeting a friend of Mr. Fox
so loud and uncompromising as Doctor Parr was at this time. As
it was, he had to do little more than cross the threshold of his
father's door.
At Hatton (Heath-town), a retired village on an eminence.
near what was then a wide tract of heath, two or three miles from
Warwick on the Birmingham road, Parr had lived since 1783,
when Lady Trafford presented him to its perpetual curacy. He
was a poor man when he went there; but when more prosperous
days came to him, he was too fond of the place to leave it, and
there he died. At the small brick parsonage he built out a good-
sized library, which he filled with books, of which the printed
catalogue is still consulted with interest by scholars; and this
became at last his dining-room also, where not seldom, at his fre-
quent festivities, neither books nor friends were visible for the
clouds of tobacco that rose and enveloped them from his morning,
afternoon, and evening pipes. Sydney Smith says he had too
much of his own way at these social parties, and would have
been better for more knocking about among his equals; but the
same sentence that laughs at him for his airs of self-importance
celebrates not the less his copious and varied learning, the rich-
ness of his acquisitions, the vigour of his understanding, and,
above all, the genuine goodness of his heart. Undue prominence.
was indeed given by two circumstances to the weak points in
Parr's character: they were all upon the surface, and they were
all of the quizzible kind. He had a quantity of foolish personal
vanity; a lisp made more absurd his pompous way of speaking;
and a corpulent figure set off disadvantageously his vagaries of
dress. When he lost the mastership of Harrow, it was said that
he went far completely to console himself by mounting that fam-
ous obumbrating wig, which, as Sydney said of it, swelled out
behind into boundless convexity of frizz. But there is something
1797-1805.
65
DOCTOR PARR AND THE CRITICS.
not difficult to forgive in absurdities of this kind, when accom-
panied by unworldliness of nature; and it is undoubtedly the case
that Parr was at the bottom a very kindly and a very simple
man. He could stand by those who had claims on his friendship,
though all the rest of the world should fall from them; and it is
the remark of a keen and unsparing judge of men, William Tay-
lor of Norwich, in a comparison he makes between Parr and
Mackintosh, that, whereas the latter inspired admiration rather
than attachment, there was a lovingness about Parr and a sus-
ceptibility of affection that gave him an immense superiority.
The time when Landor first knew Parr was that of Mackintosh's
greatest intimacy with him; and of the characteristic traits of
their intercourse still remembered there are few better than the
remark made by Parr after a long argument. Jemmy, I cannot
• talk
you down; but I can think you down, Jemmy.' It ex-
presses at the same time one of those weaknesses by which it so
often came to pass that Parr's company was inferior to himself,
and such as he could talk down only too easily. But, even with
Mackintosh, he had not seldom the upper hand. 'Formerly,'
wrote Landor in one of his latest letters to Southey, 'I used to
'meet Mackintosh rather frequently. I never knew that he
was so stored and laden as you give me to believe. He was
certainly very inaccurate, not only in Greek but in Latin.
'Once at breakfast with Parr in Cary-street, where I was, and
Hargrave and Jekyl, he used the word anabásis. Parr said,
Very right, Jemmy! very right! it is anabásis with you, but
"anábasis with me and Walter Landor." I was very much
'shocked and grieved.'
(
6 66
What I have thus thought it right to connect with such
brief mention of Landor's intercourse with Parr as will appear
in these pages, receives also illustration, valuable because of per-
sonal knowledge, from one of Mr. Robert Landor's letters. He
begins by speaking of a paper on Parr in Mr. De Quincey's
collected works; and it is proper to remark that he writes with
less sympathy for Parr's political opinions than for those of his
critic. If Mr. De Quincey had been desirous to show us how
'far it might be possible to convey the most false and injurious
' notions of a man in language which no one could contradict,
F
66
FIRST WRITINGS AND EARLIEST FRIENDS. Book II.
'which said nothing but the truth, he could hardly have suc-
'ceeded better. What he has written is very true and very
false; but there are some old people, like myself, who may
'wish that the mixture had been less skilfully malicious and a
great deal more honest. There was some resemblance between
the doctor and my brother. Never could there be a vainer
C
C
man than the one, or a prouder man than the other: the
'comic part of the same selfish passion and the tragic. Both
' demanded admiration: the doctor of his wig, his cassock, the
'silk frogs on his new coat; Walter of his very questionable
'jests recommended by a loud laugh. Both were very delight-
'ful when in good humour, and dangerously offensive when
'displeased. Mr. De Quincey represents the doctor as talking
gross nonsense; and so he often did. But then, at other
'times, his conversation was the most elegant and abundant
in charming imagery that it has ever been my fortune to
• hear.* Both resented the slightest appearance of disrespect;
'but Parr was much the most placable and willing to be recon-
'ciled. Mr. De Quincey should have recorded his warm-hearted
sincerity in friendship, which hardly failed when friendship
' had become not only dangerous but discreditable. Perhaps you
'would have thought that my brother excelled in genius, imagi-
'nation, power, and variety, when at his best, as much as Parr
'exceeded him in all kinds of acquired knowledge. There was
'the same resemblance in the warmth of their love and hatred;
but Parr's love lasted the longest, and so did Walter's hatred.
'It would be impossible to determine which of them hated one
particular connection the most, nor whether either had ever
'hated any one else so much. Beside the great difference in
'the age of these competitors (Walter was twenty-three at the
'publication of Gebir, and Parr fifty-one), and, at that time, of
reputation, I think that they were kept from quarrels by mutual
respect, by something like awe of each other's temper, and a
knowledge that, if war began at all, it must be to the knife.
It would be great impertinence in me,' Mr. Landor adds, 'if
any opinions were offered here on the doctor's literary preten-
'sions. But surely the pretensions of a writer and reasoner fami-
* This was also the opinion of William Taylor of Norwich.
6
6
1797-1805.
67
DOCTOR PARR AND THE CRITICS.
liar, during many years, with Charles Fox, James Mackintosh,
'Bobus Smith, Richard Sharp, Samuel Rogers, and other distin-
'guished people, could hardly have been so contemptible as it is
now the fashion to suppose. I say this, though he once treated
me more offensively than any one else ever did.'
(
The correspondence of Parr and Landor, while the latter was
still at Oxford, has been mentioned, and it was steadily continued
as long as the old man lived; though only one or two extracts
will from time to time be available for me. Gebir, as soon as pub-
lished, of course found its way to Hatton, and with a letter in
which the writer told Parr the fancy he had, that, during the time
the doctor was reading and examining the effort he had made,
he should himself be undergoing much the same sensation as the
unfortunate Polydorus, while his tomb, new-turfed and spruce
and flourishing, was plucked for a sacrifice to Æneas. But the
doctor's weak point was poetry; his taste in that respect was
'Bromwychian,' as Landor described it to Southey; and the poem
awakened little interest in him till it appeared in its Latin form.
Yet was he swift to recognise a vigour and animation in his young
friend's mode of writing, whether verse or prose, which he knew
to be out of the common at that time; and with amusing eager-
ness he did his best to enlist him on the side of Charles James
Fox in the strife of politics and papers then raging.
The share that Coleridge and Southey had in that memorable
strife is well known, and even Lloyd and Lamb were taking part
with their puns and pleasantries. They had, all of them, en-
gagements on the Courier or on the Morning Post; Dan Stewart,
Mackintosh's brother-in-law, of whom Lamb has left a whimsical
sketch, being Magnus Apollo at the Post, and exercising at the
Courier also not a little of the influence which he handed over
a few years later to Coleridge. But very different was Landor's
position from theirs. Those were days when Southey would often
walk the street dinnerless at dinner-time, without a shilling in
his pocket for the ordinary, or for bread-and-cheese at his lodg
ings; when he and Coleridge were content with Dan Stewart's
guinea a week; and when he thought it not amiss,' as he tells
his brother Tom, by eight months' contributing to monthly maga-
zines and reviews, to make as much as seven pounds and two
68
FIRST WRITINGS AND EARLIEST FRIENDS. Book II.
pairs of breeches. Landor's bread-and-cheese and breeches were
found for him. He was not a hired soldier, but a volunteer;
and seems never to have sought acquaintance with the regular
rank and file. His contributions, chiefly to the Courier, were in
the form of letters with or without his name; and though as
fierce against Pitt and the war party as even Parr could desire,
they had an awkward trick of bolting out of the Fox preserves
and running after game that was more to the writer's liking. For
a time, nevertheless, Parr appears to have kept him within
bounds, by the help mainly of Fox's fidus Achates, Robert Adair.
C
Several of Adair's letters to Landor are before me, between
the dates of 1800 and 1806. They show what difficulty Parr had
in bringing them together; what a shrewd opinion of Landor's
possible value in the press Adair formed at once; how willing he
was to overlook even such anti-whig heresies as a rooted dislike
of William the deliverer; and what pains were taken to put so
clever a fellow in the proper way. He and Adair would meet at
Debrett's in Piccadilly, and go down together to the House of
Commons, the most costly exhibition in Europe,' as Landor
amused Adair by calling it; and ultimately it was so arranged.
that access to the reporters' gallery should generally be open to
him. They were present together, among other occasions, at the
stormy debate of that March night of 1801 when Lord Castle-
reagh brought in his bill to prolong the act enabling the Lord-
Lieutenant to put Ireland under martial law. Landor meanwhile
was busy with his pen against Pitt and the Ministry. He would
send letters for Adair's approval, seldom satisfied with them him-
self; whereas Adair would only admit his right to undervalue
such compositions on the ground that rich men might be allowed
to be prodigal. When Landor was absent from London too, I
find Adair making it his business to examine back files of the
Courier to see if a particular letter had been given; writing to
him that he considers its omission to bo proof of the degraded
state of the English press; excepting Mr. Perry from this remark,
as a man of inviolable honour; and promising Landor better
treatment at Perry's Morning Chronicle, if he will but consent
to contribute to that paper.
Adair had some cause for his bitterness about the press, the
1797-1805.
69
DOCTOR PARR AND THE CRITICS.
Anti-Jacobin having singled him out for a succession of its most
scurrilous jokes, and the ministerial papers keeping up the mer-
ciless battery. He had become a special mark for them by ex-
actly such service to the other party as he was now trying to
render in the instance of Landor. His appearance in the re-
porters' gallery among the press-men, his introduction of some
new pamphleteer to Ridgway or Debrett, were frequent subjects
of derision with Ellis, Frere, or Canning. The latter, in his
Counter-Epistle, coupling him with Parr's buzz prose, laughs
without stint at his literary taste and pretensions; and the same
unscrupulous wit, in his Oriental letter from 'Bauba-Dara-Adul-
Phoola' (Bob Adair, a dull fool), again yokes the pair, to show
what scant accommodation may suffice for a brace of Whig bed-
fellows:
6
'There was great Dr. Parr, whom we style Bellendenus:
The doctor and I have a hammock between us.'
But this was the kind of thing that in those days all had to
expect who set themselves resolutely against the 'drunken demo-
cracy
of Mr. William Pitt,' as Landor christened the anti-Galli-
can frenzy. He had soon to encounter it in his own person. The
Anti-Jacobin,'* he wrote to Parr, has assailed me with much
'virulence: I am a coward and a profligate. Could you imagine
·
• it?
C
.
You also are mentioned with a proportionate share of in-
'solence. Let them pass.
Who would stop a cloud that over-
'shadows his garden? Thank God, I have . . . in my favour the
example of Mr. Lemuel Gulliver, who, when the Lilliputians
'climbed and crept over him, forbore that contention which a
more equal or a more formidable enemy would have aroused.'
It would nevertheless show how weak was Mr. Gulliver's de-
terring example, if I could describe in detail his reply to the
Monthly Review's criticism of Gebir. This I found among his
papers unpublished, his friend Mr. Mocatta having advised its
suppression; but I must content myself with taking from it a
very few passages.
This was not Canning's Anti-Jacobin and Weekly Examiner, butits
successor, the Anti-Jacobin Review and Magazine; which libelled Southey,
Coleridge, Lloyd, and Lamb in the 'toad-and-frog' caricature, and is gene-
rally confounded with its hardly more respectable parent.
70
FIRST WRITINGS AND EARLIEST FRIENDS. Book II.
6
เ
6
The reviewer, calling him an unpractised author, and saying
that his performance betrayed all the incorrectness and abrupt-
ness of inexperience, had added this: 'He has fallen into the
common error of those who aspire to the composition of blank
' verse, by borrowing too many phrases and epithets from our in-
comparable Milton.' To which Landor retorted by asking what
expressions he had borrowed. 'I challenge him to produce them.
If indeed I had borrowed them, so little should I have realised
by the dangerous and wild speculation, that I might have com-
posed a better poem and not have been a better poet. But I
'feared to break open, for the supply of my games or for the
'maintenance of my veteran heroes, the sacred treasury of the
'great republican. . . . For the language of Paradise Lost ought
'not to be the language of Gebir. There should be the softened
'air of remote antiquity, not the severe air of unapproachable
sanctity. I devoutly offer up my incense at the shrine of Mil-
Woe betide the intruder that would steal its jewels! It
requires no miracle to detect the sacrilege. The crime will be
'found its punishment. The venerable saints, and still more
'holy personages, of Raphael or Michael Angelo, might as con-
'sistently be placed among the Bacchanals and Satyrs, bestriding
'the goats and bearing the vases of Poussin, as the resemblance
of that poem, or any of its component parts, could be introduced
in mine.' Nothing could be better said than that. It marks
exactly the distinction; and it is interesting to note that thus
early had taken root in his mind that profound veneration for
the most majestic of English poets which steadily attended him
without abatement to the close of life, and which, as it rises or
falls in England, may be taken as no indifferent or inexact mea-
sure-of-value as well in poetry as in the taste for it.
6
• ton.
6
"
The offending reviewer was supposed to be a Mr. Pybus, who
had dabbled in verses himself; and this explains an amusing
passage which, showing the writer at the outset of life just as he
was to its close, exactly prefigures the offer with which he startled
the reviewing world twenty-five years later, when he promised.
a hot penny-roll and a pint of stout for breakfast to any critic
who could show himself capable of writing a dialogue equal to
the worst of his Imaginary Conversations.
1797-1805.
71
DOCTOR PARR AND THE CRITICS.
'Some will think me intoxicated, and most will misconstrue my good-
nature, if I invite the reviewer, or any other friend that he will introduce
-but himself the most earnestly, as I suspect from his manner that he
poetises-to an amicable trial of skill. I will subject myself to any penalty
either of writing or of ceasing to write, if the author, who criticises with
the flightiness of a poet, will assume that character at once, and taking in
series my twenty worst verses, write better an equal number in the period
of twenty years. I shall be rejoiced if he will open to me any poems of
my contemporaries, of my English contemporaries I mean, and point out
three pages more spirited, I will venture to add more classical, than the
three least happy and least accurate in Gebir.'
Shall we be angry at this? There is a remark of Dr. John-
son's on the most affecting of Shakespeare's plays,--where he says
that the characters of this poet, however distressed, have always a
conceit left them in their misery, 'a miserable conceit;' but if
so, who would take it from them? It would be hard to grudge
a conceit to misery, if that were everything left to it; or a trifle
of self-praise to a poet, if there were no one else to praise him.
Vanity, in the sense of abundance of worshippers and the fumes
of perpetual incense, it undoubtedly is not; and with a rather
touching sense of what it actually is, Landor proceeded to de-
scribe the circumstances and way in which Gebir was written,
and referred to the earlier poems published by him on leaving
Oxford. The passage has the interest of autobiography.
· •
'If my rights had not been refused me, I should not have asserted my
claims. Rambling by the side of the sea, or resting on the top of a moun-
tain, and interlining with verses the letters of my friends, I sometimes
thought how a Grecian would have written, but never what methods he
would take to compass popularity. The nearer I approached him, though
distant still, the more I was delighted. . So little was I anxious to pub-
lish my rhapsodies, that I never sat down in the house an hour at once for
the purpose of composition. Instead of making or inviting courtship, I de-
clared with how little I should rest contented. Far from soliciting the
attention of those who are passing by, Gebir is confined, I believe, to the
shop of one bookseller, and I never heard that he had even made his ap-
pearance at the window. I understand not the management of those mat-
ters, but I find that the writing of a book is the least that an author has
to do. My experience has not been great; and the caution which it has
taught me lies entirely on the other side of publication. Before I was
twenty years of age I had imprudently sent into the world a volume of
which I was soon ashamed. It everywhere met with as much commenda-
tion as was proper, and generally more. For, though the structure was
feeble, the lines were fluent; the rhymes showed habitual ease, and the
personifications fashionable taste. . . . So early in life I had not discovered
the error into which we were drawn by the Wartons. I was then in rap-
72
Book II.
FIRST WRITINGS AND EARLIEST FRIENDS.
tures with what I now despise. I am far from the expectation or the hope
that these deciduous shoots will be supported by the ivy of my maturer
years.'
(
The manuscript closes with a comment on the reviewer's
charge of borrowing,' valuable for its proof of Landor's literary
reading thus early, and of his shrewd sense of the use that is
made of charges of plagiarism; which may in fact imply the
greatest merit, and which are seldom employed otherwise than
falsely. You are punished, not because you steal, but because
you are detected, through want of spirit and address in carrying
off your booty. Plagiarism, imitation, and allusion, three shades
'that soften from blackness into beauty, are by the glaring eye
' of the malevolent blended into one.' Some of his illustrations
are excellent, and were new to me. In connection with the pass-
age from Montaigne, for example, which represents the goose.
arguing after his fashion: All the parts of the universe I have
an interest in: I have advantage by the winds, and convenience
by the waters; the earth serves me to walk upon, the sun to
light me, the sky to cover me; I am the darling of nature; and
' is it not man that treats, lodges, and serves me?"—he produces
two couplets by Pope, taken from the first and the third epistle
of the Essay on Man: the art of the plagiarism consisting in the
different application made of the several parts of the original,
and the workmanship justifying the art.
'
6
'Seas roll to waft me, suns to light me rise,
My footstool earth, my canopy the skies.'
'While man exclaims, "See all things for my use;"
See man for mine," replies a pampered goose.'
Beside the famous lines on Addison, too,
C
'Damn with faint praise, assent with civil leer,
And, without sneering, teach the rest to sneer,'
he places this capital passage out of a personification of Envy,
from a poet seldom read, though of a vigorous mind and lively
'imagination,' as he justly characterises Phineas Fletcher:
• When needs he must, yet faintly then he praises,
Somewhat the deed, but more the means, he raises;
So marreth what he makes, and praising most dispraises.'
The passage is in the 12th chapter of the 2d book of the Essays, and
will be found in Cotton, ii. 348.
1797-1805.
73
MR. SERJEANT ROUGH.
I will take only another sentence from the close. After at-
tacking Mr. Mathias and (with no very evident reason) Mr.
D'Israeli, he speaks of the latter as claiming to be descended
from an Italian family, and adds: 'He is one of the children
*
' of Israel nevertheless, as is also announced by the name.
'I mark this circumstance not by way of reproach, for in the
'number of my acquaintance there is none more valuable, there
'is not one more lively, more inquiring, more regular; there
' is not one more virtuous, more beneficent, more liberal, more
'tender in heart, or more true in friendship than my friend Mo-
catta; he also is a Jew.' This character is borne out by such
letters of his friend as Landor had preserved. A few lines from
one of them may be added, which show that already Landor was
meditating a tragedy for the stage; and this wise counsellor had
the sense to warn him that, even if he got so far as the theatre-
door, the chamberlain would be sure to turn his key upon him.
He dates from St. Thomas's-square, Hackney, on the 5th Decem-
ber 1800.
'Most undoubtedly a tragedy replete with sentiments such as you could
not help to infuse would not be received by the manager or sanctioned by
the lord chamberlain; so that I much wish you could hit on some other
plan more lucid and better brought out than you have hitherto produced.
For I honestly think your talents equal to the greatest undertaking; but
I dread that impetuosity which disdains those minor niceties of language
which are yet necessary to show where the narrative stands and what is
going on.'
III. MR. SERJEANT ROUGH.
Unhappily Landor soon lost the advantage of so judicious a
friend as Isaac Mocatta, who died in the year following the date
* The writings of Mr. D'Israeli seem to me always highly deserving of
respect and honour. He valued, as well as did what he could to raise, the
literary character. But some of his critical opinions had amazed Landor,
who reprehends him also amusingly for his too great familiarity with
learned men, as where he calls the great French printer Henry Stephens.
Here let me inform this gentleman that though Scholars have some-
times taken this liberty, it is not allowed to other folks. He might as
'well call Cicero Fetch, and Fabius Maximus Broad Bean. Either Henri
Etienne, which was his name, or Henricus Stephanus, as he wrote it
' in Latin, is the proper term. We cannot suppose that, coming over to
England, he would have called himself Henry Stephens.'
74
Book II.
FIRST WRITINGS AND EARLIEST FRIENDS.
(
•
of that letter; but an extract from an earlier one may be added, as
it touches another subject of difference between them. I thank
'you,' Mocatta had written in July 1800, 'for sparing me the
'triumph of Bonaparte's laurels. . . . The Corsican boy has cer-
tainly proved himself a man. May he crown his victories by
dictating a moderate peace! I assure you, if I feel for the dis-
appointment of the country, I do not for that of Mr. Pitt. I
was reading lately Plutarch's essay on the character of Alex-
ander, and some of his reasoning I felt as a silent reproof of my
own condemnation of Bonaparte.' The time was nevertheless
approaching when the occasion for reproof was reversed, and it
was Landor who condemned the ambition and execrated the suc-
cesses of Napoleon.
(
(
His
In July 1801, Mr. Jacob Mocatta announced his brother's
death to Landor, to whom had been bequeathed some books from
his library (among them a rare Sophocles) and a Prometheus in
ancient sculpture, which, with his usual vehement appreciation
for a friend's gift, Landor declared to be by Phidias, and which
became the property of his brother Henry. 'I never knew a bet-
'ter or wiser man, or one more friendly,' is his indorsement of
the letter that told him of the death and the bequest.
friend had just lived long enough to see the Peace which he had
hoped might be a temperate one, and which proved to be that of
which everybody was glad and nobody proud. Landor received
the letter when lodging at Oxford, where his brother Robert was
now in residence; and between Oxford and London, where the
peace and the ministry furnished occupation for everybody, the
rest of the year was passed. Only one other affair Landor had
found time to take in hand, and there is allusion to it in a letter
of the following year to his brother Henry. This time year, too, I
was to have been married' (he is referring to the recent marriage
of Rough). 'But, after committing a piece of foolery in which I
'was the puppet, the farce concluded. But what can it signify?
'I can only be sixty thousand pounds the poorer:' the peculiarity
of such expressions in his case being, that they import nothing
which in conduct he is careful to contradict, but may in general
be taken not unfairly as the measure of what he did as well as
said. No man whom I have ever known of intellect approaching
6
1797-1805.
75
MR. SERJEANT ROUGH.
to his, could so recklessly rush into the gravest enterprises, or
so carelessly make escape from them.
may
be
With Rough he was now very intimate, and a word
given to their friendship. When Landor first knew him he had
just left college, and in a fit of admiration for Gebir had written
in the manner of it a tragedy on the Conspiracy of Gowrie, which
was about as like Landor as Mr. Rowe's imitation was like Shake-
speare. When I first heard his name his poem was extinct; but
its author was remembered as one of three notorious radicals of
the Midland circuit, Copley and Denman being the other two,
of whom it was proposed by old Clarke, also of the Midland, that
the whole three should be hung up as republicans to the sign-
post of their circuit inn, with Copley in the centre as the great-
est malefactor of the three. Both literature and politics, there-
fore, recommended Rough to Landor.
Copley was a little his junior; but they had been at Cam-
bridge together, were members of the same inn of court, chose the
same circuit, and for some time were inseparable. But Rough's
ambition, more limited in one direction than his friend's, took in
a greater variety of objects, and had a more generous though a
weaker side. What so many inferior people discover in the de-
sire to attach themselves to the wealthy and noble, this young
lawyer displayed in his eagerness to become acquainted with men
distinguished by their literature; and though his life had many
failures, his persistent love of men of learning and letters is not
to be accounted one of them. He became familiar,' says Mr.
Robert Landor, with the lake poets, especially with Southey,
and with many of the younger people before the age of Scott,
Byron, and Shelley. He was an intense admirer of Walter's
• Gebir, and I think that Walter and Southey became ultimately
'acquainted through him. Before then he had published a tra-
'gedy called The Conspiracy of Gowrie. My brother repaid his
'admiration, for in such duties he was never ungrateful. Hence
their very ardent friendship; but Rough was still more familiar
'with my brother Henry, who was then resident in London.
• When called to the bar, Mr. Rough selected the Midland cir-
cuit; and about the same time Henry was established at War-
6
(
76
FIRST WRITINGS AND EARLIEST FRIENDS. Book II.
'wick as a conveyancer, which profession he exchanged for that
of a land-agent to some very large estates.'
The few of Rough's letters that Landor kept confirm this,
and show that Rough took with him to the circuit introductions
from Henry to the Landor family and to that of Doctor Lambe.
This young physician had succeeded to the practice of Doctor
Landor on his retirement; for him and his pretty wife Landor
himself had a strong liking; and in his friend's letter immedi-
ately after the circuit they found very cordial mention. One other
acquaintance was then also made by Rough: a farther acquisi-
tion of that first circuit, though not mentioned in this letter,
which especially claims to be mentioned here. The reader owes
to it a delightful sketch of the young lawyer himself, taken by a
keen yet kindly observer, at this opening of his career.
to me,
(
6
L
6
'Rough learnt from our family,' writes Mr. Robert Landor
'on his first visit to Warwick, that there was another
'brother resident in Oxford; and on his way back to town he
paid me a visit too, quite unexpectedly. In more than sixty
years which have passed since then, I have never met with any
one who had so little reserve. In about an hour I had become
'acquainted with all his prospects, literary and professional; and
in this first circuit he had taken the measure of all his future
competitors. At no time was he arrogant or contemptuous; but,
giving ample credit to the pretensions of other people, he did.
equal justice to his own. In addition to the honour which he
'conferred upon so young a man, I felt delighted with so much
frankness, good-humour, and joyous familiarity. I again met
him on his second circuit at Warwick, accompanied by Mr.
Copley: both of them dined with my brother Henry. Walter
was not there. Rough assumed the superiority which his greater
standing and experience had given him; for he had received a
' brief that very morning. He promised his future countenance
'to Copley as his junior, and Copley undertook to prepare him-
'self for the favour by ascertaining the distinction between a
drake and a duck. It seemed that Rough had opened the pro-
secution of a thief who had stolen a drake, and had persisted
in describing the bird as a duck. Corrected again and again,
6
6
6
'
1797-1805.
77
MR. SERJEANT ROUGH.
<
'he repeated the word "duck" in court; and after dinner he
'maintained that there was no difference. Copley said that there
6
was the same difference as between a bull and a cow, the bull
and the drake being the husbands of the cow and the duck;
' and also, that if any thief had stolen a bull, the animal must
'be so described, and not as a cow.
I would have spared you
'this silliness, if it had not been characteristic both of Rough's
' habits and of his future fortune. Many years after these jests,
I became acquainted at Tenby with an elderly solicitor of high
professional character, who was personally also familiar with
Rough. He mentioned that the two friends had recently ob-
'tained promotion, and regretted that one of them had hazarded
a small practice by becoming Mr. Serjeant Rough. Both gained
'the same rank at nearly the same time. My informant said that
Copley was quite safe; but that Rough was so careless and slo-
venly in his practice, that the conduct of any important case
'could not be intrusted to him. I had left Warwickshire, and
' had seen him but two or three times since my departure.
My
'brother Henry always described him, however, as not less happy
' and hopeful-though with so many plans, literary and profes-
sional, that he began none of them. He was so busy that he did
' nothing.""
<
Mr. Landor adds a remark upon the sudden and early close
of Rough's intimacy with his brother, so ardent while it lasted,
which I do not feel entitled to omit. To a great degree, in all
men, the earlier and the later years explain each other; and what
is here said of a point of character which time and experience
corrected, but failed to the very last to remove, will suggest need-
ful allowance for what is to be said hereafter.
'Rough's intercourse with Walter lasted only three or four
' years.
It was ended by some unintentional offence similar to
that by Doctor Winthrop at Parr's. Either Rough had smiled
'at a false argument, or interrupted my brother in some other
C
way, before several guests, whereupon Walter left his house and
* One thinks of Chaucer's pleasant couplet in his picture of a lawyer
of his time:
'No wher so besy a man as he ther n'as,
And yit he semede besier than he was.'
78
FIRST WRITINGS AND EARLIEST FRIENDS. Book II.
'
C
renounced his acquaintance. Your intercourse did not begin
'till many years, and a larger knowledge of society, had taught
more self-control; and he must have felt more afraid, as well as
unwilling, to offend you. But not twenty years ago he refused
ever to see again a schoolfellow whom he valued almost as highly
'as Birch. It seems ungrateful on my part to remember these
frailties; for long after our early affection had ceased, he en-
´ dured muth more patiently my remonstrances and reproaches
'than those of any other person, being resolved that we should
never quarrel again as we had done almost forty years before.
'Yet such knowledge is necessary if you would describe him
truly. It was for the sake of his peace and reputation that I
'so often gave or hazarded offence.'
.
Nor had Rough scrupled to hazard it as well during the time
of their intercourse. His high admiration for Landor's powers,
cherished all the more because shared by so very few, made him
keen to the perception of faults that obstructed their healthful
exercise; and genial, careless, good-natured as he was, hè remon-
strated more than once against complaints which he justly thought
not the most manly. The Werterism of that day was the Byron-
ism of a quarter of a century later; and Landor had to pass
through this and other distempers of youth, though happily
they left no mark upon his writings. There is a tone in Rough's
remonstrances (May 1801) that commands respect.
"... Come, come, rouse yourself and write. If you must die, it is at
least your duty to leave something behind you; and though Gebir will do
much, yet I am persuaded it is in your power to do still more. Literature,
like other things, as often obtains the reward of praise by quantity as
quality; and we are all of us so little important to others, that unless we
put them in mind of us daily, we shall scarcely avoid being forgotten.'
Anticipating my narrative a little, I may add that before the
middle of the following year Rough's bachelor-life had ended,
and, in thanking Landor for good wishes sent to him, he had
rallied his friend again upon his tone of despondency, adjured
him for Heaven's sake to keep up his spirits, and, with much
grateful allusion to Doctor Landor and the house at Warwick,
expressed his hope to be in a few weeks settled in a house of
his own, where he should at all times be eager to receive, and,
when necessary, to nurse, the friend to whom he owed so much.
1797-1805.
79
MR. SERJEANT ROUGH.
6
< My Henrietta I have at present left in the country. Be assured,
' however, that she is fully disposed to welcome you as the most
'valued of her husband's friends.' His Henrietta was Jack
Wilkes's daughter; and Mr. Robert Landor's brief allusion to
her, and to the leading points of the later life of her husband,
must satisfy whatever farther interest my readers may feel in
Landor's once celebrated, now forgotten friend, Chief-justice
Rough.
↓
Mr. Rough had married an illegitimate daughter of the pa-
triot John Wilkes; attracted rather by the father's celebrity
'than the daughter's beauty. When he and I first met at War-
wick, he proposed to travel a hundred miles by the stage-coach
← that he might attend a Christmas ball, and dance with Doctor
'Parr's daughter, whom he had never seen. As had been fore-
told, while Mr. Copley's profession advanced Mr. Rough's
receded, and now he is a family man. Very reluctantly he relin-
'quished his hopes of a seat in the House of Commons-as soli-
citor-general, attorney-general, on his way to better things.
• Then he would find leisure to begin, at last, a very great poem!
Perhaps it was through the interest of the first Lord Lansdowne
‹ that he became chief-justice in one of the West-Indian islands;
'but his heart was left with the House of Commons, and he soon
' returned to England. Some quarrel about precedency at the
governor's ball, between Mrs. Rough and the wife of a general or
'colonel who commanded the garrison there, was decided unsatis-
factorily; and the chief-justice, if such was his title, came home.
'I think that by this time Copley had succeeded Lord Eldon as
lord chancellor; and if so, there were few men who could con-
‘gratulate him more sincerely than Rough; for Rough seemed
quite incapable of jealousy, and his own turn must come soon.
'Meanwhile he could not resume his former practice, and he had,
I believe, two or three children. It was thought, unjustly, that
'his old friend might have forwarded his wishes more effectually
by obtaining for him some such appointment as would keep him
' at home. But it is not improbable that the lord chancellor may
have doubted his qualification for much responsibility so near
to the House of Commons; and Rough never changed his poli-
tical opinions, as Copley had done. At last Mr. Rough was
C
<
<
<
C
80
FIRST WRITINGS AND EARLIEST FRIENDS. Book II.
'
'constrained to accept the chief-justiceship of Ceylon. There he
'lost his wife; and after the customary residence his own health
failed, and for its restoration he came back to England. My
'brother Henry saw him, but I did not; and I must caution you
against too much confidence in my accuracy after more than fifty
years. I cannot consult my brother, as his memory is far worse
' than mine, and we have outlived all our contemporaries. Un-
able to accomplish such an exchange as he desired, Mr. Rough
' returned to Ceylon, and died there. He was kind, friendly,
'social, and of much more than average capacity, but too whim-
· sical for much success even as a poet.'
How many a like career may we read in this, of brilliant
design and imperfect execution, of the eagerness without the pur-
pose to excel, of judgment ready for a friend's guidance and in-
sufficient for our own, and yet of ardent hope so surviving every
disappointment as to be itself no mean compensation for all.
IV. WRITING FOR NEWSPAPERS.
When Southey was at Cintra in the summer of 1800 he had
written to his friend Humphrey Davy at Bristol: 'I see the author
' of Gebir has been translating from the Arabic and Persian. Can
there possibly be Arabic and Persian poetry which the author
' of Gebir may be excused for translating? This was another
of those little publications' of which his brother has spoken,
hastily conceived, more hastily printed, forgotten as soon as pub-
lished, yet with fancies and thoughts that deserved more careful
presentment and a longer life. It was not from the Arabic and
Persian at all, but was a very clever imitation of such specimens.
of Eastern literature as were then derived chiefly through French
translations; and, consisting altogether of not more than twenty
quarto pages, was accompanied by notes in about an equal num-
ber that might have set by the ears as many score of learned
combatants, if the notice drawn to them had borne any kind of
proportion to the loudness of the demand made for it. But as
their scholarship attracted nobody, it was quite as well that what
else they contained should have passed unchallenged. The thing
fell dead-born, no one caring even to raise a doubt of the authen-
1797-1805.
81
WRITING FOR NEWSPAPERS.
ticity of the so-called Orientalisms; and Landor used always to
say that the imposition certainly had taken in Parr. The old
scholar was never an adept at poetry, and his brain was just now
occupied and overfilled with politics.
(
My good friend,' runs one of his notes at the time (Landor
being in London), 'pray go the House. I have prepared Mr.
· Adair for an interview with you, as a man of intellect, and my
' valuable friend. Call on him in Great Marlborough-street, and
'leave a card. The mighty are not fallen, but they have de-
'scended to avoid being pushed down now, and to secure being
raised up hereafter. God bless you. Mrs. Parr desires her kind
regards. We often talk of you, Walter. I am truly yours,
'S. PARR.'
'The mighty' were Mr. Pitt and his friends Windham, Gren-
ville, and Dundas, who had just retired to make room for Mr.
Addington. The whole business is now so completely dead and
gone that it would only try the reader's patience to tell him how
Pitt, in carrying the Union, is alleged to have made promises to
the Irish Catholics which he could neither keep nor break with
decency; how he was thereupon supposed to have had nothing for
it but to quit the seat of power for a time, putting somebody in
to keep it warm and disengaged till he should be able to return
to it; and how it was that thus came about that ludicrous thing
called the Addington Administration. But though all the ani-
mation and the interest have gone out of it now, it was once
filled vividly with both; and the best kind of notion I can give
of Landor's pursuits and habits of thought at the time in connec-
tion with it, will be derived from a few extracts of letters then
addressed to him, and of letters written by himself.
Truth to say, however, this is not an easy task, with Parr's
letters at least. It is as difficult to decipher his handwriting*
as to connect his sentences when deciphered. He has twelve
words where one would do, and as many seventhlies and last-
lies for every division of a subject as one of the old Puritan
→ You always wrote hieroglyphically,' says Charles Lamb to George
Dyer, yet not to come up to the mystical notations and conjuring charac-
'ters of Doctor Parr.' And for an amusing illustration of Parr's hierogly-
phics, see Rogers's Table-Talk, p. 64.
G
82
Book II.
FIRST WRITINGS AND EARLIEST FRIENDS.
preachers. In vehemence as well as abundance of language, too,
his example was a bad one for Landor; whose own self-sufficient
way of judging both men and things, if at this time happily
restrained rather than encouraged by any one whose judgment
he respected, might not have grown into the unfortunate habit
which tyrannised over him in later years. Certainly no lessons
were to be drawn from Parr, either of prudence in forming opin-
ions or moderation in expressing them.
to
Upon the first news of Pitt's resignation he wrote to Landor
expose what he called the deep and mischievous craft of the
impostor. He wanted it laid open to the public in parliamentary
speeches, in newspaper paragraphs, in general conversation, and
in political pamphlets; and with a view to each and all, Landor
was to do what he could. Again and again the alarm was to be
sounded in every quarter; and in every quarter were to be pro-
claimed the aggravations of his misbehaviour to the king and
the Irish. He had betrayed the King and insulted the Irish, he
had betrayed the Irish and insulted the King. But it should all
be ripped up in the House of Commons. Why did he pledge
himself to the Irish without consulting the King? Why did he
not consult the King before pledging himself to the Irish? If
he did consult the King, who was to blame? If he did not con-
sult the King, what was the reason? If he expected assent,
then had he most wantonly brought the King into a scrape. If,
at the moment of consultation, he expected dissent, then, at the
moment of action, he must have intended to compel assent.
And so, to give but a few faint echoes of a letter that would take
as many pages to print as are here compressed in lines, and as
many weeks completely to decipher, the excited old Whig see-
saws through a bill of indictment against the retiring minister,
to which he wishes Landor to give all the 'attractiveness of his
'style, all the power of his eloquence, and all the bitterness of
' his sarcasm.'
Landor nevertheless had some difficulty, which it was the
object of a second letter to remove; and in this were submitted
to him ten several heads of accusation as the texts he would
have his young friend write upon. The shrewdness of the mat-
ter and pomposity of the manner were Parr all over; but some
1797-1805.
83
WRITING FOR NEWSPAPERS.
L
6
misgiving whether Landor was the man after all to take the
texts, and whether he could be trusted for not straying too far
afield, crept into the close of his letter. I wish,' says Parr,
you would expand the matter contained here, and publish it
in the Courier, and lay out upon it that vigorous eloquence
'with which you often charm my ears. It will have effect, if
you will keep back some of your favourite and perhaps erro-
neous opinions.' There were other difficulties also that made
Landor not very manageable. From the earlier attempts to get
him into regular harness, and put him under proper leaders, he
seems to have shied and bolted incessantly. Why,' asks Parr,
in the same letter, 'don't you go down to the House? I will
'give you letters of introduction to men you will like; and
'from the civility of being introduced by them into the House,
'why should you shrink? These strenuous efforts are not with-
out their effect, and we see him at the House at last under charge
of Adair.
But before turning to the letters of that stanchest of Whigs,
here are a few farther notes from those of Landor and Parr.
The young poet thus acknowledges the old scholar's suggestions
and praise :
'I am rejoiced to find that you have not forgotten me, and I raise my-
self up from the bosom of indifference to the voice and the blandishments
of praise. I never court the vulgar; and how immense a majority of every
rank and description this happy word comprises! Perhaps about thirty in
the universe may be excepted, and never more at a time. I have taken
courage to follow the path you pointed out. I subjoin my letter, which I
have not sent to the printer, though it has been finished a fortnight. The
reason is this: I wrote one a thousand times better than the present, and
sent it for insertion to the Courier. Now, such is my indifference, that,
when once I have written a thing, I never inquire for it afterwards; and
this was the case in respect to my letter.'
That is just the man as he was known to me forty and fifty
years later: fancying always that he could place himself 'on a
hill apart' even from those with whom he
was actually contend-
ing; and mistaking for indifference, both to opinions and to con-
sequences, what was but exaggerated impatience of contradictory
opinion and a running away from consequences. How, in return,
Parr talks, or perorates, about the peace, must be shown very
briefly. I spare the reader, here, ten lines of Xenophon in which
84
Book II.
FIRST WRITINGS AND EARLIEST FRIENDS.
he compares Pitt to Meno; though Greek is more legible than
English in the writing of Parr, and a substantial scrap inter-
larded from the ancients is some help to his own puffs and
pastry. But he carried the habit to excess, as he did most
things; and Holofernes himself was not more ridiculous in chop-
ping and changing for Latin or Greek the baldest phrases of his
mother tongue, than this genuine scholar often was.
'Glad shall I be when you sit down with us again, and chat on the vir-
tues of Moreau, the talents of Buonaparte, the humours of Paul, and the
perilous condition of this oppressed and insulted kingdom. As to late events,
the ostensible is not the sole nor the chief cause of Mr. Pitt's plot,
ἔσται λέων ὅπη χρὴ, καὶ πίθηκος ἐν μέρει,
[which I may translate to the effect that Pitt was to play the lion's part
when necessary, and the monkey's in division of spoil]. The wrangle
about indulgence to Catholics, the resignation of the old ministry, the ap-
pointment of the new, the strength studiously abducted from them, the
compliments bestowed upon them, the assistance solicited for them, and
the principles imputed to them, are one and all mere Θεσσαλὰ σοφίσματα.
Rely upon it, sooner or later, Paul will have Malta, the French will have
Egypt, and the Mamelukes will justify the proverb, devol πλÉKTELV TOL, &C.
&c. &c.'-I release the reader.
Nor was Landor loath to pay Parr back the same liberal lar-
gess for kindnesses expected or received. The old scholar was
just now publishing his 'Spital Sermon, and had promised Landor
a copy; having given him a few months before a small Catullus,
which more than half a century later I saw, still cherished, in
his hands. Characteristic acknowledgment was sent for both:
'It is a sign that I have conversed with hardly a human being, not to
know that your Sermon was published; ... yet again and again do I read
my little Catullus. I never knew the author, and I should not have
esteemed him if I had, unless as the most exquisite of poets. Do I not
know the author of the Sermon? I hope this noble work, for I can speak
of as much as I have seen, will be effectual in making Englishmen write
English. Our language is bruised, as it were, and swollen by the Latin;
but it is contaminated, enervated, and distorted by the French! If we are
to borrow, let us borrow from the principal and not from the underlings;
but with a little good management, I think we are quite rich enough.'
Adair's letters are wholly on matters political; but though
he feels strongly, he writes always with ability and a command
of temper; and in him, even while yet he was a constant butt
for the sarcasm of Canning and his friends, I seem to recognise
1797-1805.
85
AT PARIS IN 1802.
the same quiet courteous gentleman whom I remember meeting
at dinner at Holland House nearly forty years later.
He speaks here of a subject in some degree affecting his loy-
alty as a Whig, but on which, with all his ardour in the cause,
he could agree to differ with Landor.
'With regard to King William, I profess my gratitude to him to arise
from public principle, and public principle alone; but having no other
means of forming my judgment of his character than those which are com-
mon to everybody, I do not feel myself authorised to claim the concurrence
of any man living who has the faculty of reasoning for himself. With your
permission, I will show your letter to Mr. Perry, but without mentioning
your name.'
Landor's ability had made a strong impression on Adair,
but he saw also his defects, and, as in one of his letters where he
criticises an attack which had been levelled at the new govern-
ment, could give him wise and useful hints for guidance. The
subject of another was an appeal in arrest of judgment as to a
personal onslaught; Landor having laughed at the Abbé Delille,
at this time a refugee in London, much petted by the Whigs and
bringing out a poem under their patronage; and it may have
been the early favourable impression thus left by the kindly plea
of Adair for the good old abbé, that led Landor to choose him
afterwards as interlocutor in one of his dialogues. But he never
conquered his own dislike of the French character and literature.
It was one of his earliest and one of his latest peculiarities. The
armed republic that was to change the face of the world had
failed in its glorious mission; even the hopes he once built on
Bonaparte he cherished no longer; and though eager to visit
France as soon as peace was declared, and curious to see her
first consul, it was with very little of that kind of sympathy for
the hero of the eighteenth Brumaire, and now supreme ruler of
France, which carried over at the same time Fox himself, Adair,
and many eager followers.
V. AT PARIS IN 1802.
Landor had declined all introductions; though letters had been
offered him, as he told his brother, which would have opened to
him the salons of the second consul Cambacèrés, and of Berthier
86.
Book II.
FIRST WRITINGS AND EARLIEST FRIENDS.
the minister of war. There was but one Frenchman he cared to
see, and one portion of France. PARIS, as the great city looked
so soon after the storm of the Revolution, with her Louvre filled
by the spoils of Italy; and BONAPARTE, now consul for life;
when these had been seen, he should at once return.
The precise time of his arrival was that to which Words-
worth's well-known sonnet has referred :
This is young Bonaparte's natal day,
And his is henceforth an establisht sway,
Consul for Life.'
Upon the occasion when Bonaparte first publicly assumed the
rank with which he had been thus invested, Landor saw him.
Advantage had been taken of it for a great holiday, of which, as
the young Englishman walked the streets, he saw everywhere-
the mighty preparation. Yet, in the signs of enthusiasm pre-
sented outwardly, there were indications leading strongly to a
suspicion that the enthusiasm had been specially got up for Paris;
and the suspicion became a certainty when the hero of the day
made his appearance.
It was in the garden of the Tuileries; and in a letter to his
brother Henry, now lying before me, Landor described the scene.
At various points there had been built up pyramids of wood,
each of the height of five-and-twenty feet, covered with lamps of
extraordinary brilliancy. In the same manner were ornamented
'the sides of several pieces of water in which were fountains
playing; and there was not a statue nor an orange-tree of which
you could not distinguish the minutest part. Seven rows of
' benches were erected over the grand flight of steps which leads.
into the palace; immediately above, at the height perhaps of
thirty feet, sat the principal officers of state; and on the leads
which cover the colonnade were the military guards. Bona-
'parte made his appearance in the centre, where his wife had
'sat some time in company with the other two consuls.
I ex-
pected that the sky would have been rent with acclamations.
On the contrary, he experienced such a reception as was given
'to Richard the Third. He was sensibly mortified. All bowed,
(
-but he waved to and fro, and often wiped his face with, his
• handkerchief. He retired in about ten minutes.'
1797-1805.
87
AT PARIS IN 1802.
Landor's own mortification could hardly have been less than
Bonaparte's. Not thus had he expected to see the man by whose
astonishing career, up to this turning hour of it, all the world
had been enthralled: the hero of Italy, by whom conflicting
creeds were to be reconciled; the armed leader of the French
Revolution, by whom decaying nations were to be regenerated.
Was it possible that he in whom such hopes had centred could
now consent to become but another life-tenant of the Tuileries,
changing the substance for the shadows of greatness? In the
same year and month when these letters were written by Lan-
dor, that question was sorrowfully put and answered by Words-
worth:
'I grieved for Bonaparté with a vain
And an unthinking grief! for who aspires
To genuine greatness but from just desires,
And knowledge such as he could never gain?'
Bluntly and characteristically, but to similar effect, Landor
wrote off to his brother under the immediate influence of what
Paris itself had shown him; and it is worthy of note that amíd
his many changes of opinion, the opinion now formed of Napo-
leon, and of the people under his rule, was never afterwards
materially changed. His point of view was not that of Words-
worth, and his wishes and aims were different; but he had ar-
rived substantially at the same result. Doubtless the govern-
'ment of Bonaparte,' he wrote, 'is the best that can be contrived
for Frenchmen. Monkeys must be chained, though it may
'cost them some grimaces.) If you have read attentively the
'last senatus-consultum, you will find that not an atom of li-
berty is left. This people, the most inconstant and therefore
'the most contemptible in the world, seemed to have recovered
'their senses when they had lost their freedom. The idol is
beyond their reach, but the idolatry has vanished. A consul
of so great a genius will make the nation formidable to all the
earth but England; but I hope there is no danger of any one
'imitating its example. As to the cause of liberty, this cursed
'nation has ruined it forever." What he thus said in his twenty-
seventh year he was saying in his eighty-seventh, nearly in the
same words; the intervening sixty years having failed to amend
or remove the impression thus received in his youth.
(
88
Book II.
FIRST WRITINGS AND EARLIEST FRIENDS.
To his sister Elizabeth he described the second occasion when
he saw Napoleon. It was at a review in the court of the Tuile-
ries, when he stood within six or eight yards of him for a quarter
of an hour. His countenance,' he wrote, 'is not of that fierce
cast which you see in the prints, and which perhaps it may
assume in battle. He seems melancholy and reserved, but not
'morose or proud. His figure and complexion are nearly like
'those of Charles Norris. He rode a little white horse, about
'the size of my father's; and cantered up and down six or eight
' lines of military, drawn out in the court of the Tuileries, which
' is about the size of Lincoln's-inn-fields. Each line lowered its
'colours as he passed, and he took off his hat in return. The
'French are not mightily civil, and one cannot much wonder,—
'but I got an admirable place by a piece of well-timed flattery.
'After I had seen Bonaparte canter by me at the distance of
' about a dozen yards, I left my situation at the window and
'went down close to the gate of the palace. Presently came
"the chief consul and half a score generals. The people made
room through fear of the horses, which indeed were fierce
'enough, being covered with blue and red velvet, one half of
' which was hid with gold-lace. Instead of going with the crowd,
I pushed forward and got by the side of Bonaparte's Mame-
'louk, in a place where there were none but soldiers. There
was a very tall fellow just before me. I begged him to let me
see Bonaparte, and observed that probably he had seen him
' often and shared his victories. The youth was delighted. Ah!
'le voilà, monsieur ! said he and in a moment there was no-
thing between me and this terror of Europe but the backs of
'two horses, over which I could see him as distinctly as I see
'this paper.'
It is doubtful if he saw him again, though he always believed
it was the fugitive from Waterloo whom he met at Tours thir-
teen years later, when the allied armies were in Paris: but he
remembered to the close of his life that first sight of Napoleon ;
and his description only the year before his death, in conversa-
tion with an American lady in Florence, is not contradicted by
his letter written more than sixty years before. I was in Paris,'
said Landor one day, 'at the time that Bonaparte made his
1797-1805.
89
AT PARIS IN 1802.
"
'entrance as first consul. I was standing within a few feet of
'him when he passed, and had a capital good look at him. He
was exceedingly handsome then, with a rich olive complexion
'and oval face, youthful as a girl's. Near him rode Murat,
mounted upon a gold-clad charger; and very handsome he was
'too, but coxcombical.'
"
On his way back he wrote to his sister of the carriage-horses
and cart-horses of the country, and a few lines from this letter
are worth preserving.
'First I will tell you of those that are used in carriages. Their sides
are so flat that a whole horse looks like half a one, and their harness is
nothing but a hundred pieces of rope: such harness is easily repaired. On
the contrary, the cart-horses are decorated most magnificently. There is
a high piece of wood above the collar, on which is suspended a sheepskin
dyed red or blue. The rest of the body is covered with a net, the meshes
of which are so large that it serves no purpose but ornament. There is not
a horse in France that would not give all he is worth to be rid of these
sheepskins, at least in summer; but there is no redress.'
His feeling on finding himself in England again was upon
the whole a healthier one than that with which he quitted it.
The splendours of the Republic had paled. Too many close
resemblances had presented themselves between the French cart-
horse and the French citizen. The meshes woven by the con-
quests of Napoleon were no doubt highly ornamental, but other-
wise not of much benefit; and the red sheepskin of military glory
was not worth the galling pressure of its accompanying 'high
'piece of wood above the collar.' One of Landor's first acts at his
return was to assist in the publication of a new edition of his
Gebir, produced at Oxford under his brother's direction; and the
line which had characterised Bonaparte as a mortal man above
all mortal praise,' appeared with a note of very large qualifica-
tion. Bonaparte might have been so,' he now said, 'and in the
'beginning of his career it was augured that he would be. But
unhappily he thinks that to produce great changes is to perform
great actions. To annihilate ancient freedom and substitute
new; to give republics a monarchical government, and the pro-
C
(
* Atlantic Monthly for April 1866. I looked with wonder upon a
person,' says the lady who describes these last days of Landor, 'who re-
'membered Napoleon Bonaparte as a slender young man, and listened
' with delight to a voice from so dim a past.'
t
90
Book 11.
FIRST WRITINGS AND EARLIEST FRIENDS.
6
6
vinces of monarchy a republican one; in short, to overthrow by
'violence all the institutions, and to tear from the heart all the
social habits of man, has been the tenor of his politics to the
present hour.' Nor did he hesitate in another note to declare,
while confessing the hopes he had indulged of an empire of jus-
tice and equality, that in such hopes raised from the French Re-
volution every good man had been disappointed. 'God forbid,'
he exclaimed, 'that we should ever be impelled to use their means
‘of amelioration, or that our arms should be attended by success
´ like theirs—internal and external subjugation.'
VI. AGAIN WRITING POETRY.
Other literary work he also at this time took in hand. In the
lecture-rooms at Oxford he had made acquaintance with the story
of the Phocæans, the invaders of Gaul who built Marseilles; and
he now selected it for the subject of an epic. Of the exact time
when he took up or laid aside his plan, I cannot speak with cer-
tainty; but before his execution of that part which he published
there had come the interval and influence of Gebir, and it was
in some respects more adverse than favourable, for as yet even
the ten admirers he challenged had not come to him. There is
a touching admission to this effect in one of his letters to Southey
in 1809. 'I confess to you, if even foolish men had read Gebir,
I should have continued to write poetry. There is something
' of summer in the hum of insects.' After such experience, he
had less care to renew the effort in any finished or elaborate form.
He rushed at once into print with what he had written; sent it
out uncorrected in another sixpenny pamphlet; and, pleading
the example of the painter who asked people only to tell him his
faults, protested that he wished to ascertain not merely whether
his poetry was good, but whether it was wanted.
The answer now may be given succinctly that it was good
and was not wanted; falling dead-born, yet containing what the
world should not have let perish so indifferently. As a whole,
undoubtedly the poem is too like its own Sardian vase of bur-
nished gold,
'Dazzling without, but dark from depth within,'
1797-1805.
91
AGAIN WRITING POETRY.
and though between a darkness of this kind and the mud that
thickens shallow streams there is a difference, and obscurity will
often be really occasioned by depth, a poem is the worst form one
can find it in. On its surface, nevertheless, as in the Sardian
vase, there will be beauties telling with all the more dazzling pro-
minence for that defect; and there are in Landor's little tract that
contained the Phocæans things more masterly than in any other
poetical writing of that day. His prevailing characteristic con-
tinued to be a vivid picturesqueness; and I quote a few lines to
show the frequent reflective beauty that set this off:
-Those who living filled the smallest space,
In death have often left the greatest void.
When from his dazzling sphere the mighty falls,
Men, proud of showing interest in his fate,
Run to each other, and with oaths protest
How wretched and how desolate they are.
The good departs, and silent are the good.'
Of smaller pieces in the same tract, the finest was Chrysaor,
of which the treatment is as Titanic as the subject. Something
of this may be shown by the wonderful beauty of the image of the
sail at the close of the description of the giant rebel's overthrow.
... the Sacrilege
Rais'd up his head astounded, and accurst
The stars, the destinies, the gods. .
But answer heard he none. The men of might
Who gather'd round him formerly, the men
Whom, frozen at a frown, a smile revived,
Were far enormous mountains interposed,
Nor ever had the veil-hung pine outspread
O'er Tethys then her wandering leafless shade.'
Another, which was a great favourite with Wordsworth, is
very pretty and striking:
'In his own image the Creator made,
His own pure sunbeam quickened thee, O man!
Thou breathing dial! Since thy day began
The present hour was ever markt with shade !'
Whatever else may be alleged of Landor's style, there is no-
thing weak or pompous about it; flaccid or turgid lines, the cer-
tain sign of inferior handling, do not occur; and there are no
gaspings for breath. His word answers always to his thought;
and the movement of his verse, sustained at the level of his fancy
92
FIRST WRITINGS AND EARLIEST FRIENDS. Book II.
and language, takes its music from both. Passages in themselves
quite perfect stand out in this way from his compositions, even
when otherwise least successful. It is indeed his defect too often
to treat particular things with an excess of vividness, by which
the general level of his work is placed at disadvantage. Impe-
tuosity, want of patience, is as bad in literature as in life; and it
was his very power of putting rapidly and visibly on his page
what he saw himself with astonishing vividness, that, for want
of certain links of connection, dropped in his eagerness as of no
account, but very necessary to the enjoyment of his readers, gave
occasional obscurity to a style in itself transparently clear. This
remark is made in connection with the poems under notice, be-
cause, in reviewing them, the stanch and as yet almost solitary
friend of Gebir justified on this ground a little wavering from the
allegiance he so generously and loyally had proffered to its writer,
the young poet still even by name unknown to him.
Southey's article appeared in what was called the Annual Re-
view,* a 'history of literature' just set up by Doctor Aikin, which,
happily for Southey, had not a very long life; the wage for which
he was labouring at it being so low, that he must have struck
work if it had not starved out itself by starving its authors. At
this time it happened that William Taylor of Norwich had great
influence over Southey, and had been doing his best to laugh him
out of his idolatry of Gebir. Great at the derivation of words,
he declared it to have been aptly so named, 'quasi gibberish;'
and Southey, though by no means abandoning his own opinion,
was uneasy at the adverse opinion of his friend. Reviewing the
new poem, he admits that the story of its predecessor had been
related in language so involved and difficult that few could pene-
trate its meaning; and that they who did might perhaps have
overrated its merits in proportion to the difficulty they had over-
come in discovering them. Still he protested its merits to be of
most uncommon excellence, and that, though the mine was dark
and the ore deep, there was ore of priceless value. But he did
not find the second effort equal to the first, or that the five in-
tervening years had matured the taste of the author, whoever he
might be. Somebody, he added, had said of Gebir that its thoughts
* Published by Longman and Rees, 1802: see vol. i. p. 663.
1797-1805.
93
AGAIN WRITING POETRY.
.
were connected by flea-skips of association; but Gebir was lucid
compared with the Phoceans. At the same time Southey defined
the obscurity, not quite truly but not unfairly, as arising from a
passion for compression; pointing out that this might be carried
so far as to become a mere short-hand, reminding a writer of his
own conceptions, but never explaining them to others. In short,·
with much complimentary admission as to the few passages which
he had found to be intelligible, Southey's verdict was adverse to
Poetry by the Author of Gebir.
Fortunately Landor never knew this, or that his earliest cri-
tical friend had ever momentarily faltered in allegiance to him;
but the remarks on Gebir's obscurity, supposed to have been Doc-
tor Aikin's, were not without their influence. The author had
lately taken lodgings at Oxford to be near his brother Robert,
who was in residence at Worcester-college; and the fruit of their
deliberations was the publication, after not many months, of an
edition of Gebir now rarely to be met with, accompanied not only
by a Latin version of it, the Gebirus, but by prose arguments to
each book in both languages, with notes of explanation to the
passages supposed to be most obscure. I must add, however,
that even this concession provoked no kindly return; that in his
handsome coat Gebir fared no better than in his homely one; and
that the brothers, impatient of the refusal of the critics to take
farther notice of their labours, went soon after on their own
account into the critical line.
<
Mr. Robert Landor's letters have informed me pleasantly as
to these matters: Even the first edition of Gebir was followed
'speedily by little unbound publications, of which I cannot re-
'member correctly either the order or the titles. The Phocans,
'the commencement of an epic poem, various Latin verses and
English verses filling no more than a few pages, a little volume
' of Icelandic poems suggested by Mr. Herbert's success, but no-
thing in prose that I can remember before the first two volumes
'of his Imaginary Conversations, except a few pages on Primitive
'Sacrifices. I often tried to dissuade him from such diminutive
'works, or rather scraps, as betraying too much impatience, and
'as excusing the public neglect. They were read by a few per-
'sonal friends only, and only one of them was noticed in a re-
94
Book II.
FIRST WRITINGS AND EARLIEST FRIENDS.
•
.
6
'view. I am not unwilling that you should smile at my expense,
knowing how tolerant you are. When there were no magazines
'excepting the Gentleman's, young aspirants to literature could
try their pretensions nowhere else so safely as in the reviews.
• The Edinburgh and Quarterly, a little later, were accessible only
to a few of higher pretensions and qualities better ascertained.
'For the rest it was not at all necessary that they should have
'any knowledge of the subjects about which they wrote. They
'placed themselves as doctors learned in literary law. They took
'their seats on the judge's bench before they had prepared them-
'selves by their studies for the bar. It was necessary to assume
'great dignity and authority; a compassionate or contemptuous
treatment of the culprits trembling before them was necessary;
'but learning, wisdom, and experience were not necessary. Ex-
cepting that my conscience acquits me of any wish to give pain,
or of any malignant pleasure in tormenting my betters, such a
' critic was I!—a professional critic!-a reviewer! My first article
was on Walter's Iceland tale of Gunlaug and Helga-very con-
'fident in its patronage indeed! Walter was delighted, and both
'of us laughed at the imposture. The Oxford Review broke down
'after the first three or four numbers; and my conscience is the
more easy as I had contributed only two or three articles, con-
'ceited enough but not malignant. Up to this time there had,
I think, been no notice of my brother's publications since that
by Southey of Gebir. But Walter's impatience under such un-
' merited neglect was betrayed by repeated and very contemptu-
ous challenges offered both to critics and authors, in little pub-
'lications which were never read by either. Then, as at a later
age, he seemed equally enraged by the public neglect, and dis-
'dainful of its notice.'
6
6
6
6
The best of those little 'Icelandic' poems being accessible still
in the printed works, nothing more need be said of it here, ex-
cept that it appears to have been suggested to Landor by a letter
from Birch, his favourite and friend at Rugby.
VII. SUCCESSION TO THE FAMILY ESTATES.
Several of Birch's letters had been kept by his schoolfellow,
1797-1805.
95
SUCCESSION TO THE FAMILY ESTATES.
and some of them bear date shortly before the latter, by Doctor
Landor's death, became master of the Staffordshire estate; his
mother continuing life-tenant of Ipsley-court and Tachbrooke.
They are hardly of a kind to justify publication; but they show
with what anxiety, at that particular time, this true friend was
looking forward to the future which lay before the companion of
his boyhood.
'
6
None of the figures of their distant past seems to recur with
kindlier association to Mr. Robert Landor's memory. Before the
latter went up to Oxford, Birch had a fellowship at Magdalen;
and he had become tired of Oxford life and quitted it for a tutor-
ship, before Mr. Robert Landor had obtained his own fellowship.
But during the whole of his undergraduate career he had the ad-
vantage of companionship and counsel from this friend of his
brother's, and in his letters he speaks of him with the utmost
tenderness. 'Walter often visited me,' he says, 'when travelling
'between Warwick, London, Bristol, or South Wales; and he
eagerly renewed his intercourse with Birch, whom I had not
seen till then. Here was an instance of friendship which is so
' often formed between men as unlike each other as possible in
every other particular excepting a single pursuit. Birch was
gentle, quiet, unassuming, very tolerant of other men's opinions
though sufficiently consistent in the maintenance of his own,
an earnest Christian, a sincere churchman, and-O Mr. Forster!
—rather too much inclining to Toryism. Walter was a black
Jacobin. I very soon acquired the title, in my own college, of
Citizen Landor,-and even the Citizen, as being the only repub-
lican there. But Birch loved Walter and smiled at me. Walter
used to speak of his friend's maiden modesty, which extended
beyond his morals. Perhaps this wide difference between
'them kept both parties silent on graver subjects; both feeling
'unwilling to quarrel, and knowing how irreconcilable were their
' opinions. Yet Birch often checked Walter's extravagant lan-
guage by his laughter; and once he asked me how it could have
happened that my brother should have met accidentally so
C
'
เ
.
* 'At school,' Landor writes in one of his letters to me, 'Birch was
named Sancty, from the sobriety of his manners; how different from
• mine!'
96
Book II.
FIRST WRITINGS AND EARLIEST FRIENDS.
(
many ladies, in an evening's walk or two with him and me, every
one of whom was incomparably the most beautiful creature
'whom he had ever seen? how each of twenty fools could be by
'much the greatest fool upon earth? and, above all, how Mr. Pitt
'could be the greatest rascal living, if Mr. Canning surpassed
Mr. Pitt, and Lord Castlereagh surpassed Mr. Canning, and all
'three were infinitely exceeded as brutes and fools by their
' gracious sovereign King George the Third? One may discover,
in Birch's few remaining letters, not a little of this humorous
sense of his friend's ludicrous excesses of speech; at once sug-
gested, and in its expression subdued, by personal regard of an
uncommon kind, and in no way abating an almost passionate
admiration given eagerly to Landor's genius and scholarship.
The earliest in date is one of April 1805, which, after tell-
ing him of a publication by Mr. William Herbert of transla-
tions from the Icelandic that he thinks would interest him by
the accurate information in the notes and by the spirit of the
poetry, says in the next sentence: 'Our friend Cary of Christ
'Church published about a month ago a translation of the In-
'ferno of Dante, which I am just about to read. I anticipate
'considerable pleasure from it. I hear already that it sells well.'
Exactly fifty-seven years had passed after this when Landor,
writing to Mr. Lytton of Birch himself and of their school-
fellow the translator of Dante, adds in the very next sentence:
• We have another admirable translator in William Herbert. I
owe my Gunlaug to his stories from the Icelandic. How in-
comparably better this northern poetry than that of the Trou-
badours! The Icelandic seems to be a softer language than
theirs, which is highly praised by people who surely never
read it; for it is excessively harsh, and much resembles the
'Genoese. The Gauls could never scale the heights of Par-
nassus since Apollo drove them down with thunder and light-
'ning.' A word dropped by accident, unconsciously awakening
some association of the past, had again connected those names
of his youth in the old man's memory.
เ
6
(
Very frequently Birch alludes to the Gebirus. His friend
continuing to press him for any remarks it might have suggested
in the reading to so fine a Latin scholar, Birch retorts that he
1797-1805.
97
SUCCESSION TO THE FAMILY ESTATES.
is only a scholar as his old school-fellow is a master; that his
objection to criticism in such a case is the presumption of it;
and that he has but to think of past days at Rugby and Oxford
to know the little reason he should have, by comparison with
his friend, ‘for confidence in his critical sagacity, and still more
' in his grammatical accuracy.' In vain does his friend encour-
age him to greater confidence by sending him a list of faults he
has himself already discovered: Birch thinks unobjectionable
several of the passages named, and says (what is quite true of the
Gebirus) that not one of them, to which objection might be
taken on strictly classical grounds, is without beauty of another
kind more than compensating. In fine, says Birch: 'I have
come to the conclusion, after repeated reading of the Gebirus,
' that my knowledge of poetical latinity is much more confined
'than yours, and that a more extensive and habitual study of
'the Latin poets has made you even more accurate than I can
'pretend to be.'
Another subject of discussion in their letters is pastoral
poetry, as to which some of Landor's opinions are expressed
with vigour and liveliness. His point is that in pastoral poetry,
though apparently the easiest of any, none since the ancients
had succeeded; and though he does scant justice to Thomson, a
man not more lovable for his character than for his writings,
what he says has truth at the bottom of it, and he was always
proud of what he thought he had himself accomplished in this
field by the episode of Tamar.
'Thomson has many great beauties, but never was successful in his
characters; and his verses make one pant in reading them, which is
owing to their structrue, not to what they convey. He was too happy to
know anything of the passions. But we have nothing in common with
pastoral life, while even the highest of the ancients had much. Our modes
of address are different, our habits, our inclinations. They had a nerve
more than we have. Ours is polish; theirs, poetry. We succeed in pro-
portion as we remove ourselves from home, particularly in pastoral.'
Of the kind of life Landor was leading at this time, while
his father's health had been declining, the letters give various
indications. He was too eagerly anticipating his succession to the
family estates, and was greatly exceeding the income put aside.
for him. Already Doctor Landor has had to sell some property
H
98
Book II.
FIRST WRITINGS AND EARLIEST FRIENDS.
in discharge of debts contracted by him; and in return he had
undertaken to present his brother Charles to the family living
of Colton, in the event of its not falling vacant before his father's
death. Though supposed to be mainly resident in Bath or Bris-
tol, or in Wales, he was very frequently in London., Birch goes
at his particular request to see a horse he has set his mind upon;
congratulates him on the acquisition of a Titian; is able, by
a lucky purchase of his own at a broker's near Cavendish-
square, to add to his friend's collection a 'grand old head;' and
is discussing with him a Hogarth which Landor has purchased,
and which he has asked Gillray the caricaturist to give judg-
ment upon, as Hogarth may claim admittance to you on the
score of relationship.' In one of his letters Birch expatiates
on the pleasure he has had in Landor's description of the lofty
aims he is cherishing, and in the next but one sends him urgent
remonstrance against his brooding over avoidable calamities.
You find from another of the letters that these calamities are
connected with money; and from another, that a princely gift is
nevertheless ready for 'the collection made lately in Christ-church
' to the amount of sixty pounds' in aid of the author of the Plea-
sures of Hope. There are questions in politics where it is plain
enough that the friends are in imperfect sympathy; but even
Birch could hardly have refused a smile to one of his friend's
epigrams upon the common talk then spreading itself abroad as
to the Prince of Wales and his doings.
6
First Carlton House, my country friend,
And then the playhouse you should see;
Here comedies in marriage end,
There marriages in tragedy.'
One political subject there was, however, on which Landor
found himself now in agreement with his Tory friend, as with
most Englishmen who cared much for England. A powerful
independent party having its root in the higher middle class,
indifferent for the most part to the home quarrels of the leading
statesmen, and caring as little for the combinations of Adding-
ton and Pitt, or Fox and the Grenvilles, as for the foolish exclu-
siveness of the king, had been lately reanimating and strength-
ening the armed resistance to France. The previous year, which

(
(
1797-1805.
SUCCESSION TO THE FAMILY ESTATES.
GENERAL LIBRAR
Jaiversity of
MICHOAN
brought Pitt back into office, had made the first consul empe-
ror and launched against England the fleets of France and Spain.
But Nelson was again afloat, and the hope of all that was best
in England turned upon him. In verses that have not survived,
Landor had given expression to this confidence in the hero;
and almost simultaneously with the news of Trafalgar the
reached his friend, whose acknowledgment of it in a letter dated
the 11th of November 1805, is all that now remains to indicate
what it was.
poem
'I thank you for your letter and animated verses, where you seem to
have been inspired by the prophetic spirit ascribed to poets of old, and to
have anticipated the glorious victory of Nelson, the news of which had
reached me just before I received them.'
He closes the same letter by telling Landor that their friend
Cary has finished, and is about to send out in small octavo, the
second volume of his translation of Dante, which, he adds, 'con-
sidering its very close adherence to the original, seems to me
more elegant than I could easily have conceived.' In the same
letter he notices also the publication of Scott's Lay and Sou-
they's Madoc; saying he has read both, and that though he
believes it does not agree with the general sentiment he will yet
venture to say that he far prefers Southey. But he thinks
Southey's fault is diffusion, just as the friend to whom he is
writing has the grander defect of compression, the excess in the
other extreme,—an excellent remark, in which lay much of the
secret never perfectly known to Southey himself, of his singular
passion for Landor's poetry. It was an ideal he was always
aiming at, and missing; and in proportion as he found himself
still falling short of it, his admiration increased.
During the period of these letters this amiable and accom-
plished person was living as tutor in the family of an English
earl. He seems,' writes Mr. Robert Landor, 'to have grown
'tired of a college life since the departure of so many friends
'from Oxford; and he undertook the tuition of a youth in one
'of our most wealthy and noble houses. Walter learnt some
particulars of his residence there, certainly not from himself.
'Birch resigned his office before the education of his pupil had
'been completed, greatly to their regret. Soure attachment had
100
Book II.
FIRST WRITINGS AND EARLIEST FRIENDS.
(
(
' arisen between himself and a daughter of this family,—whe-
'ther it was mutual, or on which side it was strongest, is not
'known. But Birch was much too honourable and conscien-
'tious for its encouragement, and therefore retired on a small
college living. I cannot understand how any disengaged lady
'could live in daily intercourse with such a man- for he was
very handsome too-and remain insensible to such amiability.
· Walter even believed that his friend's own heart was concerned,
' and had heard additions to the story which I fancy were quite
apocryphal. I suspect that Walter may here have confounded
'the history of Birch's friend Russell, who left us only two son-
'nets, dying of a broken heart, with some such narrative, heard
'imperfectly and easily believed, of his own friend.' In the
only allusions to the family I find in Birch's letters, unusually
strong regard appears, and very marked expressions of respect;
nor does it seem otherwise probable that any romantic ending
to the little love-story was contributed by himself, for he mar-
ried and had children, surviving it a score of years; but the men-
tion of it now can give pain to no one, and what may be accepted
for truth in it is characteristic and worthy of Landor's favourite
school-fellow.
Doctor Landor died at the close of 1805, but had been ailing
all that year. There is a letter of Landor's to his brother Henry
dated in February, which mentions their father's anxiety at the
time to complete the settlement of his property, and adverts to
certain conveyances which have just been executed in his own
favour. But these are hardly mentioned before it breaks off into
allusions to Parr, his old schoolmaster James, and his own Latin
verses, where the evident and eager interest contrasts amusingly
with the careless tone of request about the property, which his
brother is to explain when he has leisure. 'I sincerely sym-
'pathise with you,' wrote Birch to Landor on the Christmas-day
of 1805, 'in your regret for the loss of your father, though his
previous state certainly rendered it desirable to himself, and
on that account should make it less afflicting to his family.'
At the close of the letter there is a mention of their Rugby days
in connection with a youth who had there been fag to Landor,
and to both of them since not a little troublesome. With a wise
1797-1805.
101
SUCCESSION TO THE FAMILY ESTATES.
thoughtfulness Birch warns his friend against the dangers, in
the new position that awaits him, of indiscriminating kindness.
The words mark the close of that period of Landor's life
over which any kind of external restraint or control was pos-
sible; and now opens that part of his history,' I am quoting his
brother's language to me,' which followed our father's death and
'the sale of his Staffordshire property, and which appears like
'an exaggeration of the improbabilities of a dream.) But be-
fore finally quitting the period which these two opening books
include, I will let him speak another word for himself upon his
Rugby days. Its place was earlier in the narrative; but as it
confirms and explains what formerly was said of the cause of
his departure from Rugby, gives his little fag a pleasanter word
than Birch could afford him in the letter just named, and sup-
plies another varied and vivid pattern of the mingled yarn of
which the web of every part of his own life was made, it will
not be out of place here. At the date of the letter we had been
corresponding about an Eton boy's cruelty to his fag, which the
newspapers had got hold of and were sharply reproving.
'When I wrote about the cruelty of the Eton boy I had not
'forgotten a lighter case at Rugby. With what pleasure and
even pride do I recall to memory that I was the first of that
'school who paid the lad he fagged. Poor little B. H. had
'three or four bottles to fill at the pump in a hard frost, and
was crying bitterly, when I took pity on him and made him
'my fag, at threepence a week, I think.
'from obedience to others, and I seldom
"
6
This exempted him
exercised my vested
rights. Perhaps the head-master, James, thought it an in-
'novation to pay. He certainly hated me for my squibs, and
' had also threatened to expel me for never calling Will Hill
'Mister; I having told him I never would call Hill or any other
'Mister unless I might call the rest so. At last he wrote to my
'father that I was rebellious and incited others to rebellion ;
and unless he took me away he should be obliged ("much to
"his sorrow") to expel me. As I was within five of the head,
' and too young for Oxford, I was placed under a private tutor
' and matriculated at seventeen. Among my enormities was writ-
'ing the verses I now send you. James had chosen some of my
Uorm
102
FIRST WRITINGS AND EARLIEST FRIENDS. Book 11.
<
worst verses to play for, as we called it: that is, every half-
'holiday was supposed to be gained for the lads by the best
verses of the day. Mine were always the best, but, out of
'malice I am afraid, the very worst of them were chosen; and
this was my revenge.'
Of the extent of it, far exceeding the precisely similar in-
stance referred to in a former page, the reader must happily be
left ignorant, the accompanying Alcaic verses not admitting of
translation. But, what they show of a man's intellect in youth
entirely without guidance or control, the letter recalling them
not less strikingly shows of the passions and impulses of youth
surviving to extreme old age; and it will be well to take this
double consideration with us into the years we have now to
retrace.
BOOK THIRD.
1805-1814. ÆT. 30-39.
AT BATH AND CLIFTON, IN SPAIN, AND AT LLANTHONY.
1. Life at Bath. 11. Robert Southey. 111. In Spain. iv. Letters to Southey.
v. The Tragedy of Count Julian. vi. In possession of Llanthony Abbey.
VII. Marriage and Life at Llanthony. VIII. Public Affairs. IX. Private
Disputes. x. Departure from England.
I. LIFE AT BATH.
In the interval that immediately followed his succession to the
paternal estate, Landor lived chiefly in Clifton or in Bath; and
at the latter place his younger brother found him, soon after
their father's death, with the reputation of very great wealth,
' and the certainty, at his mother's death, of still greater. A fine
'carriage, three horses, two men-servants, books, plate, china,
'pictures, in everything a profuse and wasteful outlay, all con-
'firmed the grandeur.' Upon the whole not a life, for such a
man, either profitable then to have lived or now to recall; and
very little here shall be said of it. Some love-verses connected
with the latter portion of it can also afford to perish. Their
heroine, Ioné, who translated far too easily into Jones, has re-
tained not so much as a fragment of romance. Even of his
Ianthé, to whom in these days much beautiful and tender verse
was dedicated, there is nothing now remaining to claim a place.
in my story except such chance allusion as hereafter may drop
from himself.
The sort of life thus led in Bath, however, could not be passed
without results more or less grave; and, in little more than a
year, they showed themselves in a form for which the remedy
was supposed to have been found in a project for selling the old
104
Book III.
BATH, CLIFTON, SPAIN, LLANTHONY.
paternal estate in Staffordshire, and reinvesting in other land at
greater profit. Reserving these things to a year or two hence,
when the necessary arrangements, meanwhile set on foot, became
practicable and were completed, I shall dwell upon those inci-
dents only of the intervening years out of which matter can be
extracted that is worth remembering, or that throws any kind
of light upon the variable career and character of which, with
all its good and evil so capriciously intermixed, its comedy and
tragedy, its clouds and sunshine, its generous emotions and tem-
pestuous passions, its use and its waste of prodigious powers, it
is my object in these pages to convey at the least no false im-
pression.
His eldest sister was now his constant correspondent, and
would have saved him from many a folly if cleverness and good
sense could have done it. But he was no sooner out of one scrape
than he was into another. 'The battledore you talk of,' he re-
plies from Bath to one of her letters, 'is called a cornet, and I
play at it better than any man in England. I was taught in
France. A little girl said to me, Jouez donc aux cornets, mon-
'sieur? My reply was, A la bonne heure, ma petite. Je ne me
'suis pas marié à présent. I played, nevertheless, and have
'played the same game since. I believe I am more in request
' here than I have ever been; not for myself,--for we are not,
' like wine, improvable by age,—but for Frolic and Favourite,
and what is whispered of Llanthony.' Frolic and Favourite
were his carriage-horses. He ends his letter with a parable of
a young lady whom a spectre was reported to have visited at
night, until her mother, by taking her to sleep in her own room,
exorcised the ghost, to which he had himself thereupon ad-
dressed these lines :
'
Thou, since she sleeps with her mamma,
Lookst like a fox in some ha-ha,
Who views, with nostrils opened wide,
A pheasant on the other side,
Pants, grumbles, whines with lank desires,
And licks his whiskers, and retires!'
Very well for the ghost that he could; but some enterprises
there were out of which retirement was less easy, and they largely
occupy his sister Elizabeth's letters. She is in a perpetual agi-
1805-1814.
105
LIFE AT BATH.
tation of warning against any ill-advised marriage, one danger of
this kind succeeding another very rapidly. She has indeed no
objection to a well-considered proceeding of the sort; and
sketches one in the language of an old servant, who has come
with her annual gift of a basket of chickens to the family at
Warwick, and 'hopes Mr. Walter will marry some fine lady of
a good family and fortin, as he ought, to be sure.' Not that
to the sister these appear indispensable, if their place is other-
wise filled. 'Birth and fortune,' she tells her brother, 'are not
' requisites, but good disposition and good understanding are;
and how many innocents, only for being pretty, have you all
your life been thinking sensible! That was a home-thrust, and
had some effect, the lady against whom in particular it was aimed
not retaining her influence; but one of these affairs had gone
very far before anything of it was known to her, and she has
almost to resign herself to the confession that it must be. 'I
hope to God your choice may be a fortunate one, for I never
was and never shall be happy when you are otherwise. You
are not just to me. I do wish you to be married; but I am
'sure the common sort are not calculated for you.'
<
6
Happily escape came again; and in this case from the lady
herself. Some offence had been taken by her, not clearly to be
made out from Landor's letter, which dwells far less on the in-
cident itself than upon the ball and supper where it happened,
with its winter pines, peas, strawberries, and 'sparagus,' besides
ice enough to cover the Nieper and beauty enough to thaw it
all. To which his sister quietly rejoins that she hears with de-
light of his being again heart-free; makes neat allusion to the
lady's predecessor as well as the lady herself, by remarking that
their friend 'the old doctor' had declared 'neither to be worthy
' of him;' hopes he may now have time, as her mother says, to
'think of somebody worth something;' and tells him that the
blaze of beauty over in Bath must be brighter than the fire by
which she is writing, if it succeeds in again making him intem-
perately warm.
Other subjects also are in the brother's and sister's letters.
He was deeply affected at the time, in the midst of his gaieties
and follies by the sudden death of a friend, Mrs. Lambe, very
106
Book III.
BATH, CLIFTON, SPAIN, LLANTHONY.
dear to him in early Warwick days; and this was followed by
another similar event which moved him even more. One of the
young ladies of the Aylmer family, whom he had met in the old
happy Swansea time, died also very suddenly; and in his let-
ters he tells his sister, again and again, how vainly he had tried
every species of amusement to escape from the melancholy thoughts
that since had haunted him incessantly. He turned at last for
relief to writing verses on the friends he had lost; and in Feb-
ruary 1806 there came out, in a half-crown pamphlet of ninety-
eight pages printed at Bath, the Simonidea, so called because its
opening pieces were dedicated to the memory of the dead, a spe-
cies of composition in which Simonides excelled. But besides
its verses on the dead, there were others on the living, in which
the ladies to whom we have seen his sister allude, the Ionés
and Ianthés, played their part; and afterwards, in writing to
Southey, he thus himself referred to the little volume: There
are many things of which I am ashamed in the Simonidea. 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.
'Adieu; and when you read the Simonidea, pity and forgive me.'
How much pity and forgiveness he needed for the kind of warmth
that had fallen under his sister's rebuke, no one knew better than
himself.
८
เ
But the heats he suffered from were not from what his sister
called the ‘blaze of beauty' only. His eager interest in politics
had not meanwhile slackened; and, unpalatable as many of his
opinions were to the particular part of society which his present
mode of living necessarily threw much in his way, moderation
or compromise on any points, even in the matter of speech, was
a virtue still unknown to him. 'About sixty years ago,' his
brother writes to me, 'an old friend of his who felt much esteem
'for him, a Major Tickell, the descendant of Addison's friend,
expressed his surprise to me that Walter should have lived
so long. "We were occasional guests," said he, "at the same
"public table in Bath two winters, where there were other mili-
""tary men; and if I had talked as he talked, there would have
""been half a dozen bullets through my body if the first five had
6
1805-1814.
107
LIFE AT BATH.
""been insufficient." Such dangers were in truth only escaped
as his character became known for extravagance, and some-
'times chiefly through the interposition of such friends as the
major.' On the other hand it is to be remembered that there
were estimable men in the major's profession then, to whom the
mere praise of Mr. Fox would be a horrible Jacobin extrava-
gance; and the accession of that statesman and his friends to
power, on Pitt's death in the early part of the year, had given
Landor's inter-
unusual bitterness to party strifes and hatreds.
course with Parr it naturally drew closer; and it brought him
again into correspondence with Adair, to whom, more eager than
ever against Bonaparte, and resolute for maintaining the effici-
ency of the power which had been thus far the only check to
his ambition, he had sent some suggestions (in April 1806) about
the navy, which Adair was anxious he should draw up in a
practical form and lay before Lord Howick. It led of course
to nothing. Before a year was over Fox had followed to the
grave his great adversary; the rest of the talents' were no-
where; and, with the Portland and Perceval combinations, the
career of Castlereagh and Canning had begun.
6
It was while these changes were in progress that an incident
occurred which Landor would often himself tell pleasantly in
his latter years.
On some occasion unexpectedly he had gone,
after a long interval, to visit his mother at Warwick; when,
Parr happening to have a large company at dinner that day, one
of the guests told their entertainer of the sudden and unlooked-
for arrival at Mrs. Landor's. 'Eat your dinner, eat your dinner,'
said Parr; but hardly had the table-cloth been removed, and
the first glass of wine taken, when the old doctor laid down his
pipe. 'Drink your wine, my friends, drink your wine; I must
'go and see Walter Landor.' And so he did. At Warwick he
presented himself, as unexpectedly as Landor had done very
shortly before, and the friends had an hour together; but no-
thing would he take, not even the cup of tea that was pressed
upon him. 'No, no, Walter, I must go back to my friends;
they are all at dinner.' And Landor would finish the story,
in a pleasant elated way, by declaring himself to be the only
man in the world that could have made Doctor Parr ride half a
108
Book III.
BATH, CLIFTON, SPAIN, LLANTHONY.
dozen miles 'with his dinner in his mouth and his pipe out
' of it.'
II. ROBERT SOUTHEY.
Soon after the incident last related, Landor had started on a
tour in the Lake-country, which Parr thus announced to a friend
who complained afterwards that the promised visit was never
paid him. In the course of the summer you will be called
upon by Mr. Walter Landor, who is going on a tour to the
'Lakes. He is my particular friend. He is impetuous, open-
'hearted, magnanimous; largely furnished with general know-
'ledge; well versed in the best classical writers; a man of
original genius, as appears in his compositions both in prose
' and verse; a keen hater of oppression and corruption; and a
'steady friend to civil and religious liberty. I am confident
'you will be much interested by his conversation; and it is my
good fortune to know that his talents, attainments, and virtues
' amply compensate for all his singularities.' No bad picture
by a friendly hand.
C
With the Lakes already were connected the chiefs of the little
band of writers whose fame became afterwards identified with
that beautiful country. Coleridge had been living at Greta ;
Wordsworth at Grasmere, not many miles away; and Southey
was now permanently fixed at Keswick, the richer for the Fox
and Grenville ministry by a pension of two hundred a year which
one of its members, his friend Wynne, had obtained for him.
Yet far less, for this, did the name of the Whig chief continue
for some years longer a grateful sound to Southey, than for an
incident of one of the last social readings at St. Anne's Hill;
when Fox and his company, not closing at eleven as usual,
' went on till after midnight reading Madoc.' This was some-
thing for a man to remember to whom poetry was all in all,
6
* The generous and genial statesman was indeed a favourite with all
the poets; and but a very few years before, Wordsworth, sending him the
Lyrical Ballads, had thus written: In common with the whole of the
English people, I have observed in your public character a constant pre-
'dominance of sensibility of heart. . . . This cannot but have made you
dear to poets; and I am sure that if, since your first entrance into pub-
lic life, there has been a single true poet living in England, he must
' have loved you.' (See Memoirs by his nephew, i. 167.)
1805-1814.
109
ROBERT SOUTHEY.
and to whom the half of seventy-nine shillings and a penny had
just presented itself as his share of Madoc's profits after twelve
months' sale. But Landor admired Madoc too; its writer's
name had become known to him as that of the first and almost
only friend of Gebir; and, in a letter to his sister in the sum-
mer of 1807, he deplores his ill fortune in having missed an
introduction to Southey. He had very nearly bought an estate
in his neighbourhood, adjoining Loweswater Lake; but he had
not seen him.
(
C
' me.
At Danvers's lodgings in Bristol the memorable friendship
began. At Bristol,' wrote Southey to Grosvenor Bedford at
the end of April 1808, 'I met the man of all others whom I
was most desirous of meeting,—the only man living of whose
praise I was ambitious, or whose censure would have troubled
You will be curious to know who this could be. Savage
'Landor, the author of Gebir; a poem which, unless you have
‹ heard me speak of it, you have probably never heard of at all.
'I never saw any one more unlike myself in every prominent
'part of human character, nor any one who so cordially and
'instinctively agreed with me on so many of the most important
subjects. I have often said, before we met, that I would walk
forty miles to see him; and, having seen him, I would gladly
'walk fourscore to see him again. He talked of Thalaba, and
'I told him of the series of mythological poems which I had
planned; mentioned some of the leading incidents on which
they were to have been formed, and also told him for what
reason they were laid aside-in plain English, that I could
'not afford to write them. Landor's reply was, Go on with them,
' and I will pay for printing them, as many as you will write,
' and as many copies as you please. I had reconciled myself to
'my abdication (if the phrase may be allowable), and am not
sure that this princely offer has not done me mischief; for it
'has awakened in me old dreams and hopes which had been
'laid aside, and a stinging desire to go on, for the sake of show-
'ing him poem after poem, and saying, I need not accept your
offer, but I have done this because you made it. It is some-
6
<
"
thing to be praised by one's peers; ordinary praise I value as
‹ little as ordinary abuse.'
110
Book 111.
BATH, CLIFTON, SPAIN, LLANTHONY.
Prepared long for this meeting at last, as well in likeness as
in unlikeness suited for friendly intercourse, finding at once a
common ground in which what was weakest in each took strength
from what was best in the other, the friendship so begun that
day was ended only by death. Soon there fell from it all that
might have taken the taint of patronage in Landor, and all that
mere literary vanity might have suggested to Southey; while yet
enough was left of the spirit of the compact made at their first
meeting, not to weaken in either the confidence inspired by it.
6
Regularly at successive intervals, for five years from this
time, Southey sent by post to Landor, written clearly in his won-
derful autograph, each section of the whole of his poems of the
Curse of Kehama and Roderick (the latter under the name of
Pelayo'), exactly as each had been first composed; and duly
by the same channel payment as regular had been sent back by
his friend, in admiration always, often in shrewd suggestion,
never without zealous and loud encouragement. Payment of
other kind, though frequently pressed, had been steadily de-
clined; but Landor ultimately forced upon Southey, through
his publishers, a cheque for a large number of copies of Kehama,
which had been dedicated to himself. To this statement it will
be right to add that every transcript by Southey, with its cover-
ing letter, was kept by Landor; and that all of them, with the
rest of the correspondence stretching uninterruptedly over thirty
years, were given by Landor to myself in view of some such un-
dertaking as the present. Southey's were afterwards lent to his
son and his son-in-law for the selection of such portions as they
might desire to publish; but Landor's, which he had himself
reclaimed from the executors of his friend, were at his own re-
quest wholly reserved for any use I might please to make of
them. In connection with these, some portions of Southey's
will be occasionally given, but only such as have not before
been printed either in his son's Life* or his son-in-law's Letters.†
Excluded from both publications, they will yet show probably
better than anything in either what there was that formed the
curious likeness in unlikeness between these remarkable men.
* Six volumes. (Longmans, 1849, 1850.)
+ Four volumes. (Longmans, 1856.)
1805-1814.
111
ROBERT SOUTHEY.
The time at which they met was when Southey had aban-
doned his earlier without finding his later opinions, when he
was out of Utopia but not settled in Old Sarum. He remained
still an ardent reformer. Only a few months back he had been
deploring that Fox should not have died before Pitt, and so
been spared the disgrace of pronouncing a panegyric upon such
an insolent, empty-headed, long-winded braggadocio; and not
a twelvemonth later, when the Quarterly Review suddenly con-
fronted the Edinburgh, armed to the teeth against a tyranny
which, absolute over poetry as well as politics, had come to be
intolerable to many,* he warned the new-comer, which he had
helped into life, that he should withdraw straightway from all
connection with it if it raised against reformers any cry of Ja-
cobinism.† Expressly, indeed, he declared himself then to be,
in terms which Landor might himself have used, for no peace
while Bonaparte lived, and for reform as the only means to
prevent revolution. But it was less in the opinions they thus
held in common, than in their mode of forming and maintain-
ing opinions even widely opposed, that they were unconsciously
so like each other. To both belonged the sanguine temperament,
the determined self-assertion, and the habit, whether within or
beyond the limits where opinion was safe, of free unbridled
thinking. To both was too often applicable what Southey said
of another friend, that the pride of reason in him left no room
or accessibility for any kind of reasoning; and the weaknesses
in both, the inconsistencies, the extreme opinions professed so
often without need, were in a great degree referable to this. In
the years that followed shortly, when to Southey reform and
revolution had come to mean the same thing, not admitting the
change in himself he attributed the whole of it to others, and
said the Jacobins that surrounded him were the Anti-Jacobins of
เ
* 'We shall hoist the bloody flag down alongside that Scotch ship, and
'engage her yard-arm and yard-arm.' (Southey to his brother. Letters, ii.
114.)
†Things are come to this dilemma, Reform or Ruin; and on one of
these horns I pray to God that John Bull may give his damned drivers a
deadly toss. A constitutional reform would save the country, and nothing
short of that will be of any avail.' (To Grosvenor Bedford, 21st April
1809. Letters, ii. 145.)
112
Book III.
BATH, CLIFTON, SPAIN, LLANTHONY.
his youth, equally unjust and as ferocious. Nor was this with-
out truth in a deeper sense than he intended, for in all essential
respects he continued what he had formerly been; and now what
most attracted him to Landor, was less the agreement in present
opinion of which he speaks, than the resemblance in habits of
mind of which he was less conscious, and which in their younger
days had made both of them rebels to authority. Several ex-
pressions to be found in the letters will seem less startling if
these few words are remembered.
There is yet another point on which a word should also be
said. It belonged to the nobler part of Southey's character that
he should take the most exalted view of the calling to which
he had devoted himself. He was one of the greatest, and pretty
nearly the last, of the genuine men of letters that England has
produced, and he honestly believed himself also to be one of
the greatest of her poets. He worked hard and got little; but
while his bare maintenance, and hardly that, arose from his
work for the day, he laboured without pay at other work for
which he knew the rewards must be distant, but appears to
have felt they would be absolutely sure. I was perfectly
' aware,' he said to a friend who had been contrasting one of
his epics with a more popular poetical romance, that I was
'planting acorns while my contemporaries were setting kidney-
'beans. The oak will grow, and though I may never sit under
'its shade, my children will.’ 'Don't call me,' he wrote to
Grosvenor Bedford at this time, 'the most sublime poet of the
age, because both Wordsworth and Landor are at least my
equals. And if I shall have done greater things than either, it
' is not because I possess greater powers.' Not that the reader
now may smile at them are these things quoted, but to explain
still farther what it was that knit so close the friendship of
which I am speaking, and made it so enduring. Southey's al-
ready avowed admiration of Landor's poetry made inexpressibly
grateful to him Landor's praise of his own; and in the pleasure
each continued to derive from the other on this point, or, to
speak plainly, in their frequently excessive self-laudations, sim-
plicity was more prominent than vanity. In a critical moment,
too, the offer to pay for printing more epics had gone straight to
(
1805-1814.
113
ROBERT SOUTHEY.
Southey's heart, almost sinking at the time for want of all en-
couragement. Kehama, just sketched out, had been flung aside;
and the series that was but to begin with Joan, Thalaba, and
Madoc, was ending prematurely amid the heaps of all three.
piled up in the publishers' cellars. He told Walter Scott, of
Landor's princely offer, that it had stung him to the very core;
and as the bite of the tarantula had no cure but dancing, so for
this there would be none but singing. To many other friends
he wrote the same, and often said afterwards that but for Lan-
dor Kehama would not have been finished and Roderick never
begun.
Whether the world could not have borne the loss is another
question. In this matter, appearances at present are against both
Southey and Landor; but as, for the latter, appeal is made in
this book against them, so it will be fair to say, for the former,
that besides many minor poems which will live with the lan-
guage, and ballads which are masterpieces of fantastic beauty,
the longer poems would seem to have fallen into unmerited ne-
glect. It is matter of doubt whether it might not be put as a
test of the existence, or otherwise, of a pure love of the art in
any man, that he should like or dislike these achievements of
Southey; and it is at least certain, that, for many subtle and
pleasing varieties of rhythm, for splendour of invention, for pas-
sion and incident sustained often at the highest level, and for
all that raises and satisfies wonder and fancy, there will be
found in Thalaba, Kehama, and Roderick passages of unrivalled
excellence ('perfect,' even Byron thought); and these may here
excuse, if they do not wholly justify, the hopes that once cen-
tred in them, and to which exalted expression is given in the
correspondence of the friends.
Their letters extend, as I have said, over thirty years; and
one more remark will fitly prelude such extracts as I may make.
Whatever fitful or wayward changes were incident to the life
of which these pages are the record, and over which already
have passed some friendships formed and broken, the intercourse
with Southey was to feel no retiring ebb, but to keep always
on at the full. As it was at the first it continued to the end.
Through all that estranged Southey's opinions more and more
I
114
Book III.
BATH, CLIFTON, SPAIN, LLANTHONY.
from those with whom he had been most in sympathy, Landor
was stanch to him. In every bitterness of the other extreme
which Landor did not scruple to indulge, Southey had excuses
ready for him. When Byron coupled them in ridicule, Sou-
they seized the occasion to avow that no greater glory could
befall his name than that of companionship with Landor's, to
have obtained whose approbation as a poet, and possessed his
friendship as a man, would be remembered among the honours
of his own life when the petty enmities of the generation were
forgotten and its ephemeral reputations had passed away. And
when that life was nearing to its close, almost the very latest
words that Southey was permitted to read with a full conscious-
ness of their meaning were these from the friend whom he had
loved so well: 'If any man living is ardent in his wishes for
your welfare, I am,-whose few and almost worthless merits
your generous heart has always overvalued, and whose infinite
' and great faults it has been too ready to overlook.'
III. IN SPAIN.
Landor's first letter* to Southey began with a warning that
he had not stoicism enough in his nature to deserve his cor-
respondent's good opinion or his own. All that was written of
Kehama had been sent to him in мs, and he makes it mainly
the subject of what he writes. With his praise of it he inter-
mixes skilful objection to its metres, rhymed and unrhymed;
and he excludes novelties of experiment from poetry as not within
its lawful province.
'Shall I avow to you that in general I am most delighted with those
passages which are in rhyme, and that when I come into the blank verse
again my ear repines? Are we not a little too fond of novelty and experi-
ment, and is it not reasonable to prefer those kinds of versification which
the best poets have adopted and the best judges have cherished for the
longest time? Poetry is intended to soothe and flatter our preposses-
sions, not to wound or irritate or contradict them. We are at liberty to
choose the best modifications, we are not at liberty to change or subvert.'
His second letter was of twelve days' later date: Southey
having meanwhile made battle for his own forms of verse, and
* Dated Sunday evening, May 8' [1808].
1805-1814.
115
IN SPAIN.
(
propounded a private belief that the whole system of classical
metres had been nothing more than a creating of difficulty for
the sake of overcoming it. Landor vigorously rejected this her-
esy: on which Southey turned off to a personal appeal, adjuring
Landor himself to write. Write in English, he said, because it
is a better language than Latin; but if you will not write Eng-
lish, write Latin; and in God's name overcome that supersti-
'tion about Robert Smith.* When I consider what he is, it
'puts me out of all patience to think that the ghost of what
'he has been should overlay you like a nightmare.' Other re-
marks he made also, on what he had heard of affairs in Bath.
He wished Landor were married; wished he were as much Quaker
as himself; wished above all he would throw aside Rousseau,
and make Epictetus his manual. To all which Landor replied,
bringing Ianthe herself into the sober presence:
'Shall I give you an elegy I have written:
Vita brevi fugitura! prior fugitura venustas!
Hoc saltem exiguo tempore duret amor.
These opening verses pleased me. I repeated them one morning in the
presence of Ianthe. She held me by both ears till I gave her the Eng-
lish:
Soon, O Ianthe, life is o'er,
And sooner beauty's playful smile!
Kiss me, and grant what I implore,
Let love remain that little while.'
The second consignment of Kehama manuscript lies before
me, scrawled over with innumerable addresses. It had gone to
the Hot-wells, Clifton. It had followed to Pulteney-house, Bath,
and to the South Parade. London and Brighton had been tried;
and it had overtaken Landor at last in Falmouth! From the
latter place he writes to acknowledge it, and one may fancy the
amazement with which Southey read these words. Nothing I
'do, whether wise or foolish, will create much surprise in those
'who know my character. I am going to Spain. In three days
'I shall have sailed. At Brighton, one evening, I preached a
'crusade to two auditors. Inclination was not wanting, and in
* Bobus Smith, the elder brother of Sydney, whose Latin poetry Lan-
dor thought not only the best of our time, but the most masterly since
Lucretius.
116
Book III.
BATH, CLIFTON, SPAIN, LLANTHONY.
(
'
a few minutes everything was fixed. I am now about to ex-
press a wish at which your gentler and more benevolent soul
'will shudder. May every Frenchman out of France perish! May
the Spaniards not spare one! No calamities can chain them
'down from their cursed monkey-tricks; no generosity can bring
'back to their remembrance that a little while since they mim-
'icked, till they really thought themselves, free men. Detestable
race, profaners of republicanism,-since the earth will not open
'to swallow them all up, may even kings partake in the glory of
'their utter extermination! I am learning, night and morning,
'the Spanish language. I ought not to give my opinion of it at
present; but I confess it appears to me such as I should have
'expected to hear spoken by a Roman slave, sulky from the bas-
'tinado. I hope to join the Spanish army immediately on my
landing, and I wish only to fight as a private soldier. There is
nothing in this unless it could be known what I have left for
it, and, having left, have lost.'*
(
6
(
It was a kind of loss which his sister more wisely would have
thought his gain; but at the step thus suddenly taken his family
were as much startled as his friends. He had mentioned it to
no one. The act followed close upon the thought of it, and he
was gone before any one could have reasoned with him.
Yet as
we look back upon it now, and recall some of the circumstances
that immediately impelled it, we may possibly discover, besides
the quixotic rashness, something generous and noble.
Napoleon's attempt to convert Spain and Portugal into de-
pendencies of France was the turning-point of his fortunes.
When he conceived that design he had all Europe, excepting
England, at his feet, and nothing seemed easier than its com-
pletion. To one who had struck down the whole of Germany
and made a satellite of Russia, what danger could there possibly
be in overturning the Peninsular thrones, one of them for years
the most abject of his vassals, and the other the most despicable
of his adversaries? Yet his ruin dates from his perfidy against
them.
The plot had been in progress some time before its real drift
* The letter has simply the date: Falmouth, Wed. Eve.' The post-
mark is 8th August 1808.
1805-1814.
117
IN SPAIN.
was suspected. Both countries had been overrun with French
troops, and the miserable Bourbon princes had been kidnapped,
before the presence of Joseph Bonaparte at Madrid told the
whole treacherous story. A kind of dumb amazement and ac-
quiescence was at first the only feeling awakened. Resistance
by that time seemed dead beyond the hope or power of revival.
Spain had no treasury and no army. Her soldiers had been
carried off to the north of Europe, a hundred thousand French
veterans were in their place, and French troops garrisoned her
strongest fortresses. Humanly speaking, all help and hope had
come to an end, when the world was unexpectedly enthralled by
such a sight as even that century had not witnessed.
The Spanish people themselves arose in mass against their
invaders. All over the country there sprang suddenly into life
local bodies called Juntas, by whom the powers of government
were seized and exercised with a success proportioned to their
resolution and audacity. The flame that had at first risen high-
est in Seville overspread the land with marvellous rapidity.
French fleets were seized, and French garrisons found themselves
isolated in fortresses supposed to be impregnable. Armies were
created and organised; a free press was established; the peas-
antry, self-formed into guerrilla bands, strengthened everywhere.
the national levies; and in the very girls and women of Spain
the French soldiers found avenging furies. It seemed as if at
last the conquering career of Napoleon had been stayed in the
presence of a power grander than any arrayed against it by the
old governments. From the spirit of patriotism and liberty
which had originally been the strength of France, men now be-
lieved that her weakness and her downfall were to come.
To say that the enthusiasm created by these events in most
parts of England was frantic is to employ no misplaced term.
But what was done thereon, from its ignoble beginnings to its
noble end, is matter of history, and excluded from these pages.
History, however, scarcely tells us how deeply individuals were
moved, as, in broken and exaggerated fragments, piece by piece,
the glorious news came over. The shouts of towns and cities
far off, says Wordsworth, found echo in the vales and hills
around him, where the hopes and fears of suffering Spain' had
118
Book III.
BATH, CLIFTON, SPAIN, LLANTHONY.
been equally in all men's hearts. Everywhere too expectation
went as far beyond probability or reason as the exploits that
had aroused it. Castanos and Baylen, Palafox and Saragoza,
names hardly known to this generation, became watchwords
over England; and when King Joseph was reported to have fled
from Madrid, it was as if Napoleon himself had been tumbled
from his throne. Coleridge, then living in Grasmere Vale, has
related how they would, he and Wordsworth together, often and
often walk out to the Raise Gap as late as two o'clock in the
morning to meet the Keswick carrier with the newspaper. It
was a time unparalleled in history, exclaimed Southey, and a
more glorious one never has and never can be exhibited to the
'world.' And just at the time when he was saying this, the
excitement had fallen upon still more inflammable stuff in Lan-
dor's breast, with the result that we have seen. He was for
action, not talking. He resolved to go out as a volunteer. He
took money to contribute to the common stock, and would him-
self lead into battle the troops he should have equipped and
armed. Very quixotic; yet at the heart of it also something of
a generous grandeur. If a more settled earnestness of purpose
had but entered into it!
<
Unfortunately, of such enterprises in general it is to be said
that they fail as a matter of course. The fine-hearted and the
harebrained make an ill match-unprofitable, for the most part,
and barren of issue. There can be no sufficient calculation and no
adequate provision. Something there was, in the present case,
of glory in having been the first English volunteer that set foot
in Spain; but this was nearly all achieved by it or got out of it.
At Corunna Charles Stuart was envoy; attached in a friendly
way to his mission was Charles Robert Vaughan, of All Souls,
Oxford, who had been at Rugby with Landor; and to Corunna
Landor first went. His two companions to whom he refers in
his letter to Southey were both Irishmen, an O'Hara and a
Fitzgerald. Upon reaching Corunna, he sent to the governor
ten thousand reals for relief of the town of Venturada, burnt to
the ground by the French. At the same time, in a letter ac-
companying his gift, he stated his intention to join at once the
army of Blake; and declared that whatever volunteers were
1805-1814.
119
IN SPAIN.
ready to join him, though to the number of a thousand, he was
ready to pay their expenses, travel with them on foot, and
fight along with them, desiring no other glory than to serve
under any brave Spaniard in arms for defence of religion and
liberty. By the supreme council of Castile, to which the go-
vernor straightway sent the money and the letter, both were
gratefully received. The reals were deposited in the national
bank, and the governor was instructed to express to Mr. Landor
the high sense which the council entertained of his generosity,
his valour, and his honourable enthusiasm.
In the interval between the enrolment of his troop, which
was formed at once, and their departure for headquarters, a mis-
understanding occurred with the English envoy. Landor applied
to himself an expression of Stuart's overheard by him at one of
the meetings of the junta, which undoubtedly was meant for
another person. The matter might easily have been cleared up,
but he did not even make the attempt. On the way with his
volunteers to Blake's army he wrote from Villa Franca an in-
temperate letter to Vaughan, and printed it both in Spanish and
English before any reply could reach him. In or near Aguilar
he remained nearly three months, engaged in petty skirmishing,
and fretting at the inaction of the northern division and its
general. Then, what the alleged affront of the envoy had be-
gun, the affair of Cintra and its disasters completed; his troop
dispersed or melted away; and he came back to England in as
great a hurry as he had left it.
At his return he told Southey that he wished greatly to
have seen Madrid, but he was afraid a battle might be fought
in his absence, and the mortification of not being present at it
would have killed him. 'In this expectation I remained nearly
'three months in the neighbourhood of the Gallician army,
'sometimes at Reynosa, sometimes at Aguilar. I returned to
'Bilbao after the French had entered. I had the satisfaction
' of serving three launches with powder and muskets, and of
carrying on my shoulders six or seven miles a child too heavy
'for its exhausted mother. These are things without difficulty
<
6
and without danger, yet they please, independently of grati-
'tude or applause. I was near being taken the following
1
120
Book III.
BATH, CLIFTON, SPAIN, LLANTHONY.
'day. This would have been exceedingly unpleasant, as I had
already sent the letter to Vaughan and Stuart, and myself and
'the envoy must meet.' He described Aguilar at that time as
an open place, consisting chiefly and almost entirely of one broad
street; and said, in proof of the strange mistakes as well as fatal
inaction of Blake, that while his main force was at the town, he
was himself a mile on the east, and had so stationed his cannon
on the west, near a ford, that a regiment of horse might have
surprised and spiked it.
'Ah,' said Southey afterwards, when he was writing Roderick,
'it is much for a poet to have traversed the scenes in which the
subject of his poem is laid. It gave you an advantage in
• Count Julian.
Such was Landor's raid into Spain; which had only this
farther result, that a letter of the Spanish minister (Cevallos)
conveyed in due time to Landor, with handsome expressions of
esteem, the honorary rank of Colonel in the service of King
Ferdinand; and in the Madrid Gazette of a few days' later date
were published the thanks of the supreme junta 'to Mr. Landor,'
as well for gallant personal service, as for gifts of twice ten
thousand reals in aid of Spanish independence and freedom.
But not a great many years later, when the restored Ferdinand
had restored the Jesuits, Landor sent back his commission in a
letter to that same Don Pedro Cevallos, telling him that he had
done his best for Spanish liberty against Napoleon, and could
not continue, even nominally, in the service of a worse perjurer
and traitor.
IV. LETTERS TO SOUTHEY.
The time when Landor again set foot in England was that
of the arrival from Portugal of the news of the convention of
Cintra, by which the entire French army, at the expense of the
English government, had been safely conducted back to France.
Sir Hew Dalrymple and Sir Harry Burrard were its authors;
and Sir Arthur Wellesley had not resisted it, though he had
never given it his approval. On all sides there were shouts of
reproach. But in spite of their allies,' wrote Landor at his
1805-1814.
121
LETTERS TO SOUTHEY.
arrival to his friend, 'the Spaniards will be victorious. Can we
'never be disgraced, but the only good people in the universe
'must witness it? Under the influence of what demon is it
' that we are forced to periodical wrecks of honour on the Spanish
'coast? Lord Douglas sees me fall! If nothing personal had
'driven me home, still I could not have endured the questions
6
of brave and generous Spaniards-why we permitted the French
'to retain their plunder, why we placed them again in array
against Spain, why we snatched them from the fury of the
'Portuguese, why we indulged them with more precious fruits.
'than they could have gathered from the completest victory?"
To which, after expressing his gladness at his friend's return,
and referring to Stuart as its supposed principal cause in terms
more offensive than Landor's own, Southey thus breaks out:
I am sure that for the first week after the news arrived, had
'Sir Hew Dalrymple appeared in any part of England, he would
'have been torn in pieces. My cry was, Break the terms, and
deliver Up the wretch who signed them to the French, with a rope
'round his neck! This is what OLIVER CROMWELL Would have
'done. OChrist!—this England, this noble country—that hands
so mighty and a heart so sound should have a face all leprosy,
' and a head fit for nothing but the vermin that burrow in it !'
That was pretty well, but was not all. He went on to say that
he and Wordsworth had been trying to get up a county petition
against the damned convention;' but 'Lord Lonsdale had re-
'ceived mum as the word of command from those who move
'his strings, and he moves the puppets of two counties.' A
court of inquiry to be sure was talked of, he says with scorn;
but the only court to do any good would be one that should send
the hand of Sir Hew Dalrymple to be nailed upon the pillory
at Lisbon, and that of Sir Arthur Wellesley for a like exposi-
tion at Madrid' (!) And then, after sketching what England,
with better advisers might have done, he uses expressions that
will perhaps help to make more lenient some judgments of Lan-
dor's modes of speech to be considered hereafter. 'But nothing
can or will go on well in this country till the besom of de-
'struction has swept the land clean. When Joseph gets back
to Madrid, it would not surprise me if Spain were to produce
122
Book III.
BATH, CLIFTON, SPAIN, LLANTHONY.
เ
a tyrannicide.
He who should do the deed should stand next
'to Brutus in my kalendar.'
6
"
C
C
Other confidences had passed between the friends at this
first interchange of letters on Landor's return, which it will be
only just to him also to quote, for such qualification or correc-
tion of remarks already made as they may fairly suggest. They
are themselves a curious comment on his recent flight into Spain.
'I believe,' he said, at the close of his letter, which bears the
postmark of November 1808, 'I should have been a good and
happy man if I had married. My heart is tender. I am fond
' of children and of talking childishly. I hate to travel even
'two stages. Never without a pang do I leave the house where
'I was born. Even a short stay attaches me to any place. But,
Southey, I love a woman who will never love me, and am be-
'loved by one who never ought. I do not say I shall never be
happy. I shall be often so, if I live; but I shall never be at
rest. My evil genius drags me through existence against the
current of my best inclinations. I have practised self-denial,
'because it gives me a momentary and false idea that I am firm;
' and I have done some other things not amiss, in compliance
'with my heart; but my most virtuous hopes and sentiments
have uniformly led to misery, and I never have been happy but
in consequence of some weakness or some vice.' To which
Southey, at once laying bare the source of these self-accusings
and self-exaltings, wisely as well as neatly replied that what he
learnt from Rousseau, before he laid Epictetus to his heart, was
that Julia was happy with a husband whom she had not loved,
and that Wolmar was more to be admired than St. Preux.
bade no man beware of being poor as he grows old, but he would
have all men beware of solitariness in old age. His advice to
his friend therefore was that he should find out a woman he
could esteem, and love would grow more surely out of esteem
than esteem would out of love. Experto crede Roberto. It was
the advice of one who by such means had quieted a nature little
less tempestuous than his own.
He
But by the time this discreet advice was in his friend's hands,
the self-blaming, self-pitying mood had passed away. To the
outburst of grief and reproach that followed Moore's retreat and
1805-1814.
123-
LETTERS TO SOUTHEY.
death at Corunna there had now succeeded bitter storms of at-
tack, recrimination, and controversy, and Landor was plunged.
in the thick of them. He replied to Southey by sending in a
printed pamphlet three dashing letters which he had written to
one of the generals (Riguelme), whose acquaintance he had made
in Spain. Southey did not essentially differ, but was hampered
by his new connections in the Quarterly; and not small was
Landor's surprise to hear that he had consented to defend Frere
in the next review against the friends of Sir John Moore. Frere,
Ellis, and Canning had been Southey's keenest assailants in the
Anti-Jacobin; but their alliance against the Edinburgh had
been swift in wiping out animosities, as any one might have
foreseen, though Southey was still far from conscious of the ex-
tent of the change in himself. Landor's bitterness on Moore's
behalf was hardly in excess of the occasion; and there are few
that will not think it honourable to Landor, who look back to
the letters of Frere used then to discredit Moore's memory. The
fame of this great soldier has since had ample vindication, but
was at that time in imminent peril; and the instinct which
brought loyally to his aid so eager a friend to the Spaniards as
Landor had shown himself was a noble and true one. I subjoin
a few words from his letter:
'If the untimely death of a character so illustrious and so nearly per-
fect as Moore would allow us to laugh at anything that reminds us of
him, it would be laughable enough to look at the subscriptions at the
bottom of Mr. Frere's letters. When a fellow has written not only with-
out truth, but with absolute rudeness; when he has told another he would
disgrace the British arms, and bring ruin on the country he was sent to
succour and support, how can he pretend to assert his truth in offering
his respect? It reminds me-in some novel I have read, I believe in
Hugh Trevor-of a curious flourish at the end of every letter from a
knavish old steward to a foolish old master. I thought, in reading the
book, it was a singular stroke of character, and a happy one.'
Southey still had a word to say for Frere, thinking the am-
bassador might have shown more spirit than the general; but
he left the writing of the defence to Ellis. The tone of his letter
was also such as to propitiate Landor, to whom he announced
his intention of writing such a history of 1808 as would give
him real pleasure. It was a task in which Scott had engaged
him for an Edinburgh Annual Register, to be started by the
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Book III.
BATH, CLIFTON, SPAIN, LLANTHONY.
Ballantynes. Landor would like the bitterness and 'undis-
'sembled contempt' which he should there find bestowed upon
all parties alike. Had ever a game been played so wretchedly
that might so easily have been won? Had he seen Wordsworth's
pamphlet on the Cintra convention? In spite of a difficult style,
he would admire its true eloquence and true philosophy. Lan-
dor's reply (August 1809) is highly characteristic:
'This work of Wordsworth is vigorous and just. My opinion of the
Spaniards is corrected by the experience of Moore. I believe no breed of
people to be so good; but they have nothing to fight for, and nobody to
lead them, if they had. . . . All old governments are bad, and my breech
shall never go to the ground by resting on one. We are a great people,
because our constitution by eternal changes is exempt from any violent
change. It has always been pervious both to light and winds. Else, like
those of France and Germany, it would have been uprooted at the first
tempest.'
From Clifton, in the November of the same year, he wrote
still in much the same tone, with a shrewd perception of all the
weakness of the Spaniards, which his friend never reached, and
with a resolute appreciation of the utter worthlessness of their
leaders, which it took many more years to make apparent to
everybody. Nor less remarkable is his expression of discontent
with the government at home, which his friend was still out-
wardly condescending to support. He had become in June of
this year, at Southey's request, a subscriber to Coleridge's Friend,
in the twelfth number of which, published in the month when
his letter was written, appeared a paper on vulgar errors respect-
ing taxes and taxation, wherein Coleridge contended that, though
taxes might often be injurious to a country, it could never be
from their amount merely, but only from the time or mode in
which they were raised; and, objecting to the analogy set up
between a nation indebted to itself and a tradesman under obli-
gation to his creditors, had said a much fairer instance would be
that of a husband and wife playing cards at the same table
against each other, where what the one lost the other gained.
Landor did not find this illustration quite satisfactory.
'When rulers are so feeble or corrupt as to make men indifferent to
their country, which never was done to so blind and precipitous a height
as now, it is idle to talk of taxation. But I cannot yet consider it so tran-
quilly as your friend Coleridge. If my wife wins my money at cards, and
•
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LETTERS TO SOUTHEY.
she is really a prudent wife, I sustain no detriment. But if she squanders
it among unworthy favourites, and bribes her servants with it to pull her
neighbour's cap, I will take care in future to play less often, and for a
smaller stake. If taxes are at no time injuries "from their amount
merely," it is because, when they are exorbitant, the mode of raising
them must be inquisitorial or violent. May we not complain of a thing
oppressive in itself, because there is also another thing which adds to the
oppression?.. I remember the logical swindling of your neighbour, Bishop
Watson, and the hot but honest reply of poor Gilbert Wakefield. I re-
member too the crucem and the diadema. I never liked either of these
writers. The one would never have made me a critic, nor the other a
Christian, nor have induced me to think him so. As I never drink wine,
I am forced every now and then to write half a dozen verses, that I may
forget what is passing round about.'
But he continued to write on the things also he most wanted
to forget; and Southey's next letter was very decisive of the in-
fluence Landor was exerting over him. The conclusion had been
forced upon him, he said, that Bourbon was as bad as Bonaparte;
and now more than ever he wished that, at the outset of the
French invasion, Spaniards and Portuguese had sung Te Deum
for the loss of their respective dynasties and united in a federal
republic. It was the form of government peculiarly adapted to
the Peninsula, because of the different fueros of the different
kingdoms; and other good must have come of it. This was the
temper in which, so late as 1810, Southey was preparing his se-
cond batch of history for the Edinburgh Register; and he kept
the promise in regard to it which he had given his friend.
Landor's next letter takes us back to literature.
'I am reading what I had not read before of Euripides. Between our-
selves, in most of his tragedies there is more preachment than poetry. I
was surprised and mortified to find it so. How, in the name of Heaven,
could the Athenians endure on the stage, so deplorably mutilated and
metamorphosed, those heroes whom they had followed in the vigour of
unsophisticated life through the wide and ever-varying regions of the
Iliad and Odyssea? A hero, penned up and purgatorised in this middle
state, is fitted to become a Monseigneur bien poudré among the mesdames
and waiting-maids and patch-boxes of Racine.'
Replying to this, on the 26th of November 1809, Southey is
able to announce to his friend that, on the preceding day, he
had finished Kehama. He did not expect that it would meet
with more admirers than Gebir, but should be thoroughly satis-
fied if they whom it did meet with admired it as much. His
work being done, he is full of fears for it; and can only comfort
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Book III.
BATH, CLIFTON, SPAIN, LLANTHONY.
himself by looking forward, and resolving that Pelayo, his new
poem on a subject from the life of Roderick, shall be begun
as soon as his plan is sufficiently matured. Four days later,
Landor replied :
'You are right in beginning another poem while the heart is warm
with poetry. Pelayo and Richard the First are the two finest subjects in
the world. I thought of Sertorius once; but, I know not how, it appears
to me that nothing romantic can coexist with what is Roman. These two
unfortunate words stand up, backing one another against me, and accusing
me of a quibble. I meant simply to say that the Romans were a blunt
flat people, and that even a Roman name breaks the spell of poetry on
plain historical ground. Spain is even yet a sort of faeryland, and we
are yet not too familiar with the faces of Goths and Moors. You possess
here peculiar advantages. No other man in Europe has had so minute
an insight of their history and character.'
The rest of the letter, dated 30th November 1809, was filled
with a Latin idyl. Like Sir Roger de Coverley, Landor had been
reading at the end of a dictionary: not like him an account of
Hector, but the story of Callirhoe, who spurned the love of Co-
resus, priest of Bacchus, whereupon he swore and prayed to his
god, who visited her people with pestilence. In their affliction
they betook themselves to Dodona, when Jupiter announced
that only the death of Callirhoe or some one in her stead could
remove the curse; and Coresus was appointed to fulfil the com-
mand of Jove. But when Callirhoe stood before him at the
altar, his revenge paled before his love and pity, and he drove
the knife into his own bosom. Landor had written this pretty
and pathetic story in excellent Latin hexameters,* close and
dramatic, and now sent the first sixty-eight to his friend, send-
ing the remaining sixty-two in a second letter after some weeks'
interval, during which Southey had been silent. He had, alas!
too good a reason. He had not been able to decipher the verses,
and very frankly did confess so much. He had also (his letter
is dated March 1810) been hoping to send Landor the first sec-
tions of Pelayo. This poem, which took afterwards the name of
Roderich, in whom its interest finally centred as the hero, went
to Landor regularly as its predecessor, section by section. But
before the first was posted, he wrote to his friend to say that he
It is the seventh of the Idylla Heroica in Poemata et Inscriptiones
(1847), and a translation by himself is in the Hellenics (1859), pp. 57-63.
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127
LETTERS TO SOUTHEY.
had corrected the last proof of Kehama, and that it was dedicated
to himself but for whom it would never have been finished.
He adds that he thought to have accompanied it with an epistle
to Landor in blank verse; but that this remained still on the
anvil. It was, indeed, never finished; a simple prose dedication
taking its place.
C
Thanks, a thousand and a thousand,' Landor sends him in
reply for Kehama, when it had arrived at last.
'How am I
' delighted that the man, whom above all others I would wish
'to know me thoroughly, sees through me. The inscription is
'most suitable to my taste; and if I may think of myself some-
'what magnificently, which I was never disinclined to do, most
'honourable to yours.' He recurs to the subject in his follow-
ing letter, and says he should like himself to have continued to
write poetry, 'if even foolish men had read Gebir . . . for there is
'something of summer in the hum of insects.' Southey promptly
replied with genuine sympathy and wise advice. He spoke
of what had prevented Gebir from being read by the foolish.
Why should he not display the same powers upon a happier
subject, and write a poem as good and more intelligible? Very
certain was it that Gebir had really excited more attention than
its author seemed aware of. The published imitations of it, and
the anger of those who objected to it, alike proved this.
'When Gifford published his Juvenal, one of the most base attacks
that ever disgraced a literary journal was made upon it in the Critical
Review, by some one of the heroes of his Baviad. Gifford, who gives way
to all sorts of violence in his writings, wrote a desperate reply, in which
he brought forward all the offences of the Review for many years back,
and one of those offences was its praise of Gebir!
Soon after, in July 1810, Southey sent to Landor, in six
closely-written folio columns, the first section of Roderich, or
as he continues for some time to call it, Pelayo. The subject
at the outset inthralls him; and he has a second sight of what
its course and treatment is to be, with which he is more than
satisfied. The received legend of Roderick's escape from the
battle-field, and dying in penitence at Visen, is that which he
means to follow; discarding his alleged abode at Nazareth, and
other stories out of the miracle-shops; and what effect he means
at the last to produce by bringing together him and Florinda
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Book III.
BATH, CLIFTON, SPAIN, LLANTHONY.
and Count Julian, Landor shall see. Nor shall this be his only
achievement. Of which, and of other projects, he now tells his
friend, in order that he may wind up by an adjuration to him,
with his full leisure and abundant power, to do likewise, and
thus leave behind him what distant generations would take de-
light in other Gebirs with happier fables.
Landor's reply took Southey somewhat by surprise, for it an-
nounced that he had at intervals been writing other things beside
Latin Idyls and Alcaics, Hints to Juntas, Simonideas, Letters to
Burdett, and Letters to Riguelme (the impetuous fragmentary pro-
duct, all of them, of the last four years), and that among them
was a tragedy with Count Julian for its hero! What other feel-
ing also arose to Southey, as portions of the tragedy were sent to
him, we shall shortly see; but when, after a few months, all was
completed and before him, he could not but survey with some
despondency his own Pelayo. He talked of compressing some
parts of it, and said it was well that their conceptions of all the
historical personages were so entirely unlike, as he should in-
evitably have been deterred from proceeding. With eager and
frank reassurance Landor replied..
'I do not see what you can compress in this part of Pelayo. If you
take away too many leaves, you starve the blossoms. There is a light
luxuriant arborescence, which shows the vigour of the roots and stem,
and answers for the richness of the fruit. As I live, I have written three
verses! made so by a stroke of the pen.'
His last letter on Southey's manuscript from which I shall
quote for the present, has a touch of personal significance, which
will best introduce the tragedy he has himself been writing.
Certainly, this last section of Pelayo is the most masterly of all. I
could not foresee or imagine how the characters would unfold themselves.
I could have done but little with Florinda and with Egilona, taking your
outline; yet I could have done a good deal more with them than any other
man except yourself. For I delight in the minute variations and almost
imperceptible shades of the female character, and confess that my reve-
ries, from my most early youth, were almost entirely on what this one or
that one would have said or done in this or that situation. Their counte-
nances, their movements, their forms, the colours of their dresses, were
before my eyes. One reason why we admire the tragedies of the ancients
'There is a light luxuriant arborescence
Which shows the vigour of the roots and stem,
And answers for the richness of the fruit.'
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LETTERS TO SOUTHEY.
is this, we never have had our images broken by the iconoclast effort of
the actors. Within my memory we never have had any worthy of the
name; but I feel convinced that Garrick himself, who was probably the
greatest that ever lived, would not have recompensed me for the over-
throw and ruin of my Lear.'
A practical comment on this will now be laid before the
reader in what is to be said of the composition of Count Julian,
and the weakness as well as the strength which Landor carried
to the enterprise of writing a tragedy will be seen. That the
natural bent of his genius went strongly in the direction of the
drama, as he seems himself at all times to have felt with greater
or less vividness, there is no doubt. The old Greek had not a
more unquestionable power than his of giving objective shape to
the most subtle and the most ethereal fancies, and this in itself
involves a very intense element of the drama. Where any marvel
occurs in Gebir, there is no doubt about it; it is actually there,
and to be seen. Transfer this to the drama, assume that a pas-
sion is to be represented, and by the same power there it is; not
mere language describing it, but the thing itself, and language
only as the effluence or outbreak of the thing. In the abstract
there cannot be a higher form of the dramatic than this, and it
holds to a large extent even in what may be called the concrete,
the details of the scene. Because, no doubt, at a play it is from
other arts than the poet's that what is mainly material should
reach us. Strictly speaking, the poet might claim to be entirely
discharged from any part of the office of setting forth, before an
audience of spectators, what already is or ought to be visible to
them. But unassailable as this is in theory, in practice it is not
found to be possible, and all kinds of descriptive and other in-
dulgences have to be brought in aid of the purely dramatic. The
result expresses just the concession or compromise which the
stage requires from the drama: which Shakespeare understood
as he understood everything, and which even such writers as
Landor and Lamb comprehend imperfectly, when they object to
the stage presentation of Lear. Lear was written to be played;
and its author, we may safely affirm, would rather have seen it
acted, however wretchedly, in a barn, than heard it read to per-
fection in a palace. Landor tells us in this letter that he delights
in the minute variations and almost imperceptible shades' of
K
130
Book III.
BATH, CLIFTON, SPAIN, LLANTHONY.
character, and that he has 'countenances, movements, forms, the
very colours of dresses,' before his eyes as he writes. Doubt-
less it was so. No one conceives a character more vividly, or
puts it more expressively in action. Each has a distinguishing
mark and a specialty of utterance, the look that none else should
give, the language that none other so appropriately could use.
He described it himself on another occasion, in saying to Southey
that he never could publish a poem that contained any character
of a human being until he had lived two or three years with that
character, and that he left off Count Julian and his daughter
twice, because each had said things which other personages might
say. But though all this may seem to raise a perfect ideal, the
practicable is another thing. Too little is left for the art of the
actor, and too much for the imagination of the audience.
We
may get at the most magnificent results too quickly, when all
the little intermediate steps have been overlooked. It
It may in-
deed be the smallest part of genius that is thus wanting to com-
plete upon the stage its highest manifestations, but the fact admits
of no dispute that to the highest without it the stage is inacces-
sible. An example is about to be afforded than which there
have been few nobler, that no given number of scenes, each of
the first order of dramatic genius, will constitute a play. Let the
characters, as in Landor's case, be all marked and all in position;
let the passions be at their highest, and always at work; let the
situations even be the best; but unless there is also obtainable
from the story an interest of quite another kind than that which,
by creative rather than merely appreciative power, the audience
must elicit for themselves, there will be no tragedy in the true
sense of the word. There will only be a succession of dialogues.
In all the various 'scenes,' however, and in all the 'conversa-
tions,' through which, from the beginning to the close of his
life, and under every 'imaginary' form, Landor's genius has most.
delighted to express itself, none have higher claims to admira-
tion, or will better reward faithful study, than those of Count
Julian.
V. THE TRAGEDY OF COUNT JULIAN.
The period of the tragedy is supposed to be that which im-
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131
THE TRAGEDY OF COUNT JULIAN.
mediately preceded the final defeat and mysterious fate of the
last of the Gothic kings of Spain, when his most powerful noble
Count Julian, whose daughter he had by violence dishonoured,
to avenge that wrong brought back into his native land the
Moorish hosts whom he had just gloriously driven out, overthrew
the monarchy, and delivered over his country to the infidel. A
more tragical conception nowhere exists. In its isolated grandeur,
indeed, it is rather epical than tragic; and there is a fine passage
in one of Mr. De Quincey's essays, where he speaks of the tor-
tures inflicted in old Rome, in the sight of shuddering armies,
upon a general who had committed treason to his country, as
not comparable to Landor's fancy of the unseen tortures in Count
Julian's mind; who, whether his treason prospered or not,
whether his dear outraged daughter lived or died, could see,
as he looked into the mighty darkness, and stretched out his
penitential hands vainly for pity or pardon, nothing but the
blackness of ruin, ruin that was to career through centuries. And
around this central figure are grouped characters that have each
an individuality strongly marked, yet all subserving the com-
mon purpose. From every point they draw Julian only closer and
closer within the meshes of misery which love for his daughter
had woven round him first, and in which all his other virtues
since have but the more despairingly involved him. It is the
old story of crime propagating crime; of evil failing ever to
expiate evil; and of blind necessity, out of one fatal wrong,
reproducing wrong in endless forms of retaliatory guilt and
suffering.
The tragedy opens at the moment when, though the extent
of his successes over his countrymen has alarmed Julian, nothing
is yet decisive, and there seems still a chance for the old mon-
archy. The outrage had been done upon his daughter Covilla
in the absence of her betrothed Sisabert, who, upon his return
in ignorance of what had passed, finding her separated from him
and her father in arms against Spain, believes Julian to be simply
aspiring to the throne, and for a time joins Roderigo against him.
The gleam of success emboldens the hard-pressed king to attempt
conciliation. Imploring Julian to wipe out his treason against
Spain by a second treason against his Moorish confederates, he
I
132
Book III.
BATH, CLIFTON, SPAIN, LLANTHONY.
proposes to divorce his wife Egilona, himself to marry the wronged
Covilla, and to divide with the father his daughter's throne. Ju-
lian rejects these overtures with scorn; but Muza, the cruel and
arrogant Moorish chief, suspects him to have yielded, and Rode-
rigo's wife, believing her divorce to be resolved on, accepts the
love of Abdalazis, Muza's more generous son. This is the position
at the opening of the third act, when Sisabert's discovery of the
truth as to his betrothed joins again his arms to those of Julian,
who accomplishes the triumph of the Moor. Roderigo is now at
Julian's feet, and is spurned by him; but Spain is in the hands
of the Infidel, who continues to watch with distrust the victori-
ous renegade, and believes he will yet prove traitor again. Julian
meanwhile has been found by Roderigo inaccessible to mercy.
The conqueror permits him to live only that life may become to
him a burden; and while the fallen king still piteously pleads
to be permitted to atone his wrong, the terrible sentence is pro-
nounced which separates eternally the wrongdoer and his victim,
sending Covilla to the convent's peace, and Roderigo to the pen-
ance of the felon. Ignorant of what has really passed, however,
even the most generous of the Moors drops away from Julian,
when he hears that the defeated king has been suffered to escape
with life; and Egilona, blinded by the mingled jealousy and love
with which she has witnessed the departure at the same time from
the camp of both Roderigo and Covilla, denounces Julian to the
Moorish commander as having yet the purpose to continue the
throne of the Goths to his daughter and her betrayer. Through-
out every scene-whatever else its ebb or flow of passion-Julian
has to bear the brunt of suffering and sorrow. High above the
rest still towers that shape of solitary pain, to which all con-
verge, whether in love or hate, with fruitless effort to overstep
the abyss that has eternally parted him alike from foe and friend.
Such hopes as animate the rest, from scene to scene, exist but to
show that from him hope is gone for ever; and the tragedy closes
as the intelligence is brought to him that, for the supposed act
of treachery which he has not committed, his wife and two sons
have been murdered by the Moor, whom his victories had made
master of his native land.
This outline of the story might easily be filled in by a series
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133
THE TRAGEDY OF COUNT JULIAN.
of passages exhibiting the varieties of power and beauty with
which its tragic scenes are written; for Landor's style is here at
its best, and contemporary poetry has nothing to show beyond
Count Julian in purity or in grandeur. But I shall limit myself
here, as in my notice of Gebir, to one or two only, characteristic
of the highest power displayed.
A most enchanting description occurs where Roderigo's wife,
Egilona, is exhibited as she was while yet her husband was true
to her, and as she is when his indifference and falsehood have
transformed her, and she is ready to become wife to the infidel.
Beaming with virtue inaccessible
Stood Egilona; for her lord she lived,
And for the heavens that raised her sphere so high:
All thoughts were on her, all, beside her own.
Negligent as the blossoms of the field,
Array'd in candour and simplicity,
Before her path she heard the streams of joy
Murmur her name in all their cadences;
Saw them in every scene, in light, in shade,
Reflect her image, but acknowledge them
Hers most complete when flowing from her most.
All things in want of her, herself of none,
Pomp and dominion lay beneath her feet
Unfelt and unregarded. Now behold
The earthly passions war against the heavenly!
Pride against love, ambition and revenge
Against devotion and compliancy:
Her glorious beams adversity hath blunted;
And coming nearer to our quiet view,
The original clay of coarse mortality
Hardens and flaws around her.
His was the fault; be his the punishment.'
Again, when the ruined and fallen king stands wailing before
him for mercy, he employs an image to express his own present
weakness and his former strength, which, for the vividness of
its appalling contrast, is among the finest in the range of Eng-
lish poetry:
'I stand abased before insulting crime,
I falter like a criminal myself;
The hand that hurl'd thy chariot o'er its wheels,
That held thy steeds erect and motionless
As molten statues on some palace-gate,
Shakes as with palsied age before thee now.'
There is another picture of him, at the opening of the fifth
134
Book III.
BATH, CLIFTON, SPAIN, LLANTHONY.
(
act, to which Mr. De Quincey's language will do greater justice.
than any words of mine. 'Mr. Landor, who always rises with
'his subject, and dilates like Satan into Teneriffe or Atlas, when
'he sees before him an antagonist worthy of his powers, is pro-
bably the one man in Europe that has adequately conceived
the situation, the stern self-dependency and the monumental
'misery of Count Julian. That sublimity of penitential grief,
'which cannot accept consolation from man, cannot hear ex-
'ternal reproach, cannot condescend to notice insult, cannot
so much as see the curiosity of bystanders; that awful careless-
ness of all but the troubled deeps within his own heart, and of
'God's spirit brooding upon their surface and searching their
abysses; never was so majestically described.'* The generous
Moor, Tarik, has said that at last Count Julian must be happy,
for 'delicious calm follows the fierce enjoyment of revenge.'
'Hernando. That calm was never his : no other will be.
t
Not victory that o'ershadows him sees he;
No airy and light passion stirs abroad
To ruffle or to soothe him; all are quell'd
Beneath a mightier, sterner stress of mind:
Wakeful he sits, and lonely, and unmoved,
Beyond the arrows, views, or shouts of men;
As oftentimes an eagle, ere the sun
Throws o'er the varying earth his early ray,
Stands solitary, stands immovable
Upon some highest cliff, and rolls his eye,
Clear, constant, unobservant, unabased,
•
In the cold light above the dews of morn.
He cannot live much longer. Thanks to God!
Tarik. What! wishest thou thy once kind master dead?
Was he not kind to thee, ungrateful slave!
Hernando. The gentlest, as the bravest, of mankind.
Therefore shall memory dwell more tranquilly
With Julian once at rest, than friendship could,
Knowing him yearn for death with speechless love.
For his own sake I could endure his loss,
Pray for it, and thank God; yet mourn I must
Him above all, so great, so bountiful,
So blessed once! bitterly must I mourn.
'Tis not my solace that 'tis his desire;
Of all who pass us in life's drear descent,
We grieve the most for those that wisht to die.'
* See the ninth volume of De Quincey's works (Leaders in Literature),
pp. 326-332, for evidence still more impressive of the effect produced by
this tragedy on a mind of no ordinary character.
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135
THE TRAGEDY OF COUNT JULIAN.
Solemnly beautiful is this close to the magnificent image.
with which the speaker has opened. For all the irreparable ruin
there is only death, and even Hernando wishes it for him; but
while yet the hero is in presence of the spectator, this is not to
be. In the ordinary sense Death is necessary to constitute a
tragedy; but the intensity of tragic suffering here is in continu-
ing to live. So thought Julian's kindest friend; and I will close
with what is said by the son of the Moorish conqueror, his most
generous foe.
'Behold him, once so potent, still so brave,
So calm, so self-dependent in distress;
I marvel at him: hardly dare I blame
When I behold him fallen from so high,
And so exalted after such a fall.
Mighty must that man be, who can forgive
A man so mighty; seize the hour to rise,
Another never comes: O say, my father!
Say, "Julian, be my enemy no more."
He fills me with a greater awe than e'er
The field of battle, with himself the first,
When every flag that waved along our host
Droopt down the staff, as if the very winds
Hung in suspense before him.
Bid him go
And peace be with him, or let me depart.
Lo! like a God, sole and inscrutable,
He stands above our pity.'
In what circumstances the poem was composed, what varie-
ties of alteration it underwent, and what throes of labour and
enjoyment, doubt and encouragement, hope and despair, attended
the successive stages of its production, the author's letters to
Southey reveal to us; but the interest taken in such details is
not sufficiently general to justify me in dwelling upon them, and
I content myself with simply describing the close.
On the 21st of January 1811, less than three weeks from
the time when the first act had been completed, Landor, writing
from the South Parade in Bath, exultingly announced to his
friend that the entire tragedy was done, and was unable to sup-
press the hope that it might even prove worthy to be acted.
•
•
'I have finished Count Julian this evening. . It will have many
defects; but I did not imagine I could do so well as I have done. The
popularis aura, though we are ashamed or unable to analyse it, is requi-
site for the health and growth of genius. . . I believe I am the first man
136
Book III.
BATH, CLIFTON, SPAIN, LLANTHONY.
who ever wrote the better part of a tragedy in a concert-room.
•
It cannot
be well done, written with such amazing rapidity. In forty hours I have
done a thousand lines. Little of the original plan is retained, but about
three hundred verses are unaltered, or nearly so. When my fingers are
fairly well again, I will transcribe the whole for you, that the eye may
take in all at a time. I ought to have it acted, as an indemnity for the
sleeve of a new coat which it has actually made threadbare. Do not
whisper to any one that I have written a tragedy. My name is composed
of unlucky letters. But if you know any poor devil who can be benefited
by the gift of one, he may have it-profit, fame, and all; and what is more,
if it is not successful, he may say it is mine. At all events, it will have
a better chance with him than with me. It would be impossible for me
indeed to have anything to do with such people as managers and lord
chamberlains, though, as the latter is a person of rather more conse-
quence, I may employ him a few years hence to empty . . . I used to
believe that I was prodigiously less absent, as people call it, than other
reading and writing men; and I can hardly bring to my memory an in-
stance of the kind, before the one I am going to mention. I sent for a
volume of Racine (having no books) from the library, for the sole purpose
of counting what number of verses was the average of a tragedy.
I was
writing when it came, and I turned over his messieurs and mesdames
with a vacant stare, and sent the volume away in a passion without the
least idea what had induced me to order an author I disliked so much.
Let me, however, do justice to Racine. I have a reluctance to begin;
but if I begin, I go on. His great fault is, every tragedy represents the
same state of society, of whatever country the characters may be, or in
whatever age the event. In a few of our higher feelings this is really the
case; but the reasonings and moral sentiments of this poet, and, above
all, the mode of expressing them, may be fairly laid down between the
Luxembourg and the Bois de Boulogne.'
It was not however until the 5th of February he sent the
copy fairly transcribed to his friend.
'My rapidity in the composition was not quite so great as I led you
to imagine. My hours were four or five together, after long walks, in
which I brought before me the various characters, the very tones of their
voices, their forms, complexions, and step. In the daytime I laboured,
and at night unburdened my mind, shedding many tears.'
Southey was not disappointed. After six days he acknow-
ledged it. Too Greek for representation in those days, it was
altogether worthy of its author. The thought and feeling fre-
quently condensed in a single line was unlike anything in modern
composition. The conclusion also was Greek. He should have
known the play to be Landor's if it had fallen in his way with-
out a name. What this was, poor Rough's had only tried to be.
Never was a character more finely conceived than Julian. The
picture of his seizing the horses was the grandest image of power
1805-1814.
137
THE TRAGEDY OF COUNT JULIAN.
that ever poet produced, and in the first rank of sublimity.
Nor could he have placed the story in a finer dramatic light. Of
course he must print the tragedy. It would not have many more
admirers than Gebir, but they would be of the same class and
cast; and with Gebir it would be known hereafter, when all the
rubbish of their generation should have been swept away. But
as to the possible acting of it, the chance, he shrewdly remarks,
would lie in John Kemble's vanity; and he thinks that through
Longman, who has some property in Covent-garden, backed by
a note from himself, he can at least insure a reading from the
actor-manager, who would doubtless bring it out if he thought
it calculated to display his talents; though, as for 'understand-
'ing the power and might and majesty that the tragedy manifests,'
this was not to be expected from a man who, after Shakespeare,
could act in such trash as Cato and the Revenge: the last a play
which had so turned Southey's stomach on seeing it nine years
ago that he verily believed he should never set foot in a theatre
again. But was it, after all, worth trial? Less from its want of
pageantry than because of its excellences, he very much doubted
its success; and for himself, he did not think he could ever con-
sent to submit to the decision of such a crew as the London dra-
matic critics a production that had cost him thought and passion,
blushes of cheek and throbs of head, and quiet tears. However,
he was ready to send the play to Kemble, and manage all the
correspondence with him; and failing him, he thought he might
send it with yet a better chance, through Walter Scott, to the
Edinburgh theatre.
Landor replied as to this after two days' interval, making an
interesting and noteworthy comment in regard to the stage. Not
until a quarter of a century later, the reader at all conversant
with such matters will remember, this disgrace of the lobbies
was wiped out by Mr. Macready, the last of the great tragic
actors of our generation.
'Kemble may be tried. It really does appear to me, on recollection,
that Count Julian is a character suited to him; but I have seen very
little of Kemble. You would hardly imagine it, I have not seen a play
acted a dozen times in my life. I am not remarkably pure or chaste;
but to hear generous and pathetic sentiments, and to behold glorious and
grand actions amidst the vulgar, hard-hearted language of prostitutes and
138
Book III.
BATH, CLIFTON, SPAIN, LLANTHONY.
lobby-loungers, not only takes away all my pleasure by the evident con-
trast, but seizes me with the most painful and insuperable disgust. Added
to which, I cannot restrain my tears, sometimes at even an indifferent
piece. It is curious that we should be more anxious to conceal our best
passions than our worst. Our pity and love are profaned by the most
casual glance; but one would imagine our hatred and vengeance were
pro bono publico. I think now of the public taste precisely as I did when
I wrote the first preface to Gebir. That preface would not serve for a
second edition. It was the language of a man who had not tried the
public, and who threw down the full measure of his expectations. If
Count Julian is endured, it will be because it is different from anything
of the day, and not from any excellence. If Kemble will not act it, I
would not submit it to inferior actors.'
Thereupon, replying early in May 1811, Southey told Landor
he was going up to London, and would carry with him the tra-
gedy for Kemble. He ought to jump at it if he knew what was
really excellent in dramatic composition; but Southey did not
expect that from him, and Landor might rely at least on the
man's being made to understand that no favour was solicited,
the obligation being quite as much on the Kemble part as on
theirs. But at this point Landor seems suddenly to have gathered
from Southey's tone, what he ought clearly to have discovered
much earlier, how vain was any hope from that quarter; and the
eagerness so suddenly expressed for the stage was now just as
hastily withdrawn. • Count Julian shall never lie at the feet of
'Kemble. It must not be offered for representation. I will
´ print it, and immediately. Give me your advice how this is to
' be done.'
Southey's advice was ready, though hardly what Landor
meant by his question. 'Print the tragedy in a volume,' he wrote
early in June, 'with boarded covers, not as a pamphlet to be
'dog-leaved.' Scott also, he told him, was writing on Roderigo;
and if the old Goth ever got any literary news in the other
world, it would surprise him to hear what work he had made for
the poets of the nineteenth century! On the 25th he received
the result of this advice in a letter from Llanthony, and a more
characteristic one does not appear in the series.
*Writing to Scott in 1812, to thank him for his Vision of Don Rode-
rick, Southey tells him, 'I have a tragedy of Landor's in my desk, of
' which Count Julian is the hero; it contains some of the finest touches,
'both of passion and poetry, that I have ever seen.'
1805-1814.
139
THE TRAGEDY OF COUNT JULIAN.
This
'I sent Count Julian to your bookseller, Mr. Longman, and gave him
to understand, though not in so many words, as people say, that you
thought not unfavourably of it. I would have been glad to have given it
up to him for half-a-dozen copies; not that I have half-a-dozen friends
who know anything of poetry, or indeed so many of any kind; but I
wanted half-a-dozen to give to people who have been civil to me.
would not do. I then proposed to print it at my own expense. This also
failed. They would have nothing to do with it. We have lately had cold
weather here, and fires. On receiving the last letter of Mr. Longman to
this purport, I committed to the flames my tragedy of Ferranti and Giulio,
with which I intended to surprise you, and am resolved that never verse
of mine hereafter shall be committed to anything else. My literary career
has been a very curious one. You cannot imagine how I feel relieved at
laying down its burden, and abandoning this tissue of humiliations. I
fancied I had at last acquired the right tone of tragedy, and was treading
down at heel the shoes of Alfieri.'
At all this Southey is overwhelmed with grief. Why such a
man as his friend, certain as he must be of the sterling value of
his poems, should care either for good or evil report of them,
was utterly unaccountable to Southey. Could he only have
known that Landor thought of offering the play to Longman,
a word from himself would have prevented all that irreparable
destruction and mischief.
The people at that house know nothing about books, except in the
mere detail of trade; and the only thing which they would think of was,
that single plays did not sell unless they were represented. And because
these Paternoster-row men have acted in the spirit of their vocation, you
have burnt a play which doubtless contained as much pure ore as Julian,
and which would have lived as long as the language. Zounds! I could
swear almost as vehemently at you as at them.'
This was written from London; in the interval before return-
ing to Keswick, Southey and his wife visited Landor at Llan-
thony; and September was the date of Landor's next letter. He
talks of the favourable weather, and what it is doing for the
land. 'After all this, if I talk of my tragedy, I shall remind
'you of the lottery-men in the newspapers. The weather has
'most certainly made several verses grow up in several places,
' and occasioned me to prune some of the rankest parts.' He
speaks of portions recovered from his holocaust of Ferranti and
Giulio; and closes by saying that if Southey could tell him of
any bookseller who would print Count Julian without giving
him any more trouble than might arise from correcting the
sheets, he should be very much obliged.
140
Book III.
BATH, CLIFTON, SPAIN, LLANTHONY.
When that letter arrived at Keswick, Southey tells him, on
the 10th of October, both the Latin and the English Gebir were
on his table. He had been putting both into the hands of
Doctor Gooch, then on a visit to him; which was a sufficient
expression of his opinion of Gooch, as it was a maxim with him
never, except in the unavoidable way of publication, to throw
pearls before swine. The doctor had left that afternoon, and the
last word spoken by him at parting was an entreaty to himself
to entreat Landor to write another poem. He winds up by say-
ing that he had written by the same post to Murray, the pub-
lisher of the Quarterly, in order that no time might be lost about
the tragedy. The result was declared in a note dated nine days
later.
'Send Count Julian as soon as you please to Mr. Murray, Fleet-street,
and he will be your publisher. I told him that I should recommend it to
you to print only two hundred and fifty copies, because the play would be
highly admired by the few, but probably not popular, being too good for
the many. In the latter part of this opinion I may be mistaken-so much
the better-in the first I cannot.'
Landor acted on this suggestion at once. In his next letter,
at the opening of 1812, he is in the midst of proofs and printing;
and early in February 1812 Southey received the printed Count
Julian. The substance of his manly letter of thanks for it may be
added. It was a work, as he believed, sui generis. No piece
to which it could be compared had ever yet been written, and
none ever would be, except it were by the same hand. Landor
was the only poet whom it seemed to Southey impossible to imi-
tate. Milton's language and structure, Shakespeare's phrase-
ology, though attempted by men immeasurably inferior, might
yet be so resembled as infallibly to remind of the prototype;
but in Gebir, and still more in Count Julian, the manner was
no more separable from the matter than the colour from the
rainbow. The form seemed incapable of subsisting without the
spirit. Yet what would be the reception of the drama? With
the Athenians for its audience, Southey could have told the
author. But being what they were, and living in an age when
public criticism upon works of fine literature was 'at the very
'point of pessimism,' he could only guess that it would pass
silently; that a few persons would admire it with all their
1805-1814.
141
IN POSSESSION OF THE ABBEY.
hearts and all their soul and all their strength; but that envy
and her companions in the Litany would not hear enough to
induce them to blow their trumpets, and even abuse it into no-
toriety.
And thus, by a hand skilful as generous, was the horoscope
of Count Julian cast, and its fate exactly prefigured.
VI. IN POSSESSION OF LLANTHONY ABBEY.
Between Landor's return from Spain and his completion of
Count Julian three years had passed, and personal incidents now
calling for mention had occurred in the interval.
The Staffordshire estate, which had been so long in his family,
and which alone became absolutely his by his father's death (the
Warwickshire estates of Ipsley-court and Tachbrooke not de-
scending to him until the death of his mother), fell short in
value of a thousand a year, and went but an inconsiderable way
to the purchase of an estate with an estimated annual rental of
more than three thousand. But after the failure of Loweswater
and its lake he had set his heart on Llanthony and its abbey,
and everything had to give way to his overpowering desire to
possess it. In the end, his mother consented to sell Tachbrooke,
the smaller of her two estates, to enable him to buy Llanthony,
on condition of a life settlement upon her from the latter of four
hundred and fifty pounds a year. What she thus gave her
eldest son was the difference between that amount and the sum
of twenty thousand pounds, for which Tachbrooke sold; but she
imposed only the farther condition that the advowson of Colton
should be surrendered to his brother Charles, to whom he had
already presented that family living. An act of parliament, and
the consent of all the brothers, were required to give effect to
these arrangements; the settlement being the same as that of
his mother's estates-upon Landor for life, with remainder to
his issue, and that of his brothers successively in tail male. The
act was also to enable additional sums to be raised upon the new
purchase for improvements and to pay off mortgages, and to give
to the tenants in possession power to charge the estate with
marriage jointures of not more than five hundred pounds a year.
142
Book III.
BATH, CLIFTON, SPAIN, LLANTHONY.
The letter of January 1809, in which he told Southey that
he had a private bill coming on before parliament, replied
likewise to an invitation from his friend to the Lakes, giving
him the additional startling information that since affairs had
been going on so badly in Spain he had again offered his ser-
vices, and that, if he went, there was little chance he should
ever again see Derwentwater, or, what was next in beauty, and
he hoped to have called his own, Loweswater. But that he
was not going, all the rest of the letter showed pretty clearly.
'I wish I had settled in your country. I could live without
'Bath. As to London, its bricks and tiles and trades and fogs
'make it odious and intolerable. I am about to do what no man
'has ever done in England, plant a wood of cedar of Lebanon.
'These trees will look magnificent on the mountains of Llan-
thony unmixt with others; and perhaps there is not a spot on
'the earth where eight or ten thousand are to be seen together.'
He proposed to be in London shortly, and would lose all abhor-
rence of travelling if he could but hope that they should meet.
(
No sooner did Southey get this news of the parliamentary
bill than he was all eagerness to introduce his friend to his older
friend Rickman, clerk to parliament, praised by everybody, and
whom Charles Lamb thought to be the most perfect man-up
to anything, down to everything, fullest of matter with the least
verbosity—that he had ever known. He would manage all the
house-of-commons part of the bill. To him Southey wrote
accordingly, with no misgiving that he should raise too high his
expectation of the friend he had to introduce. In seeing him,
he said, Rickman would see one of the most extraordinary men
that it had ever been his fortune to fall in with, and who would
be one of the greatest if it were possible to tame him. 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 the
splendour with which they burst out. But all is perfectly
natural; there is no trick about him, no preaching, no parade,
no playing off.' Of Rickman, at the same time, he wrote to
Landor, that he was a man to whom he owed hardly less than
to himself in the way of mental obligation; for it was not more
true that he had learnt how to see for the purposes of poetry
6
1805-1814.
143
IN POSSESSION OF THE ABBEY.
from Landor than that he had learnt how to read for the pur-
poses of history from Rickman.
I doubt, however, if these two worthies ever saw each other.
Everything preliminary to the bill had to be done exclusively in
the upper house, and Landor failed to find Rickman, though he
attempted it twice. He had matters greatly troubling him at .
the same date. Though hardly yet in complete possession of the
abbey, his 'uninterrupted series of vexations and disappoint-
❝ments in connection with it' had already begun. Not only his
Welsh neighbours had been doing him some mischief, but one
of his own servants had cut down about sixty fine trees, lopping
others; and this, which he considered as the greatest of all
earthly calamities, as he told Southey in a letter from Bath, had
confined him to the house several days. 'We recover from ill-
ness, we build palaces, we retain or change the features of the
earth at pleasure-excepting that only! The whole of human life
can never replace one bough.' But it is time that I should
describe the place which was to be the source of so many anxie-
ties, and whose acquisition cost him so much more than was
repaid by any happiness it yielded him.
<
t
A letter to me nearly thirty years ago thus whimsically re-
ferred to it: Llanthony is a noble estate: it produces every-
'thing but herbage, corn, and money. My son, however, may
'perhaps make something of it; for it is about eight miles long,
' and I planted a million of trees on it more than thirty years ago.
I lived there little more than eight months altogether, and built
' a house to pull it down again. Invent a hero, if you can, who has
' performed such exploits.' Here was an instance of my old friend
setting down as the thing he did the thing he only intended to
do; for his million of trees fell considerably short, in the reality, of
perhaps a tenth of the number at which his fancy reckoned them.
Such as they were, however, his plantations have been the most
profitable part of the estate; which might in other points also
have deserved as little the irony applied to it, if its capabilities
even to the same extent had been seen and used. Very far from
ill laid out would have been the whole seventy or eighty thou-
sand pounds drawn into it, if they had but been expended with
competent skill and prudent management.
144
Book III.
BATH, CLIFTON, SPAIN, LLANTHONY.
I saw it lately. From Abergavenny I posted along those
eight miles of hill and vale which belong still to Landor's son:
the mountains on either side becoming more steep, and the valley
more rich and picturesque, as, twining round and round the cir-
cuitous approach, Llanthony comes in view. Less of corn than
pasture there is of course, and much of unreclaimed and moun-
tain waste; but I saw also, through the whole extent of valley
that we passed, abundance of fair meadow-land; farms to all
appearance under good cultivation, and sheep feeding on the
slopes that even the famous breeds which Landor boasted to
have brought over from Spain could hardly have excelled. At
almost the farthest corner of the northern angle of Monmouth-
shire, into which the estate projects itself, stands what is left of
the abbey from which it takes its name; and it would not be
easy to find in any part of Britain a ruin amid nobler surround-
ings.
It is at the base of an amphitheatre of lofty hills, forming
part of the chain of the Black Mountains, through which runs
the rich deep vale of Ewyas. Drayton has described the place
in that good old book, the Polyolbion, which Charles Lamb him-
self could hardly have liked better than Landor did :
''Mongst Hatterill's lofty hills, that with the clouds are crown'd,
The valley Ewyas lies, immur'd so deep and round,
As they below that see the mountains rise so high
Might think the straggling herds were grazing in the sky:
Which in it such a shape of solitude doth bear,
As nature at the first appointed it for pray'r:'
—and that still is the impression it gives. As it may have been
two hundred or twelve hundred years ago, as when the old
poet saw it, or when the uncle of king Arthur is fabled to have
chosen it for his retreat, it strikes the visitor now. I saw it in the
later days of autumn; but the gaiety of summer would not have
been so suited to the scene. Beautiful as the principal portion of
the ruin is, the sense of beauty is not the feeling it first awakens.
All that instantly attracts and fascinates the eye in the lovely
and light picturesqueness of Tintern, is absent from Llanthony:
but deeper thoughts connect themselves with the solid simplicity
of its gray massive towers and the severely solemn aspect of its
ruined church, taking from nature no ornament other than that
1805-1814.
145
IN POSSESSION OF THE ABBEY.
worn by the hills around-majestic and bare as they, and even
in ruin seeming as eternal. A place to meditate or pray in; but
not, one cannot but instinctively feel in looking at it, to carouse
or build a house in.
What is yet standing of the house once attempted to be
built there-something less than half a mile up the slope at the
back of the abbey-is nearly all that is left upon the spot to
point the moral of the story I am to tell. Of the million trees
that were to have enriched the estate, but a small tithe are
visible in the plantations now. The bridge built over the river
Hondy that crosses the valley was swept away by floods. The
praiseworthy design of restoring the magnificent centre nave,
for which many Saxon and Norman stones were taken down
and numbered, added only fresh fragments to the ruin. The
road that was to connect the abbey with the mansion has all-
but passed away without a trace. But in three high ragged
walls open to the sky, and, when I saw them, enclosing a hay-
stack; and in some ruined but not yet unroofed stables and
cellars, built on the very edge of a mountain stream that rushes
swiftly past into the valley; what had once been an inhabited
dwelling presents itself still. And the visitor who doubts the
wisdom of building in such a scene at all, has his wonder infi-
nitely raised at the spot selected for the mansion.
Fifty-six years ago appeared the well-known Beauties of Eng-
land and Wales, in which Landor is stated to have become re-
cently proprietor of the abbey, and is reproached for indifference
to its artificial beauties by having 'directed many alterations
'to be made in the ruins, and fitted up some parts for habi-
'tation.' This, however, is not just. Landor's only wish was
to restore; and it was not his act, but that of his predecessor,
to build among the ruins. In March 1809, a year before that
book was published, he was thus writing to Southey: 'I am
' about to remove an immense mass of building which Colonel
'Wood erected against the abbey, and with which he has
shamefully disfigured the ruins. I would live on bread and
'water three years to undo what he has done, and three more
'to repair what he has wasted. It is some consolation to have
'the idea of receiving you in Monmouthshire next season. I
<
L
146
Book III.
BATH, CLIFTON, SPAIN, LLANTHONY.
' will soon have something of a cottage built, and will send
' down a whole teacaddyful of books.' The something of a cot-
tage was the unfortunate mansion; but it rose from the earth so
slowly and amid so many troubles and vexations, that he was
fain, from time to time, to add to his temporary abode in the
southern tower originally fitted up by Colonel Wood as a shoot-
ing-box, and which these additions enabled him to make his
home for the most part of the years he lived at Llanthony. That
home is now the Llanthony Abbey Tavern, the bailiff of the pro-
perty being its landlord; and its condition at this day is proof
that Landor's makeshifts 'sixty years since' were not contempt-
ible. Part of the old abbot's lodgings are adjacent, the arched
refectory now serving for cellar to a spacious antique kitchen at
the base of the tower; and there is also part of the old building
in separate use as a farm, which then was available for domestic
offices. Altogether, when the pictures had been placed and the
teacaddy of books emptied, it was no bad temporary dwelling
for the new lord of Llanthony.
Nor were the objects proposed by him in taking possession
of his new estate other than the worthiest, and such as he might
fairly have hoped to accomplish. He was bent upon restoring
and civilising on every side of him; the mountain wastes, the
church and abbey ruins, the shocking impassable roads, the
ignorant barbarous people. The extent to which he failed will
appear as the little story unfolds itself, and some of the reasons
why; but it is right to say at once that he really entertained
such designs. Unhappily, he found the stubborn and evil
qualities of the Welsh in his neighbourhood to be greatly in
excess of his expectation; and what most repelled him from his
self-chosen task, was what should most have impressed him with
its supreme necessity. Objecting a few years later to the phrase
that the vulgar have their prejudices, he said that the prejudices
belong not to them, but to those who ought to remove them if
they have any; and the same remark applies equally to other
accompaniments of humanity in its more abased and neglected.
forms, which will ever remain ill-intentioned till we have given
it other intention by some kind of cherishing and care.
Landor's earliest correspondence about Llanthony was with
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147
IN POSSESSION OF THE ABBEY.
the bishop of the diocese, Burgess of St. Davids, afterwards
translated to Salisbury. A part of the estate was the living of
Cwmyoy, of which the parish church is five miles from the
abbey on the Abergavenny road; its chapel-of-ease, in which
there is regular afternoon service still, being the old church
within the abbey enclosure; and this latter structure, which by
its rudeness much startled me at my visit the other day, seems,
when first seen, to have as much surprised and dissatisfied the
new lord of the estate. He at once put before the bishop a
proposal to restore what he believed to have been the original
church, and to apply to more becoming use the materials of the
existing chapel. His letter had been six weeks unanswered,
when he wrote again; and one would like to have seen the
bishop as he read the second letter.
• •
•
•
'Several weeks ago I thought it my duty to address a letter to your
lordship on some alterations it is expedient to make in the chapel of Llan-
thony. I wished to restore to its former state and uses an edifice which
I believe to have been the original chapel. I had hoped for per-
mission to construct from the materials a school.. If drunkenness,
idleness, mischief, and revenge are the principal characteristics of the sav-
age state, what nation-I will not say in Europe, but in the world-is so
singularly tattooed with them as the Welsh? Had I never known how to
appreciate the sacrifice your lordship makes, turning away your eyes from
the most perfect models of the most polished ages on a country which at
no period of its history hath produced one illustrious character, most cer-
tainly I should not have requested your assistance in forwarding its inter-
ests. God alone is great enough for me to ask anything of twice.'
;
To this the bishop was prompt in his reply, promising im-
mediate inquiry; and within a month he wrote again, to tell
Landor that, having had the opportunity of inquiring into the
state of Llanthony church, and the advantages of the proposal
for its renewal, he had no hesitation in giving his assent to it
but that an act of parliament also would be necessary. To which
Landor replied in a few days from Clifton; remarking very
drily that, as he had recently been obliged to adopt such a
measure to effect the settlement of some estates, he should be
slow to renew his efforts in that quarter; and so ended Landor's
first and last effort as a church-restorer. But a conservative in
church affairs he always called himself, soberly as well as jo-
cosely; and when proposing, some thirty years later, to cut
148
Book III.
BATH, CLIFTON, SPAIN, LLANTHONY.
A
down bishops' incomes and add a trifle to the stipends of
curates, he published his letters under that title; which, in this.
particular transaction of Llanthony church, let us confess that
he deserved perhaps better than his right reverend correspondent
did.
Six months earlier than his first letter to the bishop he had
been writing of the Welsh to Southey in much the same strain,
and the letter will tell us also how slowly things were getting
into shape at Llanthony. He writes from Bath, and has been
sending a message to his friend's uncle, who had a parsonage on
the borders of the Wye.
'Happily, on the borders of the Wye, the people are more civilised
than about me. They are more active, and activity will not permit the
lurking and loose indulgence of malignity and revenge. My people are
idle and drunken. Idleness gives them time, and drunkenness gives them
spirit, for mischief. I hope before the close, not of the next but of the
succeeding summer, to have one room to sit and converse in, with two or
three bedrooms. The bad weather has endangered both what is ruined
and what is repaired. As these repairs are to be annihilated by me, I
grieve the less; but if the stones are thrown down, they will be broken,
and much time will be consumed in working more.
In the succeeding summer he wrote from Llanthony itself,
not uncomfortably lodged in the southern tower, and eager to
have a visit from his friend. Direful and never ceasing had
been his troubles. His new house, not half finished, had cost
Upon his estate, of which
him already two thousand pounds.
he had not been in possession three years, he had expended in
labour eight thousand pounds. Yet the people who chiefly had
benefited by this outlay treated him as their greatest enemy.
The picture is not a cheerful one, but would probably have been
not less true if its tints had been somewhat softened.
'In architects I have passed from a great scoundrel to a greater, a
thing I thought impossible; and have been a whole year in making a
farmhouse habitable. It is not half finished, and has cost already two
thousand pounds. I think seriously of filling it with chips and straw,
and setting fire to it. Never was anything half so ugly, though there is
not a brick or tile throughout. Again and again I lament I was disap-
pointed in my attempt to fix in your delightful country. The earth con-
tains no race of human beings so totally vile and worthless as the Welsh.
... I have expended in labour, within three years, eight thousand pounds
amongst them, and yet they treat me as their greatest enemy. . . . When
I had the happiness of meeting you in Bristol, you mentioned your design
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MARRIAGE AND LIFE AT LLANTHONY.
of coming into Monmouthshire this summer. I hope nothing will hinder
it. Before two months have passed, I can give you a comfortable bed. I
have two small rooms finished, and my kitchen will be completed in six
weeks.'
The visit was not paid till the summer following; and soon
after the date of that letter he left Llanthony. But, from Bath,
he continued to report to Southey of his buildings and plantings
at the abbey; and this was the winter when he began Count
Julian in the concert-room. His plantings, alas! did not thrive;
his cedar-groves were like the groves of romance; and he saw
the million trees with which he had indulged his fancy daily
dwindle and decay. He began by buying two thousand cones,
calculating a hundred seeds from each, and believing that such
had really been the product: but, alas! the rains and the field-
' mice have hardly left me a thousand. I must begin again;
' and instead of raising a hundred and fifty thousand trees, must
'be contented with fifty thousand, or perhaps with thirty.' The
rest of the letter is about Count Julian, which he says will be
fairly transcribed within a week.
The evening of the day when the transcription began was
for Landor a memorable one.
VII. MARRIAGE AND LIFE AT LLANTHONY.
Writing to Southey in April 1811 of many unimportant and
indifferent things-suggestions for his tragedy, criticism of an
epitaph by his friend which he thought comparable to the few
finest specimens of such things in the Greek, questions of whe-
ther they are to meet in London or in Bath where he has a
spare bed ready-he thus fills up the last unoccupied corner of
his letter: 'It is curious that the evening of my beginning to
' transcribe the tragedy I fell in love. I have found a girl with-
out a sixpence, and with very few accomplishments. She is
pretty, graceful, and good-tempered-three things indispens-
able to my happiness. Adieu, and congratulate me. I forgot
'to say that I have added thirty-five verses to scene ii: of act 3.
'There was hardly time enough for the reappearance of Opas.'
Southey is delighted at the news, and gives him joy sincerely.
The very Welshmen will become more endurable if he takes a
'
I
150
Book III.
BATH, CLIFTON, SPAIN, LLANTHONY.
wife to Llanthony. He means himself to be at Bath in July,
and insists that, if Landor is absent from it then, he shall come
on to Keswick.
A few days after the letter to Southey he wrote to his mother,
who had questioned him on the reports she had heard, qualify-
ing her motherly interest with a little tender reproach.
'Dear Mother, I hasten to acknowledge your very kind and affec-
tionate letter, though I am several hours too late for the post. You have,
throughout the whole of my life, constantly treated me with the same
goodness, and I should be very ungrateful if I could ever forget it. I hope
we shall often meet again, and pass many happy days together yet. My
presence will be so often requisite to overlook what is going on at Llan-
thony, that I am afraid I should hardly be able to stay longer than a few
days with you at Ipsley. It would give me the greatest pleasure to see
you, and I certainly would come over for that purpose, if it were only for
a day. The name of my intended bride is Julia Thuillier. She has no pre-
tensions of any kind, and her want of fortune was the very thing which
determined me to marry her. I shall be sorry to leave Bath entirely, but
when I have completed my house, I must remain there. Believe me,
mother, your ever affectionate
W. S. LANDor.'
(
6
dear
Not only had want of fortune been no sort of drawback, but
it was in truth the very thing for which he was marrying the
girl. There was small opening for family remonstrance after
that, nor does any seem to have been attempted. The marriage
took place before the end of May. It had all been arranged
and settled after the manner of the eternal friendship between
Cecilia and Matilda in the Anti-Jacobin. By Heaven!' he
said to a friend who with him had entered the ball-room where
Miss Thuillier was, that's the nicest girl in the room, and I'll
marry her.' A sudden thought had struck him, and the thing
was done. He had married a pretty little girl, of whom he seems
literally to have had no other knowledge than that she had more
curls on her head than any other girl in Bath, and that she was,
as I find him also saying in one of his letters, descended from a
Swiss noble family. In sober fact his little baroness, as he liked
to call her, was the daughter of a banker at Banbury, whom ill
success had taken to other employment in Spain, while his family
found a home in Bath. There was nevertheless, in all this, no-
thing of necessity to prevent the marriage proving suitable and
happy, if what was so entirely wanting in both before the cere-
mony had only been in any sufficient degree supplied by either
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MARRIAGE AND LIFE AT LLANTHONY.
after it. This, unfortunately, continued to the last to be alto-
gether absent; and with whom primarily and to the greatest
extent the blame must be held to rest, I do not think there can
be any kind of doubt.
kind of doubt. I will in fairness add what is told me
by Mr. Robert Landor: 'I must do this little wife the justice to
say that I saw much of her, about three years after her mar-
'riage, during a long journey through France and Italy, and that
I left her with regret and pity.'
All the danger appears to have been foreseen by Birch, who
wrote his congratulations from Magdalen-college on the 20th of
June. The marriage had taken him by surprise, and he had
been expecting that Landor would have written to him. He
now told him that such a step, he had long thought, would be
likely to improve and secure his happiness, and he did not doubt
but that the choice made would confirm this opinion. Excellent
as the rude material might be, however, something would still
be wanting. You will think me a strange fellow for talking in
‹ this coarse and homely way on such an occasion... Do not smile
'at me; but it is my belief that an excellent wife is seldom
'made perfect to our hands, but is in part the creation of the
' husband after marriage, the result of his character and behaviour
'acting upon her own.' How much might have been saved to
Landor if he had but taken sufficiently into his brain and heart
these few wise words!*
No misgivings had the good old Parr-nothing but affec-
tionate rejoicings. Be assured,' he wrote on the 7th of June,
that my heart would leap for joy if I saw both of you at my
parsonage gate, and that I should give you a most cordial re-
¿
* There is plenty of proof that they afterwards sank into his mind.
In the course of a characteristic series of papers on High and Low Life
in Italy contributed by Landor to a periodical edited by Leigh Hunt, we
find a remark, where Mr. Tallboys cautions his son as to marriage, pro-
foundly impressive in its meaning and its moral: 'Death itself to the re-
flecting mind is less serious than marriage. The older plant is cut down
'that the younger may have room to flourish: a few tears drop into the
'loosened soil, and buds and blossoms 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.
Edward, may Providence guide you either in this state or from it!'
152
Book III.
BATH, CLIFTON, SPAIN, LLANTHONY.
'ception. God bless you both! Walter, your genius and talents,
'your various and splendid attainments, your ardent affections,
your high and heroic spirit, will ever command my admiration,
' and give me a lively interest in your happiness. I have read
'the Alcaics five or six times. They are worthy of you.' With
the announcement of his marriage, Landor had sent the stanch
old Whig a Latin poem against the ministry.
6
6
By the middle of June, Landor and his wife had taken up
their abode at Llanthony, and at the end of that month he re-
minded Southey of his promised visit. After my marriage, I
stayed at Rodboro' and Petty France for three weeks, intend-
ing to spring upon you on your way to London. There was a
' disinclination in my wife either to remain at Bath or visit Clif-
'ton.
She wished to escape from visits of ceremony and curi-
osity, and I would not hint to her any reason why I should be
happy to pass a few days at Bath.' Telling him then of his
correspondence with Longman about Count Julian, the ruin of
his hopes and conflagration of his unfinished tragedies, as al-
ready detailed, he goes on:
'I now employ my mornings in cutting off the heads of thistles with
my stick, and hoeing my young chestnuts. My house is raised half its
height. Do we lie out of your way? I cannot promise you much comfort
here, but I should be most heartily glad to see you. I live among ruins,
and rubbish, and, what is infinitely worse, bandboxes and luggage and
broken chairs: but I have a spare bed in the same turret where I sleep;
and I have made a discovery, which is, that there are both nightingales
and glowworms in my valley. I would give two or three thousand pounds
less for a place that was without them. I hardly know one flower from
another, but it appears to me that here is an infinite variety. The ground
is of so various a nature, and of such different elevations, that this might
be expected. I love these beautiful and peaceful tribes, and wish I was
better acquainted with them."
To this and another letter, extending the invitation to Mrs.
Southey, his friend replied from London in the middle of July
that in three weeks they hoped to see him in his turret. They
were to leave London that day week. Southey was full of hope
and eagerness for the visit. He had been once at Llanthony
thirteen years before, and had then to ford the Hondy on foot
because he could not find a bridge. He wonders whether Lan-
* For the charming close to this, see third section of First Book, p. 8.
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MARRIAGE AND LIFE AT LLANTHONY.
dor had yet discovered the St. David's Cavern which Drayton
places there, and for which he had himself inquired in vain.
They proposed before nightfall on Monday the 12th of August.
to reach the Vale of Ewyas, where they would stay two days,
going on then to Ludlow; and weary of London, which he
hated, it would refresh him both soul and body to breathe the
air of the mountains once more. Landor met him in his travel-
ling-carriage, and brought him and Mrs. Southey to Llanthony.
The visit passed off with perfect success. Visits of other
friends were made in that and the following year. Landor's
sisters came, and he prevailed even upon his mother to see for
herself what the abbey was like; but he always had a satisfac-
tion in remembering that the first who shared his turret with
him there were Robert and Edith Southey. They stayed three
nights and two days-days to which Southey referred six-and-
twenty years later, while writing the prefaces to his collected
poems, as having left with him still a joy for memory,' and of
which, more than forty years later, Landor wrote in lines to
Southey's son:
Along Llanthony's ruined aisles we walkt
And woods then pathless, over verdant hill
And ruddy mountain, and aside the stream
Of sparkling Hondy. Just at close of day
There, by the comet's light, we saw the fox
Rush from the alders, nor relax in speed
Until he trod the pathway of his sires
Under the hoary crag of Cwmyoy.
Then both were happy.'
Another memorial of the visit took the less happy shape of
a very troublesome tenant. Southey had promised to find one
for a large farm at Llanthony, having one or two in his thoughts
whom he thought suitable; but they failed him. Then he be-
thought him of one Thomas Hutchinson, brother to Words-
worth's wife-'an illiterate man, but a very worthy one, and a
thoroughbred farmer, with money at command.' Here also,
however, there was disappointment. Even Thomas was not to
be had; and they must try again elsewhere. The man yet un-
thought of, who was to be Landor's plague in the matter, waited
in the background. The very last man in Southey's thoughts,
154
Book III.
BATH, CLIFTON, SPAIN, LLANTHONY.
<
the man of all others he was not likely to have chosen, the
spiteful Fates had themselves already laid hold of, and, when
the rest had withdrawn, were to thrust unasked on the scene.
These are things of destiny. While Southey continued busily
making inquiries, this man heard of them, wrote to Landor,
and offered himself as well known to Southey. 'I shall owe
a tenant to you, after all,' wrote Landor exultingly. In less
sanguine tone Southey made reply that the person in ques-
tion (whom I shall refer to as B) was certainly known to him,
and came of an excellent stock, but he had never thought
of asking him to be tenant at Llanthony. His knowledge of
him was derived from a liking for one of his sisters, very dear to
Charles Lamb as well as himself for her genius and goodness,
though both had to be discerned through a most unprepossessing
exterior and a nervousness looking like silliness. 'B has pro-
bably to learn farming,' he ominously added, and so far is less
' desirable than Hutchinson.' This was of course disregarded,
and B was duly installed. Considerably more will be heard of
him hereafter.
(
But Landor had not waited for this teterrima causa to get
himself into all kinds of vexation and trouble with his Llan-
thony neighbours, gentry as well as commonalty. Southey's
prediction that a wife would make the very Welshmen endur-
able, had unfortunately not been realised. Matters went on so
badly, that even when the building of his house was finished
and some rooms had become habitable, the abbot of Llanthony,
as his half-sister Arden persisted always in calling him, simply
from time to time occupied these, left the rest unfurnished, and
never wholly quitted the tower. He apparently never quite
settled to the conviction that he should continue to occupy the
place. 'This blessed day,' he wrote in August 1812, ‘to use an
expression which people seldom use so emphatically, my masons
'have left me, after a job of three years. I live in my house
I merely to keep it dry, just as a man would live in a dog-kennel
'to guard his house. I hate and detest the very features of the
'country, so much vexation have I experienced in it. I wish
'to God I could exchange it for a house in Bath or anywhere!
'Another man would not have the same causes for vexation.
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MARRIAGE AND LIFE AT LLANTHONY.
(
'The people would not be his tenants. I never can be happy
here, or comfortable, or at peace. Adieu.
Adieu. Melioribus utere
'fatis!' He had also special causes of vexation at this exact
date, of which a very brief narrative from letters preserved among
his papers may not be unamusing now. It will at least be full
of character.
Being a member of the grand jury of the county of Mon-
mouth, he had startled his colleagues at the summer assizes of
1812 by an unexampled departure from precedent. Accepting
in their literal signification the formal expressions in Mr. Baron
Thompson's charge, he presented with his own hand into that
of the judge a complaint, supported by the evidence of a magis-
trate, of alleged felony committed by one of the surveyors of
taxes in the county; stated that his fellow-jurymen, whom with
himself his lordship had adjured to lay before him whatever
they might have heard of felony committed in the country, had
in the particular case refused to perform that duty; and asked
if his lordship was prepared to screen these Monmouthshire gen-
tlemen in refusing inquiry against the demand of that member
of their body who had shown its necessity: a man who never
' committed or connived at any base action, who never avenged
an injury, who never accepted a favour at the expense of in-
dependence, and who in everything that elevates the character
6
C
C
(
or adorns the mind would blush at descending to a comparison
with the first and wisest among them.'
The learned baron nevertheless, meaning nothing of the sort,
prudently abstained from even answering the letter; upon which
Landor wrote again to remind him that there was a time when
the courtesies of life required that a letter should be answered,
though written by inferiors in fortune or learning. Their busi-
ness, though of small importance, had always its share of notice;
' and somewhat was occasionally added that they might not re-
pine at what they could not aspire to, and that the inequalities
' of fortune might be smoothened by her condescension. These
things have been. Among the things that I should have
'fancied could never be, is a judge refusing to investigate a
felony, when a grand juror, whom he had commanded to lay
such matters before him, states the fact, and a magistrate
¿
156
Book III.
BATH, CLIFTON, SPAIN, LLANTHONY.
brings the evidence. I acknowledge my error, and must atone
' for my presumption. But I really thought your lordship was
in earnest, seeing you, as I did, in the robes of justice, and
'hearing you speak in the name and with the authority of the
'laws.' And so ended the matter, as indeed it could not help
ending; Landor being not so much wrong as wrong-headed, and
preferring to lose what he wanted rather than fail to overturn
all common law and usage in getting it.
The transaction was in truth not so foolish as it looks. The
object of Landor's wrath was an electioneering attorney whom
everybody believed to be a rascal, but some had found convenient
to their purposes, others did not like to meddle with, and Lan-
dor alone was for exposing at all hazards. The thing in its way
was quite as chivalrous as anything in the page of Cervantes,
and to many perhaps will seem not much less absurd; but that
at least one Monmouthshire magistrate, a clergyman and a man
of education and refinement, thought Landor right and unselfish
in moving in the matter, I learn from the letters of Mr. Davies
of Court-y-Gollen. They are besides very pleasing evidence of
the terms on which the lord of Llanthony remained with one of
the most intelligent of the resident gentry as long as he lived in
the county. The families exchange visits and more substantial
courtesies. Mr. Davies overflows with thanks for a Rembrandt
Landor has given him, and sends him back no end of poplars
and other trees. They stock each other's ponds and gardens with
fish and fruit, discuss amicably Cuyps and Claudes, and do not
quarrel even over politics. Mr. Davies is for an influence in the
county adverse to the Beauforts, or we shall be lost.' Being
appealed to in one of Landor's disputes with his tenantry, he
decides in his favour, but not without shrewd advice as to
points of temper; and he is one of the two magistrates long
afterwards referred to in the imaginary conversation with a Flo-
rentine visitor, where Landor, speaking in his own person, says,
In the county where my chief estate lies, a waste and unprofit-
'able one, but the third I believe in extent of any there, it was
6
6
represented to me that the people were the most lawless in Great
Britain; and the two most enlightened among the magistrates.
• wished and exhorted me to become one.'
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MARRIAGE AND LIFE AT LLANTHONY.
He made the application accordingly; and I am able to re-
late from his papers what followed its rejection. The time for
making it must be admitted to have been ill-chosen, his letter to
the lord-lieutenant bearing date in the same month when he had
written to the grand jury, the foreman of whom was the lord-
lieutenant's brother. This was hardly an excuse, however, for
the dryness of the duke's reply.
'Badminster, August 28, 1812. Sir, I beg leave to acknowledge the
receipt of your letter, and to express my regret that, at present, it is not
in my power to comply with your request. I am, sir, your most humble
servant,
BEAUFORT.'
Landor's rejoinder, written on the 2d of September, was not
without dignity. Since it was not his grace's pleasure, he wrote,
to nominate him on the commission of the peace, he requested
that the duke would have the goodness to appoint some other
person of more information and of more independence; 'quali
ties which no one can better appreciate, and which are so
' abundant in all parts of the county, particularly the magis-
tracy.' It was absolutely requisite that some justice of the
peace should reside within ten miles of Llanthony parish; and
he now repeated his request to avoid any appearance of discour-
tesy in applying directly to the chancellor.
<
To the chancellor, at the same time, he stated the urgent
grounds that existed for the appointment of a justice of peace
in the neighbourhood. There was not one within ten miles,
and several parts of the parish were thirteen miles distant from
one. As a consequence thefts and every kind of misdemeanour were
committed almost daily, and always with impunity. For men
were unwilling to leave their little farms, cultivated by their
own personal labour, to take offenders a whole day's journey
over mountains so wild and perilous; and were no less afraid
of returning to their homes than reluctant at leaving them on
such a business. He had mentioned these facts to the lord-
lieutenant, and though the office of a magistrate would of course
be a troublesome one to a man of retirement and letters, if it was
not presumptuous to call himself so, yet he was willing to have
undertaken it. The Duke of Beaufort, however, thought him
unfit. The letter closed with a waiver of his own claims in
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Book III.
BATH, CLIFTON, SPAIN, LLANTHONY.
favour of any more suitable person, and with a reiteration that
the appointment was necessary.
The chancellor made no reply. It is difficult now to believe
possible, what could then be done, or omitted to be done, with
perfect impunity. As Sydney Smith says of the time comprised
in the first quarter of the century when this particular chancellor
and his court pressed so heavily on mankind, it was an awful
time for liberal opinions and for all who had the misfortune to
entertain them. A man raising his voice against a Tory lord-
lieutenant was a man crying out in a desert; but Landor did not
therefore abate his voice, and happily we may hear it still. He
wrote another letter, of which the interest rises above the occa-
sion, and gives it value in a higher sense. It tells us what in
favourable circumstances he proposed to have done at Llanthony,
and what, in circumstances less happy, he did; and so much as
it eloquently and quite truly claims, of unselfishness of intention
and worthiness of design, may stand hereafter not unfairly against
some serious faults and failures of execution. It is a masterly
apology, if not a complete defence, and will soften if it does not
arrest judgment. Its date is October 1812. I give the mate-
rial portions.
TO THE LORD-CHANCELLOR ELDON.
The choice of justices and their conduct are perhaps of greater
importance than any things now remaining of the English constitution. I
thought myself qualified. I have constantly endeavoured, from my earli-
est youth, to acquire and disseminate knowledge. My property in the
county is little short of 3000l. a year, and capable of improvement to more
than double that amount. I have estates in other counties, both in pos-
session and in reversion. I have planted more than 70,000 oaks, and
300,000 other forest-trees; and I shall not leave off until I have planted
one million. Fifteen thousand acres of land will allow room enough for
their growth. Yet I have sought no medal or notoriety, and the mention
of it is now extorted from me to prove that in one instance I have not
without success attempted to benefit the county. I have, at my own ex-
pense, done more service to the roads in a couple of years than all the
nobility and gentlemen around me have done since the Conquest; and I
stated my desire of being in the commission of the peace to arise from
the power it would afford me, at the sessions, of presenting what are still
impassable, and of repressing those lawless acts which are committed in
all countries where, from similar impediments, there is little intercourse
with mankind. When the Duke of Beaufort thought proper to decline my
offer, I wrote again to him with perfect temper, and requested him to ap-
point one better qualified. He had no reply to make. It may indeed justly
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MARRIAGE AND LIFE AT LLANTHONY.
•
be said of me, if anything shall be said, Serit arbores quæ alteri sæculo
prosint; and what honour it will confer on the lord-lieutenant to have
rejected the public and gratuitous services of such a man is worth his
consideration rather than mine. I never now will accept, my lord,
anything whatever that can be given by ministers or by chancellors, not
even the dignity of a country justice, the only honour or office I ever
have solicited. In truth, it was the only one fit for me. I cannot boast
that high cultivation of mind, that knowledge of foreign nations, that in-
tercourse with men who have established and men who have subverted
empires, that insight into human nature, that investigation and develop-
ment of the causes why Europe has diverged from the same (original) state
of society into such variations of civic polity; in short, those travels abroad
and those studies at home which have adapted the great statesmen of the
day for the duties they so ably and disinterestedly fulfil. Yet somewhat of
all these things have fallen within my reach and exercised my moderate
powers of mind. DEMOSTHENES and POLYBIUS, LIVY and TACITUS, MACHIA-
VELLI, DAVILA, GRAVINA, BECCARIA, DE THOU and MONTESQUIEU, MILTON
and SYDNEY and HARRINGTON and LOCKE, may console me for the down-
fall of my hopes from that bright eminence to which none of them, in
these times and in this country, would have attained; and for which my
pursuits equally disqualify me. Here I have only occupied my hours with
what lie beneath the notice of statesmen and governors: in pursuing, with
fresh alacrity, the improvement of public roads, of which already I have
completed, at my own expense, more than a distance of seven miles over
mountains and precipices, and have made them better and much wider
than the turnpike roads throughout the country; in relieving the wants
and removing the ignorance of the poor; and in repressing, by personal
influence rather than judicial severity, the excesses to which misery and
idleness give rise. These things appear of little consequence to the rich
and prosperous, but they are the causes why the rich and prosperous
cease to be so; and if we refuse to look at them now, in the same point
of view as humanity and religion see them in, they will have to be looked
at hereafter from a position not only incompatible with leisure and quiet,
but far too close for safety. I am, my lord, WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR.'
With this and a poetical epistle in the same month to Southey,
the subject was dismissed, and he troubled duke and chancellor
no more. Through the verses, perhaps more than through his
graver protests, his bile had completely discharged itself; and,
for a better reason also than this, the reader will thank me for
subjoining some of them. They were the first important ex-
ample of a kind of writing he was afterwards very fond of, and
showed much mastery in: the rhymed verses which in Swift's
time were called 'occasional,' but for which we now borrow an
epithet from the French. Swift himself hardly threw them off
more successfully than Landor. For it is the consummate art of
such writing to seem infinitely easier than it is, and common-
160
Book III.
BATH, CLIFTON, SPAIN, LLANTHONY.
+
place professors of it are slipshod when they ought to be easy.
It should condescend without condescending, combine the most
perfect finish with an apparent carelessness of rhyming, and to
the utmost terseness of language give the tone of mere conversa-
tion.* And hence it is that the finest examples of it are often
found in men who have also written poetry of the highest
order.
'On Tiber's bank, in Arno's shade,
I wooed and won the classic maid.
When Spain from base oppression rose,
I foremost rush'd amidst her foes...
Homeward I turn: o'er Hatteril's rocks
I see my trees, I hear my flocks.
Where alders mourn their fruitless bed
Ten thousand cedars raise their head;
And from Segovia's hills remote
My sheep enrich my neighbour's cote.
The wide and easy road I lead
Where never paced the harness'd steed..
But Envy's steps too soon pursue
The man who hazards schemes so new;
Who, better fit for Rome and Greece,
Thinks to be-justice of the peace!
A Beaufort's timely care prevents
These wild and desperate intents.
His grandsons, take my word, shall show for 't
This my receipt in full to Beaufort.'
But though the affair was thus finally dismissed, it would be
difficult to overstate its effect on his temper while it lasted. He
had made up his mind even to quit England altogether, and be-
come a citizen of France. He would live in some French town
in retirement on half his income, and give up the other half to
a trustworthy agent, who should employ it exclusively in im-
proving his English estates. I gather the details of this notable
scheme from the letter which reasoned and shamed him out of
it: a wise and kindly letter of his brother Robert's, identical in
tone and temper with those that have enriched this memoir: for,
even as Mr. Landor writes of his brother now, he was writing
to that brother himself fifty-five years ago. It is to be added,
however, quite apart from any question of individual complaint,
What other higher qualities it may be enriched by, I have expressed
in my Life of Goldsmith, who wrote it as well as any man.
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PUBLIC AFFAIRS.
that Landor's opinion of the way in which affairs were at this
time administered in England, repeatedly expressed to Southey
during the past two years, has upon it the impress of very strong
convictions unwarped by personal grievance or impatience; and
the reader will perhaps not be sorry to have a few of these opinions
laid before him. Originality and interest constitute their claim
to preservation apart even from the character they illustrate.
VIII. PUBLIC AFFAIRS.
Southey's connection with Scott's scheme of the Edinburgh
Register, for which he had undertaken to supply the history of
each year as Burke did for Dodsley's, and in which he promised
Landor to give such account of Bonaparte as befitted a repub-
lican, led to occasional interchange between the friends on the
political questions of the day more frank and outspoken than
his Quarterly lucubrations at any time afforded. In the Review
he was never able quite to unmuzzle himself; and it is curious
to observe how ill from the first he and Gifford got on together
both in politics and literature. As for the notice he wrote of
Count Julian for the Quarterly, and by which he hoped to have
given Landor satisfaction, Gifford had so completely knocked its
brains out before publication, that no subsequent mention of it,
to Landor or any one else, was ever made by the writer.
A prominent subject in their letters, nevertheless, is Sou-
they's increasing work for the Quarterly, with which his grumb-
ling at the editor continues to keep pace; but he has good hope
that he will not meddle with a forthcoming article on Method-
ism which he has written in reply to Sydney Smith's in the Edin-
burgh, and which he shall follow up in the number following
with a mortal blow at Malthus, the especial object of his con-
tempt and abhorrence. Then, after several months, while yet
he is in pains of labour with his second product of history for
the Register, his article on Methodism has appeared and given
such delight to Perceval, that Southey feels he has lost a rich
benefice by not going into the church. There are, however,
* This I need hardly say was Southey's destination originally, if he
had found himself able to accept the Articles. I possess a curious little
M
162
Book IlI.
BATH, CLIFTON, SPAIN, LLANTHONY.
subjects less pleasant. Had Landor seen Jeffrey's criticism on
Kehama, as original as the poem and altogether matchless for
impertinence? Characteristic was Landor's reply, in which the
reader will not now care to criticise closely words out of which
the heat and venom have long since departed. Jeffrey himself
gave hard words in those days, and was prepared to receive
them; but, though a greatly-overrated literary critic, he was a
man of prodigious ability in various ways, of an unequalled
quickness and keenness of intellect, and with a power of inspir-
ing attachment possessed only by sincere fine natures.
'Jeffrey is called a clever man, I hear. If so, people may be clever men
without knowing the nature of a lie, or the distinction between virtue and
vice. No spécies of dishonesty is surely so unpardonable as Jeffrey's, no
profligacy so flagitious. Thievery may arise from early example or from
urgent want. It may have grown into an incurable habit, or have been
pushed on by the necessities of nature. A man may commit even murder
itself from the sudden and incontrollable impulse of a heart still uncor-
rupted; but he must possess one of a very different kind who can air and
exercise his faculties on no other ground than the destruction of fame and
the mortification of genius. I was once asked whether I would be in-
troduced to this gentleman. My reply was, No, nor to any other rascal
whatsoever. I like to speak plainly, and particularly so when the person
of whom I speak may profit by it.'
That was in May 1811; and Jeffrey, if he could have read
it and the letter which followed it in July, would doubtless
have smiled at the worshipful society of rascals in which he
found himself. Landor was then expecting his friend* at Llan-
thony, and thus continues:
'What a series of fools and scoundrels have managed this country!
Surely such fellows as Pitt and Fox should never have gone farther than
the vestry-room. A parish workhouse had been too much for their man-
agement, and they have been making a national one!'
C
It must at the same time be admitted that this sort of thing
note of Coleridge's to Cottle in 1796, consisting simply of these words:
'DEAR COTTLE, I congratulate Virtue and her friends that Robert Southey
' has relinquished all intentions of taking orders. He leaves our party,
however, and means, he thinks, to study the law. Yours, S. T. COLE-
C
RIDGE. Our party' was the Pantisocratic expedition.
* He cannot tell how to direct that letter, and the worst is, I never
was right in my life if I hesitated.' Alas! it was his habit of not hesi-
tating oftener, and reflecting more, that led him into all kinds of intem-
perances of act as well as speech.
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PUBLIC AFFAIRS.
was more harmless than Southey's occasional outbreaks. A few
months later there is a letter of his, a strange medley of shrewd-
ness and violence, criticising affairs in Spain, hopeful of Welling-
ton, giving Bonaparte a lease of less than seven years, confident
of seeing a peace dictated under the walls of Paris, and condem-
ning the Spanish soldier Blake as a general, which ends by his
declaring it humiliating that Spain should have produced two
centuries ago half-a-dozen men resolute in a mistaken cause to
slay the Prince of Orange at the sacrifice of their own lives, ‘and
'that now she has not found one to aim a dagger at the heart
' of Bonaparte !' Southey was more scrupulous than his friend
as to flinging about reckless epithets; but where he felt very
strongly, the flame of his anger burnt with a fiercer as well as
a more intense glow.
6
Replying at the opening of 1812 from Bath, whither he had
gone to meet his wife's father, Landor has a word to say for
Bonaparte himself: 'It is terrible to think that, such is the
'state of Europe, no nation can go on tolerably well without a
usurper. France would have fallen without Bonaparte. The
world is ruined by stupidity, and not by knavery or cruelty.
There is not a government in Europe that might not be and
'should not be destroyed. But the French is unquestionably
'the best, because it is in the hands of the wisest ; as for virtue
or vice, the shades of difference are utterly undiscernible.'
This was written a few months before his scheme of find-
ing a home for himself in France, which he was shamed out of
so wisely by his brother Robert; but it was not to his discre-
dit at this time that while denouncing as loudly as Southey
the misdeeds of Bonaparte, he recognised not only his genius,
which the other never did, but, in the fact of his being the
ablest of living Frenchmen, some sort of reason for putting
him at the head of France. There was no such comfort to be
got out of a survey of the existing English government, what-
ever its other merits might be; and if the statesmanship pos-
sessed by Pitt and Fox were to be measured by the England
they had left behind them, its ministerial purity, party fidelity,
or national prosperity, Landor had some excuse for pitching
it so low. It was a time when disasters were certain and
164
Book III.
BATH, CLIFTON, SPAIN, LLANTHONY.
victories yet doubtful, and when the people were as unfairly
restricted in their liberties as in their industry and enter-
prise. With the regency had begun the undisputed reign of
the mediocrities, Mr. Perceval entering with the new year as
Lords Grey and Grenville were finally bowed out; and England
had become chiefly famous for Walcheren defeats abroad, for
machinery-riots and bread-riots at home, and for every kind of
revolting variety of ex-officio informations and furious attacks
on the press. So great was the misery about Llanthony, Landor
proceeds to say in his letter, that not only had his people ceased
to be mischievous, but had even lost the spirit to exult in their
landlord's losses and misfortunes. He puts the matter with a
whimsical sense of humour that we cannot but smile at still.
'Three pounds of miserable bread costs two shillings at Abergavenny.
The poor barbarous creatures in my parish have actually ceased to be
mischievous, they are so miserable. We can find them employment at
present, and four-and-sixpence a day; yet nothing can solace them for
their difficulty in procuring bread. All my hay is spoilt. This is always
worth a day's meal to them, but it can happen only once in the season.
The poor devils are much to be pitied, for they really look now as if they
hardly enjoyed it. It is their moulting-time, and they cannot crow.'
That letter was dated the 12th of February, and was crossed
by a letter from Southey of two days' earlier date, written in
much alarm. 'Trotter's book' was the life of Fox lately pub-
lished by his secretary; and with Mr. Murray, the reader will
remember, Landor had been placed in communication by the
printing of his tragedy:
'
About an hour ago came a parcel to me from Murray, containing
among other things an unfinished commentary upon Trotter's book. Aut
Landor, aut Diabolus. From the manner, from the force, from the vehem-
ence, I concluded it must be yours, even before I fell upon the passage
respecting Spain, which proved that it was yours. I could not lie down
this night with an easy conscience if I did not beseech you to suspend the
publication till you have cancelled some passages. It would equally grieve
me to have the book supprest, or to have it appear as it is. It is yours
and yours all over,-the non imitabile fulmen.'
On the 15th Landor replied, telling what the thing was, how
it originated, and the objection Murray had himself made to a
proposed dedication of it to the President of the United States,
against whom England was then on the eve of a declaration of
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165
PUBLIC AFFAIRS.
war.
This, the rejoinder of Southey, and the letters that fol-
lowed, have characteristic value for the description they give,
not only of the Commentary, of which a few copies got into
subsequent circulation as 'Observations on Trotter's Life of
'Fox,' but of a companion tract called the Parallel, and of
the Dedication, both suppressed. All that their author intended.
by them, their startling paradoxes, their personal attacks, and
the strange combination throughout them of largeness and wis-
dom of view with proposals worthy of Laputa and an absurd
intemperance of expression, these letters vividly depicted. But
a few brief extracts only may be given.
'I will do precisely as you recommend, and request you particularly to
mention such other passages as should be cancelled. . . I praised Hastings,
and drew a comparison between him and Fox; but, said I, possibly this
great ruler may have been deaf to the voice of misery and of justice. I
drew a comparison also between Lord Peterboro' and Lord Wellington, in
which I proved the latter to be equal to the other. In short, with reference
to the military administration, I preferred the present to every other in
this reign except Lord Chatham's. But I asked myself what source of
corruption these Percevals and people had cut off? What protection they
had given to freedom or to literature? After all, who will read anything
I write? One enemy, an adept in bookery and reviewship, can without
talents and without industry suppress in a great degree all my labours, as
easily as a mischievous boy could crush with a roller a whole bed of cro-
cuses. I am surprised that Murray should object to publish my dedication
to the president of the United States. It is very temperate, and, I believe,
not ineloquent. War is not declared; and I earnestly point out the mis-
chief it would do America; how deplorable that freemen should contend
with freemen, and diminish a number already so reduced! I never wrote
anything better.'
In his allusions to America Landor had greatly the advant-
age of his friend, who had no indisposition to the war then
imminent, and was ready to give credit to any absurdity that
might help to put a wider breach between us and our trans-
atlantic kinsmen. On the other hand, what Southey says of
George Rose is not a bad comment on what Lord Shelburne is
reported to have said to him: 'Good God, Mr. Rose, why have
you not more ambition! Rose had been twenty years Pitt's
secretary to the treasury, and was everybody's factotum in those
days; but we may easily understand Landor's slowness to re-
cognise abilities of which only the most meagre memorials have
even yet come to light, though he has been dead half a century.
C
166
Book III.
BATH, CLIFTON, SPAIN, LLANTHONY.
In the recent changes Rose had stuck to Perceval, in spite of
all Canning's attempts to draw him off; and his appointment as
treasurer to the navy, with Croker for secretary, a selection he
was supposed to have suggested, but which in reality he very
strongly disapproved, had greatly moved Landor's wrath. I pre-
serve a few passages of Southey's letter, dated February 21,
1812, which both his son and his son-in-law have suppressed.
The Spanish colonies offer a wretched prospect; they are even more
unfit for independence than the Americans were, who have become inde-
pendent (by our fault most assuredly) a full century before they were of
age.
See what it is to have a nation to take its place among civilised
states before it has either gentlemen or scholars! They have in the course
of twenty years acquired a distinct national character for low and lying
knavery; and so well do they deserve it that no man ever had any deal-
ings with them without having proofs of its truth. . . You have plucked
George Rose most unmercifully. Yet if I were asked what man in the
House of Commons had done most good there, I should name this very
hero, who, according to a song sung by his company of Christchurch
volunteers to his praise, while he used to get drunk with them drinking
alternately his own health and his wife's, is "as brave as Alexander." The
encouragement of the benefit societies, the population and poor returns,
and the naval schools, we owe to G. Rose. He has actually done more good
than the whole gang of reformers have even proposed to do. The worst I
know or think of Canning is that he seems to be laying out for popularity
by showing symptoms of falling in with that party whose economy is injus-
tice, and who never hold out any nobler object to the people than that
of saving pounds, shillings, and pence. . . Your prose is as much your own
as your poetry. There is a life and vigour in it to which I know no paral-
lel. It has the poignancy of champagne, and the body of English October.
Neither you nor Murray gave me any hint that the Commentary was
yours, but I could not look into these pages without knowing that it could
not be the work of any other man. God bless you. R. S.'
How much wiser, of how much more prophetic view and
with what unmistakable earnestness expressed, are the striking
passages having relation to America in Landor's rejoinder, dated
ten days later!
'I pray fervently to God that no part of America may be desolated;
that her wildernesses may be the bowers and arbours of liberty; that the
present restrictions on her commerce may have no other effect than to
destroy the cursed trafficking and tricking which debases the brood worse
than felonies and larcenies; and that nothing may divert their attention
from their own immense neighbourhood, or from the determination of
helping to set free every town and village of their continent! To accom-
plish this end I would throw myself at the feet of Madison, and implore
till I were hoarse with imploring him. I detest the American character
•
1805-1814.
167
PUBLIC AFFAIRS.
as much as you do, and commerce as much as Bonaparte does; but a civil
war (and ours would be one) is so detestable a thing as never to be counten-
anced or pardoned, unless as the only means of bringing a ferocious and
perfidious tyrant to public justice. Nothing can be more animating than
such a tiger-hunt as this, and even the peril itself is salutary. But the
Americans speak our language; they read Paradise Lost; and their
children, if fire and sword should not consume them, will indulge their mild
and generous affections in Kehama. Surely there must be many still
amongst them who retain, in all their purity, the principles that drove
their ancestors from this country. In my opinion one such family is worth
all the turbulent slaves and nobles in the wilds of Poland, and all the
thoughtless heads that are devoted for Fernando Settimo.'
But before this letter was even posted, Southey had been
writing to confirm the suspicion with which it opened, that Mr.
Murray had taken fright at the Commentary, and was anxious
to be relieved from going on with it. Not having read it when
he undertook its publication, he has since been reading it in the
proofs, and now finds that its remarks on Mr. Canning would
put him in so painful a position that he has appealed to Southey
to get him out of the scrape. To this Landor replies in March
1812. A plague on both your houses!' He is so disgusted
with both factions, that, by way of grinding both into the dust,
he means to lay out five thousand (borrowed) pounds in establish-
ing a printing-press at Llanthony. Another scheme which he
had, to establish Lord Wellington on the throne of Portugal,
one might suppose to have involved yet greater difficulty for so
stanch a republican. But for the time no doubt he was hotly
bent on both, and equally ready when the cool fit came to sur-
render either. Observe, at the same time, how large and just
were his views on leading questions of civil liberty.
'At this time I am reading the Correspondence of Erasmus, 2146
pages! How infinitely more freedom, as well as more learning, was there
in those days than in ours! yet establishments of every kind were in much
greater danger of innovation. Two things are wanting. Perfect equality
in all religionists as to their competency in civil employments, and an
acknowledgment of the principle, ne quid falsi dicere audeat, ne quid
veri non audeat. In fact, that there is no libel without falsehood. Un-
less these rights are admitted and established, I think it a matter of utter
indifference who governs. I confess I care not how fast that system runs
to ruin which opposes them. . . I am about to borrow five thousand pounds
that I may establish a press, for the purpose, at much private loss, disquiet,
and danger, of setting the public mind more erect, and throwing the two
factions into the dust. I shall not cease to uphold the cause of Lord Wel-
168
Book III.
BATH, CLIFTON, SPAIN, LLANTHONY.
lington and the revolutionising of South America. The people of South
America are of a military origin, the descendants of brave and honour-
able men; they are uncontaminated by blackguard religions, and neither
befooled by kings nor cowed by inquisitions. Their religion and all their
other habits must perpetually remind them of their ancestors; and those
men are always the best between whom and their forefathers no cloud or
indistinctness intervenes. A North-American can see his only through
the pillory: this is a very different view from that which is presented
under the banners of Pizarro and Cortes. It must also be conceded that
an Englishman does not lift his foot so high above the dirt as a Spaniard,
and that he degenerates much sooner and much more.'
To that Southey had much to say, and said it with the
strangest possible mixture of his former and his present self,
Jacobin and Anti-Jacobin. He has a view of the libel-law that
might have satisfied Eldon himself; with a faith in republican-
ism (everywhere but in America) and a theory of colonial inde-
pendence that the same learned 'Old Bags' would have treated
as insanity. At the notion of setting up a printer's press he is
terrified in the extreme. Heaven forbid that Landor should
draw on himself such vexations! Cold lead was more perilous
than cold iron. If he would but bear in mind what the laws of
libel were, he might say what he liked to the public with safety.
One cannot but now remember nevertheless, that within a few
months of this date Mr. Perry of the Chronicle had been dragged
before the courts for copying a gentle sarcasm about the Prince
of Wales becoming 'nobly popular,' and that Mr. Leigh Hunt
and his brother were sent to Horsemonger-lane jail exactly
seven months later for calling the same high personage an Adonis
of fifty.
Southey proceeds to remark that he and Landor had the same
end in view; they only differed as to means; and it is indeed
plain, from the character of this and his other letters at the time,
that he had in his heart a more genuine republicanism than
Landor, with whom it was often little more than an unreasoning
hatred of kings. The illustration we have just seen the latter
employ, that those men are always the best between whom and
their forefathers no cloud or indistinctness intervenes, and that
a North American could see his only through the pillory, is not
one that Southey would have used. He puts the matter in an-
other way.
In his opinion, the present letter went on to say,
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PUBLIC AFFAIRS.
Landor rated the American Spaniards too highly, just as he over-
rated the Americans themselves. He asks his friend to read
Cotton Mather's History of New England, of which the annals
were told by succession not of princes but preachers. Half the
Anglo-Americans, in Southey's view, went over red-hot from
the conventicle, the other half flagrant from Bridewell; and the
tertium quid had the roguery of the one superinduced upon the
hard vulgarity of the other.
After this, for two or three months, other than public sub-
jects occupy the letters of both, and not until October are poli-
tics resumed. The interval had been marked by stirring events,
of which the latest were Borodino and Moscow; and at the
reverses of Napoleon's fortune Southey's exultation knew no
bounds. 'Huzza! fight on, my merry men all, must be our
'tune; and as long as we can keep out the white-livered Fox-
'ites at home, the cause of Europe will never be to be despaired
'of. Should they get the ascendancy, it would then indeed be
' time to turn Turk in despair.' Landor's replies were less exult-
ant. His toleration of the English government, to the direction of
which Lord Liverpool had succeeded on the murder of Perceval,
and of which Castlereagh and Sidmouth were now the animat-
ing spirits, was very naturally not on the increase; and as to
Bonaparte, the view expressed by him was in effect that which
Hazlitt, with quite a frenzy of personal passion, supported in
later years.
:
I hate him; I execrate
Genius, in a political
'I do not think with you about Bonaparte.
him but I detest our own government worse.
sense, is the Salvator or the Redemptor mundi. Corruption is the Devil,
not the Satan of Milton, but the sheer mean-spirited creature of the
Evangelists. As for the cause of Europe, which you say is never to be
despaired of, the kings and governments are such fools and rascals that I
wish from my soul Bonaparte may utterly extinguish all of them.
I am
more and more convinced that Lord Wellington alone is able to unite such
discordant nations as the Portuguese and Spanish. It requires but very
little wisdom to govern well when a people knows that he who governs
can enforce obedience. He would not permit any great demand for it.'
Immediately on this followed the general election, in which
Landor so far took part as to issue an address to the freeholders,
of Monmouthshire. He had declined, he said, himself to come
forward; but he hoped they would choose a better colleague for
170
Book III.
BATH, CLIFTON, SPAIN, LLANTHONY.
(
their old member than the brother of the lord-lieutenant, to
whose family pretensions in the point of intellect he was the
reverse of complimentary. 'We often find throughout whole
families,' he wrote, 'as lifeless an equality of mind and soul as
'the revolutionists of France would have established in rank
and property. I trust we should be as unwilling to counten-
ance the one as the other.' His address, which dealt with en-
closure-bills and other modes of meeting the existing discon-
tents, was issued in October 1812; the new parliament, from
which it had failed to exclude Lord Arthur Somerset, assembled
in November; and two months later Landor was eagerly intent
on bringing before it an enclosure-bill of his own. Writing to
Southey from Llanthony in the last days of January 1813, he
bespeaks his interest for it; and there is evidence that his
friend did all he could for the bill, his letters mentioning the
members he had written to about it; but the opinion of his
own county representatives being adverse, Landor had to aban-
don it early in the session. Even by that time, however, subjects
of more engrossing interest had supervened; and, what with his
own troubles and Bonaparte's troubles, he had more than enough
to occupy him. The private disputes are reserved to another
section; but what passed between Southey and himself during
the eventful months that preceded the abdication at Fontaine-
bleau, will properly be added here.
In April 1813 Landor notices a newspaper report of Austria
joining the coalition against France. 'Kings and emperors are
such a detestable race of rascals, I mean the present families of
'them, that I can hope nothing from their coalition at all favour-
' able to the happiness of mankind. But at all events, the fewer
'Frenchmen there are in the world, the happier will the world be.
There is no comfort or quiet for these gnats.' In something of
the same spirit Southey replies, saddened by private as well as
public occurrences, and less eager than he had been a few months
before for continuance of war with America. He was full of fear
that the German campaigns might lead to a peace, being con-
vinced that a peace leaving Bonaparte alive would be worse
than war. Still, therefore, he hoped to see his destruction, and
then peace might be lasting. But how disastrous was the out-
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PUBLIC AFFAIRS.
look at home! His friend had been too true a prophet. Our
'naval superiority stricken, the foundations of every establish-
ment undermined, and the dragon's teeth sown all around
' us.' Happily for himself, however, he recovered spirits as the
year went on; for the laureateship fell to him in the autumn,
and it would never have done to open in less cheery strain than
he did, rejoicing in the gift and exulting in the return he was
able to make for it. The letter in which he told his friend all
about his appointment: how Croker had applied on his behalf
to the prince, who promised it to him; how Lords Liverpool
and Hertford had meanwhile offered it to Scott, who waived it
handsomely in his favour; and how, in taking it, he had neither
fear of the newspaper jokesmiths nor distrust of his own power
to make the office respectable: was written immediately on his
return to Keswick, after a five-and-forty hours' mail-coach journey
from London in the middle of November 1813. It was acknow-
ledged by Landor in the same month from Swansea, with hearty
congratulations on finding at the least so much honesty and dis-
cernment displayed by the men in power. 'I never thought
'that a place gave honour to any one, or that any one gave
'honour to a place; but there is something equally agreeable
'both to the reasonable and the romantic mind in reflecting that
in war and in poetry, the elements of ardent souls, the first
men of our country fill the first station.'
6
The interest in the great war-tragedy was meanwhile thick-
ening fast, and the catastrophe was rapidly approaching. The
battle of Leipsic had been fought in October, and before the
end of the year Germany was free. Then, at the opening of the
next momentous year, came out Southey's first laureate effort,
the Carmen Triumphale; and Landor, whom business had taken
to London at the time, was hoping also to sustain the feeling
against France by a series of letters in the Courier with the sig-
nature of Calvus. Of these productions Southey heard through
Coleridge, then also writing in the Courier; and in his next
letter, everyway a characteristic one, asks if Landor had seen
what he had himself been writing in the same paper, Who calls
for peace at this momentous hour? For five years, Southey con-
tinued, he had been preaching the necessity of declaring Bona-
172
Book III.
BATH, CLIFTON, SPAIN, LLANTHONY.
parte under the ban of human nature; and if this had been done
in 1805, even the emperor of Austria, 'wretch as he is,' could
never have given him his daughter in marriage. Now his hope
was that the other 'wretch' might require terms of peace that
the allies would not consent to. Not that he wanted the Bour-
bons restored. Except when expulsions had been effected by
foreign force, restorations were bad things. The Bourbons had
been a detestable race, and adversity had failed to restore in
them the virtues royalty had stifled. It was an old notion of
his that the Revolution would not have done its work till the
houses both of Austria and Bourbon were destroyed. Eager
was Landor's reply. Yes, he was for the destruction of both;
but Bonaparte's vanity had been his ruin. He ought to have
restored Poland, and left only Russia standing of the old kings
and emperors, when he might easily, by playing off the Russians,
have ruined us in the East Indies.
There is something in that view of the case undoubtedly;
but, on the whole, it is singular and not satisfying to observe
how little of what we now should think the true moral of the
momentous events then in progress was extracted from them
by two such near lookers-on as these famous correspondents.
What the mere politicians of the time might be forgiven for
dropping out of account can hardly be excused to Landor
or to Southey. Men of such activity of intellect, familiar with
ancient and with modern history, and who had so clear an
understanding of what the French Revolution involved, might
surely also have been expected more clearly to see that so
decisive an outbreak of democracy would have to run its na-
tural course; that the principles embodied and represented by
Bonaparte would survive his repression and abuse of them; and
that the curtain about to fall on him would have to be uplifted
again for them. It was supposed to have fallen in May 1814,
when Bonaparte had left for Elba, when Wellington had been
created a duke, and when Louis the Eighteenth had taken pos-
session of the Tuileries. Southey then wrote exultingly: 'So
'the curtain has fallen after a tragedy of five-and-twenty years!
The catastrophe is as it should be. Bonaparte's degradation is
'complete. Even his military reputation is lost, and he is suf-
1805-1814.
173
PRIVATE DISPUTES.
'fered to live because he may safely be despised.' But before
that letter reached its destination Landor had quitted England;
and the causes that led to his departure will appear in my re-
sumption of the narrative of his residence at Llanthony.
IX. PRIVATE DISPUTES.
In the early months of 1813 Landor reminded Southey that
the year had come which, according to his promise, was to be
that of his second visit to Llanthony. Since his and Mrs.
Southey's first visit the house had been enlarged, and there had
been many improvements as to comfort; a truth of which he
would not find much difficulty in persuading her. Could he also
persuade her to make the trial? He could insure them well-
aired beds, and his horses should meet them anywhere and at
any time.
Southey hesitated, doubted if he could make the time suit-
able, desired it too much to drop it altogether, and was still en-
tertaining it as not impossible, when, within three weeks of the
former, a second letter reached him. It opened ominously, for
already Southey had sufficient experience of his friend to know
that any new literary enterprise was not unlikely to foreshadow
some fresh personal vexation; the one being commonly used as
a safety-valve or escape from the other. I have,' this letter
began, 'written a comedy, and shall send it within a few days
'to your booksellers for you. This, in my opinion, may be
' acted. There is a prefatory discourse by the editor, much in
'the style of our great editors on the other side of the Tweed.'
But the personal vexation, of which here was the sure forerun-
ner, carried with it in this case a special annoyance to Southey
himself. The letter, opening thus lightly, passed into tragical
utterance in the very next line, as it conveyed the terrible an-
nouncement that with the tenant B, who had introduced him-
self on the strength of Southey's name; the 'agriculturist,' of
whom so many letters had been written; the supposed man of
capital, to whom the best farm of Llanthony had been let on
terms extravagantly liberal; the real man of destiny, pre-selected
to be a plague and torment to both friends; Landor was now
•
174
Book III.
BATH, CLIFTON, SPAIN, LLANTHONY.
plunged over head and ears in disputes of an irreconcilable bit-
terness, and to which the only possible issue must be hopeless
and irretrievable loss. The substance of his statement may be
briefly given. Not on the man himself only, but on his father
and other members of his family, he had, in his grand impetu-
ous way, heaped no end of favours and liberalities for Southey's
sake. He had put church-livings at the father's disposal, and
out of them grew the first disputes. Besides the large farm ori-
ginally let to B himself, he had, at the sacrifice of a good tenant,
leased him another. During all the time he had been at Llan-
thony, he had never refused any request to the man, however
unreasonable; and suddenly he had been made conscious of all
he had lost by it. By a series of such conduct as might be ex-
'pected from a sailor turned farmer, and by living at the rate
' of a thousand a year, he has succeeded in spending his wife's
'fortune of three thousand pounds, and in fifteen months I have
' received no rent from him.' Non-payment, indeed, had been
the least of his misdeeds. As soon as B found that limits were
to be put to the indulgences he expected, he declared open war
against his landlord, subjected him to every kind of annoyance,
brought three or four brothers to the place to poach over his
manors and worry him the more, and, finally, 'discharged me
' and my gamekeeper from shooting on his farm.' Southey was
startled by all this, as he well might be; and though partiality
is hardly avoidable in stating one's own case, he did not find
ultimately that Landor had much exaggerated. His own omin-
ous remark upon B's ignorance of agriculture will be recollected;
the man's previous employments having in fact been those of
usher in his father's school, and afterwards of petty officer in an
India Company's ship. Yet it was not his character only, but
all his surroundings, that marked him out for the part he had to
play. It was one of his sisters, as before we have seen, who
induced Southey to recommend him. The old gentleman his
father was the origin of Landor's first troubles with him.
could a non-paying tenant present himself to a luckless landlord
under conditions more aggravating, than those of giving bed and
board to a quarter of a dozen idle brothers who had 'abandoned
' every other visible means of procuring an honest livelihood.'
Nor
1805-1814.
175
PRIVATE DISPUTES.
'I forgot to tell you,' wrote Charles Lamb to Landor nearly
twenty years later, in an unpublished letter now lying before
me, 'I knew all your Welsh annoyancers, the measureless B's.
I knew a quarter of a mile of them. Seventeen brothers and
'sixteen sisters, as they appear to me in memory. There was
one of them that used to fix his long legs on my fender, and
'tell a story of a shark, every night, endless, immortal. How
' have I grudged the salt-sea ravener not having had his gorge
of him! The shortest of the daughters measured five foot
' eleven without her shoes. Well, some day we may confer
' about them. But they were tall. Surely I have discovered
' the longitude-' Of course the hero of the shark was Landor's
chief tormentor. He had been in the East and in the West
Indies; and, for the sake of the whole family of sharks he was
to bring up to have their gorge of Landor, the salt-sea ravener
had spared him.
Southey's answer was written in the midst of family distress.
His wife's brother had suddenly died while on a visit to them,
and had left everything dismal and comfortless around them.
But bitter beyond all was his grief and surprise at B's conduct.
Personally he knew little of him, and never meant to recommend
him; but the man certainly had come of a good stock, and if he
had not himself implicitly believed in his honour and honesty
he would never in an evil hour have directed him to the Vale
of Ewyas. It was very strange, but misgivings about him, though
not affecting his honesty, had occurred a few months ago. He
had sent over to Keswick last summer from Abergavenny a very
vulgar fellow with letters of introduction; and this had given
Southey a bad opinion of his taste in companions.
Southey then talks of the comedy of the Charitable Dowager.
He supposes the heroine drawn from the life, and thinks as
a drama there is a want of incident, and, in that on which
the catastrophe depends, of probability; but he had found the
dialogue abounding with those felicities that flashed from Landor
in prose and verse more than from any other writer. He remem-
bered nothing but Jeremy Taylor that at all resembled them.
Jeremy had things as perfect and touching in their kind, but
a different kind: the same beauty, the same exquisite fitness ;
176
Book III.
BATH, CLIFTON, SPAIN, LLANTHONY.
but not the point and poignancy displayed in the Comedy and
the Commentary, or the condensation and strength that charac-
terised Gebir and Count Julian.
From Llanthony, Landor answered in August: upon the
personal points first, and after on the comedy.
'B told Addis, my tenant and a very honest man, that he should pay
me no rent at all events for four years. Here is between four and five
thousand pounds gone by trusting to his honour. I suffered by the same
infatuation before. I cannot bring myself to be comforted by Ovid, whose
sentences are full of poetry and wisdom, and are his greatest excellence.
"Leniter ex merito quicquid patiare ferendum est:
Quæ venit indigno poena, dolenda venit."
I wish to improve my comedy, and to have it acted. The acting I
never thought of; but Juan Santos de Murieta, a poor man of Castro who
received me hospitably when I found Bilbao in occupation of the French,
is perhaps ruined by those barbarians. I see no speedier way, little speed
as there is in this, of sending him some money.'
And then he went on to explain the method he had adopted
in writing the comedy, and how much it was to be preferred
to the old method, in an ingenious argument which he used
afterwards for a dialogue between Marvel and Milton. To this,
however, Southey did not immediately reply, being now in Lon-
don on the laureate business. From this date (October 1813)
to the May following, the Llanthony disputes assumed their most
serious form, and involved the most disastrous consequences; yet
this is exactly the interval when, judging from Landor's let-
ters to his friend, not his own but the public affairs, and not his
law-pleas but his Latin poems, we might suppose to be receiving
his exclusive attention. Assuming that the letter above named
had not reached Southey, or that he had not leisure to answer
so many things at once, he selects the thing as to which his
needs are most pressing. I really do wish that my comedy
should be both printed and acted. You alone are capable of
giving me any advice that I am likely to follow in altering the
plot. A comedy must have some bustle; a tragedy should have
none. The passions will permit no movements but their own,
-they should be painted naked, like heroes and gods. If I
can make my comedy worth ten pounds, I will send the money
'to an honest and generous man named Juan Santos de Mureta,
'whose property was destroyed by the French at Castro. He
<
6
(
}
1805-1814.
177
PRIVATE DISPUTES.
(
' received me there most hospitably, when I found that the
enemy had entered Bilbao.' His friend would observe that he
had lowered his hopes from a hundred pounds to ten; but seri-
ously he did not at present believe he could, by any exertion,
write anything for which a bookseller might safely exceed the
amount he here mentioned.
Nor had that letter been dispatched many days before he
wrote again to say that he had been finishing an old scrap of
Latin poetry as usual. Finishing! as usual!-no, continuing
and altering; then either losing it, or lighting a taper with it
{
to seal a letter.' And the letter closes with forty-three closely
transcribed lines of the poem of Corythus.* Southey meanwhile
had been writing with some misgivings about the comedy. It
wanted action and bustle. Yet had he found in the dialogue of
it a peculiar character easier to feel than to analyse. Landor's
prose was like his verse: everywhere terse, condensed, and full
of thought; and with flashes of which the thought and the ex-
pression were so apt, so happy, and so original, that he knew
not where they were to be paralleled, or where anything ap-
proaching them was to be found. Corythus he had also read
with immense satisfaction. To all this, however, there is not
even allusion in the next of Landor's letters, nor does the
Dowager itself appear again. In the pleasure of any new com-
position past disappointments were always as quickly forgotten
as even present pains and disquietudes. Occupation upon his
Latin verse absorbs him once more, and everything else is as
though it had not been. Valpy the printer,' he now wrote to
tell Southey, 'the greatest of all coxcombs, very much wished
'to print my Latin poems; but I have an intention to print
'them at Oxford, under the title of Idyllia Heroum atque He-
roidum, in a size like the sixpenny books of children. It will
'cost me 357; and I intend to give whatever they sell for,
'which may amount to about half the money, to the poor of
Leipzig. If I had finished or preserved my Polyxena, it would
be perhaps the best. At present they consist of, 1. Corythus,
'sive Mors Paridis atque Enones. 2. Dryope. 3. Pan et Pitys.
८
*It is the fifth of the Idyllia Heroica in Poemata et Inscriptiones,
pp. 19-32. And see Hellenics, pp. 174-186.
N
178
Book III.
BATH, CLIFTON, SPAIN, LLANTHONY.
6
C
4. Coresus et Calliroë. 5. Helena, ad Pudoris Aram. I have
published nothing that will bear a moment's comparison with
Corythus. My head rises to the shoulder of Robert Smith,
' and every other of the modern Latin poets is below my knee.
'Such are my dreams. What poet would tell his as frankly?
or to whom else could I tell mine?' And he winds up with
forty-six more lines of Corythus.
Yet at this very time the most critical hour of his fortune
had come.
Out of his great dispute with B had sprung sundry
minor differences, not merely with people who took B's part,
but with others having small interest in the tenant, but some
dislike of the landlord. A state of things had arrived when any
one ill disposed to the master of Llanthony had means of annoy-
ance at hand which not a few were ready to use. Among them
were magistrates, clerical and lay, with the old grand-jury grudge
against him; small farmers with rents overdue, who fancied they
saw advantage to themselves in his disadvantage; labourers to
whom honest work was hateful, but eager for any amount of
labour that was vicious or mischievous; and (not least though
last) attorneys sharp enough to turn to bitterness every hasty
act or ill-considered word. Landor's chief pride, his plantations,
supplied generally the ground of attack. His trees were up-
rooted, and his timber stolen; and upon the rare occasions when
offenders were caught, sympathising magistrates admitted them
to bail. Against one desperate fellow he had to swear that he
was in personal danger; but though the magistrate who first
heard the case directed the man's committal, ten pounds were
subsequently thought bail sufficient to justify his release. This
fellow soon after drank himself to death at Abergavenny; and,
by the Mr. P. whose acquaintance has before been made by the
reader,* Landor was accused of having caused his death; but
the accuser was acquitted when Landor prosecuted him for slan-
der. On the other hand, when one of B's brothers had been
overheard to threaten that certain trees alleged to have been
planted disadvantageously to his brother's farm should be re-
moved, and Landor posted the fact in a handbill charging him
by name as meditating felony and offering reward for his appre-
*In the seventh section of the Third Book.
1805-1814.
179
PRIVATE DISPUTES.
(
hension, the threatener recovered damages against Landor for
libel. Another of the brothers with sporting tastes had taken
up with congenial associates, of whom the most prominent was
a notorious poacher, son of the keeper of the village alehouse
and this party, according to Landor, with dogs of all descrip-
´tions and as many guns as they could procure, sported over
'several of my farms, destroyed my game, and dined upon it at
'the alehouse afterwards.' Out of this arose a third lawsuit,
which ended in an apology; and when, for the fourth time,
Landor went into the court-house at Abergavenny to give evid-
ence against a man upon trial for stealing property belonging to
him, he protested that if he had been the thief in the dock he
could not have been treated worse than he was in the witness-
box by the cross-examining counsel.
Of some of these and other kindred matters, apart from the
graver suit in progress against the elder B, Southey appears to
have inquired with great concern upon reading a paragraph in
one of the Bristol papers. 'I burst into a loud fit of laughter,'
was Landor's reply, 'at hearing that I was likely to be made an
'outlaw. One Moseley, who had broken all the principal re-
'strictions of his lease, moved me to pity by the number and
greatness of his family; and instead of recovering two or three
‘hundred pounds damages, I gave that sum for his resignation.
'Another tenant, near four years afterwards, during all which
'time his family had wanted bread, was persuaded by some of
'his friends to bring in a bill against me of 187, although every
'bill was always paid instantly, and a settlement for all demands
' had been made on his quitting the estate. I received an im-
'pertinent note from Hugh Jones, his attorney at Abergavenny,
' in reply to which I stated the circumstances, as above, and
'the utter improbability that I could be in his debt, or that so
poor a man could permit it for such a length of time. The
same Jones had incited a poacher to take a false oath against
<
6
me, as the poacher declared to my servants in the presence
'of two respectable tenants. I reminded him of all this, and
'treated him as he deserved. He brought a criminal action
against me. The grand jury of course brought in a true bill.
'Yet the fellow was ashamed, and proposed to accommodate the
C
180
Book III.
BATH, CLIFTON, SPAIN, LLANTHONY.
(
"
' matter by the intervention of two arbiters. They decided that
'I should write an apology for what was unlawful, and pre-
´scribed the form. He afterwards refused to comply with their
decision, which was contained in the form, and which stated
that, the offence being of a private nature, the apology should
'not be made public. I shall be cited to take my trial at Mon-
'mouth; and as I certainly shall not appear, I shall be out-
'lawed. That is the meaning of the paragraph. Again, a fellow
' of most notoriously bad character who has been tried for more
'than one crime, a fellow who collects the window-tax, was the
'friend of one Toombes who took a farm of me of 3007. a year
' and never paid one farthing, but ran away and lived at Aber-
'gavenny, where he killed himself by drinking brandy; and
'that tax-collecting fellow, merely to insult me, took occasion
'to come up to me and inquire aloud of a person with whom he
was walking whether I was the person who murdered poor
'Toombes. He then followed me to the office of my attorney,
Mr. Gabb, and on my demanding of him whether he asked
'that question of me, he said "Yes," and that his friend had
answered in the affirmative. Well, I brought my action, as
'the magistrate, Mr. Powell, recommended. The jury were
' unanimously of opinion that he asked only for the sake of
'information, and found him not guilty. You perceive what
'chance I have of justice, and how subject I am both to robbery
' and insult. When the materials of my house were stolen, and
' when the thief ran away from the constable and hid (in a ditch)
'the wood which the constable was making him carry as evid-
ence of his theft, I was treated by Mr. Taunton, his counsel,
'with much more violence than any criminal. Our laws pro-
'tect none but the guilty. I would not encounter the rudeness
'I experienced from this Taunton to save all the property I pos-
6 sess. I have, however, chastised him in my Latin poetry now
' in the press. I heard accidentally, from Mr. Hawkins of Pem-
'broke-college, a little anecdote, which shall not be very soon
forgotten, of this fellow Taunton.'
6
This was his comfort, and not an inconsiderable one. He
chastised Taunton (afterwards the judge) in Latin poetry, and,
what was more to the purpose, in such English as Swift might
1805-1814.
181
PRIVATE DISPUTES.
have written. That was before the action of libel. Afterwards,
on this case being decided against him, in graver mood than that
which had suggested the poetical attack on Mr. Taunton, he ad-
dressed a letter to the plaintiff's counsel, Mr. Jervis (afterwards
the chief-justice); whose unscrupulous attack on himself had
mainly influenced the jury, and from whom he hoped by this
means to elicit an expression of regret for the language he had
used; failing which he told him he should consider him as a
calumniator in whatever spot upon the earth they might meet,
except in the courts miscalled of justice 'where calumny is sanc-
'tioned by custom, and insolence has the protection of the laws.'
This letter he printed; and it is only just to my old friend that
I should quote four lines from its close, in which, to illustrate
the veracity of a statement of his adversaries that so far from
having any claim upon them, he was actually in their debt, Lan-
dor describes drily and without comment the result of the action
for rent which he had brought against his defaulting tenant.
'The Court of Exchequer has overruled the whole of their ex-
ceptions, dissolved the injunction, and awarded to me every far-
thing of my demand, to the amount of one thousand nine hun-
dred and sixty-eight pounds seventeen shillings and sixpence.'
Such indeed was the decision of the Exchequer upon the
leading matter in dispute. All the lesser differences sprang out
of it, the life at Llanthony had been embittered and broken up
by it, and now one of the highest courts of the realm declared
Landor's claim to be just. But the help this might have given,
opportunely, came now too late. As he said on receiving it, 'The
laws that permit a man to be deprived of his property for two
years may restore it to him when it is worthless,—but better
' order him at once to be starved in an iron cage.' The delays
which his adversary had been permitted to interpose, and the
facilities afforded him even after this verdict to intercept its
immediate operation, were fatal to Landor. He had already
quitted Llanthony, and was now making preparation to depart
from England.
X. DEPARTURE FROM ENGLAND.
In the middle of May 1814 Landor had taken the resolution
182
Book III.
BATH, CLIFTON, SPAIN, LLANTHONY.
to quit England, and on the 16th he communicated his intention
to Southey. Writing from Swansea, he told him that two con-
ditions would regulate the exact time of his going. When Mr.
Jervis had made up his mind whether or not to notice his letter,
and when the Oxford printers should have finished his Latin
poems, of which the profits (if there should happen to be any)
were to go to the sufferers of Leipzig; he would remove from
his country forever.
<
<
His intention and its motive will be best described by him-
self: 'I must borrow at fifteen per cent by annuity, as I have
no other means, my estate being settled; and my property is
'worth 2007. a year less, even if I get these fellows out. I ex-
pect to lose at least 20007. besides the 2007. a year and law
expenses; for they have squandered away whatever they had
by marriage or otherwise. The sister has told innumerable
'falsehoods to Lady Beddingfield and others, but I trust the
'decree of the Court of Exchequer will sufficiently expose the
'principal one. I pray to God I
pray to God I may see you before I go abroad.
'I remain here ten days. I spend three weeks with my mother,
'part at Warwick, part at Ipsley-court near Redditch; or, if
'the weather continues so cold as it is, all the time at Warwick.
'After that I go to France. I am trying to sell my life-interest
' in the Llanthony estate. If I get 30,000l. I shall be contented.
The purchaser, for about 30007. more, might buy-up the life-
'holds, and make a clear income of 3000l. per annum.'
Southey had not replied to these painful tidings when the
Weymouth post of the 27th May took him Landor's last let-
ter from England, and with it more startling announcements.
'Every hope of meeting you again in England has vanished.
'Pardon me if this is only the second of my wishes. My first is,
'that I may become by degrees indifferent to this country. The
'Court of Exchequer has decided in my favour; but B has been
' able to promise bail and a replevy, so that the ends of justice
are defeated. Nearly three years' rent will be due before I can
' receive one farthing from him; and all my timber is spoiled. I
'shall be utterly ruined. Not being able to pay the interest of
· 10,0007. debt on the Llanthony estate, the mortgagee will in-
'stantly seize on it until he has paid himself the whole of the
1805-1814.
183
DEPARTURE FROM ENGLAND.
'principal. The laws of England are made entirely for the
'protection of guilt. A creditor could imprison me for twenty
'pounds, while a man who owes me two thousand, and keeps me
'from the possession of two thousand more, can convert wealth
and affluence into poverty and distress,-can, in short, drive
me for ever from my native country, and riot with impunity on
'the ruins of my estate. I had promised my mother to visit her.
'I never can hope to see her again. She is seventy-two, and
'her sorrow at my overwhelming and most unmerited misfor-
'tunes will too surely shorten her days. My wife, when she
married, little thought she should leave all her friends to live
' in obscurity and perhaps in want. For my sake she refused
one of the largest fortunes that any private gentleman pos-
sesses, and another person of distinguished rank. Whoever
comes near me is either unhappy or ungrateful.
There is no
:
(
(
(
' act of forbearance or of kindness which B did not receive from
me. His father saw and knew perfectly that his farming must
'ruin him. Yet, instead of persuading him to resign it, he sent
'the remainder of his family to live with him, and to counten-
'ance him in all his violence and roguery. I go to-morrow to
St. Malo. In what part of France I shall end my days, I know
not, but there I shall end them; and God grant that I may
' end them speedily, and so as to leave as little sorrow as possible
'to my friends. No time will alter my regard and veneration for
you: nor shall anything lessen the kind sentiments you enter-
'tain for me. It is a great privilege to hold the hearts of the
'virtuous. If men in general knew how great it is, could they
ever consent to abandon it? I am alone here. My wife follows
me when I have found a place fit for her reception. Adieu.'
To the first of these letters Southey, sending at the same time
the close of the мss. of Roderick, had replied before the second
reached him, earnestly dissuading from the project of selling
Llanthony, and advising that his friend should go abroad for a
time only not as an emigrant, but as a guest or stranger. 'I
'grant there is vexation enough in our laws; but take it for all
in all, there is no country in which a man lives with so little
annoyance from the government.' The rest of the letter was
about Roderick and the death of Danvers: 'One of my oldest
¿
184
Book III.
BATH, CLIFTON, SPAIN, LLANTHONY.
' and dearest friends, at whose lodgings I first saw you. I loved
'him with my whole heart, and scarcely any loss could have
' wounded me so deeply.' The date of Southey's letter was only
one day later than when his friend had last written, but Landor
was already gone; and though it is not strictly incumbent on me
to tell what happened, in the interval of nearly three months be-
fore Southey again knew anything of his friend, no pain can be
caused by the brief description I shall give of it, and there are
points of character involved that it may not be right to omit.
Yet even so much reference to it will not be easy. Disagree-
ments between husband and wife are very delicate to the touch;
and I have the example to encourage or deter me of the biographer
of one of Landor's brother poets, Mr. Thomas Moore, who has
laid it down as an established truth that a man of the highest
order of genius must in the unavoidable nature of things quarrel
with his wife. That however is hardly my view, and the facts
will not carry off my hero so handsomely. Domestic differences
springing from faults of temper are made the subject of passing
mention here, in order only to show that genius possesses no im-
munity from the conditions on which all kinds of happiness rest.
Landor had gone first to Jersey; and while staying at this
place, where he was joined immediately by Mrs. Landor and one
of her sisters, the expressed intention of taking up permanent
abode in France led to frequent disagreement. The one, having
made up his mind, could not bear that the matter should be talked
of; the other, having equally made up her mind, could talk of
nothing else; and 'A pleasant sort of thing truly, that you are
never to be contradicted!' was the ordinary and only reply to
entreaties, repeated again and again, that she would not drive
him to distraction. The usual charges and retorts succeeded; the
harsher followed the lighter word; what, even while it provoked,
had been attractive, became provoking without the attractive-
ness; and at last, in the presence of the sister, such allusion was
made to the difference of years between them as Landor inter-
preted into deliberate insult, and resolved thereupon to leave.
her. He was up at four o'clock the next morning, and before
midday, having walked to the other part of the island, was sail-
ing on board an oyster-boat for France. From Tours, on the 2d
1805-1814.
185
DEPARTURE FROM ENGLAND.
of October, he wrote and told Southey what had happened. He
was ignorant then that his wife's elder sister had already writ-
ten to acquaint him with his wife's extreme grief and very seri-
ous illness; but this is the subject of his next letter to his
friend, written at the opening of 1815, in which he says that it
had at once banished from his mind all traces of resentment,
and that he had written instantly to comfort and console her.
As soon as her health and the weather admitted of her joining
him, he added, he was to meet her in England, where he should
stay only two days; and his closing assurance that Southey would
receive his Latin poems in a fortnight, has amusing confirmation
in what one of his brothers soon afterwards wrote to his mother
about this unhappy domestic dispute: When we supposed him
'to be so miserable at Tours after parting with his wife, he was
busy about a long Latin poem on the Death of Ulysses!'
(
To the letter at the opening of 1815 Southey replied on the
5th of February, loud in pleasure at the reconciliation, and en-
couraging his friend not to doubt but that he would be able to
keep his promise, and be the happier for keeping it. He bids.
him also not forget that Tours holds the grave of Ronsard, who
would have been a great poet if he had not been a Frenchman.
'But poetry of the higher order is as impossible in that curst
'language as it is in Chinese.' The letter closes with the hope
that they may meet somewhere on the Continent before another
autumn is gone: but not many weeks had passed before the hope
began to look desperate, and Napoleon was again in the Tuileries
when Landor replied. Nevertheless this had found him prepared.
War or no war, he would not return to the country that had cast
him out, by refusing to his property the protection of its laws.
He thought Bonaparte's government not unlikely now to last, and
he had obtained leave from it to continue resident in France.
That it was not his intention to return to England, and that he
had every disposition to prefer the empire to the government it
had so suddenly displaced, he told his friend in this letter. Two
more months however again unsettled everything, and greatly
weakened in Landor the desire to continue a French citizen.
BOOK FOURTH.
1815-1821. ÆT. 40-46.
FIRST SIX YEARS IN ITALY: AT COMO, PISA, AND PISTOIA.
1. From Tours to Milan. II. At Como, Pisa, and Pistoia. III. On the way
to Florence. IV. Retrospect and Prospect: a new Literary Under-
taking.
I. FROM TOURS TO MILAN.
THE intention of remaining in France survived Waterloo but a
little while, and with the second Bourbon restoration Landor re-
solved upon quitting Tours. But any return to England being
for the present impossible, he now thought of Italy for his home.
What had been his homes in Llanthony and Bath were now
no longer his. His personal property had been sold in both places,
and the management of his real estate had been taken out of his
hands. It was a sad time. The Llanthony vision was over. No
more possibility now of what once had been his dream, to rebuild
the abbey as a princely mansion; no more chance of seeing in
its plantations the two or three million trees which with a des-
perate fidelity his fancy and his hopes had made almost real;
and though his new roads were to survive him, as they do even
yet, too surely had the doom already been pronounced against
whatever else he would have associated with his name at Llan-
thony. Before his house had well been inhabited his new trus-
tees had ordered it to be taken down; but a few months earlier
a flood had carried away the bridge he built; and whatever be-
sides he valued had since been swept away as ruthlessly by a pub-
lic sale. 'I have here in my rectory,' writes Mr. Robert Landor,
८
6
‹ a Titian valued at twelve hundred guineas which my brother
Henry purchased at the auction for ten pounds.' It needs not
to dwell farther on these things.
1815-1821.
187
FROM TOURS TO MILAN.
As to his real estate he was happily more fortunate. By the
annuity reserved under the act of parliament to his mother, she
became the first of his creditors; and being enabled to demand
the management of Llanthony, she set apart from it for his use
five hundred a year on condition that the money so advanced
should be repaid to her younger children whenever by her death
the estate at Ipsley should fall into his hands. Her life was
prolonged for fourteen years, during which she had thus paid to
him seven thousand pounds; and what was held to be a suffi-
cient provision having accrued in the same interval to the younger
children, partly by her economy and partly by the bequests of
other relatives, the above-named condition, shortly before her
death, with the entire concurrence of those other children, was
abandoned and Llanthony released from that encumbrance. To
this it will be only necessary to add that irrespective of all these
arrangements there were simple contract debts unsettled which
rendered for the present unadvisable not only any return to Eng-
land, but even a continued residence at Tours; and Mr. Robert
Landor, having at the time a project to visit Italy, at his bro-
ther's earnest request joined him at Tours that they might make
the journey together.
Landor's stay in the hospitable old French town, then less
overrun with English than in later days, had been not without
many enjoyments; for the ease with which at will he put off
from his thoughts whatever troubled or harassed him, the old
characteristic well known to his family, surprised even his bro-
ther when they met so soon after the tragedy of Llanthony. I
have heard the latter, in relating their first visit together to the
quaint old market-place with its splendid fountain where Walter
had been in the habit of doing his own marketing daily during
his exile, describe the joyous greeting that broke forth from all
the market-women successively as he came in view, and his laugh-
ing word of jest or compliment for each that had given him
universal popularity. The prefet of the town, next to the market-
women, he seems to have regarded with most favour; it was the
same who (I believe erroneously) was reported to have given brief
refuge to Napoleon in his then recent flight to the English coast ;
and it was always Landor's belief that he had seen the fugitive
188
Book IV.
FIRST SIX YEARS IN ITALY.
emperor dismount in the court-yard of the prefet's house in one
of the suburbs, to which he had himself gone, finding the door
unexpectedly closed to him, upon the very day when Napoleon
was supposed to have passed through Tours.
In September the brothers started for Italy, and by means of
a letter addressed in the following month to their mother by the
younger of them I learn some of the incidents of their journey.
Here are its opening sentences: Walter wished very much to
' leave Tours on many accounts; amongst others, on account of
' its unhealthiness, the probability of fresh revolutions, and some
'personal apprehensions about his English creditors. I wished
'to see Italy; and as he pressed it most earnestly, and indeed
' could not travel without me, I agreed to accompany him. After
'contests with his landlady of a most tremendous description,
( we set off. Walter had kept his own carriage in all his dis-
tresses, and as posting was the cheapest thing in France, we
posted Walter and myself on the dicky, his wife and her maid
'within. Our road lay on the eastern side of the river Loire for
more than two hundred miles. This side was occupied by the
'German troops, and the other by the French. Thus we passed,
'between Tours and Lyons, a distance of four hundred miles,
'through 200,000 men,-Austrians, Prussians, Bavarians, Wir-
tembergers, Hessians. At Moulins the Prince of Hesse with all
'his staff was at the same hotel; and amused himself, whilst we
were at supper, by standing with another officer at the door of
our room and looking at Walter's wife. I ordered the door to
'be shut in his face. As this was done by an Englishman, he
only laughed. If it had been done by a Frenchman or a Ger-
man, there would have been no laughing on either side.'
(
<
:
The acres of vineyards seen by them on the banks of the
Loire, Landor himself would often refer to with enthusiasm as
not numbering less than hundreds of thousands; and as they
passed, he told me, he could not but remember Goldsmith and
his flute: though the scene otherwise was unlike the poet's pas-
toral picture, for along the rocky parts of the shore they observed,
miles together, the people making their homes in the rock. The
towns on the route were dirty and ill-built as Lyons itself; but
for the last half of the distance, the two hundred miles nearest
1815-1821.
189
FROM TOURS TO MILAN.
that second city of France, they found the scenery liker their
own than anywhere else, and saw enclosures of quick with timber
in the fences, rich well-cultivated land, and young wheat much
forwarder than in England. 'It was from the bridge of Lyons
'we first saw the Alps, extending immediately in our front to a
great distance. They were covered with snow half-way from
'the summits. It was about twenty miles from Lyons that one
' of our wheels broke for the third time, and we were detained
more than a day. At last however we proceeded towards Cham-
bery, the capital of Savoy, and passed through a most enchant-
ing and romantic country,-rocks, woods, vineyards, and the
'finest passes.'
:
The letter proceeded to relate with much reality and vivid-
ness their first impressions of Italy, destined to be the home of
one of them for more than twenty years and after another thirty
years his final resting-place. All this however may not be dwelt
on beyond the fact that though Landor meant at first to have
fixed his quarters at Chambery, he made wiser ultimate choice
of the Lake of Como. Of small and great discomforts also, and
their trials of temper, incident to such a twenty days' journey
over the seven hundred miles separating Milan from Tours, the
son's letter naturally told much that the mother might be glad
to hear; but even the few touches of character I shall quote
must be read with allowances. If Mr. Robert Landor did not
spare himself, of his brother he was quite as unsparing; and,
with a very humane and proper chivalry which need not now
be construed with excessive strictness, all his sympathy and all ·
his pity were reserved for the pretty little wife. To an observer
so generous as well as just, her advantages of sex as well as of
youth and beauty were indeed very great; but though prepared
for Walter's ten thousand' fits of temper, it is a little startling,
after the incident at Jersey, to find Walter's wife never giving
way to even one. 'He is seldom out of a passion or a sulky fit
'excepting at dinner, when he is more boisterous and good-
'humoured than ever. Then his wife is a darling, a beauty, an
'angel, and a bird. But for just as little reason the next morn-
'ing she is a fool. She is certainly gentle, patient, and sub-
missive. She takes all the trouble, is indeed too officious, and
190
Book IV.
FIRST SIX YEARS IN ITALY.
' would walk on foot most willingly if he wished it, and she were
'able. If he loses his keys, his purse, or his pocket-handker-
'chief, which he does ten times in an hour, she is to be blamed;
and she takes it all very quietly.' Perhaps one might have.
said too quietly. There is such a thing as an ostentatious meek-
ness, or, as the poor bad-tempered husband in the play puts it,
a ' malign excess of undemanded patience.' Nor is it difficult to
discover that the fits of passion, on the other side, were rather
of the lambent and phosphorescent than of a scorching or con-
suming kind. If he is ever really unhappy, it is because the
'cook has put oil or garlic into the soup. Give him a good dinner
'well cooked, and he is happier than an emperor. He writes
' and reads all the day besides. As for his creditors, he cares no
more about them or his own concerns than about Bonaparte's.
'He has plenty of money for this country; lives as well as ever
‹ he did in his life; and at Tours had even saved five-and-thirty
'pounds. He has one entire quarter in his banker's hands at
'present, after travelling so far.'
(
Again, on the 10th of December in the same year, being then
at Rome, Mr. Robert Landor wrote to his mother that he had
heard from Walter at Como; that he found it expensive, was
dissatisfied with it, and talked of going farther east; but that he
had himself written to dissuade this, at least for the present.
'He has seen nothing of Italy, and yet he swears that it contains
nothing worth seeing. Every place is the worst.' From Rome
the writer had moved to Naples in April 1816; and in a letter
of the 26th of that month to their sister Elizabeth he tells her
that Walter had written in the last week from Como, and seemed
just then very tranquil and comfortable, but that for himself he
would as soon trust to Vesuvius. Finally, having meanwhile
paid a visit himself to Como, he writes thus again to that sister
from Venice on the 24th of June: 'At Como I found Walter
' and his wife in comfortable apartments, or rather in a comfort-
able house. But they had lost their English maid, whose mis-
'conduct in leaving, and depravity after having left, were not
'the least part of the grievance. Julia looks thin, but not pale;
talks much of dying, and of returning to Bath, preferring the
latter a little; and amuses herself in learning the very worst
6
1815-1821.
191
AT COMO, PISA, AND PISTOIA.
'Italian from the old cook, who is quite unintelligible to Walter
' and everybody else. Walter is much as usual; that is, in very
' unequal spirits; fretful, gloomy, absent, and very gay by turns.
Unfortunately the latter is not frequent, and I believe that I
saw him to the greatest advantage. The lake is charming.'
6
At Como Landor lived three years; and three more wander-
ing years he passed, between Pisa and Pistoia, before he pitched
his tent in Florence in 1821. Between the home he had lost in
England and that which he thus found in Italy, this interval,
measured even by the general driftless character of his life and
ways, was so entirely unsettled, that it is not my intention to
dwell upon it at any length. It will suffice if I indicate by brief
passages from his correspondence the subjects that from time to
time occupied or interested him, and the manner, or the places,
in which his life was passed. My own comments will be very
sparing.
II. AT COмO, PISA, AND PISTOIA.
The first letter written to Southey from Italy miscarried;
and when again, in the June of 1816, Landor wrote to him, he
had heard nothing from Keswick since leaving Tours.
'At Como we have been exempt from the- of the Princess of Wales
for a considerable time. I think I told you that her scudiere was postilion
to Pino, a deserter from the Austrian service. He has now purchased an
estate for 200,000 florins, and his wife keeps her carriage and is allowed
15,000 florins a year. His brother is maggiordomo to the princess, and
rides out covered with gold lace and accompanied by her servants. These
rascals have kept her so poor that she has not yet been able to furnish her
rooms. Is it not scandalous that the money of England should be squan-
dered away on the most worthless wretches in Italy, when the most in-
dustrious men in England want bread? If we had one honest man in
parliament, would not some sort of notice be taken of it? Above all, it
surprises me that the prince does not divorce her. . . . Lady Cumming,
daughter of Lady Charlotte Campbell, went over to visit the princess.
She saw her in the midst of the lake with her scudiere, whose arm was
round her waist. Instead of returning, they proceeded to the house, where
they found the prefet of Como, and soon afterwards the princess entered.
In a few minutes the scudiere came swaggering in, made a slight bow to
them, took no notice of the princess, but said to the prefet, "Shall we see
you at dinner?" The princess then invited him, and he stayed. As Lady
C. had remembered him a footman under the princess, and now recognised
him to be the person whose arm was round her waist, she took her leave.
These rascals make a point of insulting all the English.'
192
Book IV.
FIRST SIX YEARS IN ITALY.
.
He had himself suffered from such insults, as he fancied,
taking to himself what probably had no reference to him; and
his present information was to be accepted with much more
caution than in the circumstances was likely to be given to it.
It will appear hereafter that it was turned to immediate use.
That any use would be made of it at all he does not seem to
have imagined, and some sentences in this portion of the letter
I am obliged to suppress.
Still Southey did not reply, and for many more months there
was a silence incomprehensible to his friend. It had been a year
of great trouble at Keswick. The heaviest affliction of Southey's
life, the loss of his (then only) son, had fallen upon him in the
spring of 1816; and in the following spring occurred the great-
est vexation of his life, the publication from a stolen manuscript
of his youthful drama of Wat Tyler, and the chancellor's (not
very logical) refusal to restrain its sale because of the injury it
was calculated to do to society. To this troubled interval of
silence on Southey's part belongs a letter characteristic of Lan-
dor in his best mood: sensitive and self-distrustful, but loyal
to his friend; in the manliest vein of sympathy; and, though
full of sorrow, nay by reason of it, nobly consolatory.
'I have written many letters to you since I received one from you.
Can anything occur that ought to interrupt our friendship? Believe me,
Southey-and of all men living I will be the very last to deceive or to
flatter you--I have never one moment ceased to love and revere you as
the most amiable and best of mortals, and your fame has always been as
precious to me as it could ever be to yourself. If you believe me capable,
as you must, of doing anything to displease you, tell it me frankly and
fully. Should my reply be unsatisfactory, it will not be too late nor too
soon to shake me off from all pretensions to your friendship. Tell it me
rather while your resentment is warm than afterwards; for in the midst
of resentment the heart is open to generous and tender sentiments; it
closes afterwards. I heard with inexpressible grief of your most severe
and irreparable loss, long indeed ago; but even if I had been with you at
the time, I should have been silent. If your feelings are like mine, of all
cruelties those are the most intolerable that come under the name of con-
dolence and consolation. Surely to be told that we ought not to grieve is
among the worst bitternesses of grief. The best of fathers and of hus-
bands is not always to derive perfect happiness from being so; and genius
and wisdom, instead of exempting a man from all human sufferings, leave
him exposed to all of them, and add many of their own. Whatever crea-
ture told me that his reason had subdued his feelings, to him I should
only reply that mine had subdued my regard for him. But occupations
1815-1821.
193
AT COMO, PISA, AND PISTOIA.
and duties fill up the tempestuous vacancy of the soul; affliction is con-
verted to sorrow, and sorrow to tenderness; at last the revolution is com-
pleted, and love returns in its pristine but incorruptible form. More
blessings are still remaining to you than to any man living. In that which
is the most delightful of all literary occupations, at how immense a dis-
tance are you from every rival or competitor! In history, what informa-
tion are you capable of giving to those even who are esteemed the most
learned! And those who consult your criticisms do not consult them to
find, as in others, with what feathers the most barbarous ignorance tricks
out its nakedness, or with what gypsy shuffling and arrant slang detected
impostures are defended. On this sad occasion I have no reluctance to
remind you of your eminent gifts. In return I ask from you a more per-
fect knowledge of myself than I yet possess. Conscious that I have done
nothing very wrong, I almost hope that I have done something not quite
right, that I may never think you have been unjust towards me. W. L.'
With more than the old affection Southey at once replied;
explained now his recent silence by uncertainty as to a visit into
Italy he had resolved himself to make; and hoped they would
shortly meet. At Como they met accordingly at the end of
June 1817; and Southey stayed with his friend three days. In
the poem already quoted for its mention of the visit to Llan-
thony, there is record of this visit also.
'War had paused: the Loire
Invited me. Again burst forth fierce War. . .
Then female fear impell'd me past the Alps,
Where, loveliest of all lakes, the Lario sleeps
Under the walls of Como.
There he came
Again to see me; there again our walks
We recommenced . . . less pleasant than before.
Grief had swept over him; days darken'd round:
Bellaggio, Valintelvi, smiled in vain,
And Monte Rosa from Helvetia far
Advanced to meet us, wild in majesty
Above the glittering crests of giant sons
Station'd around . . . in vain too! all in vain !'
Yet not wholly so; for it appears from what Southey wrote
of his journey home, immediately on his return, that these and
other shapes of beauty had made so far successful appeal to him
as even to shake for a time his allegiance to his native lakes and
mountains. When the friends thus met at Como their talk had
been much of poetry; of what they were fain to think the very
doubtful chances of duration to the then raging popularity of
Byron; and of the advance made by Wordsworth in his last
O
194
Book IV.
FIRST SIX YEARS IN ITALY.
great poem.
To these matters Southey also referred, telling
Landor that he had lately dispatched to him, along with his
own History of Brazil and other books, not only Wordsworth's
collected edition, but both his great poems published separately
during the two last years, the Excursion and the White Doe.
Landor thanks him, sends him back a box of books purchased
from shops in Milan (a thing he frequently did, both to Words-
worth and Southey), and says he would have given eighty pounds.
out of his pocket that Wordsworth had not written a particular
verse, 'Of high respect and gratitude sincere,' which he had just.
read in one of the volumes. The line is in the dedication to the
Excursion, and must be admitted to be one of those unaccount-
able descents into dead flat prose which dismay, not seldom, the
readers of this noble poet.
Before the year closed Southey wrote to him again; thank-
ing him for the books from Milan : and telling him that what
he had communicated about the lady of the lake might not
improbably be important (it wanted yet three years to the too
famous trial'); that the amusements of Como were not un-
likely before long to become the amusements of England; and
that if it should be so, her 'knight' would doubtless, from the
lady's sympathisers throughout the kingdom, have plenary abso-
lution for all those offences which in old time were punished
with brimstone, her 'assassin' would be as popular among the
London liberals 'as Bonaparte (why not?),' and her other worthies
would be red-letter saints in the Morning Chronicle.
A family event of some importance was announced in the
next letter to Southey from Como.
When we met at Como last year, I do not think you had any sus-
picion that I was in process of time about to become a father. Such,
however, is the case. I have at last a little boy, to whom I have given
the names of Arnold Savage. I would rather that he had been born in Eng-
land, and wish I could look forward to his education there. However, if I
can do nothing more for him, I will take care that his first words and his
first thoughts shall arise within sight of Florence. We certainly leave
Como in September, and shall probably spend the winter at Genoa; if
not, it will either be at Florence or Pistoia.'
That was in May 1818. Already, on the 5th of the pre-
ceding month, he had informed his mother of the event as hav-
1815-1821.
195
AT COMO, PISA, AND PISTOIA.
ing occurred 'exactly a month ago;' and that he intended to call
the boy Arnold Savage, from a Sir Arnold Savage, 'who was se-
'cond speaker of the House of Commons, and who, as Mr. Bevan
'assured me, was of our family, and proprietor of Baginton.'
That May letter to Southey was his last from Como, which
he quitted for Genoa in the following September. He had thus
early so resolved; but when the time came it was no longer a
matter of choice, for he had meanwhile, as he said himself in a
note to one of his sisters, made the place too hot to hold him.
He had replied to an invective against England, by a Milanese
poet, in some Latin verses so libellous against the council and
other authorities, that he was ordered to quit. 'I remained,' he
told Southey, writing from Pisa in December, 'a week longer,
'rather wishing to be sent for to Milan. My time expired on
'the 19th of September. I protracted my stay till the 28th, and
no attempt was made to assassinate me.' After a brief stay at
Genoa, Landor now determined to settle at Pisa for a time. He
would fain have pushed on to Florence, but the reported cheap-
ness of living at Pisa induced him to make trial of it; and from
this city, early in February 1819, he sent Southey a Latin ode
to Bernadotte, telling him it was written for the prize offered by
the Stockholm Academy on their king's accession. He closed
his letter with interesting mention of a design of Hookham
Frere's.
C
'I remember your mentioning that Mr. Frere had made out some old
Greek ballads from the Odyssea. It is curious that Cicero should have
entertained the same idea; surely not from his knowledge of poetry. He,
however, must have given Mr. Frere his idea of the fact.'
Meanwhile from Keswick, on the 3d of January, Southey
has acknowledged (it came in eighteen days') the December
letter from Pisa; has excused his recent silence by prolonged
anxiety for the health of his wife; has recommended Landor,
when he had seen enough of Italy, to try a short stay in Swit-
zerland; and has told him that before that time they may per-
haps meet again. 'I dream of seeing Rome before I die.' 'When
'my spirits wax faint, I say to myself,' replied Landor in April,
'I have yet to see Rome and Southey.' In the same letter he
is expecting some new books from his friend.
196
Book IV.
FIRST SIX YEARS IN ITALY.
'Remember what a library you sent me last year, and pray do not
think of adding anything to the two volumes I am anxiously expecting,
the last of the History of Brazil and Life of Wesley. I shall read both
with great interest, but less the first time than Roderick the fourth. Rode-
rick, I think, contains a greater variety of powers put into action than
Kehama. It did not delight me nor agitate me so much, yet there is no
poem in existence that I shall read so often.'
Very sore was Southey's need of his friend's praise just
now, for upon him and upon Wordsworth dark days had set
in. The still-continuing and increasing rage for Byron and his
imitators had all but extinguished what scant popularity the
others once enjoyed, and for selling power their books were
at zero. Southey had hoped to see the bubble burst in a year
or two; but double the time had come and gone, and never did
it soar so high as now, or flare out with what doubtless seemed
to him such frothy but highly-coloured pretences. Replying
to that letter of his friend in May 1819, he cannot control his
temper. He describes the fashionable compound as made up of
morbid feelings, atrocious principles, exaggerated characters, and
incidents of monstrous and disgusting horror; adding that the
more un-English, un-Christian, and immoral it was, the surer it
was of being better liked, provided only it was slavered over
with a froth of philosophy. Was it wonderful that, such being
the fashion, Wordsworth was despised and abused? The getting
abused in such company was his own solitary bit of comfort, for
nobody paid him the compliment of imitating what he did. At
the close of the letter, which announces also the birth of a son,
he tells Landor that somebody had mentioned him that week
in the Westmoreland Gazette as the English poet who most re-
sembled Goethe.
To this letter Landor replied from Pistoia; whither he had
gone, moving still nearer to Florence, at the approach of the
summer of 1819.
'It is just as easy to write a breakfast-table poem as to make the
drawing of a giant on a wall; who cares about the features, or looks for
anything but the giant? I have read the Bride of Abydos. Lord B. may
well ask,
"Know ye the land
Where the citron and olive are fairest of fruit,
And the voice of the nightingale never is mute?"
Who the devil does? But why should the young rascal, the hero of the
1815-1821.
197
AT COMO, PISA, AND PISTOIA.
piece, take such infinite pains to show his mistress his insincerity at the
moment he would seduce her from home?
"Bound where thou wilt, my barb, or glide my prow,
But be the star that guides the wanderer, thou."
The star then is either a barb or a boat, explain it as he may afterwards.
There are several other such incoherences, not worth looking for. I would
never publish a poem that contained any character of a human being until
I had lived with that character two or three years. I left off Count
Julian and his daughter twice, because each had said things which other
personages might say: the other characters are no characters at all-
mere shadows, passing before me often, but never entering into my heart,
or questioned by me why they did this or thought that. . . . My sole feli-
city as a poet is this, that when I wrote Gebir I had read no modern Con-
tinental poetry whatever, except the Henriade of Voltaire, one tragedy (I
forget which) of Corneille, and La Fontaine's fables. Fresh from reading
the Greek tragedians and Pindar, Voltaire and Corneille were intolerable
to me.
La Fontaine gave me, and gives me still, great pleasure, because
I love to enter into the thoughts of animals, and contract a friendship
with them whenever they come in my way. I could wish I understood a
little German, to see the resemblance between me and so celebrated a
poet as Goethe.'
At the approach of winter Landor turned back to Pisa; dis-
appointed of a house he hoped to have engaged in Florence, but
still bent upon finally settling there. His principal occupation
since he left Como had been the preparation of a Latin disserta-
tion, to accompany another more complete collection of his Latin
Poems: On the use and cultivation of the language by modern
Latinists, the reasons why they were not read more widely, and
the advantages that would result from employing Latin univers-
ally in works of taste and imagination. Upon this latter amaz-
ing paradox he wasted wonderful pains and ingenuity; and for
extraordinary mastery over the language, free and daring cri-
ticism of classics both ancient and modern, and varied reading
not alone in Greek and Latin but in Italian and English lite-
rature, the essay would justify mention in greater detail than
can be given to it here.* I use it here only as an illustration
of character. It was written under a persuasion, absolute while
it lasted, that he might thus obtain an audience for what he had
to say not only greatly wider but far more enduring than if he
continued to write in his native tongue; and though he soon
* With some changes and many additions it will be found at the close
of his Poemata et Inscriptiones (1847).
198
Book IV.
FIRST SIX YEARS IN ITALY.
1
repented of this purpose to put forth nothing more in English
that was either critical or imaginative, he had a lurking belief
to the very last, that he should live to be recognised as a poet
by reason of his Latin writings, when not only his, but all the
English poems contemporary with his, should with the language
itself have drifted hopelessly away. Nor were the eccentric
turns of his temper on this point without some advantage in the
end. Never till he was making that preposterous engagement
to use the brave old speech no longer, had he made himself so
thoroughly acquainted with its masterpieces even in tracks quite
apart from his ordinary reading. What the character of his stu-
dies had been, in past days of leisure, he has already related in
his letter to the Chancellor Eldon, and his silent companions at
Llanthony were his later heroes in many an imaginary conver-
sation; but besides this large acquaintance with other than Eng-
lish writers, the latter also had recently become more variously
familiar to him. Until he lived abroad, he used to say he did
not know what a library was; and very generally he had now
enlarged the circle of the authors with whom he was in the habit
of passing great portions of his time. 'You surprised me,' wrote
Walter Birch* to him just before he quitted Pistoia, by the
familiarity you displayed with the literature of our old divines
in the letter I had from you almost a year ago.' Another
remark from the same letter may be added. Landor had been
writing to his old school-fellow of the Latin essay he had in
hand, and of the eulogy it would contain of Wordsworth; and,
'Would you believe it? Birch replies: 'I inquired for the Excur-
'sion at Upham's last year, and found that they did not even
know that such a book had been published.' The poem had
been out nearly five years when this was written.
<
He was still at Pisa, on his birthday in 1820, when he wrote,
in answer to some political complainings of Southey, that he
thought of England as if he were in another world, and had lost
all personal interest in it.
In the same letter Birch announces to Landor his marriage, and
tells him he has become rusticated and country-parson-fied' upon a liv-
ing in Wiltshire, which Lord Pembroke had given him. This he changed
three years later for a better living in Essex, given him by his college,
and which he held to his death.
1815-1821.
199
AT COMO, PISA, AND PISTOIA.
'I foresaw and predicted the whole of these calamities when that mad-
man Pitt united the French of all parties by hostility. Men reduced to
poverty must be discontented. We wither the tree, and complain that it
becomes touchwood and catches fire.'
From the same city, during this year, Landor sent large pre-
sents of books to Southey, in return for which the latter, reply-
ing and thanking him, announces (August 1820) that the books
so long promised by himself had been dispatched: Wordsworth's
Peter Bell and Sonnets on the River Duddon, with his own last
volume of the History of Brazil and his Life of Wesley. He told
also of his other labours in history and poetry, the Peninsular
War and the Tale of Paraguay; the last retarded by its Spenser-
ian stanza, but now resumed once more. He related some of the
incidents of the new reign: Scott's baronetcy; his own doctorate
at Oxford, where nobody even at his own college remembered
him except the old porter and his wife; the proceedings begun
a month before against 'the modern Messalina,' with the support
given her by the devilish newspapers, the moral pestilence of the
age; and the beautification of London, which his friend will
scarcely know when he returns to it, if the Catilines should not
first have burnt it down. Finally, he told of a Series of Dia-
logues which he proposed to write upon a plan suggested by
Boethius; and this announcement, as it turned out, was a very
memorable one for Landor, whose reply was written in Septem-
ber, and alludes to farther batches of books which he had pro-
mised his friend. In the same letter he refers to Southey's hav-
ing resolved to write his next poem in the Spenser stanza, and
of his power to overcome its difficulties, with no more thought
of Childe Harold and of the mastery of the Spenser stanza ex-
hibited by its writer, than if there had been no such poem or
poet in that century. He then talks of Bath and its architec-
ture;
and remarks as to the beautification of London, 'I know
'not what they have been doing in your capital; but unless they
open a street from St. Paul's across the Thames, the whole
'width of the church's length, they may as well do nothing.'
เ
At the close of October Southey wrote again, and a portion
of his letter must be given. Besides what it tells of Landor's
story, or illustrates of the character of both the friends, it is
necessary to explain what will follow.
200
Book IV.
FIRST SIX YEARS IN ITALY.
"C
'Have you heard of Sir Charles Wolseley's letter to Lord Castlereagh?
I fell upon it to-day in the Times, and copy for your astonishment this
paragraph: "I beg leave to inform your lordship that, if his Majesty's
government will allow me a month's leave of absence from my present
place of confinement, I will undertake to be of the utmost service to her
"Majesty in the pending prosecution against her, by going from hence to
Como, where, during the year 1817, I lived several months with my
family; and from that circumstance, and being acquainted with several
people who were employed by the queen, I have an opportunity of get-
ting at evidence that would be of the greatest consequence, that no
Englishman but myself and a Mr. Walter Landon, who is now in Italy,
can have had the same opportunity of knowing." You probably know
that one of Brougham's brothers has been on the Continent beating up for
witnesses. If this letter had appeared in time, no doubt he would have
gone in search of you, and I should like to have been present at the
interview. Sir Ch. W. must be half crazy. We may judge how capable
he is of forming a sane opinion upon any subject, when he has so topsy-
turvy a recollection of your knowledge upon this. His letter, of course,
has not obtained the slightest notice, and therefore none can be needful
on your part. Had the mention of your name been such as in any way
to
compromise you, I should without hesitation have written to the news-
papers. Most persons seem to apprehend that this trial will not terminate
without some violent explosion. Certain it is that every possible art is
used for making the mob rise in open rebellion. But though it is very
possible to foresee the consequence of public opinions, public madness must
baffle all foresight; and this is an absolute insanity. It was well observed
by an acquaintance of mine the other day, upon hearing that Bedlam was
to be enlarged, "Enlarge Bedlam, indeed! Better build a wall round
"London !"'
Sir Charles Wolseley was sufficiently notorious in those
days, but now nobody remembers him. Few of us have even
read about the meeting of fifteen thousand non-electors in the
summer of 1819, who elected him their legislatorial attorney
and representative for Birmingham;' and the arrest for sedition
that followed, and the sentence of imprisonment he was still
undergoing while Southey wrote, interest no one now.
But we
all of us know still too well what generally had characterised
that infamous year of Six-acts and Peterloo-riots, to be very
tolerant of the eagerness of one of its radical heroes thus to make
terms with Castlereagh for a trip out of jail into Italy as a spy
and informer in even the interest of the unfortunate queen.
Landor saw the thing apparently in that light, and cared no
longer to remember what once he had been so ready to relate
of her alleged amusements on the Lake of Como. Whether
strictly she were guilty or innocent had in truth ceased to be
1815-1821.
201
AT COMO, PISA, AND PISTOIA.
the question by this time. The great body of the people had
declared upon her side; and whatever Landor's former state-
ments or the use made of them might have been, he was now,
in what he sent to one of her hottest partisans in society, to be
published by her most powerful advocate in the press, guilty
of nothing for which he had call to be ashamed. In a word, he
flatly refused to give information of the secrets of bedchambers
or writing-desks, and desired that in future a Mr. Walter
' Landon might not be united with a Sir Ch. Wolseley.'
At the same time he wrote to Southey:
'I lament that Parr should take so active a part in favour of that
woman. Never did I entertain a doubt of her guilt and infamy; but those
wretches are more guilty and more infamous who employ false keys in
bedrooms and escritoires. Such is the intelligence we read here of the
Milan committee. God forbid that any Englishman should have em-
ployed this Ompteda on so scandalous and abominable an action. Had
Brougham's brother entered my house, the interview would have been
short, and both standing. I admire the impudence of Wolseley. He at-
tempted to defend the doings of the princess; but never hinted a thought
of her innocence when I constantly represented her what all Italy knows
her to be, not indeed with legal proofs (such are almost impossible in
similar cases), but according to all appearances year after year.
Yet if a
court of justice called on me to give evidence, I should give my evidence
according to the orders and spirit of our laws, and say that, not knowing
her guilty, I am not authorised to prejudice her: proofs alone constitute
guilt.'
In the same letter he describes some of the results of the
Holy Alliance, then in full action on the Continent; and says
he has been trying his hand against it in an oration written in
Italian. He finishes with an objection to Peter Bell.
'... In whatever Wordsworth writes there is admirable poetry; but
I wish he had omitted all that precedes "There was a time" (p. 9) in Peter
Bell. The first poet that ever wrote was not a more original poet than
he is, and the best is hardly a greater.'
One may see a little personal weakness in that objection. A
whole half of the famous prologue he would have dropped, and
among the lines so condemned are these:
'Swift Mercury resounds with mirth,
Great Jove is full of stately bowers;
But these, and all that they contain,
What are they to that tiny grain,
That little earth of ours?'
202
Book IV
FIRST SIX YEARS IN ITALY.
J
Very much were they still, just now indeed the little earth it-
self not nearly so much, to a man who lived his life in the
remote far more than in the near; whose mind habitually dwelt
in those regions of imagination which the homelier poet here
designedly had abandoned; who in his ardour for classic forms
was even ready to restrict himself to classic speech; and whose
volume of poems and idyls about ancient deities and heroes,
composed in one of the languages of antiquity and dispatched
to England before that letter was written, reached Keswick
almost at the very time when Peter Bell and his adventures
with his ass made their entrance into Pisa. Southey was writ-
ing at the time the preface to his Vision of Judgment, in which
he made his onslaught on the satanic school, and a passage from
Landor's Latin essay came in with apt enforcement of his bitter
charges against Byron. Yet not in Latin essay or Latin poems
could he take delight. At both, as at his friend's objection to
the Wordsworth prologue, he doubtless gravely shook his head,
and gave expression once again to his never-ceasing regret that
Landor could write so well in a language not comparable to his
own. His next letter bears date the 8th of February 1821, and
its closing reference must be given.
'Your letter was inserted in the Times. Some parts of it you would
have altered if you had seen fair statements of the case. The madness
is now abating; still, this is the time for the Catholics to attempt the re-
establishment of their religion; for if the people of England choose to have
such a queen, they cannot possibly object to the whore of Babylon. Our
ministers want decision and firmness; but I believe it is not possible for
men to act with better intentions, nor more uprightly. The Whigs are act-
ing as basely as they did in the days of Titus Oates. God bless you.'
Landor replied on the 12th of March, and refers to another
child, a daughter, recently born to him. This event had been
announced to his mother on the 6th of the March preceding
(1820) as having taken place at seven o'clock that evening. It
'is the custom at Pisa to carry the children to be baptised the
very day of their birth, but I shall not pay any attention to
'such foolery.' He cannot but express his difference from his
friend both as to emancipation and reform.
<
'I entertain no fear whatever that the woman of Cernobbio will intro-
duce her sister of Babylon. That bloated ringdropper, that bastard of
1815-1821.
203
AT COMO, PISA, AND PISTOIA.
milliner and perfumer, has long ago lost her charms for Englishmen.
Surely it is absurd to deprive men of a seat in parliament because they
believe in transubstantiation. It is quite enough if they swear that they
will obey no person whatever in any act opposing the authority of king
and parliament. I am firmly of opinion that no danger whatever can
arise to England from the reception of the Catholics into parliament, nor
(however odious the name has become) from a radical reform.'
He adds a rather striking passage about his oration against the
Holy Alliance, in which he says he has expressed the danger to
which all constitutional governments are exposed, and the inex-
pediency, not to say impossibility, of forming houses of lords.
'With due praises to the moral character of the English aristocracy,
I have remarked that their two most memorable acts are their opposition
to the repeal of the slave-trade, and their miserable weakness and indeci-
sion in the affair of the queen. I have observed that, to form a house of
lords, materials are required which are not to be found anywhere in Eu-
rope, out of England, not even in Venice; that they must be of long
growth, strong fibre, great girth, and well seasoned.'
That is one of his works of which there is now no trace, ex-
cept in passages of his later dialogues; and the letter closes with
mention of another of his perished undertakings. Upon the
questions of poetry and criticism opened up in Wordsworth's
prefaces, he had planned a Latin essay supplementary to the
treatise prefixed to his Latin poems; and 'I have finished,' he
tells Southey, my translation of Wordsworth's criticisms, say-
ing in the preface that I had taken whatever I wanted from
him, with the same liberty as a son eats and drinks in his
'father's house I wish,' he abruptly adds, 'I had some
'thousand pounds to spare, as I had when the Spaniards rose
' against Bonaparte, that what I offered to them I might offer
'to the Neapolitans.' The revolt at Naples, it is hardly neces-
sary to add, was but one of the series of demands for representa-
tive government that arose in various parts of the Continent in
that and the preceding year, and to which Landor's sympathy
had been eagerly offered in orations' composed and printed in
Italian, and circulated by him during the last weeks of his resid-
ence at Pisa. It was a natural reaction against the repressive
system established on the fall of Napoleon, and, though in itself
short-lived, was not without permanent results. Very soon
thrust down again in Spain, in Portugal, in Naples, in Pied-
204
Book IV.
FIRST SIX YEARS IN ITALY.
1
mont, even in Turkey, to which the movement had extended,
it led directly to the independence of Brazil, to the recognition
by England of the South American republics, and to the Greek
revolution. In the excitements caused by these events no man
shared more largely than Landor.
III. ON THE WAY TO FLORENCE.
In April 1821, resolved not to pass that summer at Pisa,
Landor had come to Florence in search of a house. A letter
from his mother had reached him as he started on his journey,
and from Florence he answered it. She had told him that there
could not now be many more days for her at Ipsley, which
would soon have to prepare for its new master. But he says
nay to that, and prays that many more summers there may yet
be hers.
The misery of not being able to see you is by far the greatest I have
ever suffered. Never shall I forget the thousand acts of kindness and
affection I have received from you from my earliest to my latest days. . . I
have deferred the christening of my little daughter because I wished to
have one to be named after you, and to whom I might request you to be
godmother. As perhaps I may never have another, I shall call my little
Julia by the name of Julia Elizabeth Savage Landor, and with your per-
mission will engage some one of Julia's English friends to represent you.
This is the first time I was ever a whole day without seeing Arnold. I
wonder what his thoughts are upon the occasion. Mine are a great deal
more about him than about the house I must look for. He is of all living
creatures the most engaging, and already repeats ten of the most beauti-
ful pieces of Italian poetry. . . . What a pity it is that such divine crea-
tures should ever be men and subject to regrets and sorrows!'
6
(
Well might he so acknowledge the letter she had written to
him, for it told him what the result had been of her always
tender and proud thought of him. "Whenever I die, you will
find by my will that the arrears which belong to me from the
Llanthony property I have given up to you, as it may the
sooner lessen your embarrassment; and I hope in time you
'will come and spend the remainder of your life in this country
'where you have many well-wishers, which some time or other
you will be convinced of. By my retired way of living I have
'been enabled to provide comfortably for your sisters; and
' whenever I leave this world you will find your property im-
1815-1821.
205
ON THE WAY TO FLORENCE.
'proved by my having kept all in good repair.' She describes.
the most recent purchases made by her for the various farms,
and pleasantly adds, "As I cut no timber for the repairs, I de-
'pend on you, for my sake, not to cut any down, as the timber
'is the beauty of Ipsley.' This was a point of character with
her. Replying afterwards to that Florence letter of his, she
hopes the place may suit him better than Pisa; and indeed she
thinks it may be a healthy situation enough; but as for beauty,
no place can be truly beautiful without fine trees, which I sup-
pose in Italy you seldom see.'
<
Her letters, shrewd in all they observe upon, and homely in
most of their applications, are full of traits of this kind. Ex-
cellent in their descriptions of the country, and models of good
sense and cleverness in everything pertaining to the cultivation
of her farms, they contain little politics and less literature; yet
never anything as to either that her son might not read with a
smile. 'Doctor Parr,' she says in one of them, after describing
with a whimsical good-humour the excitement about the queen,
-'Doctor Parr is made her domestic chaplain. I think at his
'time of life he might have been quiet at home.' In another
she relates her having met 'Mr. Moore the poet, who speaks very
highly of your Count Julian, which he had been reading and
was quite delighted with.' In a third she tells him of the
King's death and of the Duke of Kent's, reading him a motherly
lecture on the fact that the duke's had been caused by 'sitting
' in wet boots and taking cold.' She never names Llanthony as
by possibility to be ever his future home, but dwells always upon
Ipsley. There is a very pleasing letter where she describes the
gardens there and the beauty of them, and in which she hopes,
it being so much more retired than Tachbrooke, that this will be
his residence for a part of every year when he returns. Some of
the pictures at Llanthony he had been fondest of, she tells him,
had been bought for him by his brother Henry, and they were
now placed at Ipsley as heirlooms. For I do so wish you, dear
'Walter,' she adds with a touching simplicity, 'some time hence
'to be able to return and find as much pleasure here as I have
'done these many years.' That was two years before she an-
nounced to him the result of her generous savings; and in the
206
Book IV.
FIRST SIX YEARS IN ITALY.
letter of the present year containing it and lately quoted, there
is a mention of the last book he had sent over to her, which in
its homely way might have convinced him, as he was already
beginning even to think for himself, that what he gained bore
no proportion to what he lost by writing his poetry in the Latin
tongue. After telling him that she expects at her age soon to
leave the world, that she is now seventy-seven, and had enjoyed
health so long she could not expect it much longer, she tells
him the book he had sent her had arrived safely, and is thought
'by the learned to be a very delightful book; but one cannot
'read it, to understand it, one's self.'
Landor wrote two more letters to Southey before he finally
encamped himself in Florence. The first was about his friend's
proposed dialogues, and the second referred to a copy in English
of his own Italian orations against the Holy Alliance, of which
beyond this reference I have found no other trace.
'Longman has not thought it worth his while to give me any informa-
tion about the little work I sent to be printed. I am very sorry for it,
as it contains remarks of great utility and perfect novelty, useful indeed
at all times, but most materially so at the present. I am informed that I
should have done better if I had sent it to Mawman, who would have exe-
cuted it gladly.'
6
At the close of this letter he asked when Wordsworth was
to publish the remainder of his great poem; and before Southey
replied on that point, Wordsworth had himself answered the
question. He wrote to Landor at the beginning of September
1821, and spoke of both the published and the unpublished
portion of his celebrated poem. 'The Excursion is proud of your
'approbation. The Recluse has had a long sleep, save in my
thoughts. My manuscripts are so ill-penned and blurred that
they are useless to all but myself; and at present I cannot face
'them. But if my stomach can be preserved, in tolerable order,
I hope you will hear of me again, in the character chosen for
'the title of that poem.' Not simply to tell Landor this, how-
ever, but to speak of the Latin poems and dissertation, and ex-
plain why they had not earlier been acknowledged, was the
principal intent of Wordsworth's letter. He had been suffering
from an irritation in his eyes that had disabled him lately from
reading and writing, but he had not been unmindful or ungrate-
6
6
1815-1821.
207
ON THE WAY TO FLORENCE.
ful; and, chary as he was of praising even those among contem-
porary poets who had the strongest claims on his personal regard,
we are entitled fairly to accept as of peculiar significance and
weight what he now said to Landor of the author of Gebir and
Count Julian.
'It is high time I should thank you for the honourable mention you
have made of me. It could not but be grateful to me to be praised by a
poet who has written verses of which I would rather have been the author
than of any produced in our time. And what I now thus write to you I
have frequently said to many.'
Of the Latin poems he afterwards speaks; says he has been
greatly honoured by receiving such a book; but, with a simple
gravity not unamusing, upholds as a time-honoured custom the
habit of writers writing in their native tongue. Referring then
to the somewhat singular circumstances in which they were liv-
ing at Rydal Mount, in solitude during nearly nine months of
the year and for the rest in a round of engagements, he says
that having nobody near him that reads Latin, he can only speak
of the essay from recollection; but Landor will not perhaps feel
surprised to be told that he differs in opinion as to the propriety
of the Latin language being used by moderns for works of taste
and imagination. My frequent infirmity of sight gives me an
especial right to urge this argument. Had your Idylliums
'been in English, I should long ere this have been as well ac-
quainted with them as with your Gebir and with your other
poems; and now I know not how long they may remain to me
' a sealed book.'
6
Not many days after receiving this letter Landor had suc-
ceeded in settling himself in the Palazzo Medici in Florence, and
was now to cease awhile from his wanderings. Before he so found
his Italian home, Como seems to have been his favourite resting-
place; and with the little turreted city he had associations he
was always fond of recalling. There, he had received the visits
of Southey, of Bekker, and of the brave descendants of the
Jovii; there, in talking daily with one of its residents, the calm
'philosophical Sironi,' he had found what seemed to him no
imperfect type of the Roman of antiquity; and there, or as he
had made his first journey there, he had seen the most venerable
208
Book IV.
FIRST SIX YEARS IN ITALY.
object in the most interesting spot of ancient Italy, the cypress
standing on the spot where Hannibal fought his first battle with
Scipio. This, he would say, was one of the two things best
worth seeing in all the country, the other being the statue at
the base of which Cæsar fell,
IV. RETROSPECT AND PROSPECT: A NEW LITERARY UNDER-
TAKING.
Southey's project of writing a Book of Dialogues, mentioned.
in the preceding letters, had confirmed Landor in a project of
his own entertained for a longer time. It was not a new thought
with him; but the circumstances in which he now took it up,
and the particular form it assumed, had a result very memor-
able.
The bent of his genius, it is hardly necessary to say, lay in
the direction of Dialogue, and the peculiarities of his tempera-
ment led him the same way. It was his first design after trial
of his strength in Gebir. He had projected a series of tragic
scenes in his early days of friendship with Mocatta. His Count
Julian was a succession of dialogues in verse, as was doubtless
also the tragedy sacrificed to appease its ill-fortune, Ferrante
and Giulio. In his comedy of the Charitable Dowager he had
given himself the same indulgence in prose. The very form, as
of an ancient oration or address in the pnyx or agora, into which
he had thrown his recent commentaries on home and foreign
politics, whether written in English or Italian, expressed still
that direction of his mind. At the bottom of it all was the
strong sense of his own individuality which made so large a
part of his character, and which he thus with the greatest ad-
vantage could bring into play. For the same form of writing
most often used to conceal one's personality, is also that which
may be employed with the greatest success to indulge in pecu-
liarities intensely personal, without the ordinary conditions or
restraints.
When a man writes a dialogue he has it all to himself, the
pro and the con, the argument and the reply. Within the
shortest given space of time he may indulge in every possible
variety of mood. He may contradict himself every minute. In
•
1815-1821.
209
RETROSPECT AND PROSPECT.
the same page without any sort of violence the most different
shades of sentiment may find expression. Extravagance of state-
ment which in other forms could not be admitted may be freely
put forth. Dogmas of every description may be dealt in, auda-
ciously propounded or passionately opposed, with a result all the
livelier in proportion to the mere vehemence expended on them.
In no other style of composition is a writer so free from orderly
restraints upon opinion, or so absolved from self-control. Better
far than any other it adapts itself to eagerness and impatience.
Dispensing with preliminaries, the jump in medias res may at
once be taken safely. That one thing should be unexpectedly
laid aside, and another as capriciously taken up, is quite natural
to it; the subjects being few that may not permissibly branch
off into all the kindred topics connected with them, when the
formalities held ordinarily necessary in the higher orders of
prose composition have disappeared in the freedom of conversa-
tion.
How far such a style or method would be found suitable to
the weakness as well as the strength of the character depicted
in these pages, the reader has the means of judging. By many
it may be thought that I have supplied such means too amply.
But if the wish for whose gratification the letters here printed
were given me by my old friend was to be complied with at all,
I could not consent so to use them as to convey an imperfect or
a false impression. Thus far, up to his forty-fifth year, through
the full half of a life prolonged far beyond the allotted term,
Landor stands before the reader, not perhaps completely yet not
partially or unfairly depicted, and in the main by himself. He
desired nothing so much as that some record having claim to be
remembered of his early intercourse with Southey, and as far as
possible of the letters they interchanged, should be made by me;
and with the materials afforded I have done my best in such
a manner to comply, as, while it satisfied that wish, should do
offence as little to the patience of the living as to the memory
of the dead.
Upon the latter point my chief hesitation has been whether
it was advisable to revive the Llanthony disputes or to refer
again to the story of his tenant B. But by omission of the for-
P
210
Book IV.
FIRST SIX YEARS IN ITALY.
mer I should have lost some illustrations of character important
in their bearing on the later passages of Landor's career; the
other reference was necessary to explain his sudden exile from
England; and in giving effect to his own wish that both should
be mentioned, I have been careful to take no part in the quar-
rels they involve. Such also would have been to him the course
most pleasing; for he was never indifferent to the truth even at
the times when he failed with accuracy himself to recollect it,
and he thought always he could afford to have it frankly told
better than any imperfect or garbled representation of it. I re-
member his anger at some remarks upon him by Mr. De Quincey
in which the fiery radiations' of his spirit were enlarged upon,
and he was described as a man intended by nature to be a leader
in storms, a martyr, a national reformer, or an arch-rebel, but
whom the accident of possessing too much wealth had turned
into a solitary unsympathising exile. Nor was his anger less
at reading an anecdote of himself, I think by the same writer,
wherein he was said to have sold, out of mere offence at the
conduct of some of his tenants, what his ancestors had held as
their patrimony for 700 years. In both statements, as in many
similar ones made since his death, fact and fiction had become
so oddly intermixed as only to be clearly separable by such de-
tail as I have given.
What there is in either that has a bearing on his real
character will be, to all who have read these pages, obvious
enough; and he would himself have been the last to object to
any one who said of him, that whether better or worse than his
fellows, it had at least been too much his boast to be other than
they. From the days of his boyhood this was his fault. At
school, at home, at college, conscious always of powers that
doubtless received but scant acknowledgment, he contracted
such a habit of looking down upon everybody, that he lost alto-
gether the power, which the very wisest may least afford to lose,
of occasionally looking down upon himself. Everything was to
begin or to be altered anew for him, he was to be more sagacious
than his elders, judge better than anybody what was best for
himself, indulge unchecked whatever humours pleased him,
and, glorying that he was not cast in the mould of other men's
1815-1821.
211
RETROSPECT AND PROSPECT.
opinions, find nothing that it became him to object to in his own,
provided only they were sufficiently wild, irregular, singular, and
extreme. The contradictions in such a character as this, its
generous as well as its selfish points, its comic and its tragic in-
cidents, are necessarily marked with more prominence than in
the ordinary run of men; and almost everything will depend
upon the side you approach it from.*
Those Llanthony disputes it is impossible to review altogether
with gravity, though they are a comedy with a very tragical fifth
act. But until, by the defaulting tenant's utter failure and
break-down in his payments, the serious element comes in sud-
denly, we can only see, in the entire tenor of that life at Llan-
thony, another phase or development of a career curiously con-
sistent in its inconsistencies. It began with the old difficulty of
coöperating in the ordinary way with ordinary human beings.
He doubtless had the best designs in the world, when he per-
sisted in claiming the right as a grand-juryman to act independ-
ently of his fellow-jurors, in presenting for investigation alleged
crimes in no way previously the subject of charge or inquiry;
but, in contesting such a claim, his fellow-jurors had common
sense as well as custom on their side. Every reason, public and
private, supported his demand to be placed in the commission
of the peace; but those who had to act with him in such a
capacity might not unreasonably object to an impracticable col-
league. No one, in short, was half the trouble to him at Llan-
thony that he began by being to himself. Everything that
(
* I doubt whether among all your acquaintances,' wrote Mr. Robert
Landor to me, 'you have ever known any two men more unlike each other
than my brother as he appeared when paying his customary visits to you
or Mr. Kenyon, so joyous, so benevolent then, and as he proved to be in
'his father's house while young, or in his own when twenty years older.
Where there was no disrespect, but only a difference of opinion on some
subject of no consequence whatever, I once heard him tell an old lady
(my father's guest, but in my father's absence) that she was a damned
'fool. If you ask why such an anecdote should be related by me, I must
reply that there may be still living many persons, beyond his own family,
who still remember such, and would contradict any narrative of yours
in which the best qualities were remembered, the worst forgotten.' I
had not waited for this appeal to resolve that, if this memoir were written
at all, it should contain, as far as might lie within my power, a fair state-
ment of the truth.
212
Book IV.
FIRST SIX YEARS IN ITALY.
followed had this for its source. In private and in public affairs
his plan of proceeding was on the same eccentric principle or
differing as widely as he could from everybody else. He was
never beyond the control of the mood that possessed him for
the moment; and though it was easy, by humouring this, to
continue friendly with him, it was yet easier to quarrel with
him by opposing it, in however slight a degree. Of course he
began by exhibiting an unwise excess of kindness and concession
to his tenant. To Southey's friend he could not do less. He
never refused him, as he says, any request however unreasonable;
he conceded them moreover in that grand style which makes the
receiver seem to be conferring the favour; and it was the man's
own complaint, when the unreasonableness had arrived at the
point of not paying anything he was under obligation to pay,
that there was no conceivable indulgence he had not been taught
to rely upon at Landor's hands. Then came discovery on both
sides; on the one that some rent must be paid or the farms given
up, on the other that there was a limit to those wonderful re-
sources of which an impression so boundless had been conveyed;
and, in the differences that followed, all the advantage went to
the side of him who had the coolness to retain it when it fell to
him. It never falls in such cases to the irritable temper and the
habit of hasty language, no matter for the consciousness of right.
that has provoked them, or for the freedom from everything un-
generous that may accompany them.
Nor should this subject be quitted in its connection with
Landor's character without the remark that, when we now look
back to the most part of what we find that he intended to do,
and measure it by the means that alone he possessed of doing
it, absurd as in some respects the impression is, there is yet
more in the retrospect to please and to excuse, at times even to
excite admiration, than to offend. Few of his infirmities are
without something kindly or generous about them; and we are
not long in discovering there is nothing so wildly incredible that
he will not himself in perfect good faith believe. When he
published his first book of poems on quitting Oxford, the profits
were to be reserved for a distressed clergyman. When he pub-
lished his Latin poems, the poor of Leipzig were to have the
1815-1821.
213
RETROSPECT AND PROSPECT.
sum they realised. When his comedy was ready to be acted, a
Spaniard who had sheltered him at Castro was to be made richer
by it. When he competed for the prize of the Academy of
Stockholm, it was to go to the poor of Sweden. When he wrote
his book about Shakespeare, it was to relieve an old school-
fellow in want. If nobody got anything from any one of these
enterprises, the fault at all events was not his. With his extra-
ordinary power of forgetting disappointments, he was as prepared
at each successive failure to start afresh as if each had been a
triumph. I shall have to delineate this peculiarity as strongly
in the last half as in the first half of his life, and it was certainly
an amiable one. He was ready at all times to set aside out of
his own possessions something for somebody who might please
him for the time; and when frailties of temper and tongue are
noted, this other eccentricity should not be omitted. He desired
eagerly the love as well as the good opinion of those whom for
the time he esteemed, and no one was more affectionate while
under such influences. It is not a small virtue to feel such gen-
uine pleasure as he always did in giving and receiving pleasure,
for one half cannot be selfish. His generosity, too, was be-
stowed chiefly on those who could make small acknowledgment
in thanks and no return in kind.
The similarity in habits of mind between himself and Southey
was pointed out in a previous part of this memoir, and has since
had illustration from their correspondence. But it will have been
seen that while both have continued to display the same pecu-
liarity of putting in the place of reason their imagination and
their passions, and of thinking thus and thus by mere force of
their will or pleasure, a wide difference has been declaring itself
between the tastes and desires which have thus so largely con-
stituted opinion in each. Landor's wishes have expanded, while
those of Southey have contracted, under the same influences. It
was not ill said, by an acute observer who knew them both, that
their fault was not that of blindness to the truth so much as that
of indifference to give it welcome unless as a discovery or posses-
sion of their own; and that, with the possession of what they
so desired, satiety ever followed quickly. Napoleon acted what
they talked, and they hated him. They were themselves ready
214
Book İv.
FIRST SIX YEARS IN ITALY.
enough to pull down sovereignties, but for the man who by his
own might trampled on the necks of sovereigns they had nothing
but contempt and dislike. With some modification this re-
mained true, up to Napoleon's fall; but what followed put differ-
ences between them. Every protest against repression at home,
every rising against reaction abroad, had from Landor as hearty
a sympathy as it had bitter opposition from Southey. The men
had not altered in temperament; but, from altering circumstances,
while self-opinion in the one had been opening itself to impressions
more permanent and universal, in the other it had narrowed itself
more and more to what in his position was merely accidental and
personal. The distinction marks what had thus far been Lan-
dor's advantage in his exile, in his removal from sordid cares, in
his freer observation of the life of the present, and in his less
restricted commerce with the wisdom of the past. It shows also,
as to both, that whatever might continue to be their impetuosi-
ties of opinion, there was more in Landor than in Southey of a
stronger spirit of the understanding to give body and consistency
to such better judgments as he might form. He was indeed pre-
paring himself, in banishment and adversity, for what probably
never would have come to him in happier fortune; and the result
will soon be seen.
<
That his opinions were meanwhile separating widely from
those of his friend he seems to have been anxious that Southey
himself should know. 'We are sailing, I think, in different
directions,' is his remark on Southey's first allusion to his own
dialogues; and Southey, replying on almost the same day to
what Landor had said against including a House of Lords in the
constitution he was recommending for the Italians, gave illustra-
tion himself of their growing differences. 'I have read with all
'the attention in my power what you say against a House of
Lords. Perhaps the most difficult of all things is to establish
a free government among a people altogether unused to free-
'dom; and if they are, as in France and Italy, a corrupt people,
'the difficulty becomes still greater. Where you have a repre-
'sentative government, two houses have at least the advantage
' of interposing delay in times of popular excitement; they afford
'something more than an appeal from Philip drunk to Philip
1815-1821.
215
RETROSPECT AND PROSPECT.
(
6
6
'sober. The House of Lords, since its cowardly conduct in the
Queen's business, which indicated the same want of fibre that
' proved fatal to it in the days of the Long Parliament, has per-
'formed the service of stopping the question of Catholic Eman-
cipation after it had passed the Commons. This is the most
important act that it has ever performed. For the sure conse-
quences of that emancipation would be a religious war in Ire-
'land upon the demand for a dominant Roman-catholic estab-
lishment, which is the next step: and in England, the repeal
' of the Test Act; the intrusion of the Dissenters into all cor-
'porations, their predominancy in all town elections, where the
' election is not purely popular; the sale of the tithes; and so,
in sure progress through the overthrow of the Church Estab-
'lishment, to general anarchy and spoliation.** To say that upon
every allusion here made Landor's views were as extreme in the
opposite direction, would express the truth quite moderately.
เ
Nevertheless in essential points of temperament they con-
tinued marvellously alike; and pausing thus between the two
divisions of Landor's life, in the hope of drawing from what is
gone some help to the better understanding of what is to come,
there is one subject on which a word may properly be said. Both
friends had fallen into a habit of applying heathen doctrines and
precedents in a manner alarmingly unsuitable to a Christian com-
monwealth; and we see how often it has gravely recurred that
they could hit upon no better remedy than the dagger of Brutus
for the treacheries of Ferdinand or the tyrannies of Bonaparte.
The same vehement extravagance of speech, for such only it was,
both of them indulged to the end; it was a part of the weakness
of temperament, of the 'believing without reason and hating
'without provocation,' into which, while as to general matters
time had mollified them, special subjects always betrayed them;
yet if Landor's life had been prolonged but a few months, no
man, at the murder which then astonished the civilised world
and for a time reconciled all opinions,† would have been more
Southey to Landor, 19th December 1821. This is one of the letters
printed in the Life and Correspondence (v. 105-107); but the passage in
the text, having been there suppressed, is here first printed.
†The allusion is to President Lincoln's death.
216
Book IV.
FIRST SIX YEARS IN ITALY.
shocked than he, and no man more indignant to be told that on
more than one occasion, without even the poor excuse of the ex-
citement of civil war or of the madness arising from political
defeat and ruin, he had himself seemed to give his sanction to
the same crime. Nor would his indignation have been unreal.
A man must be judged, at first, by what he says and does. But
with him such extravagance as I have referred to was little more
than the habitual indulgence (on such themes) of passionate feel-
ings and language, indecent indeed but utterly purposeless; the
mere explosion of wrath provoked by tyranny or cruelty; the
irregularities of an overheated steam-engine too weak for its own
vapour. It is very certain that no one could detest oppression more
truly than Landor did in all seasons and times; and if no one
expressed that scorn, that abhorrence of tyranny and fraud, more
hastily or more intemperately, all his fire and fury signified really
little else than ill-temper too easily provoked. Not to justify or
excuse such language, but to explain it, this consideration is
urged. If not uniformly placable, Landor was always compas-
sionate. He was tender-hearted rather than bloody-minded at
all times, and upon only the most partial acquaintance with his
writings could other opinion be formed. A completer knowledge
of them would satisfy any one that he had as little real disposi-
tion to kill a king as to kill a mouse.
In fact there is not a more marked peculiarity in his genius
than the union with its strength of a most uncommon gentle-
ness, and in the personal ways of the man this was equally mani-
fest. When, in the year following that to which this narrative
has arrived, Leigh Hunt went to Italy and saw him, he endea-
voured to convey the impression produced by so much vehemence
of nature joined to such extraordinary delicacy of imagination
by likening him to a stormy mountain pine that should produce
lilies. After indulging the partialities of his friendships and
'enmities, and trampling on kings and ministers, he shall cool
' himself, like a Spartan worshipping a moonbeam, in the patient
'meekness of Lady Jane Grey.' This is anticipating somewhat,
for though imaginary conversations in manuscript lie already in
his desk, none have as yet emerged from it. But from letters
to his family, from papers preserved by him of this date, and
1
1815-1821.
217
RETROSPECT AND PROSPECT.
from some enclosures in his letters to Southey, I have discovered
that this was the precise date of some of the smaller of his poeti-
cal pieces which will illustrate the remark just made as well as
almost any of his writings.
At Swansea in former years, as we have seen, he had made
the acquaintance of some ladies of Lord Aylmer's family, one of
whom, regarded by him always with a very tender sentiment,
went shortly afterwards to India and died suddenly while yet
very young.
'Ah, what avails the sceptred race,
Ah, what the form divine!
What every virtue, every grace!
Rose Aylmer, all were thine.
Rose Aylmer, whom these wakeful eyes
May weep, but never see,
A night of memories and of sighs
I consecrate to thee.'
The deep and tender pathos of that little poem could hardly
be surpassed, and in delicacy and sweetness of expression it is
perfect. It was first printed in the Simonidea, but in its pre-
sent form only in his later letters; and it has since affected many
readers with the same indefinable charm ascribed to it by Charles
Lamb in an unpublished letter to Landor of the date of 1832.
Many things I had to say to you which there was not time for.
'One why should I forget? 'Tis for Rose Aylmer, which has a
'charm I cannot explain. I lived upon it for weeks.'
(
I subjoin other brief pieces (all of them subsequently printed)
from his letters during the first years of his residence in Italy.
In some of them we meet again a heroine of former years, as to
whom farther allusion may be made hereafter; but the passion
is now a playful tenderness, and sorrow or reproach has passed
into very gentle pathos.
No, my own love of other years;
No, it must never be.
Much rests with you that yet endears;
Alas, but what with me?
Could those bright years o'er me revolve,
So gay, o'er you so fair,
The pearl of life we would dissolve,
And each the cup might share.
You show that truth can ne'er decay,
Whatever fate befalls;
218
Book IV.
FIRST SIX YEARS IN ITALY.
I, that the myrtle and the bay
Shoot fresh on ruin'd walls.'
Why, why repine, my pensive friend,
At pleasures slipt away?
Some the stern Fates will never lend,
And all refuse to stay.
I see the rainbow in the sky,
The dew upon the grass;
I see them, and I ask not why
They glimmer or they pass.
With folded arms I linger not
To call them back; 't were vain;
In this, or in some other spot,
I know they'll shine again.'
'All tender thoughts that e'er possest
The human brain or human breast
• • •
Centre in mine for thee
Excepting one . . and that must thou
Contribute: come, confer it now:
Grateful I fain would be.'
'Proud word you never spoke, but you will speak
Four not exempt from pride some future day.
Resting on one white hand a warm wet cheek
Over my open volume you will say,
"This man loved me !" then rise and trip away.'
Poet. Thus do you sit and break the flowers
That might have lived a few short hours,
And lived for you! Love, who o'erpowers
My youth and me,
Shows me the petals idly shed,
Shows me my hopes as early dead,
In vain, in vain admonished
By all I see.
Lady. And thus you while the noon away,
Watching me strip my flowers of gay
Apparel, just put on for May,
And soon laid by!
Cannot you teach me one or two
Fine phrases? if you can, pray do,
Since you are grown too wise to woo,
To listen I.
Poet. Lady, I come not here to teach,
But learn, the moods of gentle speech;
Alas, too far beyond my reach
Are happier strains!
1815-1821.
219
RETROSPECT AND PROSPECT.
Many frail leaves shall yet lie pull'd,
Many frail hopes in death-bed lull'd,
Or ere this outcast heart be school'd
By all its pains.'
'From you, Ianthe, little troubles pass
Like little ripples down a sunny river;
Your pleasures spring like daisies in the grass,
Cut down, and up again as blithe as ever.'
'In Clementina's artless mien
Lucilla asks me what I see,
And are the roses of sixteen
Enough for me?
Lucilla asks, if that be all,
Have I not cull'd as sweet before:
Ah yes, Lucilla, and their fall
I still deplore.
I now behold another scene,
Where Pleasure beams with heaven's own light,
More pure, more constant, more serene,
And not less bright:
Faith, on whose breast the Loves repose,
Whose chain of flowers no force can sever,
And Modesty, who, when she goes,
Is gone forever.'
At Pistoia he saw the hair of Lucretia Borgia, on which he
wrote a quatrain solemn yet fantastic in its beauty as the subject
that suggested it.
Borgia, thou once wert almost too august
And high for adoration; now thou 'rt dust:
All that remains of thee these plaits unfold,
Calm hair meandering in pellucid gold."
On his way to Florence these were written:
'I leave with unreverted eye the towers
Of Pisa pining o'er her desert stream.
Pleasure (they say) yet lingers in thy bowers,
Florence, thou patriot's sigh, thou poet's dream!
O, could I find thee as thou once wert known,
Thoughtful and lofty, liberal and free!
But the pure Spirit of thy wreck has flown,
And only Pleasure's phantom dwells with thee.'
It would be difficult to surpass the delicacy and beauty of
writing in all these pieces. If indeed they have here and there
220
Book IV.
FIRST SIX YEARS IN ITALY.
a fault, it will be found in something of an over-choiceness and
conciseness of expression, at times allying itself rather to subtlety
of thought than simplicity of sentiment. But for the most part,
as even the few thus presented will show, they are both in feel-
ing and style as nearly perfect as such things can be, and the
most famous of the short pieces in the Greek Anthology have
not a more pervading and indescribable air of refinement and
grace. Southey had now to confess, jealous as he was of the
time given by his friend to composition after the ancient models,
that he did not write his own language worse for having become
more thoroughly practised in theirs. He told Grosvenor Bed-
ford of Landor's improvement from his years of exile, and that
his wonderful genius was freeing itself rapidly from everything
harsh or obscure. But he spoke of him still as a man born pre-
eminently a poet; and could indeed have had small conception
that he was at this moment engaged on any prose literary labour,
of which the sudden and wide success would go far even to dis-
miss from men's farther remembrance his Gebir and his Julian.
A letter received by Southey, immediately before the allusion.
to the 'dialogues' reached him which is printed in the last sec-
tion, had enclosed what in especial at this time I suppose to
have raised his hope so high for his friend's chances, at last, of
being admitted to the highest rank among poets. This was two
dramatic pieces: one taken from the story of Ines de Castro;
the other, under the title of 'Ippolito di Este,' a rewritten ver-
sion of a couple of scenes from his burnt Ferrante and Giulio; and
out of the latter one or two brief extracts will not be inappropriate
here, as well to justify what Southey built upon it, as for the
light it throws upon the other work its author then was busy
with.
It has been said of the Imaginary Conversations that it is
never possible to read them without feeling that whatever may
be their truth to the circumstances and times in which their sup-
posed speakers lived, they are still more true to Landor himself;
that we always feel it is he who is speaking; and that he has
merely chosen characters whom he considered suitable to develop
particular phases of his own mind. There is something in this,
but it is far from expressing on the particular point all that re-
1815-1821.
221
RETROSPECT AND PROSPECT.
quires to be said. If the Conversations had been only this, they
would not have differed in result from the many similar under-
takings by writers of that and the preceding century. Their dis-
tinction and their success was the combination, with the intense
individuality to which I have alluded at the opening of this sec
tion, of some of the subtlest arts of the dramatist and of the high-
est poetical imagination. So calm a judgment as Julius Hare's
found creations in them comparable only to Sophocles or Shake-
speare; and to so keen a criticism as Hazlitt's it appeared that
the historical figures they evoked were transfused with nothing
short of the very truth and spirit of history itself. Applied to
some few of the Conversations neither praise is in excess; and
even where, as in by far the greater number, that is said from
time to time which the speaker in life would not be likely to
have said or to have been in the position to say, the man may
thus be forgotten but the character remains. True or false, the
character conceived by Landor is in the forms of thought and
speech there still. The dramatic conditions continue to be ob-
served. Landor may be discoverable where we ought to be con-
scious only of Cicero, but it is in a difference between the fact as
known to us and the conception formed of it, not in any false-
hood to that conception or in any merely personal intrusion. If
it had been otherwise, the defect would have shown itself in his
poetical as in his prose conversations; and it is to exhibit the
same spirit animating both that I now speak of the scenes of
Ferrante and Giulio. They are not more perfect than those
which accompanied them; but in a brief space they illustrate
with surprising force Landor's management of a dialogue bring-
ing the extremes of passion and tenderness into play.
The first scene is in a cathedral, the second in a prison; and
the position of the persons introduced in a few words is this. The
duke Alfonso and his brother the cardinal have two brothers
by their father's side, Ferrante and Giulio, whom they refuse to
acknowledge. The duke is jealous of Ferrante's power over his
subjects, and the cardinal of his influence over the girl beloved
by his eminence himself. The prince is a tyrant of the approved
type of medieval Italy, and the priest very exactly foreshadows
Victor Hugo's famous archdeacon. The first scene shows him
222
Book IV.
FIRST SIX YEARS IN ITALY.
in the cathedral, maddened by the rejection of his love. But
his passion in all its forms only repels its object. Seeing her
weep after leaving Ferrante, he builds upon it a kind of hope
which she at once destroys, comparing him with the brother that
she loves.
'All my soul
Is but one drop from his, and into his
Falls, as earth's dew falls into earth again.'
What follows is the dialogue in prison to which I have more
especially referred, and in which is expressed what the Italian
legend drily tells us, that the cardinal obtained an order from
the duke to deprive Ferrante of his eyes because the girl beloved
by his eminence had praised the beauty of them. Ferrante had
been imprisoned for sanctioning some popular tumult, and his
brother Giulio had come to solace him, when the cardinal brother
enters suddenly, and after bitter words of reproach and defiance
thrusts a paper upon Giulio and goes. Ferrante, ignorant that
this paper contains the sentence depriving him of sight, wonders
to see Giulio, after glancing at it, rush round the wide light
' chamber' in uncontrollable agony.
'Giulio. Have we not dwelt in friendship from our birth,
Told the same courtier the same tale of joy,
And pointed where life's earliest thorn had pierced
Amid the sports of boyhood, ere the heart
Had aught of bitter or unsound within?
Ferrante. We have indeed.
Giulio.
Has my advice been ill?
Ferrante. Too often ill-observed, but always good.
Giulio. Brother, my words are not what better men
Would speak to you; and yet my love, I think,
Must be more warm than theirs can ever be.
Ferrante. Brother's, friend's, father's, when was it like yours?
Giulio. Which of them ever said what I shall say?
Ferrante. Speak; my desires are kindled, my fears quencht.
Giulio. Do not delay to die, lest crueller
Than common death befall you.'
The intensity of anguish in those quiet words could not be
surpassed. For dramatic language and expression, in the sense
formerly contrasted with stage-dialogue, the scene is indeed a
masterpiece. Ferrante cannot yet take in the horrible truth.
But gradually as it dawns upon him he loses faith in all things,
1815-1821.
223
RETROSPECT AND PROSPECT.
-in everything but her for whose love he is to suffer. A gleam
of hope then suddenly rises. The discontent of the people at
Ferrante's imprisonment being heard in a clamour beneath the
dungeon-window, Giulio passionately urges his brother to show
himself to his friends; but the other, knowing that failure will
destroy both, invents a reason to evade the risk of sacrificing
his brother. The scene closes as the lights approach by which
the sentence is to be executed; and, from the brother whose life
has been one act of love for him, Ferrante receives the dagger
with which he stabs himself. No stage-directions are wanted
here. Everything is visible to us, as well of the outward form
and movement of the speakers as of the soul that throbs and
burns beneath.
'Giulio. Hark! hear you not the people? to the window! . . .
Up! seize the moment; show yourself.
Ferrante.
Draw me not thither....
[Aside]
Stay, Giulio!
O, were he away!
But if I fail, he must die too, being here.
Giulio. Let me call out: they are below the grate;
They would deliver you: try this one chance.
Obdurate! would you hold me down? They 're gone!
Ferrante. Giulio, for shame! weep not, or here I stay,
And let vile hands deform me.
Giulio.
They shall never.
Ferrante. What smoke arises? are there torches under?
Surely the crowd has pass'd: 't is from the stairs.
Giulio. Anticipate the blow.
Ferrante.
One more must grieve!
And will she grieve like you, too tender Giulio!
Turn not away the head, the hand. What hold you?
Give, give it to me. "T is keen. They call you forth.
Tell her. . no, say not we shall meet again,
For tears flow always faster at those words..
May the thought come, but gently, like a dream!'
As a matter of mere literary skill the whole of the dialogue
deserves careful study. No action requires to be written in, no
stage-direction to be given, no index or finger-post to be set
up, for what the reader seems actually to see with his eyes even
before the pain of it touches his heart. The marvel is that a
man who could so write should have lived considerably beyond
the term of middle age without having won for himself any name
224
Book IV.
FIRST SIX YEARS IN ITALY.
or reputation in a world to whose good opinion he never was
indifferent, even when loudest in professing not to care for it.
Some will also think it perhaps the greater marvel that he was
now to succeed after failure during all those years, yet without
abatement in the smallest particular of the wilfulness, the eccen-
tricity, or the impatience which before had made success so
difficult. The scene I have quoted may help us to a brief ex-
planation.
One obvious advantage of his new undertaking was, that,
avoiding farther competition on a ground now seized and held
in absolute possession by Byron, it was to be written in prose ;
but another and greater consisted in the fact, that while the
dialogue-form not only left him scope for humours indulged so
long as to have become part of his nature, but brought under
some kind of discipline both the strength and weakness that
were part of his genius, the general design was at the same time
such as to display in their most perfect development his choicest
accomplishments as a master of style, and his most refined power
as a dramatic writer. His five-act dramas had been dialogues,
but his dialogues were to be one-act dramas; and, placed in
future to a certain extent under dramatic conditions, there was
to be hereafter some purpose in even the most violent of the
caprices by which he had abused his strength, and in the idlest
of the paradoxes on which he had wasted it. For whatever he
had yet to say, he was to get appropriate utterance at last, his
mind was to find a settled place in which it might rest and ex-
patiate; and his life was not to be a failure altogether. When
his plan was first named to his friend, Southey wrote to him.
'I shall rejoice to see your Dialogues. Mine are consecutive, and will
have nothing of that dramatic variety of which you will make the most.
My plan grew out of Boethius, though it has since been so modified that
the origin would not be suspected. The personage who visits me is Sir
Thomas More, as one who recognises in me some dis-pathies, but more
points of agreement. This age is as climacteric as that in which he lived;
and you see what a canvas I have taken, if I can but fill up the sketch.'
It is an ill canvas for dialogue which takes a road ‘so narrow
' where one but goes abreast;' and such was Southey's, as it had
been Hurd's and Lyttelton's in similar books: mere monologues
cut up into short sentences uttered with equal appropriateness
1815-1821.
225
RETROSPECT AND PROSPECT.
་
by A and B; the main object being to recommend particular
systems or lines of thought, special opinions, or social changes.
Far different was Landor's. His plan had taken a range as wide
as life and history. All the leading shapes of the past, the most.
familiar and the most august, were to be called up again. Modes
of thinking the most various and events the most distant, all
that had made the greatness or the littleness of mankind, were
proposed for his theme. Beside the fires of the present, the
ashes of the past were to be rekindled, and to shoot again into
warmth and brightness. The scene was to be shifting as life,
but continuous as time. Over it were to pass successions of
statesmen, lawyers, and churchmen; wits and men of letters;
party men, soldiers, and kings; the most tender, delicate, and
noble women; figures fresh from the schools of Athens and the
courts of Rome; philosophers philosophising, and politicians dis-
cussing questions of state; poets talking of poetry, men of the
world of matters worldly, and English, Italians, or French of
their respective literatures and manners. The very extent of
such a design, if success were to be obtained at all, was a se-
curity for its fair execution. With a stage so spread before him,
whether his immediate purpose were expression of opinion or re-
presentation of character, he could hardly help breaking through
the circumscription and confine' of his own small round of lik-
ings and dislikings. His plan compelled it; and what else it
exacted no other man living could have supplied so well. The
requisites for it were such as no existing writer possessed in
the same degree as he did. Nothing had ever been indifferent to
him that affected humanity; poetry and history had delivered
up to him their treasures; and the secrets of antiquity were his.
The first beginnings of his enterprise had been mentioned to
Southey in a letter from Florence of the date of the 9th of March
1822.
'It is long ago since you first told me that you were writing some dia-
logues. I began to do the same thing after you, having formerly written
two or three about the time when the first income-tax was imposed. I
have now written fifteen new ones, throwing into the fire one between
Swift and Sir William Temple, and another between Addison and Lord
Somers; the former because it was democratical, the latter because it
was composed maliciously, and contained all the inelegancies and inac-
226
Book IV.
FIRST SIX YEARS IN ITALY.
curacies of style I could collect from Addison. The number would surpass
belief. The two earlier ones, the first between Lord Grenville and Burke,
the other between Henry the Fourth and Sir Arnold Savage, were written
more than twenty years ago, which no person would believe of the former;
but I gave the substance of it to Robert Adair to get inserted in the
Morning Chronicle, and a part of it (now omitted) was thought too per-
sonal, and it was refused. I hope your dialogues are printed, that they
may give some credit and fashion to this manner of composition.'
Thus employed, we leave him at the close of the first half of
his life happier upon the whole than he has been since its out-
set in the Tenby and Swansea days, with a better outlet than
has yet been open for his powers and faculties, and with even a
little gleam of sunshine, from his mother's care and sacrifices,
again lighting-up his personal fortune. In the letter to Southey
just quoted he tells him of his hope to be able, some day soon,
to fix himself permanently, not in Florence itself, but in a villa
in its neighbourhood; and he says that he shall add a garden to
it by converting a vineyard into one, which I cannot do unless
I purchase it; and (a thing I never expected) this too is in my
'power.' Another thing as unlooked for he was soon also to
find within his power. He never expected that, if any consi-
derable number of people were found to praise or admire him,
he should be able to entertain other than a mean opinion of
himself; and of this excuse for every eccentricity, this foolish
principle which has dominated over so much of his past life,
he will very shortly be deprived. He will discover that when
people praise him they do not necessarily lower him to their
level; that they do not prove him to be, for that reason, only
so much more like themselves; and that it is*not therefore es-
sentially a base or unworthy thing to desire or deserve, nay even
in some small degree to obtain, popularity. We may not be
sanguine indeed that this wiser experience will be permanent,
or that old errors and extravagances will not still be abundant;
but the promise is fairer than it has been, and from the last half
of Landor's life there is at least the prospect of better results
than have attended the years that are gone.
[The First Volume of the original edition of this Biography closed with
the Fourth Book.]
BOOK FIFTH.
1822-1828. ÆT. 47-53.
THE IMAGINARY CONVERSATIONS.
1. The Manuscript on its way. 11. A Publisher found. 111. What the
Book contained. IV. How the Book was received. Correspondence
with Southey. VI. Family Letters. VII. Additional Dialogues.
6
I. THE MANUSCRIPT ON ITS WAY.
•
'JULIUS HARE will have the kindness to put this letter into the
post-office when he reaches London. I have long expected to
see Mr. Kenyon in hopes of reading your new poem, of which
I have heard not indeed many but very high eulogies.' These
are the opening lines of the first letter written to Southey by
Landor, early in 1822, after Florence had become his settled
abode; and in the whole of his later life there are not two plea-
santer figures than the friends it names.
It was not however Julius, but Augustus Hare, to whom the
letter was intrusted, a later passage in it correcting the mistake;
for it was not till towards the close of the year that Julius was
returning to his law-studies in the Temple, after that visit to
his brothers Francis and Marcus at Milan in the preceding win-
ter, when he first made acquaintance with the name and writings
of Landor, to whom all the brothers Hare, as we shall see, be-
came ultimately known, Augustus and Marcus as well as Francis
and Julius; but the latter two most familiarly. Hare-brained,
Southey called them all; and there was sufficient truth in the
playful imputation to recommend them especially to this new
friend, to whom the impetuosity and eagerness as well as various
information of Francis, and the scholarly acquirements and spe-
culative turn of Julius, might have seemed but the reflection of
1
Book V.
228
THE IMAGINARY CONVERSATIONS.
a part of his own larger and more various nature. The Hares,'
he wrote to his sisters in 1833, 'are beyond all comparison the
'most pleasant family of men I ever was acquainted with.'
His knowledge of them began with Francis. This was the
boy-friend of Palmerston, with whom, two years before the open-
ing of the century, both having then reached the mature age of
thirteen or so, the future prime-minister of England had dis-
cussed marriage, Don Quixote in the original, and the Greek
and Latin classics ;* and whom Cyril Jackson distinguished, on
his afterwards entering Christchurch, as the only rolling stone.
he had ever known that was always gathering moss. Landor
met him first at Tours; and, soon after establishing himself
in the palazzo Medici in Florence, they became so intimate that
from Hare's society, he often said, he derived the animation and
excitement that had helped him most in the composition of his
Imaginary Conversations; nor did these friendly relations cease
until the close of Hare's life at Palermo.t Not indeed without
occasional interruption from that excess or over-vehemence of
speech from which neither was free, and which their common
friend, Lord Blessington, seems to attribute more especially to
Hare, in writing of his marriage in 1827 that il Signor Fran-
cesco had been so much improved by it that he at last allowed
other people to talk. There is even a hint of the failing in
Landor's tender allusion to the friend,
•
•
Who held mute the joyous and the wise
With wit and eloquence, whose tomb, afar
From all his friends and all his countrymen,
Saddens the light Palermo.'
And by nearly the last remaining of the English residents of
* See vol. i. pp. 5-9 of Lord Dalling and Bulwer's Life of Lord Pal-
merston; a work unhappily interrupted by the death of its author, who,
distinguished as he was in literature and in the service of the state, has
left his friends to regret a charm of manner, itself the reflection of one of
the kindliest of natures, which gave singular fascination to him in private
intercourse.
† I will quote, as honourable to both, one of Hare's last letters from
Palermo: 'My dear Landor, It did not require this fresh proof of your
'friendship to convince me that you were one of the most disinterested,
one of the most zealous and constant of friends. That I have long
'known. Qualis ab incepto.' Landor had been making some exertion for
Hare's children.
1822-1828.
229
THE MANUSCRIPT ON ITS WAY.
C
those days in Florence, where his own name will always be re-
membered with love and honour, it has been lately mentioned
to me. 'I used,' says Mr. Seymour Kirkup, 'to see him and his
'friend Francis Hare together; and it was a constant struggle
' of competition and display between them; both often wrong,
although men of strong memory. They used to have great dis-
'putes, mostly on questions of history. . . Hare was often
' astounded at being corrected. He was thought infallible; and
I remember our consul-general at Rome calling him a monster
' of learning.' But only the pleasantest side of all this was re-
membered when, on going to England with his wife in 1827,
Francis had asked for an introduction to Southey, and Landor
described him as among the kindest and most intimate friends
he ever had, to say nothing of his learning, his wit, and the in-
exhaustible spirit and variety of his conversation. I owe him
as much pleasure as I can give him, and none will be a greater
'than what these few lines will procure him.'
To Wordsworth, the real bearer of the letter of 1822 had
become known some years earlier; and he makes interesting
mention of both him and Julius in a letter to Landor early in
1824, where, after referring to Augustus as the Oxford tutor of
his elder son, he says he has a strong desire to become acquainted
with the Mr. Hare whom his friend had mentioned, and who,
to the honour of Cambridge, was in the highest repute there for
his sound and extensive learning. This was Julius, who corre-
sponded with Landor most intimately many years before he per-
sonally knew him; and the expectation even of seeing that other
friend named in Landor's letter, Mr. John Kenyon, had to wait
several years for fulfilment, being a loss to Landor, for so long, of
the joyousest and pleasantest of all his associates. At the end
of the letter Southey was adjured to tell what he is doing in the
way of poetry. Spring being always his own idle season, he is
himself doing nothing. He has not courage even to ripple the
current of his thoughts with a pencil as he walks.
Southey's reply was more about Wordsworth's than his own
poetry; and in everything he wrote at this time about that greater
master, whose slow but steady advance was all but overshadowing
such small enjoyment of poetical fame as Byron's supremacy had
230
Book V.
THE IMAGINARY CONVERSATIONS.
left to himself, there is a generous, manly spirit. He has honest
pleasure in bringing Landor to Wordsworth's side. His letters
are filled with praise of the poet of Rydal Mount.
His merits,
he rejoices to think, are getting wider acknowledgment every
day, in spite of the duncery that cannot understand him, in
spite of the personal malignity that assails him, and in spite of
the injudicious imitators who are his worst enemies. He is
'composing at this time a series of sonnets upon the religious
history of this country; and marvellously fine they are.
<
At
'the same time, not knowing his intention and he not being
aware of mine, I have been treating the same subject in prose,
so that my volume will serve as a commentary upon his. Mine
'will go to press almost immediately; and I hope to send you
both, with the first volume of the Peninsular War, early in the
'spring.'
(
،
6
(
Not many weeks later, a letter to Landor from Wordsworth
himself announced as on their way to Florence: Ecclesiastical
Sketches, or a sort of a Poem in the Sonnet stanza or measure;
' and Memorials of a Tour on the Continent in 1820. This tour
brought me to Como; a place that, with the scenery of its lake,
' had existed in my most lively recollection for upwards of thirty
years. What an addition it would have been to my pleasure
' if I had found you there! Time did not allow me to get farther
' into Italy than Milan, where I was much pleased; with the
'cathedral especially; as you will collect, if ever you see these
poems, from one of them entitled the Eclipse of the Sun.'
6
The letter went on to say that in his intervals of better sight
he had been reading Landor's Latin poems again, and he speaks
in detail of some, especially the Polyxena, as full of spirit and
animation. He was himself indeed no judge of Latin poetry,
except upon general principles; but he had received real pleasure
from these pieces, though impatient, like Southey, of time given
to them which he thought might be better given to English
poetry. Still I must express the wish that you would gratify
us by writing in English. In all that you have written in your
'native tongue there are stirring and noble things, and that is
'enough for me. In a tract of yours which I saw some years
ago at Mr. Southey's, I was struck by a piece on the War of
'
6
1822-1828.
231
THE MANUSCRIPT ON ITS WAY.
'the Titans, and I was pleased to find also rather an out-of-the-
6
6
way image in which the present hour is compared to the shade
on the dial. It is a singular coincidence that in the year 1793,
'when I first became an author, I illustrated the same sentiment
'precisely in the same manner. A comment of still more strik-
ing interest follows upon a passage in another book of Landor's,
his Simonidea, seen also on Southey's table.
*
Landor's observation was to the effect that the sonnet was a
structure of verse incompatible with the excursive genius of our
commanding language. You commend,' says Wordsworth upon
this, 'the fine conclusion of Russell's sonnet upon Philoctetes,
' and depreciate that form of composition. I do not wonder at
'this. I used to think it egregiously absurd, though the great-
'est poets since the revival of literature have written in it. Many
years ago my sister happened to read to me the sonnets of Mil-
¿
'
ton, which I could myself at that time repeat; but somehow or
other I was then singularly struck with the style of harmony,
and the gravity and republican austerity of those compositions.
'In the course of the same afternoon I produced three sonnets,
´ and soon after many others; and since that time, and from want
' of resolution to take up anything of length, I have filled up
6
many a moment in writing sonnets which, if I had never fallen
' into the practice, might easily have been better employed.'
In the same letter Wordsworth cleared up the mystery of the
missing Mr. Kenyon. He had left Rydal Mount in the previous
September with the intention of proceeding directly to Italy, but
had changed his purpose and taken a wife instead; forgetting to
send on to its destination the letter that was to introduce him to
Landor. Kenyon was again talking of starting for the Continent
with his wife, but only for the summer, so that this promised
visitor would probably not reach Florence. But there were other
visitors his friend would hear of s
'It is reported here that
'Byron, Shelley, Moore, and Leigh Hunt (I do not know if you
have heard of all these names) are to lay their heads together
in some town of Italy for the purpose of conducting a journal
* Landor had characterised the sonnet in question, in the preface to
his Simonidea, as a poem on Philoctetes by a Mr. Russell, which would
authorise him to join the shades of Sophocles and Euripides.'
232
Book V.
THE IMAGINARY CONVERSATIONS.
(
'to be directed against everything in religion, in morals, and
probably in government and literature, which our forefathers
'have been accustomed to reverence. The notion seems very
extravagant, but perhaps the more likely to be realised on that
' account.'
News of Southey was not forgotten. Had Landor heard of
the attack of Byron upon him, and his answer? His lordship
ad lost as much by that affair as Southey had gained, whose
letter was circulated in almost every newspaper in England.
Southey's son, too, continued to thrive, promising well; and the
rest of his family were flourishing. 'I am glad,' Wordsworth
adds, 'that you also are a father, and I wish for a peep at your
'boys, with yourself to complete the trio.' But beside his boys.
there was another production of Landor's of which his fellow-
poet had lately heard, and wished also to peep at, perhaps more
eagerly. Not only had Southey told him of the Manuscript
Conversations shortly before, but that it was Landor's intention
to offer to himself the dedication of them when printed; and
thus ran the closing words of his present letter: 'I expect your
' book with impatience. I shall at all times be glad to hear from
'you, and shall be proud to receive any public testimony of your
' esteem.'
Almost at the same moment Landor was writing to Southey
of such of the Conversations as he had completed: 'I have waited
'several weeks, hoping to find an opportunity of sending them
'to Longman. If anything should prevent him from undertak-
'ing the publication, the terms of which I leave at his discre-
tion, I would offer them to Mawman, to whose house I once
went in company with Parr.' The old swift impatience! Be-
fore he has even sent them to one publisher he is thinking of
another, and multiplying all the possible sources from which dis-
appointment or vexation could arise to him. With what results
we shall see.
6
<
Very soon after, writing on the 3d of June, Landor told
Southey that he had sent. a manuscript to London, by Captain
Vyner, of the Life Guards. It ought, he said, to have arrived
on the 18th of April; but Longman, to whom it was addressed,
had as yet given him no account of it. The manuscript was
1822-1828.
233
THE MANUSCRIPT ON ITS WAY.
the first portion of the Imaginary Conversations. But a post-
letter between Florence and London took then from eleven to
fourteen days, and if the captain had dropped his precious
freight in Paternoster-row at the instant of arrival, Landor
could not by the promptest conceivable dispatch have learnt
this any earlier than the first week in May. Yet some days be-
fore even that date he had swiftly and decisively informed the
Longmans by post in what way four copies of the book might be
sent to him. Four copies of the printed book while yet the
types to be used in composing it were without form or place!
It was the old impetuous way; but though it probably surprised
Paternoster-row a little, no sign was made from that respectable
quarter. There was absolute silence up to the time when this
letter of the 3d of June described the torments that the silence
had occasioned.
'I left entirely to Longman the conditions on which he might publish
my book, and I wrote again a full month ago to him informing him how
he might forward to me four copies. He has taken no notice whatever
either of my manuscript or my letters. Will you do me the kindness to
request him to send the former to Mawman, who I believe will undertake
it, leaving it at his discretion. This disappointment has brought back my
old bilious complaint, together with the sad reflection on that fatality
which has followed me through life, of doing everything in vain. I have
however had the resolution to tear in pieces all my sketches and projects,
and to forswear all future undertakings. I try to sleep away my time,
and pass two-thirds of the twenty-four hours in bed. I may speak of my-
self as of a dead man. I will say, then, that these Conversations con-
tained as forcible writing as exists on earth. They perhaps may come out
after my decease, and the bookseller will enrich some friend of his by at-
tributing them to him, and himself by employing him, as the accredited
author of them, on any other subjects. If they are not really lost, or set
aside for this purpose, I may yet have the satisfaction of reading them
here at Florence, and perhaps they may procure me some slight portion
of respect.'
Such perverted ingenuity of self-torment even Rousseau might
have envied, nor has the wonderful Confessions a more curious
page. But all Landor's character was in it. Beginning and end-
ing not unhopefully, hope has entirely vanished in the interval.
He thinks his venture wrecked; accepts the ill-luck as part of a
fatality that attends him; and throws up everything. All the
projects he had formed he abandons, and all the sketches con-
nected with his lost achievement he destroys. He takes to his
234
Book V.
THE IMAGINARY CONVERSATIONS.
bed, and will sleep away the rest of his time. As in future there-
fore he can only regard himself in the light of a dead man, he
thinks he may say how good the perished Conversations were ;
and with this arises suddenly another not unnatural thought,
that perhaps they were too good to be lost. What if they have
fallen among thieves instead, and the thieves are only waiting
the chance of their author's death to make out of them a har-
vest of money as well as fame? A fancy he finds so aggravating
that he turns promptly the other side of the picture, puts off his
intention of dying, and hopes he may yet have the satisfaction,
not merely of reading his printed book in Florence, but of get-
ting out of it a little fame for himself.
Nor has this better mood subsided on the 21st of the same
month, the date of his next letter to Southey, when, though he
is still without certain tidings of the manuscript, and not with-
out misgivings, he is far from despair. He is at work to recover
a copy, but believes the original may yet turn up in London, and
mentions a circumstance extenuatory if not exculpatory of the
Longmans. 'In the few lines I wrote to you the other day I
' expressed the grief I had experienced, I know not whether from
'Longman entirely, or from Captain Vyner of the Guards to
'whom my parcel was intrusted by a Mr. Olivieri of Florence.'
6
The mystery was not cleared up till nearly three months later,
when, writing to Southey on the 16th of September, Landor tells
him that the manuscript which he had so bitterly bewailed for
not arriving in the Row by the 18th of April, had not actu-
ally arrived there till the 19th of August, and that the re-
proaches he had heaped on the Longmans for unanswered let-
ters were at least equally divisible between them and himself.
He had meantime, after much agitation, intrusted the Ms. to
Julius Hare, whom Southey had seen, with the care of deliver-
ing it to Mawman for printing. 'Hare is very anxious to be
' presented to you. He is a most acute and well-read man.
mention him to you, which I have done in
my letter. Among my scraps and projects I had filled a couple
' of sheets (I think) with a conversation between you and Por-
6
' told him I would
I
( son. In my bitter vexation at the miscarriage of my мs. I
threw away whatever I could lay my hands on.
Some days
1822-1828.
235
THE MANUSCRIPT ON ITS WAY.
<
ago I found an old letter with part of it, in which were some
' remarks on Wordsworth's poetry. I enlarged on these, and
'there is now a dialogue between you and him on this subject.'
A point of some delicacy is afterwards touched upon. He had
offered the dedication of his book to Wordsworth, and the offer,
as we have seen, had been accepted with pride. But it was not
to be. He had written with such asperity and contemptuousness
of the people in power, he told Southey, 'that a sense of delicacy
'would not permit me to place Wordsworth's name before the
' volume.' And then came his reason for having handled so
sharply the people in power.
'Why have these rascals suffered me to be insulted by their agents?—
me, who never asked them for anything, and who was silent when I thought
them wrong in their measures? Out of four thousand English here I was
selected for slight and contempt! the only man in all the four thousand
who ever acted with disinterestedness for the public good, or who will be
remembered a year after his death. Under no other system could this
have happened. It could not have happened in Russia or in Turkey. In
those countries men who are superior to others in virtue and intelligence
are promoted and rewarded. I wanted neither. I did not even claim re-
spect. I would only have avoided disrespect, disdain, and insult. So
long as such wretches are in power and employment, I am the avowed and
unmitigable enemy of those who countenance them, and of the govern-
ment that allows it. My peace and health have suffered; and, what is
worse, my compositions. These bitter waters soak through their most
solid parts, and there is hardly a plant that does not taste of them. It
appears to me that there will be about thirteen sheets in duodecimo. If
Mawman begins to print on the 5th of October (he will receive the Ms. on
the 1st), they will be finished by the end of the month; and I have ordered
a copy to be sent to you, with one for Wordsworth, at Longman's. There
are now twenty-three Conversations.'
Recovering breath from this philippic, which was but the
expression given by his wild irascibility to a commonplace dis-
pute with some members of the British Legation in Florence,
who will read the lines added about Mawman without laughter
mingling with pain? Nothing literally is known to the writer
but that the Ms. will be taken to that publisher; yet upon this
frailest of foundations is built at once not only its acceptance,
but a series of operations on the part of all to be concerned in
producing it, of such unequalled vigour as will insure a printed
book in five-and-twenty days. Thus with headlong eagerness
was Landor ever raising up inexhaustible provision for dis-
236
Book V.
THE IMAGINARY CONVERSATIONS.
appointment and trouble. Sisyphus was nothing to a self-tor-
turer who might at any time of his own accord have taken his
hand from the stone.
II. A PUBLISHER FOUND.
Mawman declined the book as Longman had declined it. It
was next taken to a publisher named Martin, and by him also
refused. Then it was taken to Valpy, who proposed terms that
could not be acceded to. In these negotiations nearly six months
passed; and it was March 1823 when Landor again wrote to
Southey, soon after he had instructed Julius Hare to carry the
manuscript for another chance to Ridgway. Busied in all the
interval with additions and improvements, interested more than
at first in the variety of subjects he has opened, adding and in-
venting daily from unsuspected riches of resource, and with
every fresh demand upon his power finding its energy and pro-
ductiveness unfailing, Landor was by this time so satisfied with
his progress, so confident in the value of his amendments, and
so occupied in the task of transmitting them to Hare, that he
had happily not over-tormented himself with the succession of
unsympathising publishers who have churlishly refused his book,
and was even ready himself to pay for a printer if no one else
would do it. But he was in some trouble as to Wordsworth and
the way in which he was likely to take the abandonment of his
intention to dedicate the book to him.
Among my new conversations are Bacon and Hooker, Marcus Cicero
and his brother Quinctus; and to you I need not express the difficulty of
my task. The dialogue between the latter two takes place on the eve of
Cicero's death, at his Formian villa. Mr. Hare tells me you have assisted
him in his attempts to obtain me a printer. I desire no profits, if any
should arise from the publication; and I would take upon myself half the
loss, provided that only three hundred and fifty copies were printed in
octavo. There will be about twenty-two sheets. It appears to me that
all important questions should be fairly and fully discussed. I invite cri-
ticism and defy power. It will vex me if I am at last obliged to employ
a printer who publishes only pamphlets for the mob, conscious as I am
that in two thousand years there have not been five volumes of prose
equal in their contents to this. By volumes I mean the entire works of
one author. I have wearied my excellent friend Mr. Hare to death with
perpetual corrections and insertions. He never even saw mo. He does
not complain of his trouble, occupied as he is in other literary labours;
1822-1828.
237
A PUBLISHER FOUND.
but reproves my attacks on Catholicism, to which he appears more than
moderately inclined. There is no religion or party to which he would not
be an ornament and a support. . . . It is not improbable that I forgot to
tell you I had another son born five months ago. I gave him my names,
Walter Savage.'
Another month was hardly gone when the publisher was
found at last. Landor's suggestion of the 'printer who pub-
'lishes only pamphlets for the mob' having ended like the rest
by Mr. Ridgway's politely declining, Julius Hare was left to his
own judgment. He had now quitted the Temple for a classical
tutorship in Cambridge, upon the joint persuasion of Whewell
and Wordsworth's brother, then Master of Trinity; but, having
contributed to the London Magazine in his Temple days, he had
a favourable knowledge of its proprietor, John Taylor, and to
him he made application.
'I considered him the most honourable man in the trade; and after no
small difficulties, arising however altogether from conscientious scruples
and in no degree from considerations of profit, we came to an agreement;
or I ought rather to say, I was so weary of soliciting publisher after pub-
lisher, and so anxious to put the work into the hands of a respectable
man, that I forced Taylor to undertake it.'
Landor's instructions as to terms had been that the publisher
was to receive all the profits, and he would himself engage,
provided the impression were limited to 500 copies, to make up
any loss at the end of one or two years. Making sure however
of a larger sale than this, Hare proposed as a compromise be-
tween Landor's offer and the usual half-profits plan, that both
the loss and the gain should be shared. And it was so settled.
But the difficulties were not over. The printing had hardly
begun when Taylor's 'conscientious scruples' broke out strongly
at some passages which he held to be objectionable. He required
a too plain-spoken word put in Cromwell's mouth to be removed,
and Hare, having heard from Southey that Landor would cer-
tainly not give way on the point, resisted. Upon this Taylor
said its retention would make the difference between his printing
a thousand copies or two hundred and fifty less; and Hare reply-
ing that he had no alternative, the word held its place and the
impression was limited to seven hundred and fifty.
It appeared in both first and second editions, but in the Collected
Edition of 1846 was expunged by himself. He had then learnt to be
more sparing of flowers from the deanery-garden.
238
Book V.
THE IMAGINARY CONVERSATIONS.
More serious discussion then arose upon a passage in the con-
versation between Middleton and Magliabechi, the result of
which was a reference by Hare to Southey to ask if either he or
Wordsworth would consent to look over the proofs, Taylor
undertaking to be bound by the decision if either of them ap-
proved what he condemned. Whereupon Southey wrote this to
Landor (8th May 1823); and after declaring his belief that Tay-
lor was a man very superior to most of his trade, and that he
had demurred really on grounds of principle, said he had himself
at once replied that he would most willingly, Wordsworth hav-
ing gone to the Netherlands, take upon himself the responsibility
suggested, and act for his friend in the matter as his friend
would by him, taking care that wherever there was an omission
the place should be marked. He added that the specimen Lan-
dor had sent him of the dialogue of the Ciceros was delightful,
and that Julius Hare spoke of the whole just in such terms as
he should expect it to deserve.
On the 31st of the same month Landor replied. He felt so
much pleasure on receiving Southey's letter, he said, that it
hardly could be increased by reading it, although the informa-
tion it gave him satisfied all his wishes. By way of solving
the difficulty bis friend was in, he suggested that a note from
the author should be inserted, wherever the objectionable pass-
ages appeared, requesting the editor to mark them with a spe-
cial reprobation. This characteristic proposal, it is needless to
say, would only have given greater force to Taylor's objections
by giving greater prominence to the questionable passages.
Southey preferred therefore to act on the powers of omission also
given him, and some few sentences were condemned accordingly.
But as to the passage in the Middleton, in which that not very
orthodox divine was represented as disputing the efficacy and
even the propriety of prayer, Southey was unable to see the force
of Taylor's objection, and the point had again to be referred to
Florence. Hare would have let the thing pass, and Southey
thought it admissible, but Taylor stuck to his objection; and it
was while Landor's decision was still waited for that Hare took
upon himself to cut the knot. It is difficult to reconcile Tay-
lor's obstinacy with his own offer to be bound by Southey's de-
cision; but, incompatible as such a view appears with any sug-
1822-1828.
239
A PUBLISHER FOUnd.
gestion of a compromise, Hare thought that Taylor had never
barred his right of electing to decline the whole matter, and so
expressed himself afterwards.
'I had agreed to print what Southey sanctioned; but of course this
was only binding to a certain extent, and could not oblige Taylor to print
what he thought morally wrong, and hurtful to Christianity. He may
have been mistaken: I thought he was. I thought the argument against
prayer, as an argument, good for nothing. I may have been equally mis-
taken; but at all events I cannot blame Taylor for acting conscientiously
according to his judgment.'
It should be added that Taylor repeatedly desired Hare to find
another publisher, and recommended him one (Mr. Simpkin)
who would feel no such scruples as he had himself; but Hare
disliked the thought of changing. Taylor had shown so much.
interest in the book, and had taken such pains to have it hand-
somely and correctly printed, that Hare was more anxious than
ever to continue with him; and rather than break, even ven-
tured at last to make the alterations in the Middleton. This was
hardly judicious. It got rid of a difficulty for the time; but
Landor had a ground of complaint on discovering it, and some
excuse afterwards (a thing that did not often happen to him)
for quarrelling with a very worthy man.
It was during the Middleton discussions and delays that
Hare gave Taylor permission to print in the London Magazine
the dialogue between Southey and Porson containing the com-
ment on Wordsworth's poetry. This was done to please Words-
worth, Landor willingly consenting; and in the July number of
1823 it appeared. Sharp as were some of Porson's sayings in
it, the poet had reason to be proud of the tone and matter of
the dialogue; and it was of no common import, at this turning-
hour of his fame, that a champion of such appearance and prowess
should declare upon his side. Southey spoke of him to Porson
as in those latter times the glory of their country; and, when
reminded that a rabble had persecuted him and a Jeffrey made
him his prey, retorted with a couple of allegories, that an ele-
phant was born to be consumed by ants in the midst of his
unapproachable solitudes, and that in the creation God had left
his noblest creature at the mercy of a serpent. Even Porson's
severity was so tempered as not to exclude the highest claims.
240
Book V.
THE IMAGINARY CONVERSATIONS.
•
He condemned the habit of pursuing thoughts too far, of show-
ing them entirely rather than advantageously, of accumulating
instead of selecting them, in language that the poet might in
earlier days have read with inexpressible advantage; and his
bitterest censure of the line about the witness' and second
'birth,' which then disfigured the stanza of Laodamia descriptive
of the Elysian fields, hardly detracted from its accompanying
magnificent eulogy that the poem was one which Sophocles might
have exulted to own, and that the former part of the stanza
might have been heard with shouts of rapture in the regions it
describes. Altogether the dialogue excited considerable interest,
and much curiosity was raised for the appearance of the book
which the same magazine had promised would be immediate;
but for several more months the promise was not kept, and
Wordsworth meanwhile wrote to Landor.
He began by saying he was both tired and ashamed of wait-
ing any longer, and he therefore wrote to thank Landor now,
even before his completed book had appeared. He had been
at Keswick in the summer, when Southey had read to him part
of the dialogue in which he was introduced as a speaker with
Porson (it had appeared, something I must say to my regret,
' in a magazine'), and he had since read the remainder himself.
'You have condescended to minute criticism upon the Laodamia. I
concur with you in the first stanza, and had several times attempted to
alter it upon your grounds. I cannot however accede to your objection to
"the second birth," in the latter stanza merely because the expression has
been degraded by conventiclers. I certainly meant nothing more by it
than the eadem cura and the largior æther, &c. of Virgil's sixth Æneid.
All religions owe their origin or acceptation to the wish of the human
heart to supply in another state of existence the deficiencies of this, and
to carry still nearer to perfection what we admire in our present condition;
so that there must be many modes of expression, arising out of this coin-
cidence or rather identity of feeling, common to all mythologies; and under
this observation I should shelter the phrase from your censure. But I
may be wrong in the particular case, though certainly not in the general
principle.' (At the close of his letter he wishes very much to have Lan-
dor's opinion of Dante.) 'It has become lately, owing a good deal I be-
lieve to the example of Schlegel, the fashion to extol him above measure.
I have not read him for many years. His style I used to think admirable
for conciseness and vigour without abruptness; but I own that his fictions
often struck me as offensively grotesque and fantastic, and I felt the poem
tedious from various causes. . . . Farewell. Be so kind as write soon; and
believe me ever sincerely and affectionately yours, WM. WORDSWORTH.'
1822-1828.
241
WHAT THE BOOK CONTAINED.
What Landor replied does not appear; but his opinion of Dante
was given in very memorable fashion some years later by the
publication of his Pentameron.
A month after Wordsworth's letter, on the last day of Feb-
ruary 1824, Southey announced to Landor the completion in
London of the printing of the Imaginary Convcrsations. The
book thus ready to be given to the world contained thirty-six
conversations, eighteen in each volume; and of these I will now
attempt such brief description as may sufficiently show their
drift or design, their varieties of style, and some few of the illus-
trations of character that surprisingly abound in them.
III. WHAT THE BOOK CONTAINED.
The opening subject was taken from our early history. The
first Richard. returning from his imprisonment, is met by the
abbot of Boxley, and to his old confessor relates the story of
his wanderings and his captivity. The moral of it is contempt
for the princes of Europe, and respect for Saladin. He had dis-
covered them to be creatures of less import than the sea-mews
on their cliffs; men praying to be heard and fearing to be under-
stood; ambitious of another's power in the midst of penitence;
' avaricious of another's wealth under vows of poverty; and
jealous of another's glory in the service of their God.' Was
that Christianity, and was Saladin to be damned if he despised
it? He had in him seen wisdom, courage, courtesy, fidelity, and
the power to judge a hero's nature by his own. 'To them he
'sent pearls and precious stones, to me figs and dates; and I
' resolved from that moment to contend with him and to love
'him.' The story told by the Lion-heart has also another lesson.
As Richard sailed along the realms of his family, little else had
been visible to him than sterile eminences and extensive shoals;
with which he could not but contrast the capacity and courage
of the men by whom they had been governed. 'What nation
' hath ever witnessed such a succession of brave kings two hun-
'dred years together as have reigned uninterruptedly in Eng-
'land? Example formed them, danger"nurtured them, difficulty
'instructed them, peace and war in an equal degree were the
R
242
Book V.
THE IMAGINARY CONVERSATIONS.
เ
supporters of their throne.' Thus on the first page of a work
which, as he said to Francis Hare, it was his pride so to have
planned as to be under no restraint, from claim of citizenship.
or country, to withhold what might be due to men of every race
and clime, Landor impressed unmistakably that other pride which
he never could suppress, of having been born himself an Eng-
lishman.
For interlocutors in his second dialogue he had chosen bear-
ers of names also very dear to his countrymen, Sir Philip Sidney
and his friend Lord Brooke, the subject of whose talk, among
the wilds and glades of Penshurst, is of the art of contentment
and a happy existence; which could hardly have been written
by a man ignorant of the Apology and the Arcadia, though
these are not reproduced even in the turn of a phrase. Never
indeed, throughout all the series, was there anything in the
dialogues borrowed or merely imitative. Not to insert in any
one of them 'a single sentence written by, or recorded of, the
'personages who are supposed to hold them,' had been the pride
of Landor's design; he adhered to it inflexibly; it helped him
to truth of character where least careful as to truth of circum-
stance; and, when he makes Sidney talk of the difficulty of writ-
ing as the ancients have written without borrowing a thought or
an expression from them, we see the personal reference. But
with what Brooke says of the spot amid Penshurst woods in
which he had found his friend, I must quit the dialogue. Among
its many wise things there may be finer, but there is none that
more clings to the memory. 'What a pleasant spot, Sidney,
have you chosen here for meditation! A solitude is the audi-
'ence-chamber of God.'
The supposed talk of Henry the Fourth with Sir Arnold Sav-
age, the first recorded Speaker of the House of Commons, sup-
plied another English subject for his third dialogue; and matters
critical, such as may have interested literary Laen at the close
of Porson's life, with incidental notices of the poetry of Words-
worth, were handled in the fourth, or Southey and Porson dia-
logue already named, in which there is a capital stroke against
Gifford of the Quarterly. Introduced as the little man that fol-
lowed Southey in the Critical Review, whose pretensions widened
1822-1828
243
WHAT THE BOOK CONTAINED.
every smile his imbecility excited, Porson is made to say of him
that he would certainly, if Homer were living, pat him in a
fatherly way upon the cheek, and tell him that 'by moderating
'his fire and contracting his prolixity, he might give the public
before long something really worth reading.' In the detail and
niceties of criticism Landor is never so strong as in its generals
and principles, but the subject was handled in this dialogue
without unfairness on either side, and with so much of character
on both as to mark their differences even in points of agreement.
Replying to a friend's remark upon it, Southey conceded that
Porson and himself might not have conversed as Landor had ex-
hibited them; but we could neither of us have talked better'
he added, and most people will agree with him.
In the fifth the speakers were Oliver Cromwell and that
Michael (misnamed by him Walter) Noble, the friend of Oliver
and member for Lichfield in the Long Parliament, some of whose
blood ran in Landor's own veins; his grandfather, Robert Lan-
dor of Rugeley, having (in 1732) married the sole daughter and
heiress of Noble's grandson Walter, of Chorley Hall, Longdon,
through whom Landor's father inherited a good estate. The drift
of this is to show Cromwell stubbornly putting aside the inter-
cessions of his friends the republicans for the life of Charles;
and there is capital character in the half-humorous, half-evasive
way in which the deeply-set tragic purpose of the Puritan general
declares itself. This conversation was very nearly the only one
that pleased the Quarterly reviewer, who had probably failed to
discover what was really meant by it.
The sixth dialogue was first of a series famous for its range
of subject, its variety of treatment, and a familiarity with classic
life and thought unparalleled since the revival of letters, bring-
ing upon the scene the sages and orators of antiquity. Eschines
and Phocion are the speakers; their twofold theme being De-
mosthenes, and the character and laws of the Athenians. Defects
in both are sharply criticised; in the former by Eschines, in the
latter by Phocion, whose defence of the great adversary of Philip
becomes a lesson in eloquence and government to his rival. The
tone and manner of it may be shown by the remark with which
Phocion checks the impatience of Eschines under the thought
244
Book V.
THE IMAGINARY CONVERSATIONS.
of the evil enemies and times that have befallen them, remind-
ing him that no one from without can inflict worse upon a man
than he is always inflicting on himself, and that the remedy for
both is the same. 'The gods have not granted us, Eschines,
'the choice of being born when we would; that of dying when
we would, they have.' The philosophy is true throughout to
the point of view of ancient life, but with the proper reserves
and limitations is not inapplicable wholly to modern thoughts
and ways.
The seventh dialogue, with Elizabeth and Burleigh for its
speakers, was quite a little masterpiece of humour and character.
Here Edmund Spenser's laureateship and pension are talked.
about; and the queen's pleasant pedantic patronage of the Muses,
condescending to those sacred damsels as but another sort of
maids of honour, shows off by whimsical contrast her minister's
complaint that ladies of such doubtful character should so have
'choused' her highness. Nor was the picture of Elizabeth's suc-
cessor in the eighth dialogue, where the speakers are James the
First and Isaac Casaubon, and the principal subject popery, un-
worthy to rank with it. James's oddities of speech had not been
so felicitously caught as Elizabeth's vernacular, but his native
mother-wit, pedantic folly, shrewd cunning, real learning, dog-
matic absurdities, argumentative subtleties, and a hatred of Jesuit
and presbyter as devouring as his love for himself, were repro-
duced with humour and success. And it was very well said of
this class of the dialogues, I think by Hazlitt, that the verisimili-
tude arises less from the studied use of peculiar phrases or the
exaggeration of peculiar opinions, than from the fact that the
writer is so well versed in the productions and characters of those
he brings upon the stage that the adaptation takes place uncon-
sciously and without apparent effort. Southey, then fresh from
his Book of the Church, was unprepared for such handling by his
friend of the weapons of theological controversy; and he found
all that portion of the dialogue denouncing the popes, exposing
the horrid vices and monstrous beliefs of Rome, and slaying again
the thrice-slain Bellarmine, masterly in the extreme. But his
appetite was only for the high-spiced condiments of James: it
had no stomach for the stronger meats to which his majesty is
1822-1828.
245
WHAT THE BOOK CONTAINED.
'I
invited by Casaubon. I would authorise no inabilities or pri-
'vations for a difference in mere articles of faith: but I would
exclude from all power, all trust, all office, whoever should as-
sert that any man has legitimate power of any kind within this
'realm, unless it repose in, or originate from, the king or parlia-
´ment, or both united.'
The ninth was the first in which Landor appeared in his
own person, talking with the Marchese Pallavicini, whose palace
he rented at Albaro, and to whose boast of the magnificence
of Genoese doorways he makes reply that there are oaken stair-
cases in England as worthy to commemorate, and that he had
himself inherited an old ruinous house (at Ipsley) up whose stair-
case the tenant rode his horse to stable him. The talk through-
out is much upon architecture; and to one passage I will refer,
for the comment it then provoked and the confirmation it has
since received. He is speaking of the earliest of the Romans
who had any idea of amplitude in architecture, and mentions.
approvingly Tiberius and Nero. To this much gravity of objec-
tion was made by the earliest critics of the Conversations, and
Hazlitt condemned it as the wildest of paradoxes that Tiberius
should be put forth for a man of sentiment retired to Capri out
of grief for his wife, and Nero promoted into a humane and
highly popular person. Yet since that date there are scholars
both in Germany and England who have discovered something
of truth in both paradoxes: and a learned professor at this very
hour is busily engaged in demonstrating, in one of the reviews,
that Tiberius was a brilliant soldier, and a not unjust or cruel
sovereign; and that the turning-point of his life, the cloud which
darkened his spirit in youth and never quitted him in age, was
the divorce from Vipsania and compelled marriage with Julia,
which Landor made the subject of a later and very masterly
dialogue.
'I have been told that among Landor's Conversations,' writes
Julius Hare in the Guesses at Truth, the most general favourite
is that between General Kleber and some French officers.' This
was the tenth; and if it be as Hare says, one may easily see
why. It is in truth a story, even a love-story, the dialogue being
set in narrative; and all that is suffered or said in it expresses
246
Book V.
THE IMAGINARY CONVERSATIONS.
}
*
with extraordinary force the cruel character of Bonaparte's glory,
and its hardening effect on Frenchmen. The eleventh dialogue.
introduced Bishop Burnet and Humphrey Hardcastle, and in
execution was one of the happiest of the series. The bishop's
style is excellently caught: credulous, gossiping, coarse, but with
character in every word, amusingly graphic and distinct. The
Southey and Byron controversy had been raging just before,
and both combatants had tossed about the name of Landor,
Byron rhyming it with gander in one of the later cantos of Don
Juan: when Landor himself by this dialogue took part in the
quarrel, delivering his heaviest blows from the mouth of the
garrulous bishop, in a sketch of the most popular poet of his
day; Mr. George Nelley, my Lord Rochester's reputed child;
who
'whenever he wrote a bad poem supported his sinking fame by some
signal act of profligacy; an elegy by a seduction, a heroic by an adultery,
a tragedy by a divorce. On the remark of a learned man that irregularity
is no indication of genius, he began to lose ground rapidly, when on a sud-
den he cried out at the Haymarket, There is no God. It was then surmised
more generally and more gravely that there was something in him, and he
stood upon his legs almost to the last. Say what you will, once whispered
a friend of mine, there are things in him strong as poison, and original
as sin.'
But hardly had the dialogue been printed when Byron's gallant
exertions for the Greeks, followed by his death, turned Lan-
dor's
anger into sorrow; he was eager to make what amends be
could ;
and in his second edition he paid a generous tribute to
the better parts of a character of which, in the conversation, he
had depicted only the worst.
The speakers in the twelfth dialogue were the famous Aus-
trian Grand-duke Peter Leopold and the French President Du
Paty whom he has summoned to confer upon the new code he is
preparing for Tuscany, and with whom he discusses the laws of
various nations, such defects in them as call for amendment, and
such social or national peculiarities as they have risen from, or
by sympathy become part of. England is not spared any more
than France and Italy; but in the latter it is shown that bad
laws had grown out of what was worst in surrounding social
and religious influences, while in the former they had sprung
up in the teeth of what was best in both society and religion.
1822-1828.
247
WHAT THE BOOK CONTAINED.
In the thirteenth conversation Demosthenes and Eubulides
appeared on the scene, the orator defending himself to his old
teacher of Miletus against adversaries alike of his politics and
eloquence, and in his turn carrying war into the territory of his
assailants. The conversation closes with what is too evidently
a whimsical sketch of Canning under the cover of the last fa-
vourite orator of the Athenians, Anædestatus. The fourteenth,
between Bonaparte and the President of the Senate, was a laugh
at the extravagant servility of the speeches addressed to the
French emperor by his officers of state; and that it was not
ineffective may be inferred from Hazlitt's calling it, in his in-
tense Bonapartism, a scandal against good taste and decency.
To this conversation in its original form was appended a long
and most remarkable note, of which in the collected edition
portions were absorbed into other dialogues, upon the charac-
ter of Bonaparte and some passages in his career; containing
among other things a description of the retreat from Moscow, as
fine as anything in the ancient historians. In the fifteenth
Landor reappeared in his own person in friendly talk with the
Abbé Delille, and the main part of it was an attack on Boileau,
which one would like him to have made less dogmatically,
and with less confidence in his knowledge of the delicacies of
a living language not his own. But the admirers of Boileau can
afford to leave such exquisite sense and satire as his to turn
with its smile the edge of a sharper assailant, and the digressions
are masterly. It may be added that this dialogue contains the
substance of a talk Landor used often to mention having had
with Talma (to whom John Kemble introduced him), when with
a curious freedom from national predilections, the French trage-
dian declared our English blank verse to have a great superiority
over the rhymed tragedy of the French stage; which imposed
upon the actor, he said, the necessity of so breaking the joints
and claws of every verse as to be able to pronounce it as if it
were no verse at all, 'thus undoing what the poet had taken the
greater part of his pains to accomplish.'
6
The sixteenth dialogue introduced the Emperor Alexander
discussing with Capo d'Istrias the results and prospects of the
Holy Alliance, and apology was made in a note for attributing
248
Book V.
THE IMAGINARY CONVERSATIONS.
to both speakers more wisdom and reflection than either pos-
sessed. Certainly, to such a writer as Landor, one can see that
the difficulty was infinitely less to show that the great are great
than to show that the little are little; and it is only a truism
to add that he is most successful where the most is demanded
of him. The seventeenth, between Kosciusko and Poniatowski,
also contained many admirable things: and its closing speech
Julius Hare used to point to as a specimen of perfect rhythmı,
such as might have been deemed scarcely attainable in a language
rather of thought than of sound such as ours is. But the great
performer can make his instrument wellnigh what he pleases.
The eighteenth, between Middleton and Magliabechi, closed.
the first volume; and here occurred the passages whereon con-
tention arose between Landor and his publisher, and which were
omitted in the first edition by Julius Hare. They had relation
to the efficacy of prayer: but if expurgation were to be made at
all, it is difficult to understand the justice of leaving in the
dialogue its other reasonings and humorous illustrations directed
against doctrines and practices exclusively Romish. Even Southey
could see that such omissions were not exactly fair, and he de-
clined to be a party to them. The conversation is unquestion-
ably a powerful one, but the effect would have been greater with
less offence in the tone, and there are some words spoken by
Magliabechi that seem to have this objection in view. I de-
'fended you to my superiors,' he says to Middleton, by remark-
'ing that Cicero had asserted things incredible to himself merely
'for the sake of argument, and had probably written them before
' he had fixed in his mind the personages to whom they should
'be attributed in his dialogues; that, in short, they were brought
'forward for no other purpose than discussion and explosion.'
In this was also let drop the secret of an occasional want of veri-
similitude as chargeable to Landor as to Cicero.
The second volume opened with a dialogue, nineteenth in the
series, between Milton and Marvell, who talk of what we should
hardly expect to have been their theme, but find to be quietly
characteristic both of them and of the time. Of government, re-
ligion, the noblest forms of human life, and the highest regions
of poetry, Milton had talked in happier days, and his thoughts
1822-1828.
249
WHAT THE BOOK CONTAINED.
about them all are grandly familiar to us in his own majestic
pages but here, within sound of the riot of Bacchus and his
revellers, we learn what may have been his thoughts about some
wiser kinds of mirth, in what he says upon the literature of
comedy. His friend Andrew has in hand the design of writing
one, and this raises between them interchange of thought and
suggestion not only as to its forms but its province, and its prin-
cipal masters among the ancient writers.
The speakers in the twentieth were Washington and Frank-
lin, who are supposed to have met on the envoy's return from
Paris, and between whom are exchanged experiences and thoughts
that would be likely to occur at such a time: recollections of
the recent struggle; comparisons of forms of government and re-
ligion; confidence in the prospects of the new world which they
have created; distrust of such arrangements of the old world as
their success has left undisturbed; and suggested remedies for
Ireland, of which the principal four have claim upon attention
even yet. Franklin would have abolished middlemen to check
absenteeism, ennobled Irish gentlemen to encourage residence,
removed the Protestant establishment to arrest Popery, and
established fisheries to relieve the potato. The shrewd man of
type professes no confidence in talking men; thinks that no kind
of good can come from keeping the understanding at tongue's
length; and is disposed to lay no small part of England's losses
on her too great reliance upon orators. 'I have been present
'while some of them have thrown up the most chaffy stuff two
hours together, and have never called for a glass of water. This
' is thought the summit of ability; and he who is deemed cap-
able of performing it is deemed capable of ruling the East and
'West.' That was levelled against Pitt, and will be found to
have considerable meaning in it to this day.
The series had no conversation more attractive than the
twenty-first for the quiet sweetness of its tone and character.
Lady Jane Grey, called suddenly away from the companionship
of her books to that other in which her life was wrecked, takes
counsel from her tutor, Roger Ascham, on the duties awaiting
her. Shaken by fears, the good old man bids her wean her
husband from ambitious thoughts.
250
Book V.
THE IMAGINARY CONVERSATIONS.
'If ever he meditate on power, go toss up thy baby to his brow, and
bring back his thoughts into his heart by the music of thy discourse.
Teach him to live unto God and unto thee; and he will discover that wo-
men, like the plants in woods, derive their softness and tenderness from
the shade.'
The dialogue was a great favourite with Hazlitt, whose praise.
of it rises to enthusiasm. The twenty-second was between Francis
Bacon and Richard Hooker; the fallen chancellor seeking con-
solation from religion in his trouble, and giving back to Master
Hooker the worth of yet more than he receives. There is much
character in the little scene represented, and the style of each
speaker is nicely shadowed forth.
To a quite other world we pass in the twenty-third of the
series, where the talk is between a Spanish republican, General
Lascy, and a treacherous priest and partisan of Ferdinand, the
cura Merino. But back to the antique world and its serener
thoughts we are taken in the twenty-fourth, where Sophocles
has been summoned to the side of Pericles to congratulate him
on the completion of the Piræus and the Pocile, and where the
great ruler and the great writer of Athens, proud of the complete-
ness of that glory of their city which has its foundation in the
supremacy of its citizens, converse of the mighty power given to
its statuaries and painters to restore to the living their dead
ancestors and hand down themselves to their children in re-
motest times. The thought rises thereupon to Pericles of how
worthless an incumbrance, how wearisome an impediment, life
itself may be. We are little by being seen among men, be-
cause that phasis of us only is visible which is exposed toward
'them and which most resembles them; we become greater
by leaving the world, as the sun appears to be on descend-
ing below the horizon. Strange reflection! humiliating truth!
that nothing on earth, no exertion, no endowment, can do
'so much for us as a distant day.' The subject is afterwards
pursued by Sophocles in a form designed to suggest higher con-
solations, and this is one of the grandest of the minor dialogues
for the depth and reach of its reflection. Its successor, the
twenty-fifth, wonderfully contrasted with it. Here Louis the
Fourteenth was introduced with his confessor, Father la Chaise,
the object being that the speakers should unconsciously illus-
"
1822-1828.
251
WHAT THE BOOK CONTAINED.
trate the inseparable alliance of superstition and cruelty, and
satirise the ferocious religious wars of the most Christian king.
The twenty-sixth conversation was between Tooke and John-
son, and was so enlarged after its first appearance as to become
in the collected edition two dialogues. It was upon the English
language, the corruptions that have crept into it, and the res-
torations necessary to its correctness both in writing and speech.
All his life this subject interested Landor. From early youth
to extreme old age it was his constant hobby to be putting forth
such spellings of words as he professed to be able to vindicate
from old writers; and reclaiming to the service of the language.
what he alleged to have been improperly rejected as obsolete.
Nevertheless it may not be said that he has gone any great way
towards the settlement of a subject of unquestionable import-
ance. He was not enough of a philologist to make always the
needful distinction between what is legitimately an old English
word and what is merely a form illegitimately given to it by
changing fashions of scrivener or printer.
He is full of sugges-
tions that are subtle and ingenious; many of his reasonings are
unanswerable; and by these he has done much, as by the exam-
ple of his own writing he has done infinitely more, to enrich
the language, whose purity he jealously guarded and to whose
dignity he largely added; but admirable as are many of the
changes he insists upon, we fail to discover that he is governed,
in any, by a very intelligible or uniform principle of change.
I may illustrate briefly a few of what must be called his
inconsistencies. He would remove from one word, for example,
all the marks of its origin; and then, with or without reason,
would as sedulously retain them in another. He would write
clame, exclame, proclame, because of the Latin derivation;
would spell soup soop, and group groop, to remove the mark
of their French derivation; and on the other hand again, to re-
tain such trace, would write parlement for parliament, manteau-
maker for mantua-maker, would strike the i out of all such
words as conceive, receive, perceive, achieve, and would spell
allegiance, for its derivation after liege not allege, alliegeance.
He makes many appeals from the vulgar (in the sense of com-
mon) to the learned, in determining what to speak or how to
252
Book V.
THE IMAGINARY CONVERSATIONS.
(
spell; but he has yet also the wisdom to know that few expres-
sions can become vulgarisms without having a broad foundation,
and that to have changed the scholarly gown for the homely.
jerkin is not always the worst that can befall a word. Upon
this indeed is based one of the happiest things said in the dia-
logue, that whereas the language of the vulgar has the advant-
age of taking its source in known, comprehended, and operative
things, the language of those immediately above them, flowing
as it does in general from what is less clearly comprehended, is
as a rule less pure. 'Hence the profusion of broken and ill-
assorted metaphors which we find in the conversation of
' almost all who stand in the intermediate space between the
' lettered and the lowest,' and of which curious instances are
given. He shows at the same time in what way a vulgarism
may become the property of the best writers, by example among
others of a word, 'underneath,' of which either half conveys
the full meaning of the whole; but which is significant though
redundant, and had been inscribed on the gravestones of peasants
long before it shone amid heraldic emblems in the golden epi-
taphs of Jonson. Very properly he thinks it silly to argue
that we gain ground by shortening on all occasions the syllables
of a sentence. 'Half a minute, if indeed so much is requisite,
is well spent in clearness, in fulness, and pleasurableness of
expression, and in engaging the ear to carry a message to the
' understanding.' Yet this is forgotten when he would have us,
on Addison's authority, substitute 'grandor,' the same in sound
as its adjective comparative, for 'grandeur,' which he maintains
to be as bad as if we retained liqueur, honneur, faveur, and other
'puny offspring of the projected jaw.'
The real truth, however, is that these inconsistencies in
the endeavour to be consistent only help to show that, even if
attainable, consistency would not be desirable. Doubtless there
is something to be said for making wholly our own what we
have fairly won, by putting under English laws our captives
from the French and other tongues; but there must still be
exceptions, and, as to trifles in spelling, one would hardly dis-
turb customs long established for a uniformity after all not
arrived at. We must admit it to be not reasonable to naturalise
1822-1828.
253
WHAT THE BOOK CONTAINED.
some words and leave others out in the cold; that it is not con-
sistent to get rid of French terminations in quiver, monster,
letter, pentameter, &c, and not to write also meter, scepter,
sepulcher, luster, theater, &c; and that it is indefensible to
write travesty and gaiety while yet we retain reverie, or to
write lie and not retain applie, relie, allie; to write precede and
not procede, accede and not succede; to write said and paid,
and not praid and staid; or laid and not allaid, knowledge and
not colledge, abridge and not alledge; but it is to be feared
that there is really no help for these irrationalities. Still, not
a small service is done by remarking them; and for students of
language the dialogues of Tooke and Johnson will be always a
rich collection of such peculiarities and defects as a rare mastery
of English, and prolonged and unwearying investigation of its
irregularities and intricacies, could alone have brought together.
In other ways also they are characteristic of Landor, as a few
more examples of his reformed spellings will perhaps amusingly
illustrate.
·
Appealing to better authors in wiser ages, he would write
with them finde, minde, kinde, blinde, holding the retention of
the e to be as necessary to pronunciation as its elision would be
fatal in chaste, waste, or paste, and that to say tim for time
would not be worse than mind for minde. Not seeing why we
should make three syllables of creator and two of creature, he
would write creture. The adverb still, to avoid confusion be-
tween adverb and adjective, he would write stil; and for uni-
formity he would write both til and until. He cannot see why
won should be the preterite of win, while begun is the preterite
of begin. He thinks that, writing being the sign of speech,
pronunciation should determine the spelling of such words as re-
ferr, inferr, interr, compell, dispell, and so on, the whole of which
should end with the double consonant. He condemns all such
words as resistless, relentless, exhaustless, upon the ground that
no word can legitimately end with 'less' that is not formed from
a substantive; and, pointing out that a word so formed, as
moneyless, peerless, penniless, thoughtless, careless, is neces-
sarily not capable of a comparative or superlative, he discards
as unhappy and inelegant all such phrases as a more or most
254
Book V.
THE IMAGINARY CONVERSATIONS.
careless, a more or most thoughtless, or a more or most peerless
person. Since we write architecture and sculpture, he would
write also painture, as in one instance Dryden does; and if
Cowley's 'pindarique' is to be laughed at, he does not see why
antique and picturesque should not be equally reducible to
order. As we say treacherous and ponderous, he would say
monsterous and wonderous, to which he would assimilate enter-
ance and rememberance. He sees as little reason for poulterer as
for masterer, maltsterer, or ministerer. He would turn the adjec-
tive circumspect into a substantive like prospect and retrospect,
adding the same termination for the adjective as in the latter
words, circumspective, prospective, retrospective. He declares
passenger or messenger to be as coarse and barbarous a substi-
tute for passager or messager as sausinge for sausage. He would
have rough, tough, sough, guided by bluff, rebuff, luff. He
would omit the u wherever it is not sounded, as in favour, hon-
our, and all that family; treating in the same way other not-
sounded letters, as the b in debt, crumb, and comb, and the s in
island, puisne, demesne. He would avoid in every possible case
the diphthong and reduplication of vowel, preferring to the ordi-
nary coat, green, sheaf, &c, cote, grene, shefe, kene, gote, dore,
flore, for which and many of the like he pleads Chaucer's autho-
rity, as for worke in place of work. After ostrich he would
write partrich, and he would assimilate anarchical and mon-
archical to the simpler patriarchal. He sees no better reason for
apostle than for symble, and would, for agreement with their
kinsfolk epistolary and apostolical, write apostol and epistol.
Like Milton, he would write sovran and foren, both pronuncia-
tion and etymology declaring themselves against sovereign and
foreign. As civil forms civility, he holds that abil should form
ability; and generally as to all that class of words he would
substitute il for le, as humbil, dazzil, tickil, &c. He would
always write preterites and participles with t, as possest, dis-
perst, extinguisht, refresht, nourisht, stopt, knockt, dreamt,
burnt, usurpt, talkt, remarkt, lavisht, askt, mockt, defying any
human voice even to utter such words as cork'd. He objects
to all such inversions of active and passive as well-read, well-
spoken, well-mounted; and inasmuch as lead has led for its
1822-1828.
255
WHAT THE BOOK CONTAINED.
preterite, he thinks read should have red, without the de that
Byron and others added to it, for that nobody could mistake the
verb for the adjective.
Reasoning thus in that particular instance, however, he is
in others quite as ready to reject existing forms because they
involve confusion between words identical in spelling but differ-
ent in meaning; and in fact it is to be repeated, ingenious and
excellent as many of his suggestions are, that in adopting, for
his only guide to such an extensive change as he desires in the
forms of our language, the assumption that spelling should al-
ways agree with sound unless a higher authority should inter-
pose, and that this higher authority is to be found sometimes
in the old writers, sometimes in specialties of derivation, some-
times in the mere avoidance of anomalies and singularities, he
would, if able to obtain any considerable following, make only
worse-confounded such confusion as exists. Uniformity is im-
possible, and would hardly be desirable, in a language derived
from such an infinity of sources. You may restore a language
as you clean a picture by rubbing away the richness and mellow-
ness of time. Where we are pleased, improprieties, pass unno-
ticed; and it is well that they should. But while I thus take
exception to what formed so large a part of the labours of my
old friend in this interesting field, there was another not incon-
siderable part for which infinite thanks are due to him. His
canons of style are always sound; throughout these dialogues,
in the remarks on masters of style and in illustrative examples,
they find valuable expression; and against false taste, incorrect-
ness, and impurity of every kind, the language had ever in him
an unwearied sentinel, during all his life on watch and guard.
The last instance I remember was immediately before his final
departure from England, when he had passed his eighty-first
year, and, in a conversation between Alfieri and Metastasio pub-
lished in Fraser's Magazine, had singled out for scornful denun-
ciation the fashionable and thrice-detestable word puch, au
example of the very worst kind of base corruption of language.
You will suppose that by this expression he meant courage: he did
We Italians would have said spirit, or heart, which comes nearest.
'But the meaning of pluck, until this year, had always been the entraila
80.
256
Book V.
THE IMAGINARY CONVERSATIONS.
(
(
'That utterance of Landor,' Mr. Carlyle wrote to me at the time,
referring to this passage, 'did my heart good. Indeed, the first
of those two imaginary conversations is really as good as any-
thing I ever saw from Landor. Do you think the grand old
Pagan wrote that piece just now? The sound of it is like the
ring of Roman swords on the helmets of barbarians. An un-
'subduable old Roman! Make my loyal respects to him the
'first time you write.' It was the same spirit that had animated
the Tooke and Johnson, burning brightly to the last.
(
Different in form from the rest, the twenty-seventh dialogue
is more correctly to be described as a narrative by Landor of his
calling at the house of an Italian friend, Cavaliere Puntomichino,
who had travelled in England; of his meeting there an Irish
gentleman, Mr. Dennis Eusebius Talcranagh, who had lately
published an imperial folio of eleven pages on the Wolf-dog of
Erin; and of his taking part in a conversation that followed
on Italian society and manners, and on British travellers and
reviewers, which in regard to these various subjects was the re-
verse of complimentary. As might have been expected, this
conversation gave great offence in Florence. The subject of the
twenty-eighth conversation, between Hofer and Metternich, had
been suggested by Southey, and there is good character in it, as
well as capital writing. The air of his mountains is not fresher
than the talk of the Tyrolese leader. The twenty-ninth was
between the kinsmen Hume and Home; the former talking
much as his essays might suggest, and making many keen
thrusts which the other parries feebly. But though doubts are
rather started than solved in this dialogue, its matter is full of
interest; and there is a remark of Hume's in the course of it,
that the evil principle, or devil, was hardly worth the expense
of his voyage from Persia, to which some orthodox theologians
seem lately to have given their assent. In the thirtieth, Ma-
vrocordato and Colocotroni discussed eloquently the affairs of
Greece, bitterly denouncing the Holy Alliance; and here oc-
เ
' of animals, torn out of them, and the vilest part of them. The Romans
were satisfied with cor and pectus; their contents, animo and coraggio,
'suffice for us; but what is ejected from a beast is to an Englishman the
'coronal of glory.'
1828-1828.
257
WHAT THE BOOK CONTAINED.
curred the suggestion, put forth with the utmost gravity, for
another trial of the bow and arrow as an instrument of war.
In the thirty-first was introduced one of Landor's greatest
favourites, Alfieri, talking with the Florentine Jew, Salomon;
and better talk it would not be easy to imagine. Landor had
a wonderful liking for Alfieri, in whose intolerant liberalism,
aristocratic republicanism, and fierce independence, he had all
the enjoyment of his own. Here was, in another, what others
might see in himself; and the weakness of it never, but the
strength of it always, impressed him. 'As a writer and as a
man, I know my station. If I found in the world five equal
'to myself, I would walk out of it, not to be jostled.' National
contrasts in the English, French, and Italian; comparison of
moderns with the ancients in regard to satirical writing; a dis-
crimination of the gravity of wit and humour from the gaiety of
banter and quibble; and a masterly definition and limitation of
the right provinces of satire; are the principal points of this
dialogue, the scene of which is laid in Fiesole. Nearly six years
after writing it Landor became himself the owner of a villa in
the same place, built by Michael Angelo, and could boast that
the very spot in that immortal valley where Boccaccio had
placed his Lago delle Belle Donne formed a portion of the
grounds of his own farm and vineyard.
The bad faith of the greater to the lesser states of Europe
was the theme of the thirty-second conversation; Lopez Baños
and Alpuente being the speakers, and their principal subjects
the conduct of France to Spain, the gallantry and self-denial of
Mina and the patriots, and the atrocities of Ferdinand. Here,
as in most part of the conversations merely political, the sub-
jects have passed away; yet the charm of the composition is
enduring, and sayings abound in them that will never lose their
freshness.
The thirty-third dialogue, between Lord Chatham and Lord
Chesterfield, was upon the principal English philosophers,
Bacon, Hobbes, Newton, and Locke; Chatham taking occasion
to make unsparing assault on Plato, and Chesterfield giving
drily his assent that it was rather an idle thing for an old gen-
tleman in a purple robe to be sticking pins in every chair on
S
258
Book V.
THE IMAGINARY CONVERSATIONS.
which a sophist was likely to sit down. We have here a diffi-
cult and complex subject treated too confidently; but the con-
versation is nevertheless one of the best. All the eulogy of
Locke is admirable; the style throughout is wonderful for a
clearness as of crystal; and there are incidental sayings of
singular beauty. Often, as in the criticism of Plato, where as-
sent is most reluctantly given, admiration is most strongly
awakened; the handling of the objection to the poets in his
Republic is full of masterly illustration; and the exception to
be taken to the criticism altogether is not so much that the
particular objections are untenable, as that the general view is
incomplete. If it could be proved to demonstration to-morrow
that Bacon's mind was prodigiously more vigorous and compre-
hensive than Plato's, that his philosophical acumen was sharper
and more penetrating, and that his imagination was not only
more creative, but cast from its altitude more definite and more
proportioned shadows, the influence exercised by Plato, not on
thinkers merely but on thought and on belief through successive
ages, would remain unexplained, a thing solitary and apart, mys-
terious and unaccountable. Tradition is powerful and almost
sacred, but will not satisfy us as to this.
The objection to Plato is resumed in the next following (the
thirty-fourth) conversation, between Aristoteles and Callisthe-
nes; which upon the whole I should be disposed to characterise
as more interpenetrated than any other with intimate and accu-
rate knowledge of the old Greek literature, character, and social
life, although it contains also, under the flimsiest of disguises, a
coarse attack on Metternich and Castlereagh! Of the respective
claims of philosophers and kings, of the superiority of republics
over monarchies, of the debasing tendencies of despotism on the
despot, and the inferiority of the sensual to the intellectual
pleasures, the friends hold converse grave and noble. There is
not a page that is not radiant with as exalted thought as when
Callisthenes contrasts the perishable sway of Alexander with
Aristotle's everlasting empire.
'His judgment-seat is covered by his sepulchre: after one year hence
no appeals are made to him: after ten thousand there will be momentous
questions, not of avarice or litigation, not of violence or fraud, but of rea-
1822-1828.
259
WHAT THE BOOK CONTAINED.
son and of science, brought before your judgment-seat, and settled by your
decree. Dyers and tailors, carvers and gilders, grooms and trumpeters,
make greater men than God makes; but God's last longer, throw them
where you will.'
To the class of conversations like the Ascham and Lady Jane
Grey and others to be named hereafter, prose-poems of faultless
construction, made as of one entire and perfect chrysolite,' and
not to have any portion taken from them without impairment
of their beauty, the thirty-seventh belonged. This was the
Henry the Eighth and Anne Boleyn of which Hazlitt and Hare
spoke with equal enthusiasm. The delicacy of the means by
which its effect is produced appears to have impressed them
both alike; and the latter, observing it as a fine peculiarity of
the dialogue that its language was throughout quite simple,
recommended it as a study for those who conceived poetry to
consist in imagery. One image there is nevertheless, where,
driven to find excuse for her gaiety, Anne tells her lord that the
withered leaf catches the sun sometimes, little as it can profit
by it; but beyond a doubt the extraordinary beauty of the com-
position is its quiet plainness and even homeliness of speech. It
would be difficult to imagine an effect more touching than that
of her closing allusion to her daughter, when at last made fully
conscious of the fate awaiting herself. 'Love your Elizabeth,
my honoured lord, and God bless you! She will soon forget
to call me do not chide her: think how young she is.'
:
The last dialogue of the series was that of the Ciceros. The
speakers were Marcus Tullius and Quinctus, and the greatest
beauty and impressiveness distinguished it throughout. The
brothers, who had taken opposite sides in the wars closed by
the second triumvirate, meet at the house of Quinctus by the
sea, on the evening before that anniversary of the birthday of
Tullius which was also to be the day of his violent death. Sun-
dered by civil strife so long, they have been drawn together
now by the calamities of their country; hope subsided in both,
and ambition silenced, the tenderness of earlier days has re-
turned; and for the last time together, in friendly converse, they
walk along the shore of Formia. The greatest champion of the
republic contrasts, to her sorrowing assailant, the genius and the
virtues fallen with her, and the rulers risen in their place; to
260
Book V.
THE IMAGINARY CONVERSATIONS.
rebuke the living Lepidus, Octavianus, and Antonius, he sum-
mons from their urns Cornelia and the Gracchi, Sertorius, Pom-
peius, Cato, Lucullus, Cæsar, and Brutus; the gloom and despair
that surround him pass away, in the brightness of the hope that
Philosophy has opened beyond them; and, in language model-
led after the choicest of the treatises and orations that bear his
name, he shows himself as ready cheerfully to part with life as
he had been reluctant to bid farewell to liberty.
'Everything has its use; life to teach us the contempt of death, and
death the contempt of life. Glory, which among all things between stands
eminently the principal, although it has been considered by some philoso-
phers as mere vanity and deception, moves those great intellects which
nothing else could have stirred, and places them where they can best and
most advantageously serve the commonwealth. . . . Fame, they tell you,
is air but without air there is no life for any; without fame there is none
for the best.'
This blending of a personal emotion with the antique life of
Rome constitutes preeminently the attraction of this dialogue;
which for the completeness of the identification of its ideal por-
traiture with historic truth has been frequently and perhaps
justly characterised as the masterpiece of all the conversations.
A competent critic has indeed declared that the sayings in it
attributed to Cicero on subjects especially his own are such as
might not only not have lessened but have added to his fame;
and a story was told of Lord Dudley by Francis Hare, which
Landor has more than once with pardonable pride repeated to
me, that during one of his illnesses in Italy he had asked a
friend to read aloud to him this dialogue, and, to his friend's
admiring question at the close, whether it was not, by Jove,
'exactly what Cicero would have said,' had himself exclaimed,
"Yes, if Cicero could have said it!'
Such thoughts and speech were worthy to close a book of so
great and so original a character. Possessing these two qualities
to an extent that no general criticism could have adequately
shown, and being of all Landor's future labours in literature the
determining type and expression, even such specialty of detail as
I have given may save the necessity of repeated description here-
after. The thirty-eight dialogues thus first issued became in
number, before Landor's death, not fewer than a hundred and
fifty; but different in themselves as all these were, it was not the
7
241
1822-1828.
261
WHAT THE BOOK CONTAINED.
less the distinguishing mark of their genius to be both in their
conformation and in their mass almost strangely alike; and it is
this unity in the astonishing variety, the fire of an irrepressible ge-
nius running through the whole, that gives to the book contain-
ing them its place among books not likely to pass away. What
the earliest dialogues were, I have put perhaps sufficiently before
the reader; and down to the very last, if I continued my review,
the same wealth of character, thought, and style would present
itself for description; but little more will now be necessary than
simply to mention as they arise the subjects chosen and the names
of the speakers. The intensity and the range of mental power
displayed will thus also sufficiently declare themselves. There
is scarcely a form or function of the human mind, serious or
sprightly, cogitative or imaginative, historical, fanciful, or real,
which has not been exercised or brought into play in this extra-
ordinary series of writings. The world past and present is re-
produced in them, with its variety and uniformity, its continuity
and change. When the American writer Emerson had made the
book his companion for more than twenty years, he publicly ex-
pressed to the writer his gratitude for having given him a resource
that had never failed him in solitude. He had but to recur to
its rich and ample page, he tells us, to find always free and sus-
tained thought, a keen and precise understanding, an affluent
and ready memory familiar with all chosen books, an industrious
observation in every department of life, an experience to which
it might seem that nothing had occurred in vain, honour for
every just and generous sentiment, and a scourge like that of the
Furies for every oppressor whether public or private. He felt
how dignified was that perpetual Censor in his curule chair, and
he wished to thank so great a benefactor. 'Mr. Landor,' con-
tinues Emerson, 'is one of the foremost of that small class who
'make good in the nineteenth century the claims of pure litera-
In these busy days of avarice and ambition, when there
is so little disposition to profound thought or to any but the
'most superficial intellectual entertainment, a faithful scholar,
' receiving from past ages the treasures of wit, and enlarging
'them by his own love, is a friend and consoler of mankind. . .
'Such merits make Mr. Landor's position in the republic of let-
' ture.
•
262
Book V.
THE IMAGINARY CONVERSATIONS.
'ters one of great mark and dignity. He exercises with a gran-
' deur of spirit the office of writer, and carries it with an air of
'old and unquestionable nobility. His acquaintance with the
'English tongue is unsurpassed. . . . Of many of Mr. Landor's
sentences we are fain to remember what was said of those of
Socrates, that they are cubes, which will stand firm place them
'how or where you will.' The author of this tribute gave also
practical proof of the strength of the admiration that suggested
it. The wish to see the faces of three or four writers' had been
one of his principal motives for visiting Europe in 1833; and
when fourteen years later he had crossed the Atlantic again, he
told his countrymen, among other experiences of Europe, what
his intercourse had been with those three or four writers whose
faces he had so desired to see. Their names were Coleridge,
Wordsworth, Landor, and Carlyle.
IV. HOW THE BOOK WAS RECEIVED.
In February 1824 Southey sent to Landor from England the
first printed copy of his book, and in the letter accompanying it
spoke, as with the views then held by him it might be supposed
he would, with rapture of its genius and with reserve of its
opinions. A few months later in the same year he bade Lan-
dor be of good heart, for a more striking work had never issued
from the press 'in these kingdoms,' nor one more certain of sur-
viving the wreck of its generation. The book is making you
known, as you ought to be; and it is one of those very few
´ which nothing can put aside.' This letter, written at the open-
ing of December 1824, had the additional interest for Landor
of two supplementary pages in the handwriting of Wordsworth.
‹
'I have begged this space from Southey, which I hope you will for-
give, as I might not otherwise for some time have had courage to thank
you for your admirable dialogues. They reached me last May, at a time
when I was able to read them, which I did with very great pleasure. I
was in London then, and have been a wanderer most of the time since.
But this did not keep me silent. I was deterred, such is the general state
of my eyes, by a consciousness that I could not write what I wished. I
concur with you in so much, and differ with you in so much also, that
though I could easily have disposed of my assent, easily and most plea-
santly, I could not face the task of giving my reasons for my dissent!...
1822-1828.
263
HOW THE BOOK WAS RECEIVED.
Your dialogues are worthy of you, and a great acquisition to literature.
The classical ones I like best, and most of all that between Tully and his
brother. . . . I long for the third volume; a feeling which after my silence
I should not venture to express, were you not aware of the infirmity which
has been the cause of it. I sent a message of thanks, from Cambridge,
through Julius Hare, whom I saw at Cambridge in May last. Ever affec-
tionately and gratefully yours, WM. WORDSWORTH.'
With well-founded pride Landor received this tribute from
two such famous men. Your letter,' he wrote on the 6th of
January 1825, 'with its closing lines from Wordsworth, gave me
'incredible delight. Never did two such hands pass over the
same paper, unless when Barrow was solving some problem set
before him by Newton.' He had already, on the 4th of the
previous November, acknowledged what Southey said on the eve
of the publication. I never ask what is the public opinion of
'anything I write. God forbid it should be favourable; for more
'people think injudiciously than judiciously. Your sentence has
'elated me.
"De me splendida Minos
Fecerit arbitria."
It is irreversible.'
What meanwhile had been the sentence generally upon the
book I shall perhaps be expected to say. There can be no doubt
that it produced at once an impression which it falls to the lot
of few books in a generation to make that have not amusement
for their principal design. Such readers as it obtained were thor-
oughly aroused by it. Even where its opinions met with the
least favour, its mark was most decisive. It was not a book that
any cultivated reader could put aside as of indifferent account ;
and its power and originality were admitted in the strongest ob-
jections it provoked. On the one hand, without challenge it
might be said that no book had appeared in that generation com-
parable to it for the variety of its claims: imagination, wit, and
humour; dramatic insight, and play of character; richness of
scholarship; correctness, conciseness, and purity of style; extent
of information; speculative boldness; many-sided interest; and
sympathies all but universal. On the other hand, as unchal-
lenged might the assertion be made that never had so masculine
an intellect been weakened by so violent a temper, so many dur-
I
T
264
Book V
THE IMAGINARY CONVERSATIONS.
able thoughts degraded by so many momentary humours, and
such masterly discrimination of praise and blame made worth-
less by so many capricious enmities and unreasonable likings. It
do not indeed find, in the criticisms published at the time, any-
thing to my mind satisfactorily descriptive of the book, or any
real subtlety of appreciation for either its strength or weakness:
but this is fairly the tone that may be taken to express the dif-
fering verdicts of those who talked about it; and though no great
circulation awaited it at the outset, it reached without difficulty
the class of readers who most sensibly influence the general
opinion in such things, and have always a great deal to do with
the making or unmaking of books in the matter of immediate
reputation. The entire result will better appear in the sequel.
But at last Landor had won for himself a hearing; he contri-
buted to the town talk for a whole season at least; at the uni-
versities, in particular, his name became a familiar word; and
men who in those days were at Cambridge have declared to me
that decidedly the literary sensation of 1824 was the Imaginary
Conversations, and that Byron's last poem, even in this year of
his death, had not more warmly been discussed at the bachelors'
tables or in the common rooms.
Julius Hare had formed an exalted estimate of the book. He
believed of it, and retained this belief to the end of his life, that
it would live as long as English literature lived. Some of the
conversations he thought unsurpassed by the masterpieces of
poetic creation, ancient or modern; and by the style in all of
them he was fascinated in the extrem、. None other so good
was known to him in our language. There was hardly a dialogue
which he did not think a model of what prose composition should
be; and at its best, where the air of classic antiquity breathed
about the speakers, the style seemed to him what Apollo's talk
might have been, as radiant, piercing, and pure. But though he
thus characterised as incomparable the manner of the work which
he so largely had helped to bring into the world, to its sometimes
questionable matter he was not insensible; from several opinions
expressed in it his own shrank instinctively; and while its per-
versity even increased his own liking for it, as the wayward child
is cared for most, he had a fear that other readers would be less
1822-1828.
265
HOW THE BOOK WAS RECEIVED.
forgiving. He saw the extreme probability that for some foolish
faults of temper a book deserving honour in the highest might be
waylaid at starting, suffer perhaps in consequence a long neglect,
and emerge at last not without serious injury. It occurred to
him that attacks of this kind might be so anticipated as to blunt
their edge and sharpness, by combining, in the same fearless
review of the contents of the book, earnest expression of all the
praise deserved by it with ironical indication of all the abuse to
which its impetuosities had exposed it; and he published such
a paper in Taylor's London Magazine. It was excellently done
for its purpose, and had the effect desired. Hazlitt had indeed
the first word, in the Edinburgh Review; but though he dealt
some heavy blows at the literary Jacobinism of the Southey con-
nection, regretted Landor's want of temper and self-knowledge,
and ridiculed unsparingly his dogmatism, caprice, extravagance,
intolerance, quaintness, and arrogance, he at the same time ad-
mitted his originality, learning, and fifty other valuable quali-
ties, placed in the highest rank his delineation of character, and
conceded to him a power of thought and a variety and vigour
of style which made him excellent wherever excellence could
consist with singularity. After naming several of his dialogues
from English history as taking rank with truth itself, Hazlitt
ended by confessing freely that in the classical dialogues he had
so raised himself to the level of the men portrayed that all nar-
row and captious prejudices had there been thrown aside, he
had expanded his view with the distance of the objects contem-
plated, and into his style had infused such a strength, severity,
fervour, and sweetness, as those orators and heroes had never
themselves surpassed. In critical writing, however, blame goes
so much farther than praise, and the objections of the Edinburgh
were not only put so sharply but were apparently so justified by
the illustrations given, that, if the Quarterly had followed with
unmixed severity, very grave damage might have been done.
Julius Hare prevented it. The onslaught had been prepared
(for Gifford's detestation of Landor was in no degree abated by
Southey's affection for him); but so much of it had been cleverly
anticipated in Hare's whimsical parody, that on the appearance.
of the London Magazine in May the article which the Quarterly
266
Book V.
THE IMAGINARY CONVERSATIONS.
6
designed to have published in June had to be entirely recon-
sidered. Coming close upon the other, the laugh would not
have been against Landor. It did not make actual appearance
till the end of the year, and had then become brief and com-
monplace enough. Southey meanwhile, having ascertained who
was writing it, would probably have succeeded in obtaining more
consideration for his friend if Gifford had not again interposed.
I liked everything in it,' he says of the article, in one of his
letters of January 1825, that had no reference to Landor, and
nothing that had. The general tenor I should no doubt have
'liked better, if Gifford had not struck out the better parts;
'but nothing could have reconciled me to anything like an as-
sumption of superiority towards such a man.' To Hare's paper,
on the other hand, he had given eager welcome; and he more
than once declared his agreement with what Hare had said at
its close, that no book had been published, since that wherein
Shakespeare's plays were collected, containing so much that was
excellent of such various kinds as the Imaginary Conversations
of Landor.
'
Hare was nevertheless uneasy after his paper appeared. What
would Landor think of it? To understand irony, is not at all
times easy; when we are ourselves the subject, it is sometimes
difficult; and in this particular case there could be no doubt that
all the wild and whimsical absurdity, put forth as in ridicule,
had grave warrant in the book itself. Landor took everything
kindly however; and Hare's acknowledgment, written from Trin-
ity-college on the 14th of July 1824, was full of gratitude.
'Few letters have ever given me so much pleasure as that which I have
just received from you. For, besides the gratification I could not fail of
deriving from such praise, which is precious in proportion to the depth
from which it comes, I had felt some doubts whether the good-will that had
dictated my criticism might not have been lost sight of amidst the clumsi-
ness and coarseness of the execution; and I trembled lest you should think,
as Taylor did, that I had given a very undue preponderance to the abusive
portion. It seemed to me indeed that his opinion arose in great measure
from that commonest of blindnesses, the inability to understand irony;
but the fault might also be mine; and I was therefore delighted to be re-
leased from these doubts by such a sentence as is conveyed in your letter.
The most amusing result from the article had been, Hare went
on to say, that the criticism already sent to press by the editor
1822-1828.
267
CORRESPONDENCE WITH SOUTHEY.
of the Quarterly had been recalled and returned to its author
in order that he might omit sundry passages anticipated in the
parody, especially a long diatribe on the childishness of dia-
logues. The criticism was to appear shortly, and was to be, as
might have been expected, adverse. On the whole, the critics
had been favourably disposed; though, to judge from what Hare.
had seen, they had proved themselves to be quite as ignorant of
all the principles of composition as English critics usually are.
Hazlitt's article in the Edinburgh certainly was the cleverest he
had read. He, I am well informed, is among the greatest ad-
'mirers of the Conversations.' But Hare had little liking for
Hazlitt. It was not merely that the latter idolised Bonaparte.
With equal intensity he hated Wordsworth and Southey, con-
necting Landor with the same dislike; and Hare adds that the
general impression of his article, though almost every passage of
the book quoted had been praised, was, as everybody said, ' How
'famously the Imaginary Conversations have been cut up in the
'Edinburgh Review.' One thing would not soon be forgotten.
Jeffrey had inserted a sentence in Hazlitt's paper, wherein he
had the impudence to declare that but for his discipline Words-
worth would never have written the Laodamia !
V. CORRESPONDENCE WITH SOUTHEY.
And now, reserving to a later page my mention of the new
edition of the book and of the series of additional dialogues on
which already Landor is busily engaged, I resume my illustra-
tions of the ordinary course of his life and thoughts in Italy from
the date of his residence in the palazzo Medici.
The question of the improvement of nations through their go-
vernments is a frequent subject of discussion between himself and
Southey; and it is curious that the latter, who in the Quarterly
Review was most eagerly assailing at the time the one extreme
of opinion in England, and thereby giving all his strength to the
support of the other, was at the same time confessing in his let-
ters to Landor that both extremes were so bad that if a wish of
his could incline the beam, he should not know in which scale
to cast it. He was disposed to think, however, in opposition to
268
Book V.
THE IMAGINARY CONVERSATIONS.
Landor, that old despotisms could better be modified by a single
will than by a popular assembly; and he also thought that, let
individuals and communities err as they might, it was apparent
that upon the great scale mankind were improving; but at the
same time he fancied that if he were in Italy he should approach
nearer to his friend, and that his friend, if in England or in
America, would draw nearer to him. Landor's view is entirely
hostile to the governments abroad, and the reverse of friendly
to the then English rulers; but there is one subject he frequently
presses on his friend as of quite unspeakable importance (which
it surely was), and as to which a part of the suggestion or spe-
culation he indulges may claim to have anticipated by several
years the greatest triumphs of colonisation in modern times.
'There is a passage in your letter on the matter of which I reflect more
often than on anything else. Few persons ask themselves what is to be-
come of the rising generation of educated men who can find no room in
the three professions. Why cannot associations be formed, and why can-
not ministers patronise them, of extensive colonies in Van Diemen's Land;
not colonies of thieves and gamblers and mercantile men, but of gentle-
men's families (as in Canada) and well-educated young men and women?
Why cannot allotments of land, never exceeding a thousand acres for each
individual, be portioned out and lots drawn for them, with a few hundred
pounds (on security given by their friends at home) at four per cent for
twenty years? I myself would go, provided the government were repub-
lican, which at that distance could be no objection to those at home. Why
cannot they treat us as kindly and as wisely as a girl treats her silkworms?
We want only leaves and perches and the liberty of working in our own
way.'
Ireland is a subject that mightily interests both friends, but
they are far asunder as the poles in the remedies they would
apply to her. Southey's view was taken from a narrower ground
altogether than Landor's, and turned indeed almost exclusively
on a distrust of the Roman Catholics. What he said on that
point, however, will be worth preserving, as well for itself as for
Landor's comment. The date of the letter is 1824.
'Our prospects are blackening for a storm. The system of concilia-
tion, as it is called, is producing in Ireland its proper and inevitable con-
sequences. We have taken up a nest of frozen vipers and laid them upon
the hearth, and now, unless we mean to leave the house to them (and the
estate too), we must set to work and scotch them. A rebellion is to be
looked for, the object being the separation of the two countries, and the
establishment of the worst of all existing superstitions in its worst form.'
C
1822-1828.
269
CORRESPONDENCE WITH SOUTHEY.
6
C
'Well,' said Landor to this, 'I dislike and avoid all poli-
'tics. But in Ireland the errors of many centuries are to be
corrected. The worst of these was omitting to extirpate Rom-
'ish influence when it could be extirpated easily, as in England
• and in Scotland. The death of Cromwell, usurper as he was,
was by far the greatest misfortune that ever befell the English
'nation, not excepting the ministry of Pitt. How very inter-
esting even still is the account your "Master" Spenser gives of
Irish affairs in his times! I have often turned to it when I
'could not go on with the Faery Queen.' 'Vix me ipse credens,'
he resumes in the following month, 'I have been reading a
'second time your Book of the Church. My hatred of frauds,
'fallacies, and dissensions, the church-jackdaws, I did fancy
'would have made me loath to approach the precincts. But
'the constancy of our reformers was always an object of admi-
'ration and delight to me, and you have done it ample justice.'
The same subject was renewed three years later, when Landor
thanked him for his Letters to Charles Butler, and 'the noblest
'eulogy on me that it is possible I ever can receive' prefixed to
them; telling him that without any of his zeal for the church
of England he felt all his abhorrence to that of Rome, and sug-
gesting as a remedy for such evils as the latter inflicted that all
the civil distinctions between Roman Catholic and Protestant,
from which, as he admirably urged, their priesthood derived
its present power over their laity, should at once be removed.
There was much in this view of it, though not everything.
The old interchange of thoughts on matters personal to them-
selves also, their books and their ways of life, occupied their
letters as well as the politics of the day; and from these a few
extracts may be amusing.
The year of Landor's settlement in Florence was that in which
the Byron and Southey quarrel raged fiercest. Southey's Vision
of Judgment and preface had called forth Byron's Vision and
preface; the laureate's eulogy of Landor, in the poem so con-
fidently translating George the Third into heaven, had been fol-
lowed by his antagonist's amusing inquiry whether Landor were
not author of a poem as confidently consigning the old mon-
270
Book V.
THE IMAGINARY CONVERSATIONS.
*
arch to another place; and the carte and tierce of rejoinder
and reply had closed in Byron's cartel of a more mortal defiance,
which Douglas Kinnaird very discreetly declined to deliver. To
Byron's published attack on Landor, Southey alluded in a let-
ter of May 1822, and said he rather supposed, after the advice
given him in reply, that he would not meddle with either
of them again. But Byron returned to the attack on both
friends; and in the thirteenth canto of Don Juan, which he was
now writing at Pisa, and which Leigh Hunt's brother published
in London towards the close of 1823, had discussed the various
pretenders to the laurel.
Some persons think that Coleridge hath the sway,
And Wordsworth has supporters, two or three;
And that deep-mouth'd Boeotian Savage Landor
Has taken for a swan rogue Southey's gander.'
Landor might still have been laughing at this, which did not.
reach him till the following April, and which certainly failed to
move him to any sort of anger, when the sad intelligence of
its writer's death was announced to him suddenly, and he at
once wrote to tell Southey that he had been affected, 'even
'deeply affected,' by the untimely death of their old assailant,
and in a note transmitted for his new edition had said as much.
To everything else in that letter Southey referred, but not to this.
Julius Hare had replied, however, as soon as he received the
note, to say how much it rejoiced him, and how the sudden news
of Byron's death made him grieve that at the very moment he
should have contributed to diffuse such an attack as Landor had
made upon him.
Another subject in the letters appearing and reappearing fre-
quently is, whether or not the friends might be able to concoct
between them a history of their own times; a history that would
* The editor of the last library edition of Byron (6 vols. Murray, 1855)
says in a note to the preface of his Vision, that it was reported of Lan-
dor that he said he would not, or could not, read Lord Byron's works,
and Lord Byron resolved to retaliate upon the works of Landor. But
'their real feelings were those of mutual esteem. Lord Byron expressed
in private his admiration of Mr. Landor's generosity and independence,
' of his profound erudition and brilliant talents; and the poetry of Lord
'Byron was panegyrised by Mr. Landor in his Imaginary Conversations.'
1822-1828.
271
CORRESPONDENCE WITH SOUTHEY.
<
not confound them, as Landor said in the preface to one of his
volumes of Conversations, 'with the Coxes and Foxes of the age.'
This saying reveals something of what the history might have
been, and we may be thankful that the attempt was not made.
Southey was not opposed to it at first; but as time went on he
saw clearly that if their employment was to be history, it should
be that of other times rather than their own. He put the mat-
ter very well to Landor in telling him that the difference was
not greater, between the atmosphere on a fine summer's day on
the top of one of their Cumberland mountains and the same air in
the crowded London streets, than between his dialogues on past
and on present times. The retort might have been made that
this was unavoidable, and that in reality the past is better seen
at its calm distance than the present in its nearness and noise;
but against selection of such a subject the argument was a good
one. 'When you are consubstantiating yourself,' said Southey,
'with Lucullus, or Cicero, or Isaac Casaubon, every thought and
feeling are such as you are the better for having entertained
' and uttered; and others are the better and the happier for
partaking them. I should like dearly to see such a history of
'Rome as you and you only could write from the commencement
' of Augustus's reign to the end of the Antonines.' To himself
the temptation of trying his hand nearer home was brought close
to him in 1829, when the government sounded him as to his
disposition to write a history of the American war from the
English point of view, as Jared Sparks had then begun to do
from the American, our state papers being opened to him for the
purpose. But he declined because of other tasks. 'I wish,' wrote
Landor when he heard of it, 'you had been induced to under-
'take the history of our times, beginning from the American
war. You and myself are the only men capable of so great a
'work; and you rather than I, from more practice, more cool-
ness, more patience, and some other causes. It was the work
I had destined to accomplish as my last and greatest; but it
can only be done in England.' Yet how little of the calm and
equable temper of history either of them would have brought
to such undertakings, we may judge from what had passed be-
tween them two years earlier; when the news had reached Kes-
C
6
272
Book V.
THE IMAGINARY CONVERSATIONS.
wick of Lord Liverpool's disablement for farther public service,
and they interchanged thoughts about the statesman whose way
to the highest office it had opened. Southey remarks to Landor
that, in his judgment, it would be fortunate for Canning's repu-
tation if his broken health should prevent him from taking pos-
session of the premiership, for which he has long been scheming,
' if he is not belied.' In spite of his brilliancy of talent, and of
personal good qualities that made him liked wherever he was
known, nobody, according to Southey, would have the remotest.
confidence in him. To which Landor, whose favourite aversion
poor Canning always was, made eager reply in March that what
he said about Canning was no doubt well founded. 'Every
rogue of a statesman is much beloved by his friends. Pitt was;
Fox was; Windham was; Sheridan was. These, however, all
yield to Canning in roguery, as much as they yield to him in
' abilities.'
6
6
(
That Landor's interest in his friend's poetry continued to
animate his letters, it is of course needless to say. Introducing
Captain Shadwell Clerke to him in March 1824, he described
this gallant gentleman as hardly less enthusiastic than himself on
the Roderick, and as having declared (a fact not publicly known
till several years later) that Byron himself had pronounced it
to be the first poem of the time.' To such pleasant personal
themes Southey readily responded always. On the 14th of the
next August he thanks Landor for the letter brought by Captain
Clerke; tells him that his little boy is old enough to have begun
upon the Latin granimar, being now in his sixth year; and adds
that he had himself completed, on the previous Thursday, his
own fiftieth.
To this Landor replied in November. Words-
worth's last letter, he told him, had mentioned his daughters,
and spoken of their beauty rapturously.
'The gravest and most philosophical father must be delighted at this.
Cuthbert will be the great occupation and great satisfaction of your life.
The only thing in mine for which I am indebted to fortune is that my son
is born rather late in it, so that we may amuse each other. To see the
happiness of children was always to me the first of all happiness. How
pure and brilliant is it in them! how soon it runs over the brink, and
among what shouts and transports!.. My wife's brother is going to Eng-
land, and she hesitates between her younger child and her family there.
1822-1828.
273
CORRESPONDENCE WITH SOUTHEY.
I
But having one sister just married,* and another going to India in the
spring, and about to be married to Mr. Ravenshaw, the son of a director,
I think it likely she will go. I neither persuade it nor oppose it, but I
shall be very unhappy without the two children she takes with her.
never thought that you were older than me, which it appears you are by
about six months. I shall be fifty the 30th of January. We may both
reasonably hope to see our children men, but I would rather see mine a
child than lord chancellor.'
Thus, through all the letters of the friends, which have in-
deed no pleasanter passages, their families of books and children
alternate in the confidences interchanged between them. 'Till
we become parents,' Southey wrote in 1823 (8th of May), 'we
'know not the treasures of our own nature; and what we then
'discover may make us believe that there are yet latent affections
and faculties which another state of existence may develop.'
The remark originated a very beautiful passage in the dialogue of
the Ciceros, the first draft of which Landor had just sent over.
'I am delighted,' he says (31st of May), 'with your observa-
'tion on the pleasure we derive from our children. It induced
me to remember that I had not attributed to Cicero what I
'should have done on this occasion.' The addition being made,
he continues:
'Before I wrote this conversation, I would on no account open Plato.
I have since read twice over his dialogue of Socrates, and am not so dis-
couraged as I might have been. I have given Cicero his variety, and his
rambling from topic to topic, ever pardonable in a conversation between
two;
but the few touches of paternal tenderness I now give were wanting,
and I should have passed many sleepless nights at the faultiness of my
work if I had omitted them. For I have attempted in every conversation
to give not only one opinion of the speakers, but enough to show their
character.'
Replying to former kindly inquiries in that same year, Southey
had told his friend that Time was setting his mark upon hinı,
but laid his hand gently; having as yet taken nothing from him
but the inclination for writing poetry, though an annual catarrh
had for some years severely shaken him. To this Landor re-
joined by prescribing a few months' residence 'here in Tuscany.'
To Major-General Stopford, adjutant-general in the army of Co-
'lumbia,' to whom Landor had just dedicated the first volume of the Con-
versations. Between him and the Stopfords the most affectionate relations
were maintained to the very last, uninterrupted and unabated.
Τ
274
Book V.
THE IMAGINARY CONVERSATIONS.
'I have an immense palace, with warm and cold baths, and
everything desirable. Why not come over? We will visit
· Vallombrosa and other delightful places together. Here are
´ several public libraries, cool and quiet; and you will find the
'most perfect freedom from all interruption both within and
without.' And so the letters of the friends went on, the old
mingled yarn being in all of Landor's. They told of sickness and
idleness; of another child born to him (in 1825, the last); of a
general intolerance of talking creatures, with much kindly toler-
ance of the dumb creation; of an ever-boiling indignation against
actual or imaginary enemies of freedom; of troubles arising from
other heats besides his own; of the consciousness (founded on
nothing particular) that by the rulers alike of Italy and Eng-
land he is marked out for persecution; and of his grim satisfac-
tion in feeling that he is no contemptible man who can have
managed to exclude, from every kind of preferment in the state,
not only his chattering children then in the next room to him,
but his posterity to the latest descendants!
I may add that the old interchanges of parcels of books
continue, Landor repaying by scores the units he receives; but
the due arrival of what he sends is sadly irregular, and the losses
occasionally great. Everything of Southey's and Wordsworth's,
with others they thought likely to interest their friend, went
out safely enough to Florence; but to the overflowing returns.
in kind from Landor, of old books picked up in Italy, mischances
are of frequent recurrence; and in the letters from England of
both friends there are complaints of delay or miscarriage, some-
times of total loss, and, from Wordsworth very frequently, of
damage from salt water. Here is one.
'The two volumes de Re Rusticâ in particular, which I did not possess
and had often wished to consult, are sorely damaged, the binding detached
from the book, the leaves stained and I fear rotted. The venerable Bible
is in the same state; indeed all to pieces. These are such unpleasant
facts that I doubt whether I ought not to have suppressed them. You
promise me a beautiful copy of Dante; but I ought to mention that I pos-
sess the Parma folio of 1795, much the grandest book on my shelves, pre-
sented to me by our common friend Mr. Kenyon, who, by the bye, is happily
married since I last wrote to you, and has taken up his residence at Bath.'
Southey was more fortunate in receiving safely what had
1822-1825.
275
CORRESPONDENCE WITH SOUTHEY.
་
been sent to him, though by the same ship; for in a letter of
nearly the same date he tells Landor that he found the box of
books on his return, and they had escaped all damage from the
seas. 'As yet I have only had time to place them upon my
'shelves, and to see that many of them are very curious.' An-
other consignment very shortly follows; and he has again, while
Wordsworth makes farther complaint, to congratulate himself
that the books you sent me were lucky enough to escape all
'injury.' There is a fate in such things; and though boxes of
books might even stray into other houses meanwhile, they were
sure to find their way to Southey's at last. 'He,' wrote Words-
worth to Landor, when describing more damage to his own from
the water-rats, appears to be accumulating books in a way that,
'with my weak eyes, appals me. A large box of them, directed
to him, has just strayed into my house, through I know not
'what blunder in the conveyance.' Southey was in London at
the time; but Wordsworth adds a pleasant picture of him and
his. 'You hear so often from Southey that it is wasting time
'to mention him. I saw Mrs. Southey and four of his children
'the other day, two of the girls most beautiful creatures. The
' eldest daughter is with her father in town. He preserves ex-
'cellent health, and, except that his hair is grizzled, a juvenile
appearance, with more of youthful spirits than most men.'
Southey's latest news of his own and Wordsworth's under-
takings were sent to Landor in February 1827. He was then
busy with his long-deferred Colloquies, which at last were in
the press, and with the closing volume of his Peninsular War,
which was to be ready by Christmas if he lived and did well.
Wordsworth was printing a new edition of his poems, which he
was re-arranging and enlarging. Some fruits of his own past
labour, too, would shortly reach Landor. Mr. Kenyon would
carry to Florence his Tale of Paraguay, Letters to Charles But-
ler, and the second volume of the Peninsular War. These do
not seem however to have reached Landor until late in the
following year, when (November 28th) he acknowledges their
arrival. But still another year had to pass before the long-
looked-for Colloquies reached Florence. Acknowledging their re-
ceipt at the end of the following July he says: 'All the pleasure
276
Book V.
THE IMAGINARY CONVERSATIONS.
6
(
'I received from your most argumentative and eloquent Collo-
quies was less in its intensity than my sorrow at the death of
your uncle, Mr. Hill... Although I saw him but once, I re-
'member his features perfectly, and discover, which I should
'not have done without your remark, their resemblance to Sir
'Thomas More's. But his countenance, I think, was of a loftier
'cast than that shrewd and witty man's. The one would rather
'die in defence of his opinion, and the other in defence of his
'friend.'
With one farther reference of the date of 1827 I will now
pass from the Southey letters to Landor's correspondence with
members of his family. In the March of that year he told Sou-
they that Francis Hare had urged him incessantly to reprint his
poetry, and that he meant to do so. He should include Count
Julian, Gebir, about half those printed in the Simonidea, and
some trifling ones written since. The Julian would be unaltered;
every reference to modern times and things would be omitted
from the Gebir; he would give some Latin pieces; and he should
most certainly, in the collection, leave nothing for gleaners in
after-time. 'I am now indeed induced to reprint a part, lest
'hereafter some person should reprint the whole. I hope the rest
' will never be lookt for or thought of.' He expressed the same
wish in the preface (dated from Florence in January 1827), re-
marking with equal truth and good sense that it is only the
wretchedest of poets who wish all they ever wrote to be remem-
bered, and that some of the best would be willing to lose the
most. The volume, as we shall see, was not published until
1831; and not many readers, and still fewer purchasers, were
attracted to it.
VI. FAMILY LETTERS.
With his mother Landor always corresponded regularly; and
his birthday never passed without a present from her which made
small but welcome addition to his income. All her letters, shrewd
and sensible to the last, have the affection of home about them.
They have some sort of encouragement for him always; give him
only kindly glimpses of the past; never tire of looking forward
1822-1828.
277
FAMILY LETTERS.
to a future when he shall be again among the county neighbours,
of whom they send him all sorts of news; express not much in-
terest, it must be confessed, in his literary achievements; but
display, every one of them, the utmost motherly solicitude for
the welfare and the future of his children. She and her son
alike show points of character; and it is worth remarking that
her handwriting is as well formed as his own, though by wider
lines and larger letters it is fifty times more legible.
6
6
(
เ
In 1822, sending him only the county news, she tells him
that Leamington, to the immense annoyance of Warwick, is be-
coming quite a fashionable watering-place; and she describes her
daughters meeting the young ladies of Studley-castle, 'hand-
some fine girls, but not like their mother in beauty or man-
'ners.' In the December of that year Landor sends her a minia-
ture of his boy Arnold, who seems to her all fun and merri-
ment, and looks a happy little fellow. These indeed are his
happiest days; but I hope in his future years he will not have
a hard lot, if he is blessed with health and knows his duty to
'God.' In April of the following year she says that she always
feels gratefully, amid her growing weakness, that she had lived
to an unusual age with almost every happiness she could wish.
His own age she computes as fifty on his forty-ninth birthday
(30th January 1824), when she thanks him for having sent her
a picture of himself; and though he had said he was so altered
that she would not know him, she had him too constantly before
her eyes ever to forget his face. Though this day you are fifty,
'I hope you will have many happy years yet to enjoy. I think
'sometimes it must be impossible that I should have lived to see
you this age. Surely it is time I should make room for others,
'for I have passed my eighty-first year, have had as many bless-
'ings as fall to the lot of mortals, and am very willing to go.
'Who would wish to outlive all their friends?'
Her next letter in that year mentions the death of Lord
Byron; 'a man of great abilities, which had given him the power
' of doing much good, which he failed to do:' and her next, the
publication of the Imaginary Conversations, which had now been
out between four and five months. I have heard you have a
'publication just come out. For God's sake do not hurt your
278
Book V.
THE IMAGINARY CONVERSATIONS.
C
'
eyes, nor rack your brains too much, to amuse the world by
writing: but take care of your health, which will be of greater
consequence to your family.' Nor had she anything much more
encouraging to offer to her son's ambition even after hearing that
all the world were talking of the book he had written. 'I have
'heard your late publication highly spoken of by many; but as
'I am no judge, I shall say nothing relating to it. I wish you
to take care of your eyes and health, and let the world go on
as it has done. I think of the fate of Lord Byron, and that
'those who have the greatest abilities have the greatest misfor-
tunes,—because they have, more than others, mortifications and
disappointments.'
<
6
C
There is something in that view of the case undoubtedly.
The world really did care little to be amused as her son was
amusing it, and would seem to have been quite willing to go on
as before. Nevertheless the power to amuse or amend the world
carries with it a necessity to make the trial; the Byrons and
the Landors are not able to be mute, whatever the penalties of
speech may be; the mothers who bore them are for this as respon-
sible as themselves; and the excellent old lady at Ipsley-court
would probably have been startled to know to what extent her
own solid, genuine, and noble nature had but found another kind
of utterance in the genius of her son. With less in herself of
the substance of which the Conversations were made, she would
have been readier to applaud them.
She wished
In the November of that year she formally proposed to Lan-
dor what before she had hinted to him, that she should be per-
mitted to receive and educate Arnold in England. She did not
like, she said, either Italian or French education.
him to have an English education, and to know the country in
which his forefathers were brought up. Landor is grateful, but
cannot consent yet. Arnold would not be seven years old until
March; for the present he did not think he could live a single
month without him; and he describes the schoolmistress he
goes to now, saying it is not their intention ever to send him to
any school in Italy from which he cannot daily return to his
home, for he means himself to teach him Latin and Greek in the
spring; but the time will come for England, and for the garden
1822-1828.
279
FAMILY LETTERS.
L
<
<
his grandmother has promised him. He is as fond of it as I
was at his age. If ever he goes to any public school it shall be
Eton, and that five or six years hence, for about three years.'
Alas, the time never came. No year passed while the boy's
grandmother lived in which the offer was not renewed; but if
the opportunity for doing what is right is not taken in the day,
the morrow for it never comes. In a letter to his sister Ellen
two months after his mother's first proposal, Landor deplores
his inability to have done what he knew was his duty in this
matter, protesting that he had refused an invitation to Rome the
previous year because he could not bring himself to leave Arnold.
'In fact, I do not ever wish to be a day without any one of them
'while they are children. They are different creatures when
they grow up.' It might be a good reason, but it was not an
unselfish one, and it was the source of unutterable misery.
(
The letter of his sister to which he so replied, besides telling
him all they meant to have done to make Arnold happy, had
been full of pleasant talk of the wonderful things they were hear-
ing about the Conversations, and had mentioned an omission
which touched Landor nearly. 'I could not resist telling you,'
she wrote, ‘a wish that many have expressed that Doctor Parr
might not be forgotten. Learned men have desired it, not ig-
'norant women like me. The Doctor himself has grieved for the
'omission. He said to Charles last week, "How is Walter? I
6.66
hope he is well. O, he has shown a mighty mind,—a mighty
""mind." The kind old man was then in failing health; and
the eager letter of remembrance Landor straightway sent, reached
him only on his deathbed. It enclosed a copy of what the
writer afterwards printed as a preface to the fourth volume of
the Conversations, in which he said that his first literary exer-
cises were made under the eye and guidance of his venerable
friend, corrected by his admonition, and animated by his ap-
plause; that his house, his library, his heart, had been always
open to him; and that among his few friendships, of which
partly by fortune and partly by choice he had certainly had fewer
than any man, he should remember Parr's to the last hour of
his existence with tender gratitude. The letter was written from
Florence on the 5th of February; Parr died on the 6th of March;
280
Book V.
THE IMAGINARY CONVERSATIONS.
and Landor heard of the death from his mother on the 19th
of April, in a letter shrewdly wondering how the Doctor, in a
world of which he complained so much, should have managed
to acquire so many of the good things of it as to be able to
leave his married daughter thirty thousand pounds, his other
daughter ten thousand, sundry sums to other people, and four
thousand pounds, besides three hundred a year, to the second
Mrs. Parr.
(
In the same letter she sends him messages from a Roman-
catholic lady (Mrs. Willoughby) who remembered him at school.
' at little Treherne's at Knowle,' and who thought him likely
to prove a very proud father, although she did also recollect
that the only shade in his character was a 'want of patience.'
Her next letters, at the end of 1825, told him farther about the
visitors that crowded to this new place' (Leamington), driving
the gentry away from Warwick; and that the principal amuse-
ments then going on in the older and more respectable city ap-
peared to be lion-fighting and the baiting of dogs. In 1826 the
first of his letters from home is begun by his sister Ellen, who,
having occasion to speak of Llanthony, reminds him of the happy
weeks that she and her mother and Elizabeth had passed there,
and of the delightful walks they had taken over those beautiful
hills and through that peaceful valley. 'I wish your son may
' like it, and live there, and become an Englishman.' To this,
however, the old lady puts a characteristic closing page. After
telling him that Dr. John Johnstone was going to write Dr.
Parr's life, and that she thought it might have been better to get
somebody to write it who was accustomed to write something
else besides prescriptions, she hopes he will settle his son in Eng-
land but she would like to see him at Ipsley or in Staffordshire,
rather than among those Welsh who had made everything so
uncomfortable.
:
There is a story that Landor, six years after this date, when
paying his first visit to England since his exile, gave uncon-
sciously a rather striking practical comment on that remark of
his mother's. He had come with his cousin and agent to a very.
beautiful spot on the banks of the Trent called Carwardine-
spring, when he stood suddenly rapt in admiration, crying out
1822-1828.
281
FAMILY LETTERS.
6
6
excitedly, 'Why the deuce did not I buy this place and build
my house here, instead of at that confounded Llanthony?
' Rather,' said his relation quietly, 'why did you sell this place,
'which had been in your family for centuries?' It was a por-
tion of his father's land in Staffordshire obtained by intermar-
riage with the old family of the Nobles, and Landor had sold it
to Lord Uxbridge with a rich wood still called Noble's Ruff,
when making up the purchase-money for Llanthony.
Landor's last letter in 1825 had amused his mother not a
little. He had told her that, there in Florence, he had not more
than two or three friends, a manageable number; but that there
were some dozens who called upon him, and whom he could not
receive. One Mr. Hogg, however, a friend of Dr. Lambe's, had
come to him lately and been very welcome. It was Mr. Jeffer-
son Hogg, Shelley's friend and fellow-collegian, who began the
poet's biography a few years ago and was stopped for plain-speak-
ing. A Mr. Hare, a very learned man, was sitting with me one
morning when Mr. Hogg sent in his card with Dr. Lambe's
name also on it. I showed it to Hare, and told him I now
'thought myself La Fontaine, with all the better company of
'the beasts about me. He was delighted.' His mother seems to
have been delighted too, for she told him, in reply, that she
knew how he would laugh himself when he said that to his friend,
and she spoke of the election for Parliament going on at the time
in Warwick as if it had brought up the very worst company of
beasts about them.
(
เ
One of his earliest letters in 1826, written from a country
house two miles out of Florence, the Villa Castiglione, which he
had taken for three years, described for his mother a visit he was
then making at Rome. So cold had the winter been in Florence,
that only his previous acceptance of his friend Hare's offer to give
him a place in his carriage for this journey would have tempted
him from home; and though the change of air had done him
good, all the wonders of the eternal city did not console him for
the absence of Arnold and Julia. Notwithstanding his promise
to remain three weeks, therefore, he should return within the
fortnight. Both natives and English treated him magnificently,
and every evening he met the most splendid society: but this
1
4
Book V.
282
THE IMAGINARY CONVERSATIONS.
only made him melancholy; for he thought incessantly of Arnold,
whom he had never before been twelve hours without seeing, and
of the Greek the boy was learning, many sentences of which he
was able to speak correctly. To which it may not be inappro-
priate to add that I found carefully treasured among his papers,
and indorsed 'Arnold's first letter to me and my reply,' what
follows: the little boy's round text being in letters half an inch
long.
'MY DEAREST PAPA, I hope you are well. We have had all bad colds.
But thank God we are now quite well again. Walter, Charles, and Julia
send you a thousand kisses. And I send you ten thousand, and I wish
you to come back again with all my heart. And believe me, my dearest
papa, your affectionate son, A. S. LANDOR.'-'January 31, 1826. My
DEAREST ARNOLD, I received your letter to-day much too late to answer it
by the post; but you will see that I was thinking of you and of Julia yes-
terday by the verses I send you on the other side. I am very much pleased
to observe that you write better than I do; and, if you continue to read
the Greek nouns, you will very soon know more Greek, unless I begin
again to study it every day. When I was a little boy I did not let any
one get before me; and you seem as if you would do the same.
I pro-
mised you a Greek book, but I will give you two if you go on well, and
next year two others, very beautiful and entertaining. I shall never be
quite happy until I see you again and put my cheek upon your head.
Tell my sweet Julia that, if I see twenty little girls, I will not romp with
any of them before I romp with her; and kiss your two dear brothers for
me.
You must always love them as much as I love you, and you must
teach them how to be good boys, which I cannot do so well as you can.
God preserve and bless you, my own Arnold. My heart beats as if it
would fly to you, my own fierce creature. We shall very soon meet. Love
your BABBO.'
The verses on the other side' were those to his 'little house-
'hold gods,' written the day before his letter (his birthday); and
differing only from the poem as printed, in the stanza that tells
of the marvellous tales he will relate to sister and brother on his
return :
'Severing the bridge behind, how Clelia
Saved the whole host to fight again,
And, loftier virtue! how Cornelia
Lived when her two brave sons were slain.'
Later in the year there is much in Landor's letters to his
mother of the gaieties in Florence, of the evenings he passed
with the Blessingtons, of Lord and Lady Normanby's private
theatricals, of the Duchess of Hamilton's parties, and of the en-
1
1822-1828.
283
FAMILY LETTERS.
joyment all these had given to his children. The Blessingtons
were friends of recent date, but greatly liked and valued; he said
always that he remembered no pleasanter time of his life in Italy
than the summer evenings passed with them in the Casa Pelosi,
on its terrace overlooking the Arno; and even since his removal
from Florence to the Villa Castiglione, which made the distance
from them three miles, he passed two evenings of every week
with them. Noticing his mother's mention, in December, of a
visit of his sisters to Swansea, following her usual adjuration to
him to return to live again among them, he says that amid all
the glories of the Arno he had not forgotten home, and that the
streak of black from the smoke of the mines along that most
beautiful coast in the universe, had never succeeded in rendering
him quite indifferent to Swansea. How beautiful did he think
the seashore covered with low roses, yellow snapdragons, and
thousands of other plants, nineteen years ago! He adds that Lord
Guildford (to whom he had dedicated a volume of his Conver-
sations) had given him a very pressing invitation to the Ionian
Islands, but he did not think he should ever move farther than
a morning's walk from the table where he was writing. All this
however his mother treats only as the whim of the hour, and she
still steadily and perseveringly keeps before him the necessity,
for his children's sake, that a limit should be put to his exile.
Replying to her again in his birthday letter in 1827, he says
that certainly they lost some comforts out there in Florence, but
they had many others instead. And he, for his part, was per-
fectly reconciled to his destiny of living the remainder of his
days on the Continent, perhaps altogether in Tuscany. But she
must continue to send him (what she had threatened to discon-
tinue) all the Warwickshire news, for the changes interested
him. In four months he should have completed the thirteenth
year of his absence from England; his hair was growing white ;
and many who were children when he was in the county must
now have children of their own. 'Yours is not the only white
head in the family,' wrote his sister Elizabeth in answer.
Charles's hair altered completely in about six months, so that
when he came here last winter my mother admired it, and won-
´dered to see it become just the same as when he was a boy.'
A
284
Book V.
THE IMAGINARY CONVERSATIONS.
She tells him also of other people changing, such as his nephew
Charles, who, though not yet fifteen, was as tall as his father;
and of some people quite unchangeable, such as his old friend
Dr. Lambe, who had not altered the least in the world; and as
their mother, who seemed indeed smaller than ever, but was very
nimble, and ‘altogether wonderful, as her writing perfectly with-
'out glasses at eighty-four proves.' In July of the following
year the same sister announces to him the deaths, within a few
weeks of each other, of two sisters of their mother, the three
numbering at that time among them exactly 250 years; and
adds, what will not surprise any one who has observed as a rule
how death is regarded by the extremely old, that her mother had
been far less affected than she expected her to have been by this
event.
The last tidings of Landor himself having been that he did
not think it likely he should again move farther than a morn-
ing's walk from the table where he was writing, of course his
Warwick friends were prepared to hear any day that Florence
no longer contained him; and accordingly, early in August, his
sister Ellen, having written to introduce to him Mr. and Mrs.
Middleton, a clever portrait-painter and his wife, was told in hist
reply that he had gone upon a pressing invitation to Naples. From
Lord Blessington had come the bidding to accompany him there
in his yacht; and as he had never seen Naples, he told his sister,
and never could see it to such advantage as in the company of a
delightfully well-informed man, she might be assured he was not
very reluctant to go. Arnold indeed had not been well, but the
fever had now quite left him; and there being strange unac-
countable shells to be picked up for him on the shores of Naples,
of Elba, of Salerno, and twenty other places, the little fellow
had given Babbo leave of absence for twenty-five days: But be-
fore his leave expired, Babbo's pleasure had suffered grievous
interruption.
He will tell it best himself in an extract from a letter to his
sister Elizabeth. Language less characteristic would not do it
· justice.
'Arnold had had a fever a few days before I left Florence for Naples,
and I would not go until his physician told me he was convalescent. Not
1822-1828.
285
FAMILY LETTERS.
receiving any letter at Naples, I was almost mad, for I fancied his illness
had returned. I hesitated between drowning myself and going post back.*
Meanwhile Lord Blessington told me he would instantly set sail if I wished
it, and that I could go quicker by sea. I did so; and we arrived in four
days at Leghorn. Here he gave me a note enclosed in a letter to him,
informing me that Julia had been in danger of her life, but was now
better. To-day the physician will attend her for the last time.'
It was a malignant fever; which the youngest child also
caught, but recovered in sixteen days, during three of which life
had been despaired of; and in that interval the other children
owed their safety chiefly to the exertions of Lady Blessington,
who had driven over to the villa and brought them into Florence
for a time. These occurrences, Landor added, had turned the
rest of his hair white, after taking off what was refractory and
would not turn; but, thankful not to have lost one after being
so near losing three of his family, they had left him at the last
strength and spirits better than ever.' He adds a word or two
of his Neapolitan experiences.
6
The ruins of the temples at Pæstum, if ruins they can be called, are
magnificent: but Grecian architecture does not turn into ruin so grandly
as Gothic. York Cathedral a thousand years hence, when the Americans
have conquered and devastated the country, will be more striking. The
Lucrine Lake is a poor pond,-if poor is that pond which produces the
proprietor more than a hundred a year every acre of it, and this chiefly
by the cockles. Formerly it was remarkable for the flavour of its oysters.
Lake Avernus, one would imagine, is terrific. On the contrary, it is a
pretty little round lake, with groves full of birds all round. I did not see
* Let no one imagine that this is too extravagant even for Landor.
It runs very nearly parallel with a story told always with much enjoy-
ment by his brother Charles, of his having lost his road to a friend's house
where a party were waiting dinner for him, and startling a country bump-
kin by the peremptory demand that he should either at once show him
the way or cut his throat upon the spot. To this may be added the rela-
tion, by Dickens, of an incident of a few years later date, well remembered
by me. 'At a friendly dinner at Gore House, when it was the most de-
lightful of houses, his dress-say, his cravat or shirt-collar—had become
slightly disarranged on a hot evening, and Count d'Orsay laughingly
'called his attention to the circumstance as we rose from table. Landor
'became flushed, and greatly agitated: "My dear Count d'Orsay, I thank
you! My dear Count d'Orsay, I thank you from my soul for pointing
"out to me the abominable condition to which I am reduced! If I had
"entered the drawing-room, and presented myself before Lady Blessing-
“ton in so absurd a light, I would have instantly gone home, put a pistol
"to my head, and blown my brains out!" ›
C
286
Book V.
THE IMAGINARY CONVERSATIONS.
1
the island of Capri, which I much regret. Elba I saw on my return: a
very beautiful and fertile island, with the best harbour in Italy.'
He mentions in the same letter that he had just heard the
day before that the third, fourth, and fifth volumes of his Con-
versations would be out in two or three months, early in the
beginning of the ensuing year certainly. The third had been
printed for a year and more, but the publisher had delayed it;
and another publisher had undertaken the fourth and fifth. (The
third appeared in 1828, but the others were still delayed for
reasons to be presently named.) He was sick of writing. Never
would he write anything more. He had burnt all the things he
had begun, and many that he had nearly completed. He was
now occupied in collecting pictures. With more money at com-
mand he could have made a fortune by the purchase of pictures
in Italy. A man must live on the spot, and visit them daily,
thoroughly to master pictures. He was but a child at it, yet the
dealers thought him knowing. More of this hereafter.
The previous year (1827) had been that in which he made
acquaintance with the kindest and most generous man in exist-
ence,' Mr. Ablett, of Llanbedr-hall in Denbighshire, the inti-
macy of whose wife's sister (Mrs. Young) with Mrs. Dashwood,
a cousin of the Hares, had led to the fortunate meeting; and
through Mr. Ablett, in the spring of 1829, the Fiesolan villa
was bought which will forever be associated with Landor's name.
The present was the year (1828) when the celebrated sculptor
Gibson made, for Ablett, a bust of Landor, of which copies in
marble reached England in this and the year following. It was
the time, too, when his sister Arden died, and when from her,
and from another friend deceased, some small additions were
made to his fortune. His sister Ellen tells him of these; and
at the close of her letter mentions his old friend Serjeant Rough,
who had lately reappeared in the county, as having several times
inquired kindly after him, and as having said that the Conversa-
tions should have produced him a good fortune. This last touch
nettled Landor, and he retorted upon his old companion with an
odd mixture of dislike and liking.
'The mine of wealth derived from my Conversations brought me three
hundred and seventy-two pounds, the two editions. One hundred and
1822-1828.
287
FAMILY LETTERS.
seventy-two the first, two hundred the second. As to that impostor Rough,
I never hear the fellow mentioned without fresh contempt. . . . However,
if he had continued to cultivate poetry instead of those thistles called law,
he would have been perhaps the best poet of the age. By the way, you
have not read Keats and Shelley; read them!'
Some other notices from his family letters of this date may
also be worth giving. The title of the poem by his brother
Robert was The Impious Feast; and it well justified the later
and maturer praise it received from him as a poem of very vari-
ous power, and presenting in the sustained structure of its verse
a striking originality.
'Gibson came to me the very day Ackelon brought me Robert's poem,
and I give him two sittings, one in the morning, one in the evening.
There have been three days, and there will be four more, before he takes
the cast in plaster-of-paris. I am told that Chantry is equal to him in
busts, but very inferior in genius. The one is English upon principle,
the other Attic. On Sunday I read Robert's preface, which is well written.
I shall not begin the poetry till I can give it an undivided attention;
which will be when I get into the country, and lie under the vines all
day. I hope to begin this mode of life on the 1st of July.' (April 1828.)
'I have laid out nearly 1001. in pictures, part of which I sold again
for 1807, and the better part is left yet. If I had had 3000l. eight years
ago, I could have cleared 12,000l. in the two first years. The dealers here
know only the Florentine school; and one of them, the best and most
honest, often asks my opinion even on this. I have put a few hundred
pounds into his pocket. Our friend Mr. Middleton could not be prevailed
upon to buy a Raffaelle for 5001. It is worth 20001, and will bring it ere
long. He buys Carlo Dolces and gentry of that kidney; but he has also
bought a Pietro Perugino, who in my opinion comes immediately after
Raffaelle and Frate Bartolomeo. I could have had it, if I had had the
money, for 151. It is worth about 3001. He gave seventy, I think. His
picture of Julia is perfect. Arnold is much handsomer than he has made
him. His face has the radiance of a young Apollo.' (June 1828.)
This portrait of his eldest son, and daughter by Mr. Middle-
ton was a present he had made to his mother, and it was taken
to her by Augustus Hare. She thought it priceless; and until
within a day or two of her death, morning and evening, used to
salute the two little faces, and wish them good morning and good
night.
This morning I met Sir Robert Lawley, who walked with me for half
an hour, and made many inquiries about the family. He had taken it ill
that I had declined two or three of his invitations to dinner-parties; but
I told him I never intended to be at one anywhere all the remainder of my
life. . . . My friend Hare [Francis] has married Miss Paul, the daughter of
288
Book V.
THE IMAGINARY CONVERSATIONS.
Sir John Paul, and has 20,000l. with her. His brother Augustus writes
me word that he follows the good example in the summer, and that Lady
Jones gives him 400l. a year. She is his aunt, and the widow of Sir Wil-
liam' (December 1828).
He tells his sisters, in the same letter, that his bust at Rome
was greatly admired, and that he is sending a copy taken for his
wife and another for his mother; to whom he also writes an-
nouncing this, and urgently entreating her to guard against sud-
den changes in the weather. The anxiety strongly expressed by
him was but too well founded, for the new year then about to
open was to be the last of his mother's life.
VII. ADDITIONAL DIALOGUES.
I now resume the narrative of the Imaginary Conversations
from the point at which it was left on the publication of the first.
series. In the notice sent to Landor by Julius Hare, in July
1824, of the critical notices that had appeared of the book, he
reported from Taylor that its sale had been considerable but slow,
and it was therefore very uncertain how soon it might become
necessary to print a second edition. At the earliest it would cer-
tainly not be published till June in the following year, so that
there would be ample time for all the emendations Landor might
deem it advisable to make. Were they, then, to keep back the
new dialogues in order to see whether a second edition might be
wanted next spring? Or should they print a third volume by
itself, which might come out at Christmas? At present the
manuscript in hand looked less than its brethren, but he dared
say would find itself considerably enlarged before it could see
the light.
At the close of the same letter there are uneasy references to
the omissions; Hare remarking that the Middleton, if he can
'persuade Taylor,' shall be inserted in the second edition in its
original shape. Most unwillingly had he acceded to any altera-
tion, he added, except as to the two lines Southey consented to
erase; but Taylor was so fixed, that the only way of saving any
part of it was by some modification, which was as slight as he
'would let it be. As so much has come out without offending,
1822-1828.
289
ADDITIONAL DIALOGUES.
'he will perhaps not be quite so scrupulous next time.' In so
speaking to Landor of his publisher, allowance enough was hardly
made for its probable effect on Landor's continued relations with
Taylor. He was not the man to suffer patiently such a censorship
over his writings, or that his bookseller should be permitted to
usurp an authority which such men as Southey and Hare saw no
sufficient ground for exerting. In circumstances the most favour-
able, even when sanctioned or committed by Southey, the omis-
sions had been a sore subject with him, and in especial when
dictated by considerations wholly personal to himself. 'You
'carried your tenderness too far,' he wrote to Southey about a
passage left out of the Puntomichino, 'in suppressing my story
' of the thirteen lest I should be assassinated. Had I my choice
of a death, it should be this, unless I could render some essen-
• tial service to mankind by any other.'
The completion of the third volume to which Hare's letter
referred was sent over by Landor to Southey four months after
that letter was written. He writes on the 4th November 1824:
'I have finished and send herewith for publication the third and last
volume; or rather a few supplementary passages to it, for the greater part
was finished long ago. I had composed parts, and large ones, for the fol-
lowing: Mahomet and Sergius; Charlemagne and the Pope; Tiberius and
Agrippina; Seneca and Epictetus; Ovid and a Gothic poet; Francis the
First and Leonardo; the Black Prince and the King of France; Queen
Anne and Harley; Alexander and Porus; Sertorius and the Ambassadors
of Mithridates; Sextus Pompeius, Octavius, and Antonius; Queen Mary
and Philip; Algernon Sydney, Russell, and Lady Rachel; Harrington and
Penn; Charles the Second and Sir Edward Seymour (prototype of Whig
roguery); St. Louis and the Sultan of Egypt; Fénelon and Bossuet; Cor-
nelia and Caius Gracchus. This last and the Tiberius would have been
better than anything of any kind I have ever done. I shed a great many
tears as often as I attempted the Tiberius. He is represented by Sueto-
nius to have seen Agrippina but once after their forced separation and his
marriage with Julia, and to have been deeply affected; so that care was
taken they never should meet again. I make him grateful to Augustus
and Livia, but attributing all his misery to their ambition. Agrippina
draws their characters and gives some imaginary conversations. Tiberius
betrays gradually his suspicious character, but love predominates. His
description of the senate; his hatred of it; his resolution to retire to Ca-
prea, which he describes; his eternal absence from Agrippina,—evident
marks of madness on the mention of it. If I had preserved any one scrap
of this, I would send it, although it would be good only by its contexture.
It appears to me that I should have made a great deal more of Tiberius
than I have of Gebir and Count Julian; but I have done nothing which
U
290
Book V.
THE IMAGINARY CONVERSATIONS.
satisfied me in the part of Agrippina, and might perhaps have been a year
before I could become acquainted with her for the purpose.'
Sufficiently long, that is, to dispense with those helps by way of
explanation on points of history and character, which the audi-
ence (and there must always be an audience for a drama, real
or imaginary) can never altogether dispense with in a dramatic
composition: the result of such too consummate form of the
dramatic art being, that it meets the other extreme of a complete
ignorance of its conditions, and is, for purposes of the stage and
as far as any audience is concerned, no art that in the least ad-
dresses itself to them.* He continues:
'Cornelia and Caius Gracchus was the other conversation on which I
should have exerted all my energy. Hardly anything was done in it.
This volume would have been more elaborate and more important than the
others, and would have cost me double the time of both. Three are enough:
they will raise against me almost every man in England. I have not yet
received my copy, but I have made large additions. Whether there will
ever be another edition is uncertain however. My heart beats often for
your Colloquies. I am glad that you have adorned them with some
scenery. I do not recollect that I have done anything of the kind except
on the entrance to Ashbourne, where Walton is the speaker. I stand
agape at myself' (he says abruptly, at the close of this letter). Not only
have I dared to introduce Cicero and Demosthenes, Bacon and Hooker,
but Shakespeare himself, to whom they are cradled infants. What will
you think of me? Here for the first time I shrink and shudder.'
The intention thus expressed being, as we see, to close with
a third volume, the subjects enumerated are to show us what was
lost by this decision; and it is curious enough that, though the
three volumes became expanded to quite as much as three times
that bulk, only the first, third, and fourth dialogue in the list,
admirably chosen as most of the subjects are, ever reappeared;
those three being ultimately sent over for the third volume. We
shall find shortly, however, that in a fit of temper what he called
the fourth volume was flung into the fire, and this may account
for the loss. The Shakespeare took afterwards another shape;
and the Queen Mary and Philip, though actually sent over to
Hare, was lost on its way to the printer; but, out of all the rest,
of only the three named do we hear again, and as to one of
them a letter of seven days' later date gives farther curious de-
See the remarks closing the fourth section of my Third Book.
1822-1828.
291
ADDITIONAL DIALOGUES.
tail. On the 11th of November he wrote to tell Southey that
he had been able after all to accomplish the Tiberius and Agrip-
pina (or, as he now called her, Vipsania); and thus he described
the achievement:
'I have been spending the greater part of two months at castel Rug-
giero, the villa of the commissary-general here, Buccellato; and it is here,
among the rocks of the torrent Emo, that I found my Vipsania, on the 5th
of October. The hand that conducted her to Tiberius felt itself as strong
almost as that which led Alcestis to her husband. It has however so
shaken me at last that the least thing affects me violently, my ear parti-
cularly. The current would have been impassable if I had not thrown in
the midst of it the discourses of Augustus and Livia, reported in part by
Tiberius and in part by Vipsania.'
Those breaks to the current were nevertheless afterwards re-
moved;* and of the dialogue as it then remained, and now stands
among the Conversations, Julius Hare wrote to Landor, in a
letter dated the 24th of June 1826, that he should feel little
hesitation in declaring it 'the greatest English poem since the
' death of Milton.'
For the completion of the third volume Landor now of course
waited impatiently, making as little allowance as he usually did
for the delays interposed by his own incessant alterations or ad-
ditions. Julius Hare assures me,' he writes on the 6th of Janu-
ary 1826, 'that the third volume of my Conversations will come
' out at the end of January. He however had not then received
'two sheets closely written of a conversation between the late
'Duc de Richelieu and others. I am as heartily glad to clear
my table-drawer of copies and fragments, as I was the other
day to sweep off the stale remedies and sordid accompaniments
'of a ten days' quinsey.' The difference was, that the attacks
of composition being of regular and rapid recurrence, the copies
and fragments were in continual accumulation. You had better,'
wrote Hare soon after the above date, 'let us stop the printing-
(
(
C
<
The new form of the conversation is thus described in a letter of
April 1825. Repentance came over me for my violence done to Vipsania,
and I wrote a new conversation between her and Tiberius. I could not
' recollect one sentence of the old, and have omitted the calmer part, the
characteristic speeches of the courtiers, &c. After four hours I com-
pleted, what does not indeed console me for the first, but a creature of
passion and interest.'
<
292
Book V.
THE IMAGINARY CONVERSATIONS.
' off until I ascertain more clearly how far the dialogues I have
'will extend; when others, if necessary, may be added.'
Thus matters stood at the time of Hazlitt's visit to Italy in
that year, and while Leigh Hunt, at the close of the unsettled
days of his Italian life which followed the deaths of Shelley and
Byron, was still lingering in the neighbourhood of Florence.
Neither of them appears to have had any great liking for Taylor,
and both permitted themselves to speak of him to Landor, and
of the profit that such a book as the Conversations should have
brought to its author, in a way that the circumstances did not
warrant. With the feeling rankling against Taylor for the cen-
sorship he had claimed and exercised, it was as if a match had
been put to a barrel of gunpowder; and explosion followed ac-
cordingly.
The ostensible occasion was a letter from Taylor, written in
half-playful mood and innocent enough, though with some allu-
sions not happily chosen, and an assumption he ought not to
have taken for granted. It expressed his regret for the omissions
he had caused to be made in one or two of the dialogues, and
then said there was another omission for which he owed Landor
an apology: the not having placed at his banker's the half-profit
of the first edition, which, however, he might perhaps be excused
from doing, as the reprint of the work might possibly alter the
face of the account and leave him creditor. This was assuming
that the second edition was to be printed on the same terms as
the first, for which, as it afterwards appeared, Hare had not given
him authority; but remembering Landor's tone at the outset,
and his haughty professions of indifference to profit, the error
was at least a pardonable one, though expressed with amazing
want of judgment. Landor at once fired up at it, and his letters
fell like a thunderbolt on Taylor and Hare.
The epithets applied to the former need not be repeated. Suf-
fice it that he was forbidden to continue the printing of any part
of the new edition of the Conversations; and that in a communi-
cation of the same date to Hare (1st April 1825) Landor enclosed,
with farther remarks, a copy of 'what he had written to Taylor.
'He knows very well what I hear from Mr. Hazlitt, that those book-
sellers who engage to take half the profits never take only half the risk;
1822-1828.
293
ADDITIONAL DIALOGUES.
yet with this uncustomary advantage on his side, and having sold all the
copies three months ago, he delays the payment of what is due on the
plea that I may hereafter be indebted to him for something not ordered
or contemplated by me. . . . I shall consult Mr. Leigh Hunt and other
English authors now at Florence on what is best to do or to say on this
business.'
In a letter to Southey, ten days later, he enters more into
detail; and from this it would seem not only that Taylor had
left unanswered some letters which he ought to have answered,
but that while Landor undoubtedly had sanctioned the printing
of the third volume, he did not at the time know that any part
of the second edition had gone to press, and it had really been
his intention to require previously some new arrangement. He
adds some reasons for suspecting foul play (drawn from the larger
number printed of the third volume than had been printed of the
first and second) which are unreasonable as the rest of his letter;
reiterates what he had suffered by not receiving what was due
to him, of which he had promised a portion for some pictures
lately bought; and then, in language which I preserve for the
astounding statement it conveys, but otherwise not to be read
with gravity, tells Southey he has made a bonfire of that fourth
volume of Conversations, the mysterious disappearance of the
proposed contents of which has already been remarked.
'His first villany in making me disappoint the person with whom I had
agreed for the pictures instigated me to throw my fourth volume, in its
imperfect state, into the fire, and has cost me nine-tenths of my fame as
a writer. His next villany will entail perhaps a chancery-suit on my chil-
dren, for at its commencement I blow my brains out. . . Mr. Hazlitt, Mr.
Leigh Hunt, Lord Dillon, Mr. Brown, and some other authors of various
kinds, have been made acquainted, one from another, with this whole affair;
and they speak of it as a thing unprecedented.' (Then he describes his
having rewritten the Tiberius and Vipsania, and thus concludes:) 'It is
well I did it before Taylor had given me a fresh proof of his intolerable
roguery. This cures me forever, if I live, of writing what could be pub-
lished; and I will take good care that my son shall not suffer in the same
way. Not a line of any kind will I leave behind me. My children shall be
carefully warned against literature. To fence, to swim, to speak French,
are the most they shall learn.'
Southey took every part of this letter with equal gravity. As
to its closing lines, he told his friend that the only abiding plea-
sures, the only permanent satisfactions, this world affords, were
to be found in religion and literature; that he could not give
294
Book V.
THE IMAGINARY CONVERSATIONS.
his children an aptitude for either, if they had it not; but that,
trusting to time and providence for the increase, he could pre-
pare the soil and sow the seed. Then as to Taylor's conduct, he
says that one part of it will bear a good explanation, for that the
larger number printed of the third than of the other volumes is
what he has himself had experience of, in perfect good faith,
with his History of Brazil and other books. But that is the
only thing he defends. All the rest had appeared to him as it
did to Landor; but what vexed him was that such a writer should
destroy a single line, or forbear writing one, because a bookseller
showed himself to be no better than the spirit of trade had made
him. 'That spirit is a vile one, and it is better to be pillaged
'by it than possessed. This is my comfort always.'
Not so did Hare accept Landor's charges against his friend.
He met them in a way that did Taylor justice, and himself much
honour; nor could I have justified my present revival of them,
necessary to the purpose of this book as the mention of them
was, if I had not been able also to state that they were com-
pletely refuted. He admits delays in replying to letters, but
shows that a portion of this blame had been his own: and,
confirming both what Landor alleged of his having given no
express authority to permit Taylor to print a second edition,
and what Hazlitt had said of the custom of publishers bearing
the whole risk when allowed to share the profits, reminds Lan-
dor as to the latter that this had been departed from in Tay-
lor's case not at his but at their instance; and as to the former,
gives him the reasonable grounds there were for supposing that
an authority, understood if not expressed, did actually exist. In
proof that Taylor had no eagerness to take advantage of his
position by hastening the reprint with any notion of profit, he
states that on making it known there was room in the market
for a new edition, he had also said expressly that the Middleton
dialogue would prevent his having anything to do with it, and
it was only after much correspondence this reluctance had been
overcome. Landor's information that ' another man' might have
expected several hundreds for the Conversations, Hare disposes.
of by remarking that it was a belief not shared by the London
publishers, or so many would not have refused the book; and
1822-1828.
295
ADDITIONAL DIALOGUES.
the assertion that Taylor desired to evade the payments actually
due, is refuted at every point with irresistible evidence. The
offence in short is narrowed to the opening admission that there
had been improper delays in replying to letters and forwarding
accounts: it seemed to Hare that this was the only thing blame-
worthy in the whole of Taylor's conduct: nor could he for his
part visit such a fault very heavily. I cannot, because I often
'commit it myself; I cannot, because I remember what you
'make Cicero say, that "neither to give nor take offence are
surely the two things most delightful in human life.”' Fin-
ally he declared, that so far from Taylor meriting such treatment,
Landor, on the contrary, was under considerable obligations to
Taylor for the pains and care he had bestowed on the Conversa-
tions. The letter was dated from Trinity-college on the 21st of
April 1825.
6.66
When it was dispatched, Taylor's own reply to the charges.
had not been received; Hare, on being first made acquainted
with them, having immediately written as above acquitting him
of blame; and Taylor's letter reached Cambridge the day after
Hare's went from that place to Landor. It confirmed on every
point Hare's statement; and the money-account enclosed with
it, for which a check had already been sent to Landor's agent
at Rugely, established everything with scrupulous accuracy. A
fault was confessed in having left some letters unanswered, but
no other was admitted. Writing again from Trinity-college
on Sunday the 24th of April, Hare sent this letter to Landor,
telling him that he would see from it how much pain he had
been giving to a most simple-hearted amiable man. He would
also, Hare trusted, have become convinced how futile had been
the grounds of his indignation; and he would be thankful that
his friend had had it in his power not to suffer the wound to
rankle, but could instantly soothe and heal it. You say, in the
'conversation on the death of the grand-duke, "Lose nothing,
""as you hope for heaven, of that which may give you a better
opinion of your fellow-creatures." O that you yourself would
more regularly act according to this principle, and believe,
'when you see something that appears not quite right, that it
may as often be a mistake as a misdeed!' Beneath all Landor's
6 66
296
Book V.
THE IMAGINARY CONVERSATIONS.
wild irascibility there was a noble nature. He accepted silently
the wise rebuke. Taylor's assumed censorship of his writings
remained still a point of offence which Hare had too lightly
passed over; but not another complaint was made by him.
Taylor was afterwards spoken of with respect, and in Hare in-
creased confidence was placed. Upon the last letter reaching
Landor he gave amusing proof of it. He had been sending
meanwhile a succession of instructions, each recalling the last,
and Hare thus referred to them in a postscript:
About a new publisher I do not know what to do. As your second
letter contradicts the first, your third says you will have nothing to do
with either Longman or Constable, and I fear a fourth may come with a
new scheme, what am I to do? After having failed once so egregiously,
I do not like trusting anything but your express desire; and any way the
second edition now cannot come out before Christmas.'
The fourth letter brought the express desire that Hare should
act for the best according to his own judgment, and gave him
also full authority.
Not until August 1826 was Hare able to send over a copy of
this second edition to Landor in Italy. Writing to his brother
Francis in October of that year, he tells him that he had, by
Hayter the painter, sent out the volumes two months before;
that the third volume, though printed, was not yet published;
that this volume was still better than its predecessors; and that
the second edition had been in an equal degree improved and
enlarged. Mr. Colburn was the new publisher; and, for the
impression printed of the edition and of the additional volume
not yet issued, had paid two hundred pounds. Against the bet-
ter advice of Julius Hare, however, he had declined to issue the
new volume, until the success of the second edition had been
ascertained; and this falling short of his expectations, the other
was held over until the beginning of 1828. There is neverthe-
less no farther complaint from Landor. The eagerness of inven-
tion has been upon him during all those months, and the delight
of giving form to his fancies had sufficed for him. In this the
man of genius finds a comfort against many troubles. Dialogue
after dialogue had been written in the interval with astonishing
ease and enjoyment; and in a letter to Southey of the 27th
September 1825 there was this characteristic passage: Julius
1822-1828.
297
ADDITIONAL DIALOGUES.
.
(
'Hare having told me that I had sent enough materials for two
more volumes, I hope to see two more printed by the end of
January.' The thing was not possible in the most favourable
circumstances. As it was, two more Januarys were to pass be-
fore even his third volume saw the light; and, for that fourth
and fifth, another publisher had to be found.
At the end of June 1826, a few days after the second edition
appeared in London, Julius Hare wrote to express his opinion
of it, and also of the unpublished third volume. That the second
was superior to the first edition was implied in its having nearly
400 pages more, the new parts being always worthy of the old,
and often superior to them. Many of the conversations seemed
to him to have been very much improved, especially the Porson,
the Alexander, the Franklin, the Lascy, the Puntomichino, the
Aristotle, and the Chatham, which last was now become worthy
of a place among the rest. In the former edition he hardly
thought it was. In the Cicero too he had found many additions
that had delighted him, and above all the exquisite allegory, to
which he would pay the highest praise by saying it was the
most Platonic passage in the two volumes. Very often also the
logical connection was more distinctly brought out, and the
whole had certainly acquired more of the tone of conversation.
'Still, in the highest merits of composition, in the delineation of
'character and of passion, and in irony (such irony as I find in
'the Coleraine and the Bossuet, and at the conclusion of the
Peter, the Richelieu, and the Soliman), the third volume is
decidedly superior. The Tiberius I should feel little hesitation
' in declaring the greatest English poem since the death of Mil-
'ton.' In some cases, Hare went on to say, as in the Leopold
and the Tooke, he feared Landor would miss the callida junc-
tura; and once or twice the insertions had been injurious. The
note at the end of the Chatham was more contemptuous as it
first stood; and he had felt a good many doubts about the ad-
dition to the Anne Boleyn. That to the Jane Grey was perfect.
He had thought it impossible to add to this without injury; but
the addition had even increased its unity, and more fully brought
out Jane's pure simplicity. Hare had taken no steps yet toward
printing the new conversations. 'One should wait, I think, to
เ
>

298
Book V.
THE IMAGINARY CONVERSATIONS.
' determine by the sale of the third volume, what number of
copies to print. Have you heard of Southey being returned
'to Parliament for the borough of Downton? I suppose it is
'that he may speak against the Roman Catholic claims. In
'his Vindiciæ he has a note on the Imaginary Conversations.'
Since the date of his previous letter Hare had taken orders in
the English church; but he continued still for the present at
Trinity-college.
now.
At this time Southey had not replied to Landor's letters for
some months, and it was not until February 1827 he explained
his silence. A bad accident had deprived him of the benefit he
expected from his trip to Holland in 1825; and the shock that
awaited him on his return from another visit in 1826, when he
lost his youngest daughter, again undid all the good that had
been done. It is a melancholy letter he now writes to his old
friend, sad even for the cheery way in which he speaks of the
many busy projects that are about him still, because it reveals
the consciousness that any other life than the life of labour that
had so early broken him down has ceased to be possible for him
Landor's reply is full of grief. The pleasure he looked
for and had begun to receive from Southey's letter ceased at
once, at the first words almost; and never in the whole course
of his existence had he been oppressed by a heavier sorrow than
he had suffered the whole of that day from what it told him.
'The last I heard of you was that you were elected member of
Parliament, and that you had declined to take your seat from
a want of qualification. What a scandal to the administrators
'of public affairs, to the country, to the age!' Then he tells
Southey that a copy of his second edition has gone to him, that
the third volume will soon be on its way, and that he has
finished two more volumes, a fourth and a fifth. 'Whether
they will ever be printed I know not, and never will inquire.
This is left with Julius Hare.'
C
There was precisely the same uncertainty a year and a half
later, but it had not meanwhile restrained his ardour of compo-
sition; and the result was told to Southey in November 1828.
Francis Hare had urged him, he said, letter after letter, to make
up the hundred of his conversations. He had thrown away many
1822-1828.
299
ADDITIONAL DIALOGUES.
half-written ones, but at last he had completed the number, and
perhaps he had done amiss in admitting any that contained
living characters. When Southey should have read the third
volume, which at last was issued, and a copy of the sheets of
the fourth which would be sent along with it, he was to say
whether their contents were, as Julius Hare fancied, better than
the two first. About the two last being better (what he had sent
for one volume having expanded into two) he had no doubt; and
anxious and restless he had been that each duad should excel
the preceding. 'I have had no letter from Julius Hare since
'the month of March, but I have received the third volume, and
'the fourth also, though without the dedication. What progress
' is made in the fifth and sixth I am quite ignorant.'
very
In that March letter, Hare had only announced to him the
expansion of his fifth volume into two, and had given him little
hope of its going to press as yet. But the fourth and fifth were
in hand; Mr. Ainsworth was to be the publisher; and so strongly
was he objecting on the score of bulk, that Hare, whose troubles
had been infinite in the matter, had to consent to a fifth. Still
there came fresh disputes as time went on; a full year had in-
terposed before Hare wrote again; he had in the interval been
obliged to withdraw the two printed volumes from the publisher
who had undertaken them; and it took a good deal of time
(Hare wrote at the end of July 1829) to find a substitute.
'The Conversations are too classical and substantial for the morbid and
frivolous taste of the English public, and few publishers, except my friend
Taylor, look beyond the saleableness of a work. Duncan has at length
agreed, on the terms of sharing the profits, if there are any. The sixth
volume is not yet gone to a printer, and, as I am going abroad for a couple
of months, must wait till October. I would that it were in my power to
extend my journey as far as Florence, that our epistolary might be suc-
ceeded by a personal acquaintance; but I fear my time will not allow of
that, as I must spend some days at Bonn to learn report of Niebuhr's
second volume.'
He and Thirlwall were now engaged in translating that remark-
able book; and, two years before, he and his brother Augustus
had published anonymously their Guesses at Truth.
The weeks were passed at Bonn, but the journey was not ex-
tended to Florence, and until Landor's visit to England in 1832
300
Book V.
THE IMAGINARY CONVERSATIONS.
the friends did not see each other. With the publication by
Mr. Duncan in 1829 of the volumes above named, Hare's con-
nection with the Imaginary Conversations may be said to have
ceased. For the sixth volume he failed to find a publisher at
his return, and the task somewhat later devolved upon me.
Meanwhile, in a letter of April 1829, Southey told Landor that
the first volume of his unpublished series had been sent to him.
Some things in it he wished away, but as to very very many
more Landor would know how truly they must have delighted
his old friend; and in especial, he said, Lucullus and Cæsar had
thoroughly pleased him, through every line of it, as one of the
most delightful of all. And now, as with the first series, brief
account may be given of the second.
The three volumes contained only nine more dialogues than
were in the first series, but some were of greater length. Eleven
of the subjects were taken from modern politics; three were of
a personal turn and character; sixteen were illustrations of bio-
graphy, eight of them relating to English worthies, and the other
eight to Italian, French, or German; five might be classed as
historical, the speakers being rulers or princes of past times;
and there were five Greek and five Roman conversations. I will
take them generally in this order.
It was Landor's settled opinion, frequently expressed during
his residence in Italy, that the sovereigns then reigning on the
Continent were responsible for all the revolutionary tendencies
that agitated Europe at the time; and the violent reaction wit-
nessed by him even before his return to England was but the
fulfilment of what he had confidently foretold. Prominent among
the princes that seemed to him despicable, and for characterising
whom as the most ignorant and gross barbarians that had ap-
peared since the revival of letters he is indeed not harshly to be
judged, were the French and Spanish Bourbons, the kings of
Spain and Portugal, the rulers of Austria and France, and the
Pope (Leo XII.) with his confederates in Italy. In one of the
political dialogues the speakers are Don Victor Saez and El Rey
Netto; in a second the latter prince reappears with his brother-
sovereign of Portugal, its title being Don Ferdinand and Don
John-Mary Luis; in a third, Miguel and his mother are intro-
1822-1828.
301
ADDITIONAL DIALOGUES.
duced; and in a fourth we have Leo XII.. and his valet Gigi.
Throughout them the principal object is to show the inseparable
connection of tyranny and superstition with cruelty, of cowardice
with religious persecution, and of all with unspeakable silliness.
Landor's apology for sometimes putting better talk into his dia-
logues than his assumed talkers were capable of, will here only
apply in a Rabelaisian sense. Not a redeeming grace is given
to any of them, unless in that relish for their own baseness which
in the expression of it has a gusto of enjoyment so intense as to
amount to genius. Few are the passages extractable from these
dialogues that might not shock a reader unprepared for the
lengths of infernal malignity, and ferocious cruelty, which fanati-
cism of any kind will not scruple to defend under the pretence
of religion; and any frank avowal of the hidden satire under-
lying these repulsive utterances will be rarely found. But there
is one such where Saez tells his master that a legitimate king
can never have a surer ally than what is called a constitutional
minister, because it is the experience of all those gentry that the
people are a football to be fed with air, and that the party always
sure to be winner is the one that kicks it farthest. And another
appears in the information communicated by Miguel to his mother,
on somebody's remark that the wit of 'Don Jorge da Cannin'
would immortalise him, that it was no good nowadays people
trying to make themselves immortal, for that immortality, his
confessor told him, had become so creaky and crazy that he would
not be tempted by an annuity upon it at three years' purchase ;
in short, that true immortality in this world can come only from
the Pope, two centuries or so after burial, and when all but his
holiness had forgotten the deeds and existence of the defunct
about to be beatified. While a third is where the Pope's valet
tells his holiness that he had heard only a few days before of
some one having said that the representative of St. Peter and
the monarchs his friends and allies, striving and struggling to
throw back the world upon the remains of chaos, reminded him
of nothing so much as the little figures round Greek vases, which
strained at one thing and stood in one place for ages, and had
no more to do in the supporting or moving of the vases than the
worms have. Ah! cries Leo, that is not your language. 'Not
302
Book V.
THE IMAGINARY CONVERSATIONS.
an Italian's, not a Continental's! It breathes the bluff air of
'England.'
In a preface afterwards cancelled, Landor declared that his
political dialogues had been the most difficult part of his task,
for that 'a man does not lose so much breath by raising his hand
' above his head as by stooping to tie his shoe-string;' and to
this a few lines from a letter to myself may perhaps be worth
adding :
Of course the fellows who attack me for personalities in my conver-
sations, and for personalities about creatures perishable and sordid as
themselves, never heard of Plato, or have the least notion that that earliest
and most celebrated composer of prose dialogue has introduced contempo-
raries of as worthless and almost as mischievous a character as the worst
in mine. Rely upon it that the book which carries about it nothing to
mark its own age will rarely be very interesting to another.'
Of the political dialogues two more have each a crowned head
for its hero, the king of the Sandwich Islands being one, and the
king of Ava the other; the object being, in the first, to exhibit
the ignorance of a savage who should imagine that court-dresses
were an absurdity, or should expect that a title implying a duty
carried with it the duty implied; and in the second, to carica-
ture the claims as well as the achievements of royalty in the
Western world by showing that what a monarch of Ava cannot
but regard as falsehoods, incredible and preposterous, have been
for scores of years in Europe ordinary matter-of-fact occurrences.
Two others bring in leading European statesmen.
In the one,
Villèle and Corbière, rejoicing to have so gagged France that she
dares not even talk of the Napoleon for whose glory she had
sacrificed so much, have nevertheless no alternative but to con-
sent to the recognition of Greece, and find it not their least
bitter mortification to be thereby obliged to agree with an idle
visionary, an obscure and ignorant writer, who in a work en-
'titled Imaginary Conversations had been hired by some low
'bookseller to vilify all the great men of the present age, to
'magnify all the philosophers and republicans of the past, and
'to propose the means of erecting Greece into an independent
'state.' In the other, Pitt has a farewell interview with Canning,
in which his experience, of the proper way of serving the state.
is imparted much after the manner of Swift in advising servants
6
1822-1828.
303
ADDITIONAL DIALOGUES.
of a lower grade, amounting in the whole, we may say, to three
leading suggestions: that he is to speak like an honest man, to
act like a dishonest one, and to be perfectly indifferent what he
is called.
The remaining three dialogues, strictly political, had refer-
ence to the Greek revolution. In the Photo-Zavellas and Kaido
the aspiration of the Greeks for independence, even as early as
the beginning of the century, receives affecting illustration; a
young chieftain resisting the importunity of his sister that he
should not place himself in the power of one of the pashas, and
quietly sacrificing life that his countrymen may be undeceived.
The same purpose of illustrating Greek nobleness and hardihood
is also in the conversation of Odysseus, Tersitza, Acrive, and
Trelawney, where, by means of a visit made by an English sym-
pathiser with the existing struggle, Shelley's and Byron's friend,
to an outlawed Greek family in their fastness or cavern on Par-
nassus, their character and aspirations are vividly reproduced, in
language picturesque as the mountain scene and eloquent with all
its associations. Finally, in Nicholas and Michel we have the
struggle on its political side; the czar's brother informing him.
of the position in reference to it taken up by European states,
and reporting also views and prophecies respecting it acquired
from a travelling Englishman; the czar himself thinking so
highly of these that he is eager to offer to so wise a man the
star of a privy-councillor and a post on the Caspian; and Mi-
chel's comment on the offer giving us plainly to infer who the
wise man was. 'He informed me that having lately been con-
' versant with Sophocles and Plato, he entertained the best-
'founded hopes, in case of a maritime war, he should be nomi-
nated, on some vacancy, as worthy of bearing his Britannic
Majesty's commission of purser to a fire-ship.'
(
Of the three conversations having a personal interest, the
first, between Lord Coleraine, the Rev. Mr. Bloomsbury, and
the Rev. Mr. Swan, with much ironical humour contrasted a
couple of clergymen of the same church, the one a perfect type
of what her liberal and forbearing practice should be, the other
a methodistical impostor who forces himself into the sick-room
of a racketing, gaming, dissolute Irish lord, by whom before his
304
Book V.
THE IMAGINARY CONVERSATIONS.
days of grace he had been plucked at the gaming-table, in the
hope to get his money back as a legacy from the dying sinner.
The second was in the form of a narrative, comprising several
other dialogues besides that from which it took its title of the
Duc de Richelieu, Sir Firebrace Cotes, Lady Glengrin, and Mr.
Normanby; giving under the latter name some vigorous experi-
ences only slightly disguised from Landor's own; showing Tom
Paine in his lodgings in Paris shortly after Robespierre's fall;
in the notices of Normanby's life including a full-length sketch
of his father the village schoolmaster, some persecutions for
opinion which even a life so humble could not then escape, and
some love-adventures in which a very genuine old-world hu-
mour alternates with delightful pathos; describing an Irishman's
journey from Florence to Rome; and closing with some sketches
of Ireland herself, impartial in their sunshine and their shade.
This dialogue was a special favourite with Emerson, and de-
served to be for though travelling far afield, and too often
losing connection by the way, it contains passages of mirth as
well as sadness in a strain of tender delicacy not always usual
with Landor; and in several places, as where Normanby relates
his having called-in an auctioneer to sell his father's library,
and the good schoolmaster's opinion of particular books is noted
side by side with what the man of the hammer thought of them,
we have things as characteristic as any in the conversations.
But in sayings of individual significance the last of those per-
sonal dialogues was the richest of all.
Landor in this was himself the principal speaker, talking
with two visitors at his palazzo, an Englishman and a Floren-
tine, of such divers topics as arise in common conversation, but
with a mastery of every subject handled, and a precision of style,
that common talk is stranger to. Opinion is here given of the
city ruled by Ferdinand, though in terms of less unmixed eulogy
than are applied to her ruler; for we are told that they are a sting-
ing as well as honeyed little creatures who inhabit that central
hive, not created for the gloom of Dante, but alive and alert in
the daylight of Petrarch and Boccaccio. High opinions of Shel-
ley we find to be also here expressed; and with these were joined
some remarks on Keats in a spirit of keener appreciation. Rank-
1822-1828.
305
ADDITIONAL DIALOGUES.
ing him with Burns and Chaucer, not merely for the freshness of
his apprehension of objects of common life and external nature,
but for what Sidney calls 'the elementish and ethereal' parts of
poetry, Landor goes deeper in his criticism of Keats than is
always his wont; and since the dialogue was written, two more
generations of readers of poetry have gone far to confirm its judg-
ment. The scathing words in it directed against the malignity
of personal abuse which then disgraced literature, and embit-
tered, if it did not actually shorten, the young poet's closing
days, have since lost much of their meaning. We seem now
to be falling into the other as profitless extreme of conferring
genius and glory all at once; and the danger, to the old hands
as well as the new beginners, is on the side of excessive praise.
Some half-dozen poets' have been discovered and ticketed
during the last ten years, of any one of whom it would be haz-
ardous indeed to say that a vestige is in the least likely to sur-
vive to another generation.
6
What farther Landor said in this dialogue of his general
avoidance of the society of literary men, from a disinclination to
take part in their differences and to receive displeasure or un-
easiness at the recital of their injuries, is within my experience
true. Nor less true, as I tested abundantly during my long in-
timacy with him, is what he remarks upon his English visitor's
request that he would repeat verses he had written on Keats and
Burns. 'I rarely do retain in memory anything of my own, and
' probably you will never find a man who has heard me repeat
a line.' Of his writings generally he adds that he is far from
certain that in their inferences they are all quite sound; but he
believes that they will give such exercise in discussing them as
may tend to make other men's healthier. 'I have walked always
'where I must breathe hard, and where such breathing was my
'luxury: I now sit somewhat stiller, and have fewer aspirations:
´ but I inhale the same atmosphere yet.' All the indifference he
professed to the good opinion of his contemporaries, I cannot say
that he felt; but of the tricks and arts of authorship he had
none, and at the least no man had a better title to say that
whether his books were read in that age or the next was a matter
no more adding to his anxiety or occupying his speculation
X
306
Book V.
THE IMAGINARY CONVERSATIONS.
than whether they should be read that morning or the next after-
noon.
*
The subject reappears in perhaps the finest of all the sixteen
dialogues I have classed as illustrations of biography, where
Newton talks with his old tutor Barrow at Cambridge before
going up for his master's degree. Much of this is a comment on
Bacon's Essays, which it is not extravagant to say is as good as
the essays themselves; much has a personal reference; and every
part is suggestive in the highest degree. Rise, but let no man
'The best thing is
stand apart from it
on any side. . . . Have no intercourse with small authors: culti-
'vate the highest; to reverence and to defend them. . . . Those
' who have the longest wings have the most difficulty in the first
' lift you,' is the counsel of the old divine.
'to stand above the world; the next is, to
(
เ
เ
'
mounting. . . . Do not be ambitious of an early fame: such is
apt to shrivel and to drop under the tree. . . . Reputation is
'casual: the wise may long want it, the unwise may soon ac-
quire it, a servant may further it, a spiteful man may obstruct
it, a passionate man may maim it, and whole gangs are ready
'to waylay it as it mounts the hill.' In sayings that seem to
have so wanted to be said that the utterance makes them com-
mon property, all the dialogues are rich; but this one singularly
so; and I have heard Landor humorously complain of the many
poachers who, acting liberally upon that notion, had so used
them and had sported unlicensed over all his manors; protest-
ing that he could forgive them if in taking his sentences they
would take as well the advice contained in them, and declaring
with his hearty laugh that never had he put so much wisdom
into so few syllables as in the last words of Barrow to Newton
in this very dialogue. The younger Isaac has asked the elder
I am glad to subjoin what was remarked as to this by the dear friend
of both the subject and writer of this biography. 'A vain man,' said
Dickens, 'has little or no admiration to bestow upon competitors. Landor
had an inexhaustible fund. He thought well of his writings, or he would
'not have preserved them. He said and wrote that he thought well of
them, because that was his mind about them, and he said and wrote his
'mind. He was one of the few men of whom you might always know the
'whole of whom you might always know the worst, as well as the best.
'He had no reservations or duplicities.'
1822-1828.
307
ADDITIONAL DIALOGUES.
whether a studious man ought to think of matrimony, and the
elder has replied that poets, mathematicians, and painters never
should; but that other studious men might, after reflecting upon
it twenty years. Newton thereupon shows himself disposed to
give up his mathematics and reflect the twenty years. To which
says Barrow: 'Begin to reflect on it after the twenty, and con-
'tinue to reflect on it all the remainder; I mean at intervals,
' and quite leisurely. It will save to you many prayers, and may
suggest to you one thanksgiving.'
Another equally attractive dialogue in the class of which I
am speaking was the Penn and Peterborough, founded on that
passage in Spence's Anecdotes, where the friend of Swift and Pope
says he took a trip once with Penn to his Pennsylvania; intro-
ducing the friends as they traverse on horseback the yet untamed
forests stretching in the direction of the Pacific, and for its prin-
cipal themes of talk opening out fields of speculation and inquiry
as vast and unreclaimed; forms and tenets of religion and go-
vernment, institutions and establishments in their tendencies
spiritual or social, and the direction or extent to which New
communities should take example from Old in the arrangements,
usages, and graces of life. The dialogue is a very picturesque as
well as powerful one; and Landor's sympathy being quite as
much with Penn's dislike of establishments and liking for re-
publics as with Peterborough's free-thinking and aristocratic
tastes, fairer play than usual is shown to both sides in all the
arguments. These of course I turn away from here; having only
space remaining for a few pregnant words wherein the mischiev-
ous cry that would exclude a Shakespeare or a Milton, supposing
them likewise to have received the requisites of fortune, from
being ever proposed or thought of for election in any borough
where they might happen to be born, because forsooth it is men
of business that are wanted, and not men of books or genius, is
disposed of by Penn: As if men of genius are not men of busi-
ness in the highest sense of the word; of business in which
'the state and society are implicated for ages!
Of the other six conversations taken from English biography
there are four, the Leofric and Godiva, the John of Gaunt and
Joanna of Kent, the Lady Lisle and Elizabeth Gaunt, and the
308
Book V.
THE IMAGINARY CONVERSATIONS.
Walton, Cotton, and Oldways, which take rank with the Jane
Grey and the Anne Boleyn as very exquisite prose-poems. Godiva
was a favourite heroine of Landor's; in his boyhood he used to
steal away from Warwick to attend her fairs and festivals; and
with consummate delicacy he has treated her in this scene, show-
ing how Leofric's vow was made and her own resolution taken,
and what were her timid tender thoughts the night before she
rode through the city. The time of the John of Gaunt scene is
when the people have risen against his suspected intention of
seizing his nephew's crown, and he is saved only by the interfer-
ence of the popular idol, his brother's widow, the mother of the
child he would have wronged. That of the third is where that
Elizabeth Gaunt is brought to Lady Lisle's condemned cell whom
Penn saw place round her body with her own hands the fagots
that were to consume her for the same crime as Lady Lisle's, of
having given shelter to one of Monmouth's adherents. Nor is
the fourth, the Walton and Cotton, a less beautiful though a
quite different idyl; fresh as a page of Izaak's own writing; a
natural country landscape overrun with charming thoughts; and
with a sweet soberness in its cheerfulness and sunshine, that, as
Walton says of the effect upon himself of sights and sounds of
nature, makes us readier to live and less unready to die.
Briefest mention may suffice for the two concluding subjects.
from English biography, Archbishop Boulter and Philip Savage,
and Romilly and Perceval; the one a discourse on Irish griev-
ances and remedies, the other a discussion of English law and
lawyers; this last being also one of the themes taken up by Males-
herbes and Rousseau, in the first of the eight dialogues where
famous foreigners converse. Here the best things are said by
Malesherbes, who tells his friend that in his politics he cuts down
a forest to make a toothpick and cannot make even that out of
it, and that his moral questionings and misery are mere self-in-
vited torture. It is as much at your arbitration on what theme
you shall meditate as in what meadow you shall botanise; and
" you have as much at your option the choice of your thoughts
Why, if that were true,
6
"
as of the keys in your harpsichord.'
says Rousseau, who could be unhappy? Those,' Malesherbes
replies, of whom it is not true.' In two others of these dia-
1822-1828.
309
ADDITIONAL DIALOGUES.
logues French immortals appear, in glimpses perhaps more cha-
racteristic: Montaigne talking with Joseph Scaliger in his light-
est, wittiest, least reverent fashion; and Bossuet, sent by the
king to compliment one of his child-mistresses on her elevation
to the rank of duchess, listening with a half-mournful, half-smil-
ing gravity to the giddy, vain, wild, gentle, childish, joyous girl,
until at last, the very danger of the good-hearted sinful little
creature moves him to tell the truth to her, and as the courtier
drops from him the God rises and speaks. There is hardly a
finer thing than this in the whole of the conversations.
Wolfgang and Henry of Melchtal, Beniowski and Aphanasia,
Catherine and Daschkoff, and two dialogues of Boccaccio and
Petrarch, Chaucer taking part in the second, complete the bio-
graphical series. The first reanimates with dramatic intensity
and force one of the old Swiss legends of the tyranny overthrown
by Tell; the second is an incident of Russian story in which
a Siberian maiden effects the liberation of a Polish youth, for
whose safe-custody the Empress Catherine has made her father
responsible; and the third brings upon the scene, with appalling
vividness, Catherine herself, who is shown with her maid Dasch-
koff outside the chamber-door within which Orloff and the rest
are murdering her husband. The two last are delightful speci-
mens of humour and character, the one showing us Boccaccio
visited by Petrarch in his villa at Fiesole, and the other Petrarch
pacing the cathedral green at Arezzo with Chaucer and the author
of the Decameron. The happy adaptation of scene in both dia-
logues is perfect, and the design is to reproduce as exactly as pos-
sible the respective styles of these three great masters of dramatic
narration. I wish I could take, from the lips of Boccaccio,
Monna Tita Monalda's love-story, where the artlessness of the
narrative has a very subtle charm, and impropriety itself par-
takes of the innocence of the father it confesses to.
Of the five historical dialogues three have their scenes in the
East. The Alexander and Priest of Hammon is a grim laugh at
the vainglorious pretensions of the conqueror; the Mahomet and
Sergius shows the prophet, disgusted with the corruptions of the
old religion, consulting the Nestorian monk upon the several
points of the new, which he designs to be embodied in his
310
Book V.
THE IMAGINARY CONVERSATIONS.
Koran; and the Soliman and Mufti exhibits a counsellor of the
great sultan giving him reasons why his order to have the Koran
translated into the languages of all nations should not be com-
plied with. 'O son of Selim! if every man reads, one or two in
' every province will think.' The finest thing in the dialogue
is the sudden surging-up at its close of that Eastern passion for
pleasure in which all goodness and wisdom are submerged and
perish.
The remaining two subjects from history, treated briefly, but
both of them in the highest degree dramatic, were William Wal-
lace and Edward the First, in which at the supreme moment of
his victory the conqueror of Scotland suffers ignominious defeat;
and Peter the Great and Alexis, where the son is brought back
a captive after his flight to Vienna, and his father, loading him
with brutal and coarse reproach, remits him for trial to the senate,
and hears afterwards of his death. Despite the too repulsive
barbarism of Peter, there is something grand in this dialogue;
though its philosophy may be said rather to underlie the dia-
logue than to be written in it, it is there; and no one would
have relished more keenly than Landor that portion of Carlyle's
wonderful book in which the father of Friedrich lives for us
again.
The five Greek dialogues were Anacreon and Polycrates,
Xenophon and Cyrus the younger, a second conversation of De-
mosthenes and Eubulides, Diogenes and Plato, and Epicurus,
Leontion, and Ternissa. The first is a dramatisation of one of
the most delightful of the narratives of Herodotus, the ring of
Polycrates; lessons of government and religion are conveyed in
the talk of Xenophon and Cyrus; and the second conversation
of Demosthenes and Eubulides was justly one of Julius Hare's
especial favourites, for in parts of it the mind of the writer is at
its highest elevation. The time is just upon the death of Philip,
when all Athens has crowded 'buzzing' with the news into her
central streets, leaving to the two friends the country and fresh
air, and, 'what is itself the least tranquil thing in nature, but
' is the most potent tranquilliser of an excited soul, the sea.' To
this fine passage I will add that other in which the great orator,
disturbed by the levity of his countrymen at a moment when
1822-1828.
311
ADDITIONAL DIALOGUES.
they had need of their steadiest resolve, recalls a former and
nobler time. 'I have seen the day, Eubulides, when the most
august of cities had but one voice within her walls; and when
'the stranger on entering them stopped at the silence of the.
gateway, and said, "Demosthenes is speaking in the assembly
""of the people." I expressed a doubt to Landor once, I re-
member, whether in both these conversations he had not made
the language of Demosthenes too figurative; and he made me a
very ingenious reply. He had introduced him in both, he said,
talking with a professed rhetorician, and very differently there-
fore from his usual practice before the Athenian commonalty.
When indeed, even here, he had shown him in argument on a
matter of fact, a project of policy, or an application of law, he
had given him his good sense and had not shorn away a hair
from his strength. But all this was very different business from
a country walk with an ancient master of scholastic exercises;
and might it not fairly be supposed that Demosthenes would be
glad enough of that opportunity to change his habit of speaking
when in public? On the margin of the dialogue at the time I
made a note of the illustration employed by him. 'A man who
has long been travelling sits down willingly, but lies down
more so; for a total change of posture is more grateful to him
' and more natural than a partial. The man himself is unal-
tered by it; his dimensions, the girth of his loins, and the
'breadth of his shoulders are the same.' The objection is
not altogether met, but we see his sensitive anxiety to be
thought to have preserved in these writings what is supposed
by many of his critics to have formed no part of their plan.
The intrusion of himself into a dialogue, it should be kept in
mind, does not necessarily always exclude the rightful speaker.
Demosthenes tells Eubulides how he composed his Orations,
and it is not less true of the old Greek because it happens to be
also the way in which Landor composed his Conversations.
'It is my practice, and ever has been, to walk quite alone. In
I my walks I collect my arguments, arrange my sentences, and
utter them aloud. Eloquence with me can do little else in the
city than put on her bracelets, tighten her sandals, and show
'herself to the people. Her health and vigour and beauty, if
"
312
Book V.
THE IMAGINARY CONVERSATIONS.
'she has any, are the fruits of the open fields.' There are one
or two still living in Florence who have frequently met Landor
composing his dialogues aloud among the hills at Fiesole.
It is the same when Plato challenges his assailant Diogenes,
in the conversation that bears their names, to demonstrate where
and in what manner he has made Socrates appear less sagacious
and less eloquent than he was; and enjoins him to consider the
great difficulty of finding new thoughts and new expressions for
those who had more of them than any other men, and of repre-
senting them in all the brilliancy of their wit and in all the ma-
jesty of their genius. Here again it is not the less Plato speaking
because it is Landor also, to whom it is difficult not to apply a
number of other sayings in the dialogue; which has otherwise,
in the tone adopted as to Plato, the same defect I have indicated
in speaking of the Chesterfield and Chatham. The truth is,
that Landor's recent study of Plato's writings had been such as
to substitute, almost necessarily, small critical objections for a
larger and wiser appreciation. He had been so bent, he once
told me, upon finding for himself what there was in the famous
philosopher, that he went daily for several weeks or months into
the Magliabechian library at Florence, and, refreshing his neg-
lected Greek, read the whole of the dialogues in the original
from beginning to end. I was no longer surprised at the result,
though nothing more was added. Of the sayings having per-
sonal reference, some may be even the more interesting and bet-
ter worth quoting for the fact that nothing personal was intended
by them. As, where the remark occurs that great men too often
have greater faults than little men can find room for; where it
is said of Aristotle that he makes you learn more than he teaches,
and whenever he presents to his readers one full-blown thought
there are several buds about it which are to open in the cool of
the study; where it is claimed for every great writer that he is
a writer of history, let him treat on almost what subject he may,
for that he carries with him for thousands of years a portion of
his times; and where Diogenes prefigures the fate of all such
enlighteners of the earth. The sun colours the sky most deeply
' and most diffusely when he hath sunk below the horizon; and
1822-1828.
313
ADDITIONAL DIALOGUES.
C
they who never said, How beneficently he shines! say at last,
'How brightly he set!'
Such sayings might be yet more largely added from the last
of these Greek dialogues, the Epicurus, Leontion, and Ternissa;
the conversation which, upon the whole, I should say, was Lan-
dor's supreme favourite, and which contains certainly more of
those points of character that constituted the weakness as well
as the strength of his own, than any other in the entire series.
When Epicurus describes as dearest to him 'those whose hearts
possess the rarest and divinest faculty of retaining or forget-
'ting at option what ought to be forgotten or retained,' it can-
not but occur to us, after experience of the life I have endea-
voured to place impartially before the reader, that the faculty
has in it also something not divine, and that to forget at option
what ought (perhaps) to be remembered is at the least a doubt-
ful Epicurean virtue. The entire subject of the dialogue is the
platonic intercourse of the philosopher with two handsome.
young girls of twenty and sixteen, to whom he shows his newly-
planted garden two or three miles from Athens, and explains
while he practises the precepts of his philosophy. Of the safe
applicability of the precepts at every season, my earlier narrative
would hardly be a happy illustration; and of the trouble not
inseparable from such charming friends, its closing page will
have something to say; but in this place mention has only to
be made of the poetical wealth of the dialogue throughout, of
the freshness of its pictures of external nature, of the delicacy
of its criticism, of the wonderful beauty of many of its fancies
and thoughts. Here is the saying that 'the voice comes deep-
'est from the sepulchre, and a great name has its root in the
'dead body.' Here counsel is given to the young to pay a
reverence to greatness both in rulers and writers, but to adjust
it always by the consideration that the benefits of the one are
local and transitory, while those of the other are universal and
eternal. And here the philosopher of pleasure vindicates the
serene endurance and triumph of philosophy over any weapons
that can be brought against her.
The five Roman conversations were, Marcellus and Hanni-
bal, Metellus and Marius, Tiberius and Vipsania, Epictetus and
314
Book V.
THE IMAGINARY CONVERSATIONS.
CONVERSATIONS.
Seneca, and Lucullus and Cæsar: the three first named taking
high rank in the class which I have set apart as prose-poems.
In the first the conqueror of Syracuse lies with his death-wound
before Hannibal, whose way it has cleared to Rome; in the
second the tribune Metellus and the centurion Caius Marius
meet at the siege of Numantia; and the third is that meeting
of Tiberius and Vipsania after their divorce, which can hardly
fail to affect the most careless reader with something of the
emotion its writer underwent in composing it. The eternal pro-
test of every age, against the sacrifice of human hearts to state-
convenience or policy, seems to rise with the cry of anguish of
the unhappy prince, as he thinks of the contentment and quiet
that might have been his though the palace of Cæsars cracked
' and split with emperors, while I, sitting in idleness on a cliff
' of Rhodes, eyed the Sun as he swang his golden censer athwart
'the heavens, or his image as it overstrode the sea.' The Epic-
tetus and Seneca is one of the shorter dialogues, but very
striking for its contrasts as well in the character as in the philo-
sophy of the high-bred man of learning and the low-born slave,
and enforcing admirable rules of simplicity and naturalness in
writing. The most generally interesting of all these Latin dia-
logues, however, and most deservedly Southey's favourite, was
the Lucullus and Cæsar. Everything that may be supposed to
form part of the daily life of the most luxurious of Romans in
the last years of the republic is here reproduced with a vivid
reality. Even the farm, the cows, the lake, the fish-ponds, the
Adriatic itself visible from that height of the Apennines, all of
them as much adjuncts to the local truth of the scene as the
tapestries and pictures in the hall, or the marble statues in the
library, or the frescoes in the banquet-chamber that reproduce
Cæsar's victories, take their places in the little drama presented
to us in this delightful conversation. What a library is here!'
exclaims Cæsar. 'Ah, Marcus Tullius! I salute thy image. Why
'frownest thou upon me? collecting the consular robe and up-
lifting the right arm, as when Rome stood firm again and Cati-
'line fled before thee.'
Such was the new series of Imaginary Conversations, of
which it only remains that I should indicate the dates and
1822-1828.
315
ADDITIONAL DIALOGUES.
forms of publication. Twenty of the dialogues were issued as a
third volume of the original series, one of them (partly in verse)
on Inez de Castro being subsequently withdrawn to form por-
tion of a dramatic poem with that title; and this third volume,
with a dedication to Bolivar dated 1825 and a postscript sup-
plied in 1827, was published by Mr. Colburn in 1828. Fif-
teen more formed the first volume of a new series, which a
second volume of twelve more completed; one of the latter that
had Peleus and Thetis for its speakers, thus violating the rule
to exclude imaginary people, being afterwards transformed into
a scene which is acted in the Epicurus and Leontion; and this
'second series,' its first volume dedicated in May 1826 to Sir
Robert Wilson, and its second in August 1826 to Lord Guild-
ford, was published by Mr. Duncan in 1829, the year to which
my narrative has arrived. Anticipating a little, I will add that
what Julius Hare had done for the first and second it devolved
on me to do for the third series of the Imaginary Conversations;
and as, out of these, eighteen had been completed, and eight
more were partially written, before Landor left Italy, it will con-
clude the story of this remarkable work if I now mention what
the subjects of them were.
Five were classical. In two, forming a bright little prose-
poem, shaded with touches of character of the utmost delicacy
and pathos, Æsop and Rhodope are the speakers. In a third,
spoken over the fall of Carthage, and rising to even a grander
theme in the immeasurable services of Greece to Rome, the
speakers are Scipio and his Greek friends Panatius and Poly-
bius. In the fourth, Pisistratus receives from Solon counsel
and commiseration. In the fifth, where Lucius and Timotheus
converse, and nearly every sentence is radiant with wisdom or
wit, the great Greek satirist warns one of the leaders of the new
Christian sect against the errors under which the old Gods had
perished. This is a very masterly production.
Fourteen had for their speakers people famous in foreign
lands. The East supplied one in Rhadamistus and Zenobia, a
brief dialogue of intense passion: to which character belonged
also a subject from Spain, Philip the Second and Donna Juana
Coelho; one from France, Joan of Orleans and Agnes Sorel; and
316
Book V.
THE IMAGINARY CONVERSATIONS.
three from Italy, Tancredi and Constantia, Tasso and Cornelia,
Dante with his wife Gemma Donati, and Dante with his angel
Beatrice. Galileo visited in his prison by Milton is the subject
of a seventh; the eighth, filled also with pleasant memories of
Florence and Fiesole, was a dialogue between the painter Fra
Filippo Lippi and Pope Eugenius the Fourth; and La Roche-
foucault talking to La Fontaine supplied the ninth, both speak-
ers talking so well that one would hardly suspect the writer to
have hated the first of these Frenchmen almost as much as he
loved the second. The German subjects were three: Melancthon
in colloquy with Calvin; and Sandt conversing with Kotzebue
on the eve of the commission of his crime, and with Blucher
afterwards in prison while waiting his punishment. The thir-
teenth and fourteenth, Cardinal Legate Albani and the Picture-
dealers, and the Emperor of China and his minister, formed por-
tions respectively of two sets of papers, on High and Low Life
in Italy, and on the Adventures of a Chinese statesman dis-
patched to Europe for a batch of first-rate professors of Christi-
anity, with whose help his master, profiting by experience of
the Jesuits, hopes to sow, among his enemies the Tartars, divi-
sions and animosities that will destroy them.
The six latest were on English themes, all of them dialogues.
of character, interfused with intense passion in that where Mary of
Scotland surrenders herself to Bothwell: and, in the rest, where
the English Mary and her sister Elizabeth meet after their bro-
ther's death and the proclamation of Lady Jane; where the
queen Elizabeth talks, after the massacre of Bartholomew, with
Cecil and Anjou and the French Ambassador; where Bishop
Shipley says adieu to Franklin after his mission of peace has
failed; where Addison encounters Steele after the bailiffs have
been with him; and where Andrew Marvell after a visit to Mil-
ton meets Bishop Parker in Bunhill-row, showing at their
very best Landor's humour and eloquence, grasp of individual
portraiture, and play of wit and fancy. The last has, perhaps
more than any, the greatest qualities of his writing consistently
sustained, at their highest level and with the fewest drawbacks.
BOOK SIXTH.
1829-1835. T. 54-60.
AT FIESOLE.
1. Closing Years in the Palazzo Medici. II. Mother's Death. III. The
Villa Gherardescha. IV. England revisited. v. Again in Italy: old
Pictures and new Friends. VI. Examination of Shakespeare for Deer-
stealing. VII. Pericles and Aspasia. VIII. Self-banishment from Fie-
sole.
I. CLOSING YEARS IN THE PALAZZO MEDICI.
From France to Italy my steps I bent,
And pitcht at Arno's side my household tent.
Six years the Medicaan palace held
My wandering Lares; then they went afield,
Where the hewn rocks of Fiesole impend
O'er Doccia's dell, and fig and olive blend.
There the twin streams in Affrico unite,
One dimly seen, the other out of sight,
But ever playing in his smoothen'd bed
Of polisht stone, and willing to be led
Where clustering vines protect him from the sun,
Never too grave to smile, too tired to run.
Here, by the lake, Boccacio's fair brigade
Beguiled the hours, and tale for tale repaid.
How happy! O, how happy had I been
With friends and children in this quiet scene!
Its quiet was not destined to be mine:
'Twas hard to keep, 'twas harder to resign.'
So wrote Landor, in a little poem on his homes; but the Medi-
cæan palace had not held his Lares five years when he moved
into the country two miles from the Tuscan capital, and inter-
posed the villa Castiglione between his homes in Florence and
Fiesole. Here he lived, with a short interval in the winter of
'28 and '29 at the casa Giugni, until he found his Fiesolan
318
Book VI
AT FIESOLE.
home. A characteristic incident had closed his intercourse with
the living representative of the Medici. Mr. Kirkup writes to
me:
'I remember one day, when he lived in the Medici palace, he wrote
to the Marquis, and accused him of having seduced away his coachman.
The marquis, I should tell you, enjoyed no very good name, and this had
exasperated Landor the more. Mrs. Landor was sitting in the drawing-
room the day after, where I and some others were, when the marquis
came strutting in without removing his hat. But he had scarcely ad-
vanced three steps from the door when Landor walked up to him quickly
and knocked his hat off, then took him by the arm and turned him out.
You should have heard Landor's shout of laughter at his own anger when
it was all over, inextinguishable laughter which none of us could resist.
Immediately after he sent the marquis warning by the hands of a police-
man, which is reckoned an affront, and quitted his house at the end of
the year.'
The same anecdote is related to me in the letter of a family
connection who passed some time at the Italian villa,* and
who, after remarking that Landor's frequent outbreaks of in-
tensely sensitive pride astounded the Italians more than any-
thing, says truly enough that the secret of it was not the vulgar
sense of importance attached to his position as an English gen-
tleman, but the vast ever-present conviction of the infinity of
his mental superiority. 'The smallest unintentional appearance
of slight from a superior in rank would at any moment rouse
' him into a fury of passion, never thoroughly allayed till its last
'force had spent itself in an epigram.' Such incidents, at the
worst never fraught with much gravity, often took even a highly
amusing turn, during his earlier years in Italy, from his imper-
fect acquaintance with the language; and here Mr. Wilson Lan-
dor's letter confirms what was said on a former page.
'Though at last he understood it thoroughly, and spoke it with the
utmost grammatical correctness and elegance, he acquired it with less
facility than might have been expected. Mrs. Landor, without any study,
could converse in it with ease and volubility long before her husband.
When Southey visited them in Italy, although well acquainted with French
and Italian, he showed himself a self-taught linguist, and his hearers were
not a little amused at his oddities of pronunciation and speech.'
* Mr. Edward Wilson Landor, a cousin of the Landors of Rugely, now
a police-magistrate in Perth (Western Australia), from whom, in Septem-
ber 1867, when the first four books of this biography had been printed off
for more than two months, I received the letter above referred to.
1829-1835.
319
CLOSING YEARS IN THE PALAZZO MEDICI.
It was in the palazzo Medici that Hazlitt visited Landor in
the spring of 1825. I again quote Mr. Kirkup's letter.
I perfectly remember Hazlitt's being here. He wished to
He wished to pay Lan-
dor a visit, but was advised not, unless he was well introduced. Armitage
Brown, who was Landor's greatest friend here, offered him a letter; but
Hazlitt said he would beard the lion in his den, and he walked up to his
house one winter's morning in nankeen shorts and white stockings; was
made much of by the royal animal; and often returned-at night; for
Landor was much out in the day, in all weathers.'
6
My Australian correspondent confirms this story on the relation
of Mrs. Landor, describing the great critic's garb as 'a dress-
'coat and nankeen trousers half-way up his legs, leaving his
'stockings well visible over his shoes: but his host,' Mr. Wilson
Landor adds, 'would not know whether he was dressed in black
or white. He wore his own clothes like Dominie Sampson,
'until they would hardly hold together; and when he visited
'his sisters at Warwick they used to resort to the expedient
'practised upon the dominie, and leave new garments for him
' at his bedside, which he would put on without discovering the
'change.'
In that there is overcolouring, but the frequent absence of
mind could not be exaggerated; and I remember one such
amusing instance of forgetfulness which perhaps originated the
story, since it certainly led to the necessity at Warwick of sup-
plying him with other clothes than his own. He had been so
much put out at one of his visits by having left the key of his
portmanteau behind him, that his sister was hardly surprised to
see him, when next he appeared at her house, eagerly flourish-
ing in his hand an uplifted key, at once knowing this to be his
comforting assurance to her that any possible repetition of the
former trouble had been guarded against. Storms of laughter
followed from him as she expressed her satisfaction; and the
last of his successive peals had scarcely subsided, when, inquiry
being made for his portmanteau, the fatal discovery presented
itself that to bring only a key was more of a disaster than to
bring only a portmanteau. On this occasion the portmanteau
had been left at Cheltenham.*
*
* It was in 1843. He wrote to me at the time: 'My portmanteau and
all my clothes were left behind at Cheltenham, against all my precau-
320
Book VI.
AT FIESOLE.
'He was so frequently absorbed in his own reflections,' con-
tinues his relative, 'as to be unconscious of external objects,
' which indeed seldom much affected him. He would walk
' about Bath, as between Florence and Fiesole, with his eyes
'fixed on the ground, taking no heed of the world around him.
I have known him to travel from London into Denbighshire
and be quite unable to say by which route he had travelled,
'what towns he had passed by, or whether or not he had come
'through Birmingham.' My own experience also confirms this,*
and some sentences from the same letter may illustrate what
I have already said elsewhere.
C
'He was an enthusiastic friend; and as far as sound, violence, and
unmeasured denunciation went, a bitter hater; but beyond unsparing
vituperation, he would not have injured an enemy. He would certainly
not have lent a hand to crush him. It was the strong whom he always
rushed to attack. With all the violence of his dislikes and likings, he had
also the softness and tenderness of the poetic temperament. He was pas-
sionately fond of young children. He was generous to profusion when-
ever he had the means. . . . Self-satisfied under all circumstances, he was
without personal ambition or the desire of aggrandisement. His own con-
ception of himself was too elevated to permit of his descending to ordinary
meannesses. He neither desired money, beyond what the necessities
of the hour demanded, nor rank, nor influence. . . . He noticed a man's
appearance as little as he studied his own.'
What is pleasantest here, as well as most material, receives
farther confirmation in the letters of Mr. Kirkup, and testi-
monies thus independent of each other will not be thought un-
important.
'I first knew him in 1824 through Mr. Armitage Brown, the great
friend of Keats, and the most intimate and confidential friend of Landor
'tions. The worst is the loss of much poetry and prose written in the
last three months. I am not such a fool as to trouble my head about
the clothes, nor wise enough not to trouble it about the pages. However,
I never look after a loss a single moment.
Quod vides perîsse, perditum ducas,"
says Catullus and say I.'
* And worse.
He would find himself at Birmingham when he ought
to have been elsewhere. You will wonder what I had to do at Birming-
ham!' he wrote to me in the summer of 1844, explaining a hasty letter
sent me the previous day with that postmark. Why! just nothing at all.
'I should have changed trains at Coventry for Leamington, but the fools
never cried out a word about that station,'
1829-1835.
321
CLOSING YEARS IN THE PALAZZO MEDICI.
+
for many years. Among his associates then, and until he quitted his villa,
was an elderly gentleman named Leckie, very jocose and satirical, whom
Landor liked as much as his wife disliked him. . . . Landor lived economi-
cally and dressed very shabbily. He only indulged in buying a number
of very ancient pictures which were not esteemed at that time. He told
me he had left all his own affairs to the care of his brother (Henry) and
his agent, on their promise that they should never send him any account,
for he hated the sight of figures. And they kept their word, so that he
never knew what he was to have. He was always eccentric. He never
would look at a review, and lived without books, or nearly so. His memory
was most astonishing, and he used to boast that he could always quote
securely from it; but he trusted too much to it sometimes, and made mis-
takes. His strength was language, Latin and English; and his passion
was painting, another language; but he was not learned in that.
.. As
I have said, he often was shabbily dressed, and I have known servants
offend him by taking him for a beggar or poor devil. He had the repu-
tation of being a violent man, and no doubt was so. But I never saw
anything but the greatest gentleness and courtesy in him, especially to
women. He was chivalresque of the old school. At Lord Dillon's in Flor-
ence we used to meet often, and there we together made the acquaint-
ance of Lamartine. Landor was much attached to Lord Dillon, in spite
of his being a poet; for he was always reciting, and people laughed at
him. Not so Landor. He showed the most courteous attention; and
often gave him a word of advice, so gently as never to offend him. He
used to say that Lord Dillon's smiling handsome fair face was like a ray
of sunshine in Florence.'
Something of Hazlitt's own talk at Landor's table is among
the passages of Mr. Kirkup's letter I have some hesitation in
using; but as the details of his Scotch divorce, including the
surprising diaries of the first Mrs. Hazlitt, have lately been pub-
lished with family authority,* there will perhaps be no harm in
saying that as Hazlitt's present continental journey was in the na-
ture of a holiday wedding-trip with his second wife, whose small
independence had enabled him to give himself that unusual en-
joyment, he appears to have had no scruple in dilating to his
friends on those facilities of Scottish law which had opened to
him such advantages.
'He related to Landor, Brown, and myself one day the history of his
own divorce. He told us that he and his wife, having always some quarrel
going on, determined at last, from incompatibility of temper, to get sepa-
rated. So, to save Mrs. H.'s honour, and have all their proceedings legal,
they went to work in this way. They took the steamboat to Leith, pro-
21-65.
See Memoirs of William Hazlitt, by W. Carew Hazlitt, vol. ii. pp.
Y
322
Book VI.
AT FIESOLE.
vided themselves each with good law advice, and continued on the most
friendly terms in Edinburgh till everything was ready; when Hazlitt de-
scribed himself calling in from the streets a not very respectable female
confederate, and, for form's sake, putting her in his bed, and lying down
beside her. "Well, sir," said Hazlitt, turning more particularly to Lan-
dor, who had by this time thrown out signs of the most lively interest,
"down I lay, and the folding-doors opened, and in walked Mrs. H. ac-
companied by two gentlemen. She turned to them, and said: Gentle-
men, do you know who that person is in that bed along with that
"woman? Yes, madam, they politely replied, 'tis Mr. William Hazlitt.
"On which, sir, she made a courtesy, and they went out of the room,
"and left me and my companion in statu quo. She and her witnesses
"then accused me of adultery, sir, and obtained a divorce against me,
which, by gad, sir, was a benefit to both."
Mr. Kirkup takes occasion to add, that as he and Mr. Brown
were never married, they could hardly, during the progress of
this tale of wonder, be expected to listen with the eager anxiety,
or to hail its conclusion with the irrepressible delight, evinced
by Landor; but they were all not a little surprised, and till then
quite ignorant that such beneficial uses were to be made of the
law. On other points too Hazlitt and his host found them-
selves in unaccustomed yet perfect sympathy; and so heartily
did each enjoy the other's wilfulness and caprice, that a strong
personal liking characterised their brief acquaintance.
These few notices of friends and life in Florence it seemed
right to interpose before resuming my narrative in the year of
the removal to Fiesole; and I will now only add a note or two
from Leigh Hunt's recollection of Landor himself at the time.
He found him living among his paintings and hospitalities, in a
style of unostentatious elegance very becoming a scholar that
could afford it, but with a library the smallness of which sur-
prised Hunt, and 'which he must furnish out, when he writes
'on English subjects, by the help of a rich memory.' He had
some fine children with whom it was his habit to play like a
real schoolboy; being as ready to complain of an undue knock
as he was to laugh, shout, and scramble himself. His conversa-
tion was lively and unaffected, as full of scholarship or other-
wise as his friends might desire, and dashed now and then with
a little superfluous will and vehemence, when speaking of his
likings and dislikes. 'His laugh was in peals, and climbing; he
'seemed to fetch every fresh one from a higher story.' Both his
1829-1835.
323
MOTHER'S DEATH.
genius and scholarship greatly impressed his visitor. He could
really fancy and feel with, as well as read, Ovid and Catullus.
He had the veneration for all poetry, ancient or modern, that be-
longed to a scholar who was himself a poet; and showed a pro-
per knowledge of Chaucer and of Spenser as well as of Homer.
He seemed to Hunt, by his book of Idyls, to have proved him-
self to be by far the best Latin poet of our country, after Milton;
more in good taste than the incorrectness and diffuseness of
Cowley, and not to be lowered by a comparison with the mimic
elegances of Addison. Upon the whole, what Leigh Hunt had
to say of this remarkable man, with whose poetry he had become
acquainted but the year before, after reading the book that had
made him suddenly famous as 'one of our most powerful writers
' of prose,' is to be summed up in a remark already referred to.
He had never known any one of such a vehement nature with
so great delicacy of imagination: he is like a stormy mountain-
'pine that should produce lilies.'
II. MOTHER'S DEATH.
At the opening of 1829 there seemed to be less cause for
anxiety as to his mother's health than had been expressed for
some preceding years. Her letters had never been more frequent,
and seldom more shrewdly or strikingly expressed. On the 7th
of January she thanks him for the portrait of his two beautiful
children; says how proud she is of what Mr. Southey in one of
his books had been saying of her son; tells him of a living
she had purchased for his brother Robert near Pershore, ‘in a
'pleasant country, and not far from Ipsley;' and adds that her
daughters had been reading to her what had pleased her very
much out of Bishop Heber's Journal, where his name was men-
tioned and some of his poetry quoted. On the 19th of March
there is a letter from her filled with county news about the Law-
leys, and with what was going on at Warwick-castle and at
Guy's-cliff; telling how much Sir Robert Lawley had lamented
'Walter's unwillingness' to see more of him in Florence, and
what handsome things Lord Aston had said of the author of the
Imaginary Conversations. In May she reports of her grandson
324
Book VI.
AT FIESOLE.
Charles that he was in the fifth class at Rugby, and that the
new master there was said to have wonderful influence; that
the boys worked very hard to gain his approbation; and that
flogging and fagging were nearly abolished altogether. This
was Arnold. However, the old lady adds, 'I hope the boys
'won't study more than is good for the health of them, and I
'did not like to hear that the play-ground is deserted.' That
was her last letter to her son in Florence, though she lived until
the October following. She had an illness somewhat suddenly
in the spring, from which she never quite rallied; and through
the intervening months it is discoverable that she was becom-
ing gradually weaker, though no immediate danger was thought
to exist.
Landor continued to write to her as usual. He complained
to her in January how much people had beset him with intro-
ductions since his Conversations appeared, and why it was that
the last series was still delayed. However, it would really be
out at the end of March; and she would find that he had men-
tioned his kind old friend Dr. Parr with the regard and gratitude
he owed him. He writes to her in June of the pleasantest
weather he can remember in Italy, and asks her to tell his sister
to send him various fruit-seeds. He tells her a few days later
that she was not to be alarmed by anything she heard of his
having been expelled from Florence, because he was back again;
and the grand-duke had only laughed when he heard that the
real offence had been what he had said in his book of Florentine
patriots and Florentine justice, and of one of the Florentine
grandees selling his wife's.old clothes before she had been dead
a fortnight. At the end of July he informs her of his great
misfortune in the death by apoplexy of his friend Lord Blessing-
ton at Paris; and this must have been the last letter his mother
received from him. He sent her over his bust by Gibson at the
end of August; but the letter accompanying it was to his sisters.
In this he told them to explain to her that it was the gift of an
incomparable friend, Mr. Ablett, through whom he had obtained
at last a home of his own in Italy; and this was replied to by his
sister Ellen, who said the bust had arrived without the slightest
injury, that it was beautiful and much admired, and that Lord
1829-1835.
325
MOTHER'S DEATH.
6
Aston in particular was delighted with it. She added that they
were in the midst of gaieties; that the Studley-castle people
were staying with them; that they had had a succession of
archery meetings; and that their mother had just returned from
Ipsley, very feeble, but insisting on the gaieties going on.'
This was on the 8th of September, and is the last glimpse of
her, brave and self-denying to the close, which we are permitted
to receive. She died in October, within one month of her 86th
year;* and in writing of it to Southey he said that he fancied
he should have been less affected by it, not having seen her for
fifteen years. 'But it is only by the blow itself that early re-
'membrances are awakened to the uttermost.' On the 12th of
November he had written to his sister Elizabeth :
'My mother's great kindness to me throughout the whole course of
her life, made me perpetually think of her with the tenderest love. I
thank God that she did not suffer either a painful or a long illness, and
that she departed from life quite sensible of the affectionate care she had
received from both her daughters. I am not sorry that she left me some
token of her regard; but she gave me too many in her lifetime for me to
think of taking any now. You and Ellen will retain, for my sake, the
urn and the books. I wish to have her little silver seal, in exchange for
an Oriental cornelian which you and my brothers gave me, belonging to
my father. I have his arms, which is enough. The one I mean is pretty
in its setting, and contains the word "Leitas" in Persian letters. My
brother Henry was so kind as to purchase two Venetian paintings, once
'Par-
From a marble monument in Tachbrooke church I take the sub-
joined, written mainly by Landor himself, but with additional touches by
his brother Robert: Gualterus Landor, Roberto generoso, pio, integer-
'rimo Patre natus: duas uxores duxit; a prima filiam unicam, ab altera
'filios Iv. filias III. suscepit; lepidus, doctus, liberalis, probus, amicis ju-
'cundissimus; anno ætatis LXXIII. decessit.-Juxta, prout vivens mori-
ensque voluit, composita est uxor ejus Elizabetha, filia Caroli Savagii,
'conjux, mater, fæmina pia, optima, vix annos LXXXV. menses XI.'
'don me,' wrote Landor in 1856, when he sent me a copy of the inscrip-
tion as originally drawn up by him, 'pardon me, what I never can par-
'don in myself, the use of Latin in an Englishman's epitaph, which ought
'to be written for Englishmen to read. It was urged on me.' An English
inscription on an adjoining tablet in the same church may also here be
given, though it anticipates some events in this memoir. To the memory
of Mary Anne Landor, second daughter of Walter and Elizabeth Landor,
'who died December 26, 1818, aged 40 years; and of her youngest sister,
Ellen Landor, who died July 17, 1838, aged 55 years. Lastly, of Eliza-
'beth Savage Landor, their eldest sister, who died February 24, 1854,
aged 77 years.'
C
326
Book VI.
AT FIESOLE.
mine, and to place them at Ipsley. I thanked him at the time, and thank
him again; but I am resolved to accept nothing whatever from any of my
relatives. If my mother's picture was purchased at Llanthony, I would
buy it gladly. Pray let me hear about it. I remember it at my grand-
mother's fifty years ago. Adieu. I am ill-disposed for writing more.'
Upon that incident of his expulsion from Tuscany, which
was one of his last announcements to her, a few words are all
it will be necessary to add. It might have seemed a little start-
ling if told of any one else, but in his case it made hardly a per-
ceptible difference in his relations to the magistracy and police
of Florence, with whom he had generally some quarrel on hand.
Three years earlier he had written to Southey that the things
said about the Tuscans in his Conversations, and principally
those in power, being translated with bitter comments by some
literary men in Florence whom he could not admit into his
house, had greatly exasperated against him the ministers of the
grand-duke, whom however he did not know by sight, nor they
him; so that it was a matter of perfect indifference to him. The
ground of indifference lasted exactly two more years, at the end
of which he obtained perforce a personal acquaintance with
some of the ministers, having been called before the courts and
threatened to be sent out of Tuscany. And now,
And now, another year
having intervened, this threat was to be put in force.
A robbery of plate committed at his villa led to such an
angry correspondence with the police respecting it, that their
president, laying hold of some intemperate expressions in which
Landor had ripped up older grievances, obtained from some of
the ministers of the grand-duke an order for his expulsion from
Florence. Paying no heed to this, he addressed to the grand-
duke himself a very spirited remonstrance; and this having been,
though without his knowledge, strengthened by the intercession
of Lord Normanby, Sir Robert Lawley, and others, the only far-
ther notice of the matter was a public avowal by himself, silently
received by the authorities, to the effect that, since they had
thought fit to declare his continued residence among them to be
distasteful, it was his fixed resolve to settle himself in Tuscany.
He closed with similar avowal the account of the affair which
he sent to Southey. 'Such being the case, I resolved to pitch
'my tent in the midst of them; and have now bought a villa,
1829-1835.
327
MOTHER'S DEATH.
'belonging to the Count Gherardescha, of the family of C. Ugo-
'lino, and upon the spot where Boccaccio led his women to bathe
' when they had left the first scene of their story-telling. Here
'I shall pass my life, long or short, no matter; but God grant
' without pain and sickness, and with only such friends and such
'enemies as I enjoy at present.' The latter, it must be added,
he did not cease to cultivate. He kept up fruitful sources of
dispute with 'rascally' magistrates, as well as with 'pious' thieves;
but on the whole, excepting for a quarrel with a neighbour about
a watercourse to be presently related and which engaged all
his energies for a time, Landor lived at his new villa quietly
enough for nearly six more years. He had been impressed, per-
haps more than was usual with him, by Francis Hare's warning,
sent when he heard of the recent banishment from Florence, that
he would never find anywhere on the Continent so suitable a
home. Writing in August from Trinity-college where he was
staying with his brother Julius, after eager expression of his
delight at hearing of Landor again in Florence, Hare gave him
several reasons for declaring it to be the best and fittest abode
for him in Europe; implored him, by all their pleasant memories
of it, to contrive not to get into any fresh scrapes that might
finally drive him out of it; and pronounced it to be, by all the
strictest laws of social intercourse, enough for one gentleman to
cane one scoundrel once in one life. Telling him, then, that his
brother Augustus had just received from New-college the Wilt-
shire living of Alton Barnes where Crewe wrote his poem of
Lewisdon Hill, he closes with an abrupt question, Why is I in
Italics short? which Landor has answered by scratching across
the page the line,
'Omnia namque Italus promittere grandia gaudet.'
The villa, into which he had moved just before his mother's
death, remains to be described; but first may be mentioned a
visit to him which already had also occurred before she passed
away. There had appeared in Florence, he told his sister Ellen,
the dearest of all the friends he ever had or ever should have,
his Ianthe of former years, now a widow of title who had buried
two husbands, who remained nevertheless so handsome that an
328
Book VI.
AT FIESOLE.
English earl and a French duke were offering their addresses to
her, and in these the Frenchman was persisting in spite of all
discouragement. Talk of time not going back, why, the sudden
vision of this one face had rolled back from him in an instant
more than twenty years! With which thought, put into verse,
he closes his letter:
Say ye that years roll on, and ne'er return?
Say ye the sun, who leaves them all behind
(Their great creator), cannot bring one back
With all his force, though he draw worlds around?
Witness me, little streams that meet before
My happy dwelling, witness Affrico,
And Mensola! that ye have seen at once
Twenty roll back, twenty as swift and bright
As are your swiftest and your brightest waves,
When the tall cypress o'er the Doccia
Hurls from his inmost boughs the latent snow.'
The 'happy dwelling' was the Fiesolan villa, his present great
enjoyment of which, how he came into possession of it, and his
way of life there, will be best understood from what he wrote
about it to the old home in Warwick.
III. THE VILLA GHERARDESCHA.
When Leigh Hunt, after many sad disappointments in Pisa
and Genoa, found himself in Florence, his refuge from his trou-
bles was to wander about Maiano, a village on the slope of one
of the Fiesolan hills, two miles from the city, thinking of Boc-
caccio. On either side of Maiano were laid the two scenes of
his Decameron the little streams that embrace it, the Affrico
and Mensola, were the metamorphosed lovers in his Nimphale
Fiesolano; within view was his villa Gherardi, before the vil-
lage the hills of Fiesole, and at its feet the Valley of the Ladies.
Every spot around was an illustrious memory. To the left, the
house of Macchiavelli; still farther in that direction, nestling
amid the blue hills, the white village of Settignano, where Mi-
chael Angelo was born; on the banks of the neighbouring Mug-
none, the house of Dante; and in the background, Galileo's villa
of Arcetri and the palaces and cathedrals of Florence. In the
thick of this noble landscape, forming part of the village of San
1829-1835.
329
THE VILLA GHERARDESCHA.
Domenica di Fiesole, stood the villa which had now become
Landor's. The Valley of the Ladies was in his grounds; the
Affrico and the Mensola ran through them; above was the ivy-
clad convent of the Doccia, overhung with cypress; and from
his iron entrance-gate might be seen Valdarno and Vallombrosa.
Ten years after Landor had lost this home, an Englishman tra-
velling in Italy, his and my dear friend, visited the neighbour-
hood for his sake, drove out from Florence to Fiesole, and asked
his coachman which was the villa in which the Landor family
lived.
'He was a dull dog, and pointed to Boccaccio's. I didn't believe him.
He was so deuced ready that I knew he lied. I went up to the convent,
which is on a height, and was leaning over a dwarf wall basking in the
noble view over a vast range of hill and valley, when a little peasant girl
came up and began to point out the localities. Ecco la villa Landora!
was one of the first half-dozen sentences she spoke. My heart swelled
almost as Landor's would have done when I looked down upon it, nest-
ling among its olive-trees and vines, and with its upper windows (there
are five above the door) open to the setting sun. Over the centre of
these there is another story, set upon the housetop like a tower; and all
Italy, except its sea, is melted down into the glowing landscape it com-
mands. I plucked a leaf of ivy from the convent-garden as I looked, and
here it is. For Landor. With my love.'
So wrote Dickens to me from Florence on the 2d of April
1845. He had complied with the expressed wish of Landor
himself, on being asked what he most desired his friend should
bring him from Italy; and when I turned over Landor's papers
in the same month after an interval of exactly twenty years, the
ivy-leaf was found carefully enclosed with the letter in which I
had sent it. Here too may now be added what Dickens farther
said when thus reminded of the incident. I quote from his
review of the first edition of this biography in the last paper
written by him in All the Year Round.
'The friend, on coming back to England, related to Landor that he
had been much embarrassed, on going in search of the leaf, by his driver's
suddenly stopping his horses in a narrow lane, and presenting him (the
friend) to "La Signora Landora." The lady was walking alone on a
bright Italian winter-day; and the man, having been told to drive to the
Villa Landora, inferred that he must be conveying a guest or visitor.
"I pulled off my hat," said the friend, "apologised for the coachman's
"mistake, and drove on. The lady was walking with a rapid and firm
"step, nad bright eyes, a fine fresh colour, and looked animated and
330
Book VI.
AT FIESOLE.
"(
agreeable." Landor checked off each clause of the description, with a
stately nod of more than ready assent, and replied, with all his tremend-
ous energy concentrated into the sentence: "And the Lord forbid that
"I should do otherwise than declare that she always was agreeable-to
every one but me!"'
Landor began the first New Year's-day (1830) passed in the
villa Gherardescha by writing to his sisters. It had opened in-
auspiciously as far as weather was concerned. He had to tell
them how terrible the season was out there, in what their letters
were never tired of calling 'sunny Italy.' Owing to his living
two miles from Florence, it was eight days since the children
had been able to go to school, either on foot or in a carriage.
The roads were covered with ice, and appeared like so many
frozen cataracts. There had been for several days two wood-
cocks within a few yards of his door, where there was an open
spring. He went on to tell them also that his mother's death
had set him thinking of old times, and for several weeks there
had been moving visibly before his eyes processions of the old
Warwickshire faces. There was good ancient Mrs. Cook of Tach-
brooke, so patient of him in his boyhood; how did she carry her
many years? And yet they could not be so many, perhaps not
seventy; though hers was the oldest of all living faces he re-
membered in his childhood. Poor Mr. and Mrs. Farmer too, with
all their Christmas kindnesses to him; and the Parkhursts, the
Venours, the Wades, the Welds, the Cliffords, and many be-
side. He may perhaps visit England in another year: he has had
so many invitations; and from Paris even more. But my coun-
C
6
try now is Italy, where I have a residence for life, and literally
may sit under my own vine and my own fig-tree. I have some
thousands of the one and some scores of the other, with myrtles,
'pomegranates, oranges, lemons, gagias, and mimosas in great
quantity. I intend to make a garden not very unlike yours at
'Warwick; but, alas, time is wanting. I may live another ten
years, but do not expect it. In a few days, whenever the
'weather will allow it, I have four mimosas ready to place
'round my intended tomb, and a friend who is coming to plant
them.' He had also the inscription ready, intimating that he
should have lived enough when the tear of that friend had been
dried by him; and of course his Ianthe is presumably to be
'
1829-1835.
331
THE VILLA GHERARDESCHA.
taken as the lady and friend referred to. But whether the tear
he is to dry was for her husbands that had been, or for those
that were to be, does not appear; and from the recollection of a
visit I once made to her with Landor some years later in Bath,
I should have said that few tears at any time had troubled that
still bright, easy, good-humoured Irish face.
'Lo, where the four mimosas blend their shade
In calm repose at last is Landor laid:
For ere he slept he saw them planted here
By her his soul had ever held most dear,
And he had lived enough when he had dried her tear.'
The natural desire which all this awakened in his sisters to
know more about the new abode now affording him such genial
occupation, he gratified by a description in a later letter (2d Feb-
ruary 1831), which may be read with something still of his own
interest and pride in this new possession. I shall only farther
preface it by the remark that the money so generously advanced
for its purchase was repaid upon his son Arnold's attaining to
his majority in 1839, and that Mr. Ablett declined to the last to
accept any interest on the loan.
'Two years ago, in the beginning of the spring, I took a walk towards
Fiesole with a gentleman settled in North Wales, Mr. Ablett. I showed
him a small cottage with about twelve acres of land, which I was about to
take. He admired the situation, but preferred another house very near it,
with a much greater quantity of ground annexed. I endeavoured to per-
suade him to become my neighbour. He said little at the time, beyond the
pleasure he should have in seeing me so pleasantly situated: but he made
inquiries about the price of the larger house, and heard that it was not to
be let, but that it might be bought for about two thousand pounds. He
first desired me to buy it for him: then to keep it for myself: then to re-
pay him the money whenever I was rich enough,-and if I never was, to
leave it for my heirs to settle. In fact, he refuses even a farthing of in-
terest. All this was done by a man with whom I had not been more than
a few months acquainted. It is true his fortune is very large; but if others
equal him in fortune, no human being ever equalled him in generosity.
'I must now give you a description of the place. The front of the house
is towards the north, looking at the ancient town of Fiesole, three quarters
of a mile off. The hills of Fiesole protect it from the north and northeast
winds. The hall is 31 ft. by 22, and 20 high. On the right is a drawing-
room 22 by 20; and through it you come to another 26 by 20. All are
20 ft. high. Opposite the door is another leading down to the offices on
right and left; and between them to a terrace-walk about a hundred yards
long, overlooking Valdarno and Vallombrosa, celebrated by Milton. On the
right of the downward staircase is the upward staircase to the bedrooms;
332
Book VI.
AT FIESOLE.
and on the left are two other rooms corresponding with the two drawing-
rooms. Over the hall, which is vaulted, is another room of equal size,
delightfully cool in summer. I have four good bedrooms upstairs, 13 ft.
high. One smaller and two servants' bedrooms over these, 10 ft. high.
In the centre of the house is a high turret, a dovecote. The house is 60 ft.
high on the terrace side, and 50 on the other; the turret is 18 ft. above
the 60. I have two gardens: one with a fountain and fine jet-d'eau. In
the two are 165 large lemon-trees and 20 orange-trees, with two conserva-
tories to keep them in, in winter. The whole could not be built in these
days for 10,0001.
'I am putting everything into good order by degrees: in fact, I spend
in improvements what I used to spend in house-rent: that is about 751. a
year. I have planted 200 cypresses, 600 vines, 400 roses, 200 arbutuses,
and 70 bays, besides laurustinas, &c. &c. and 60 fruit-trees of the best
qualities from France. I have not had a moment's illness since I resided
here, nor have the children. My wife runs after colds; it would be strange
if she did not take them; but she has taken none here; hers are all from
Florence. I have the best water, the best air, and the best oil in the
world. They speak highly of the wine too; but here I doubt. In fact, I
hate wine, unless hock or claret.'
This was perhaps his happiest time in Italy. The villa gave
him employment at home, for which irritating subjects were for-
gotten or put aside; the Lawleys and other Warwickshire friends
pressed upon him hospitalities, which he did not so often decline
as of old; with 'cordial Hare and joyous Gell' many long-re-
membered pleasures were associated, Hare and his young wife.
having come to Florence, and visits at each other's houses being
frequently interchanged; acquaintance with Mr. Kenyon too,
who with his wife made some stay at Fiesole, had ripened ra-
pidly into a friendship which continued through all his later
years; to another visitor from England, Mr. Crabb Robinson,
full of cordial talk about Southey, Wordsworth, and Lamb, he
had taken no less kindly; visitors from places more distant than
England made occasional pilgrimages to see him; and even his
literary exercises were unattended, at the moment, by fevers of
impossible design, or self-invited failures and despairs, for he
was simply collecting and revising his poems, and had put away
for the present in his desk those dialogues in which, as he told
Southey, he had introduced Shakespeare and frightened himself.
If his sisters would but visit him now, he had never been so
able to bid them welcome. They should have his two best
rooms, two more beautiful than any in Warwick-castle, per-
1829-1835.
333
THE VILLA GHERARDESCHA.
fumed with orange-flowers, tuberoses, violets, and mignonette,
growing profusely under the windows. In that February letter
they are strongly pressed to come, and to bring with them one
of his father's breed of spaniels, and to send Mr. Ablett another.
A message to his brother Robert was in the same letter, telling
him his poem was too good for success, and himself too good for
failure by any such mistake as marriage. Henry is the only
one of us exactly cut out for the married state. But my ex-
´treme fondness for children compensates me for everything.'
Which he proceeds to show.
<
6
'Arnold is not ashamed, though almost thirteen, to throw his arms.
about my neck and kiss me twenty times together; and the others claim
the same right, "and have their claims allowed." Yet he is not effemi-
nate. He is very much admired for his manliness and spirit. He fences,
speaks French, and reads Greek passably. I hope he will dance, as I
have told him that I lost more pleasure by being a bad dancer than by
anything else; and since that he begins to practise more.'
Very sensible reply to all this was made by his sisters. They
could understand his own enjoyment in the caresses of his chil-
dren, but not, in the absence of any present plan of life and study,
the advantage the children were to derive from it in future years.
They spoke of their nephew Charles, now a lad of eighteen (the
letter is dated in March 1831), having become a favourite of
Dr. Arnold's; so that when their brother Charles had thought
of removing him, 'I hope not; I cannot spare him,' said Arnold.
Why should not his cousin come to England, where all his fu-
ture interests would be? Was it too late even then to give him
the advantage of such a school, where he would not be the less
respected for his father's name? Landor's rejoinder was in Dr.
Arnold's words, but, alas, with far other meaning: 'I cannot
spare him.' He was pleased to hear of Charles, who would
keep up the name in England; but Arnold would be content to
live in Italy. In other words, he sentenced him to what he
has himself characterised, in his touching picture of Andrea of
Hungary, as
... the worst
Of orphanage; the cruellest of frauds;
Stint of his education, while he played
Nor fancied he would want it. . .'
So for the two younger boys as well.
Though he had once
334
Book VI.
AT FIESOLE.
!
thought of the army and the law for them, he had since been
thinking they were less likely to be rogues and impostors if he
kept them out of professions. I lived nearly all the best days
of my life on less than 1507. a year; they may do the same.
'A young single man in Italy need not spend more. Music,
drawing, reading, occupy more innocently the few hours of
' life that are worth living than worldly and lucrative pursuits.
Happily all three are very fond of one another, and will never
'scramble.' There was no reasoning with such nonsense as this.
Such a fool's-paradise can only be shut when the irreparable
mischief has been done.
6
A
The farther letters interchanged in February and March of
this year (1831) concerned chiefly the Ipsley estate, and other
matters arising out of their mother's death. Landor steadily re-
fused to profit by the latter incident in any way, and could not
see why his trustees should even think of letting the place. His
mother had enjoyed the change of air every summer, and why
should not his sisters? Indeed, he would much rather never
let it than deprive them of any benefit they might derive from
such a change. Certainly our dear mother prolonged her life
'by the quiet of the place, and the delight she took in its beau-
'tiful scenery.' The furniture he would most assuredly not re-
ceive anything from. Let it be given to some honest family in
low circumstances, whose fathers or mothers had ever showed
any kindness to any of the Landors; some old servant of their
grandmother, or their aunt Eyres. Llanthony, I am afraid,
'will never be occupied by any one. I proposed to take down
'the house, and sell the materials; for certainly neither I nor
'Arnold will ever live there. I never think of it without think-
'ing of the ruin to which it has brought me; leaving me one
'of the poorest Englishmen in Florence, instead of one of the
' richest.' However, they might not perhaps think him so badly
off, if they were to come and see his beautiful villa, his noble
hall and staircase. Yet he would rather have had it near Swan-
sea, the part of the world he liked best of any. By choice he
would always be within easy walk of the sea. His great failure
at Fiesole had been the attempts to raise a turf. He finds the
ground will produce everything but grass; so they will know
•
1829-1835.
335
ENGLAND REVISITED.
what to send him, and let them not forget his favourite mul-
berry. The close of his letter turns to the younger generation
of Warwickshire names. 'Merely names to me, but connected
' with remembrances that reach beyond them.' But he supposes
the families go on much the same, and what would the Lucys
think if he were to introduce into a dialogue Shakespeare's old
Sir Thomas? His sisters do not directly answer that; but Eliza-
beth's next letter has a mention of the Lucys, doubtless arising
out of it, which is highly picturesque and suggestive. Some
families, she says, never seem to change through all their gene-
rations. There are the Lucys, for instance. Old Lucy was at
that time sheriff, and she only hopes his little boy of six years
old will appear in court with him.
'He is a good little fellow, but neither judge nor jury could look grave
at him. He is old Lucy precisely. He believes the whole world was made
for him and in honour of his dignity. He opens his round little eyes, but-
tons his round little mouth, inflates his round little face, and is graver
than any owl, including his grandpapa.'
IV. ENGLAND REVISITED.
That life was to pass without trouble even in the villa Gher-
ardescha, the reader will hardly expect from what he knows of
the character of its new lord. At the opening of 1831 I find
him in the thick of a terrible dispute with one M. Antoir, an
old attaché of the French legation, who, having a cottage near
the villa, had accused Landor of stopping an underground water-
course supplying the lands of both, and on his peremptory
denial had charged him with asserting what was not true. Here-
upon Landor challenged the Frenchman, and obtained for his
second Mr. Kirkup, who was sufficiently wise in such matters to
carry Landor through with honour and safety. The folly and
obstinacy of a second had cost Mr. Kirkup the life of one of his
best friends, John Scott; and he so managed the present affair
that it is only now worth mention as an evidence of Landor's
docility and confidence in proper hands. When not left wholly
to himself he was never quite unmanageable.
The incident occurred at the close of 1830; and in 1831
there reached him from London the first collected edition of his
336
Book VI.
AT FIESOLE.
Poems, prepared at the suggestion of Francis Hare to whom
it was dedicated, and published on commission by Mr. Moxon,
Julius Hare guaranteeing the expenses. Not many months later
his sisters were startled by a series of very radical and exultant
letters from him, in regard to reform bills, at a time when it
seemed, on the other hand, to these good kind women, that their
glorious country and its unimprovable constitution had fallen
into the hands of fools and rogues. But this was nothing to
their wonder at his announcement to them, on the 7th of Fe-
bruary 1832, of a sudden intention formed by him to visit
England in May. Ablett had pressed him so much, and his obli-
gations to that friend were so great, that he had not felt justified
in continuing to refuse.
In May 1832, in midst of the excitement that still was at-
tending the great Reform Bill, he arrived accordingly; and on
the 14th of that month wrote from London to tell his sisters
that he had traversed France safely in the thick of the cholera,
but that missing the boat at Dieppe, he was kept there a week
with nothing to see or read, and nobody to talk to. He had after-
wards stayed two days at Brighton with his Ianthe of early days,
the Countess de Molandè and her family, 'in the midst of music,
dancing, and fashionable people turned radicals. This amused
'me highly. Lady Bolingbroke told me that her husband would
never enter the House of Lords again. Yesterday I dined with
our good old friend Lord Wenlock. This morning the people
'are half mad about the king and the Tories.' He reached
London at last, and during his three days' stay attended a recep-
tion at the Duke of Sussex's, visited Charles Lamb at Enfield,
and went up to see Coleridge at Highgate.
C
<
In the last two visits his companion was Mr. Crabb Robin-
son, who had been very anxious that he should see those worthies,
and be seen of them. He did not make much of his interview
with Coleridge, who, though he put on a bran-new suit of
'black' in honour of the visit, and made Landor as many fine
speeches as if he had been a little girl, yet managed to keep all
the talk to himself, and took no notice of an enthusiastic men-
tion of Southey; but the hour he passed with Lamb was one of
unalloyed enjoyment. A letter from Crabb Robinson before he
1829-1835.
337
ENGLAND REVISITED.
}
came over had filled him with affection for that most lovable of
men, who had not an infirmity to which his sweetness of nature
did not give something of kinship to a virtue. 'I have just seen
'Charles and Mary Lamb,' Crabb Robinson had written (20th
October 1831), 'living in absolute solitude at Enfield. I found
your poems lying open before Lamb. Both tipsy and sober he
' is ever muttering Rose Aylmer. But it is not those lines only
· that have a curious fascination for him. He is always turning
to Gebir for things that haunt him in the same way.' Their
first and last hour was now passed together, and before they
parted they were old friends. I visited Lamb myself (with Barry
Cornwall) the following month, and remember the boyish delight
with which he read to us the verses which Landor had written
in the album of Emma Isola. He had just received them through
Robinson, and had lost little time in making rich return by
sending Landor his Last Essays of Elia. 'Pray accept,' he
wrote, a little volume. 'Tis a legacy from Elia, you'll see.
'Silver and gold had he none; but such as he had, left he you.
'I do not know how to thank you for attending to my request
' about the album. I thought you would never remember it.
Are not you proud and thankful, Emma? Yes, very both.'
And then underneath the words is the feminine signature of his
young friend.
'If you can spare a moment,' Lamb adds, 'I
'should be happy to hear from you. That rogue Robinson de-
'tained your verses till I called for them. Don't intrust a bit
' of prose to the rogue, but believe me your obliged C. L. My
'sister sends her kind regards.'
Landor's next visit was to Julius Hare at Cambridge. He
saw now for the first time the friend to whose judgment and ac-
tive kindness he owed so much, and passed three delightful days
with him. Next he went to exchange greetings with his sisters
at Warwick; after a week with them, made more joyous by the
frequent presence of Mr. Kenyon, who with his wife was then
staying at Leamington, he pushed on to join Mr. Ablett in North
Wales; and from Llanbedr in July he wrote to his sisters. He and
Ablett were to leave in another week for Lancashire and Cum-
berland, where he proposed to spend a day or two with Southey,
and about as much time with Wordsworth. He described his
Z
338
Book VI.
AT FIESOLE.
friend's Welsh home as abounding in magnificent trees, with the
richest valley in the world as well as the most varied hills; and
with lofty mountains not too near, nor too distant, but just as
great folks should be. He declared that every cottage on the
estate was more habitable than the best house on the Continent,
for that every one had a patent oven and a clock, and was sur-
rounded by a garden.
Our next glimpse of him is at the Lakes with Southey and
Wordsworth, to whom he introduces Ablett, and with whom his
stay is more brief than was at first intended, because of other
unlooked-for claims upon him. But an evening was spent in
company with both, recollected afterwards for its talk of poets
and poetry, wherein I remember his telling me he thought scant
justice was done to Byron by his friends, and insufficient appre-
ciation given to Scott; for that, when he had himself quoted
from the latter a line about the dog of a traveller lost in the
mountain snows, the comment it drew forth was a remark upon
it by Wordsworth as the only good line in the piece, with addi-
tion that the very same subject had been treated in one of his
own poems, which he thereupon recited from beginning to end.
I have heard him say also, that, objection having been taken to
an over-abundance of imagery in the prose of the Conversations,
Wordsworth unluckily took to himself a remark made in reply,
that prose will bear a great deal more of poetry than poetry will
bear of prose.
Once again, before leaving Cumberland, the friends met at
the seat of a common friend of both Ablett and Wordsworth,
Mr. Rawson of Wastwater. I heard myself from Mr. Ablett
two or three years later of the happy day thus passed; and his
account to me of the laughable vehemence with which Landor
had denounced the word impugn, employed by Southey in the
course of their talk, and after unavailing defence given up by
him to his friend's immitigable wrath, receives amusing confirm-
ation from a reply afterwards made to a letter of Southey's, who,
having found the word in Spenser and Shakespeare as well as in
Cranmer and South, retracted his too hasty surrender, and had
taken heart to say so to his friend. Spenser and Shakespeare,'
retorts Landor, 'have employed words ugly enough, but this is
6
1829-1835.
339
ENGLAND REVISITED.
6
the most odious. South himself, highly as I estimate him,
' and even you, whose language is still better, will never push
me across the road to shake hands with this uncouth ruffian.'
At Wastwater the friends separated, and within a couple of days
Southey wrote to say that Landor's recent apparition had been
to them as a dream, but as the pleasantest of dreams, and
one that was never to be indistinctly remembered. Landor ans-
wered this from Warwick, which, he tells his friend, after what
appeared to him almost an age of wandering, he had reached
the preceding week; and which, formerly of all places in the
world the most quiet and idle, was now joining its own noises
to those of Leamington. 'I remember the time, not forty years
'ago, when Leamington had only two tenements that joined each
other, and in the whole village only six or seven of any sort,
'besides the squire's, one Prew, who was the uncle of my grand-
mother. If her brother had lived, he would have had this
' vast property, at that time a small one. I cannot help smiling
' at the narrow escape I have had of three such encumbrances.'
(
From Julius Hare he heard in the same week that his visit
had left with Wordsworth also the pleasantest impression. Julius
had seen much of the great poet in that and the preceding year,
having passed some time with him at Rydal; 'and rarely indeed
in the course of life,' he wrote to Landor, 'is one allowed to
take such a survey of all that is lofty and all that is profound
' in our nature, as one obtains from living with him in his home.
He has frequently desired me to give you his kindest remem-
'brances and the assurances of his highest regard. Your poli-
'tics did not alarm him. He was in excellent health and spirits,
· and talked with all the alacrity of youth of the day you passed
'with him.' To this I will add the comment afforded by some
sentences from a letter sent by Hare to Landor in the midsum-
mer of the previous year (1831), which future biographers of the
poet may thank me for preserving. 'When Wordsworth was
'last with us at the end of April, I was very much grieved to
'find how much the state of the country and the ministerial re-
'form-bill had preyed upon his health. Everybody said he
'seemed to have grown ten years older in the last three months.
If the bill does all the good which its most infatuated advo-
'cates anticipate, it will hardly make amends for this evil.' The
6
340
Book VI.
AT FIESOLE.
·
anticipation of both evil and good is almost always in excess;
and brief as were the months that had brought the poet back
to his alacrity of youth, they had doubtless satisfied him also
that the country was getting on its legs again.
We hear of Landor next in Richmond and in London, from
which he wrote to his sisters on the 24th of September to say
that his English visit was coming to a close. His wife's family,
with whom he had been staying at Richmond, had been most
kind to him, but he was very impatient to be again among his
own creatures. Cholera had been with him on every side as he
travelled, but he had tried to be a match for it, and it would be
very spiteful of it to do for him' anywhere but at his own villa,
where he had a place prepared, and where his two labourers
were to have a crown each for planting him. Their brother
Robert would tell them of the fortunate meeting 'before the inn
at Evesham, where his carriage and my coach had stopped ;'
and they would have heard of his visit to Charles at Colton.
On the following Saturday he meant to leave England, and they
would probably receive meanwhile some pictures he had intrusted
to Mr. Ablett for them.
Julius Hare and one of his Cambridge friends (since master
of Downing) accompanied Landor on his return. They travelled
through Belgium, up the Rhine to Frankfort, and through Mun-
ich and the Tyrol into Italy, reaching Florence on the last day
of November. After he quitted Hofer's country, and while stay-
ing with his friends in Venice, a city that he held always to be
incomparable among cities as Shakespeare among men, he had
put into his own language what he heard from the Tyrolese pea-
sants about Hofer's death, and sent it over to England for pub-
lication. At the same time he sent also to Kenyon an ode to
Southey and an ode to Wordsworth, written while yet he had
lingered amid the passes of the Tyrol. Much excellent verse was
in the latter, on the company of immortals with whom he ranked
his friend; and very pleasantly it closed by wishing them
'Every joy above
That highly-blessèd spirits prove,
Save one: and that too shall be theirs,
But after many rolling years,
When 'mid their light Thy light appears.'
1829-1835.
341
AGAIN IN ITALY.
Nor will the reader object that I should add the closing verse
of the yet nobler ode to Southey, in which, referring to the old
dedication of the Curse of Kehama, there is the grand exaggera-
tion of thanks and praise which, from Raleigh and Spenser
downward, poets have exercised the right to give to brother
poets, without exception or challenge:
(
Not, were that submarine
Gem-lighted city mine,
Wherein my name, engraven by thy hand,
Above the royal gleam of blazonry shall stand;
Not, were all Syracuse
Pour'd forth before my Muse,
With Hiero's cars and steeds, and Pindar's lyre
Brightening the path with more than solar fire,
Could I as would beseem requite the praise
Shower'd upon my low head from thy most lofty lays.'
As soon as I read your ode to Southey,' wrote Kenyon to
Landor (16th January 1833), 'I resolved to print it. I sounded
'S. on the subject, and then sent it to the Athenæum, the Editor
' of which deferred it for a week, that it might give éclat to the
'first paper of the year. Southey said something about omit-
ting the last stanza, as beyond the occasion; but this I did not
attend to.' Crabb Robinson wrote to him a few months later
that Wordsworth was extremely grateful, though he thought
Southey's ode the best, and wished that, in his own, Dryden had
been praised less and Spenser more.
V. AGAIN IN ITALY: OLD PICTURES AND NEW FRIENDS.
Landor had by this time become known, not wisely but too
well, among the Italian picture-dealers, who passed through his
hands as many rare old masters as would have set up the for-
tunes of half the galleries in Europe. In this as in too many
other things he had no judgment but his will; and a cheerful
self-imposture enabled him in perfect good faith to carry on the
imposture honestly with all, even with the rascals who made
it their commodity. He would so prepare you by a letter for his
Rubens or his Raffaelle, or in its presence would do it homage
with such perfect good faith, that your own eyes were as ready as
342
Book VI.
AT FIESOLE.
his to be made fools to the other senses. Your picture found its
way to Alton,' wrote Augustus Hare to him in the summer of
1833, and we thought it almost worthy of the letter which an-
nounced its coming. More perfect than that letter it could not
'have been, if Raffaelle had painted the whole of it.' Often
have enjoyments in this way been mine which the presence of
the real masters could not have made addition to; and never
had I reason to question his own belief that the canvas did
actually contain the glories that were but reflected on it from
imagination and desire. It was incident to such treasures of
course that they should rapidly accumulate; here and there even
a real master crept in; and what with the splendour of the
frames, the show upon his walls became magnificent. But the
principle of the collection admitted hardly of a limit, and the
treasures overflowed. He had taken several with him to Eng-
land. Ablett had a Carlo Dolce; his sisters some Claudes and
Canalettis; and his brother Henry, with special injunction that
he should place them at Tachbrooke, which in part he had lately
repurchased, some masters as old as Perugino. He now tells
his sisters (8th January 1834) that he has a great many more
pictures going to them, only delayed by the rogues in the cus-
tom-house wanting more money. As to his brother's or their
offering to pay for them, that was quite out of the question. He
had more than he has room for, as his windows are low, not
reaching to the middle height of the apartments and they were
to tell Henry that his batch would follow. They would be very
old ones, Cimabues and Giottos, and were getting ready from
suppressed convents and monasteries at Prato and Pistoia. In
later years I partook myself of this munificence; and I well re-
member, when I then met Julius Hare with Landor at Kenyon's
dinner-table, with what a grave smile, lighting up the deep-
marked lines of his thoughtful face, Julius spoke of his drawing-
room at Hurstmonceaux as perhaps the only one in England
that had seven virgins in it each of them almost three hundred
years old.
:
The notices that follow are from Landor's letters to his sis-
ters in 1834, the last that were to be written to them from his
home in Italy.
1829-1835.
343
AGAIN IN ITALY.
I
AUGUST 27, 1834.
'We have heard that Coleridge is dead. He had recovered his health
when I saw him, and told me that he had not been better for many years.
Poor man! He put on a bran-new suit of black to come down and see me,
and made me as many fine speeches as he ever could have done to a pretty
girl. My heart aches at the thought that almost the greatest genius in
the world, and one so friendly to me, is gone from it. Southey too is likely
to suffer the most severe affliction, not merely in the death of his old friend,
but his wife (he says) has been long declining in health, and he fears to
lose her. She too, when I saw her, was florid and strong, and had not
begun to bear the appearance of age in any respect whatever. I hear won-
derful things of a new poem by Mr. Taylor, Philip Van Artevelde.'
SAME DATE: A NEW BOOK.
'Before a month is over, you or Harry (it comes to the same thing) will
receive a very curious book, "The Examination of William Shakespeare
before Sir Thomas Lucy touching Deer-Stealing." Of course it will in-
terest Henry more than you, being law. It is not impossible that I may
be very soon in England, for I have told Lord Mulgrave that I would ac-
cept the Archbishopric .of Canterbury, if he would obtain a commendam
from the king for me to hold the Popedom at the same time. But perhaps
the popular outcry against pluralities may raise some difficulty. I begin
to sicken of Italy; for five entire months we have not had rain enough to
wash a pocket-handkerchief, and no dew. Even the big leaves are falling
off; my pear-trees and peaches are withered. I shall lose nearly sixty.
The apricots stand it for the present.'
In the same letter he sends word of another consignment of
pictures on the way to his sisters and to Henry. The previous
one had been most successful. Thanks were profuse; and his
sister Elizabeth had described amusingly Henry's enthusiasm,
as he knelt before virgins and children, no less a picture than
they. This last batch, his sister Elizabeth told him in acknow- .
ledgment, had become quite the rage' at Warwick, all sorts of
people flocking to see them; but sisters and brother had not
yet divided the spoil. Her previous letter (22d October), ur-
gently pressing him to pay them another visit in the ensuing
year, had given him melancholy news about Southey's wife; and
to this he replied very sadly, telling her that he could not bring
himself then to move from Florence, and enclosing her some
verses sent as his reply to a similar invitation. The verses'
were that fine ode to Joseph Ablett to be found in the collected
works, which will preserve his friend's name as long as his own
survives. I give a part of it here as written in this letter, be-
cause of the changes made in it as printed, where the couplet
เ
1
Uor M
344
Book VI.
AT FIESOLE.
on Coleridge's death is omitted altogether. Poetry can hardly
boast of a line in which more is said, or set to a lovelier music,
than that upon Wordsworth and Southey.
'Together we have visited the men
Whose song Scotch outcries vainly would have drown'd;
Ah, shall we ever grasp the hand again
That gave the British harp its truest sound?
Coleridge hath heard the call, and bathes in bliss
Among the spirits that have power like his.
Live, Derwent's guest! and thou by Grasmere springs!
Serene creators of immortal things.
Thou knowest how, and why, are dear to me
My citron-groves of Fiesole.
Here can I sit or roam at will;
Few trouble me, few wish me ill,
Few come across me, few too near;
Here all my wishes make their stand;
Here ask I no one's voice or hand;
Scornful of favour, ignorant of fear.
Behold our Earth, most nigh the sun
Her zone least opens to the genial heat,
But farther off her veins more freely run:
'Tis thus with those who whirl about the great:
The nearest shrink and shiver; we remote
May open-breasted blow the pastoral oat.'
On the 26th of January 1835 he wrote again to his sisters,
very anxious about Ellen's health, as to which ill report had
reached him, and promising Henry at least twenty more pictures,
most of them greatly better than the first, and quite as curious,
'excepting the Cimabues, which nobody else possesses, I mean
no private man.' Its opening allusion is to some Warwick friends
he had called upon.
'The next morning our minister, George Seymour, came to see me,
and I desired him to present them at court, when she finds herself strong
enough for giving parties. He will show them every possible attention. I
never knew a man I liked better than Seymour, and his friendship for me
is equal to my regard for him. And now I must tell you that that wicked
book about Shakespeare has called forth the most eloquent piece of criti-
cism in our language. You will find it in the Examiner. Let me recom-
mend to you Leigh Hunt's London Journal, three halfpence a week. It
contains neither politics nor scandal, but very delightful things in every
department of graceful literature. It has copied, I hear, word for word,
the splendid eulogy of the Examiner, in its 38th number of December 17.
Maou
1829-1835.
345
AGAIN IN ITALY.
I intend to send for this paper from its commencement. I am sorry to
hear of Charles Lamb's death. If you have not read the Essays of Elia,
pray send for them. I did hope to see once more both him and poor
Coleridge. I have addressed some lines to his sister, whose affecting his-
tory I will tell you some day.
Comfort thee, O thou mourner, yet awhile!
Again shall Elia's smile
Refresh thy heart, where heart can ache no more.
What is it we deplore?
He leaves behind him, freed from griefs and years,
Far worthier things than tears:
The love of friends without a single foe;
Unequall'd lot below! . . .
Are not his footsteps follow'd by the eyes
Of all the good and wise?
Though the warm day is over, yet they seek
Upon the lofty peak
Of his pure mind the roseate light that glows
O'er death's perennial snows.
Behold him! from the region of the blest
He speaks: he bids thee rest.
And now I must transcribe for you some verses written on my Carlino by
Mr. Milnes.'
Being already in type, they may be omitted here. Addressed
'to a child with black eyes and golden hair,' they stand first in
Mr. Milnes's Poems of many Years; and, with others to Landor's
second son in the Memorials of a Residence on the Continent,
under the date of 'Fiesole, 1833,' they commemorate the intro-
duction to Landor in that year of one who held always after-
wards a high place among his friends. The very last of Landor's
letters from Italy to Southey was brought over in 1835 by Mr.
Milnes, whom it introduced to the laureate; and one of the last
received in Italy by Landor, also a letter of introduction for a
young poet, was taken over to him by Mr. Algernon Swinburne
from Lord Houghton after nearly thirty years. Their friendship
during the interval had been uninterrupted; and has received.
grateful commemoration, since the first edition of this biography
appeared, in a paper contributed by Lord Houghton to the
Edinburgh Review.
To this date belongs also the personal knowledge of Emer-
son, valued by Landor as a compliment worthy to have been re-
346
Book VI.
AT FIESOLE.
ceived. 'You will hardly remember my name,' wrote Emerson
to him three years later, 'and I will therefore remind you that
' in the spring of 1833 I was indebted to your hospitality and
'courtesy at Florence, as I had already been, and shall always
be, to your wisdom.' This letter accompanied some books
which Mr. Charles Sumner had brought with him to England
in 1837, as an acknowledgment of the 'delight and instruction'
derived from the Imaginary Conversations.
From the American sculptor Greenough, himself a man of
genius, Emerson had received, through a common friend, Lan-
dor's invitation to San Domenica di Fiesole; and on the 15th
of May he went up to dine with him.
'I found him noble and courteous, living in a cloud of pictures at his
villa Gherardescha, a fine house commanding a beautiful landscape. I
had inferred from his books, or magnified from some anecdotes, an im-
pression of Achillean wrath,—an untameable potulance. I do not know
whether the imputation were just or not, but certainly on this May day
his courtesy veiled that haughty mind, and he was the most patient and
gentle of hosts.'
Upon this thoughtful American admirer Landor's talk produced
the effect of a man decided in his opinions, rather liking to sur-
prise his listener, and well content to impress, if possible, his
English whim on even the immutable past.
'No great man ever had a great son, if Philip and Alexander be not
an exception; and Philip he calls the greater man. In art he loves the
Greeks, and in sculpture them only. He prefers the Venus to everything
else, and, after that, the head of Alexander in the gallery here. He pre-
fers John of Bologna to Michael Angelo; in painting, Raffaelle; and
shares the growing taste for Perugino and the early masters. The Greek
histories he thought the only good, and after them Voltairo's. I could
not make him praise Mackintosh, nor my more recent friends; but Mon-
taigne very cordially, and Charron also, which seemed indiscriminating.'
He appears to have talked, too, of Wordsworth, Byron, Mas-
singer, Beaumont and Fletcher; to have lauded Southey, some-
what to the impatience of his visitor; to have expressed great
admiration for Washington; and to have praised the beautiful
cyclamen which grows all about Florence.
A second time Emerson shared the hospitality of the villa,
and this time Greenough accompanied him, when Landor enter-
tained them by reciting at once half a dozen hexameter lines of
Julius Cæsar's! from Donatus, he said.
1829-1835.
347
AGAIN IN ITALY.
'He glorified Lord Chesterfield more than was necessary, and under-
valued Burke, and undervalued Socrates; designated as three of the
greatest of men Washington, Phocion, and Timoleon; and did not even
forget to remark the similar termination of their names. A great man,
he said, should make great sacrifices, and kill his hundred oxen without
knowing whether they would be consumed by gods and heroes, or whether
the flies would eat them.'
Emerson had seen some wonderful microscopes in Florence, and
spoke of the uses to which they were applied; but he found that
Landor despised entomology, though in the same breath, anti-
cipating Herschel's fine remark on the microscope and telescope
as explorers of the infinite in both directions,' he said that the
'sublime was in a grain of dust.' Emerson adds to these no-
tices of Landor's talk, after mentioning one of his rooms filled
with pictures, that he had been more curious to see his library;
but that one of the guests at the dinner told him Landor gave
away all his books, and had never more than a dozen at a time
in his house. Which indeed was perfectly true.
The sum of Mr. Emerson's impressions of the famous Eng-
lishman, one of the three or four he had come so far to see, writ-
ten thirteen years after they thus had met, shall be given in his
own words.
'Mr. Landor carries to its height the love of freak which the English
delight to indulge, as if to signalise their commanding freedom. He has
a wonderful brain, despotic, violent, and inexhaustible, meant for a sol-
dier, by some chance converted to letters, in which there is not a style
nor a tint not known to him, yet with an English appetite for action and
heroes. The thing done avails, and not what is said about it. An ori-
ginal sentence, a step forward, is worth more than all the censures. Lan-
dor is strangely undervalued in England; usually ignored; and sometimes
savagely attacked in the reviews. The criticism may be right or wrong,
and is quickly forgotten; but year after year the scholar must still go
back to Landor for multitudes of elegant sentences, for wisdom, wit, and
indignation that are unforgetable.'
A sudden departure of some friends whom he wished to ac-
company to Venice took Emerson away from Florence at the
close of May, and compelled him to say adieu to Landor by letter
instead of in person. The letter thanked him earnestly for his
ready hospitality to a stranger, and took occasion at the same
'time again to acknowledge a very deep debt of pleasure and in-
'struction to the author of the Imaginary Conversations.'
348
Book VI.
AT FIESOLE.
Nearly twenty years later, when Landor had his home in
Bath, and while the Exhibition of '51 was bringing all the world
to London, he was reminded, by the American sculptor who thus
visited him with Emerson, of one subject that had arisen in their
conversation under his 'fig-trees on the southern slope of the
'Fiesolan hills,' not included in his countryman's recollections.
Looking down on the little village where Michael Angelo was
born, they had spoken of the kind of art that the Tuscan princes
had chosen chiefly to encourage in Florence, since the date when
the founder of the monarchy entered as prince, and Michael
Angelo went out as exile. This was the art of mosaic: the
school for fashioning 'piebald mineralogical specimens into a
'greater or less resemblance of fruits, flowers, and landscapes ;'
which had flourished while Giotto was overlaid with whitewash
and Leonardo and Raffaelle were carried off by strangers from
their native cities; and which had dared at last to rear, by the
very side of the tombs of Giuliano and Lorenzo, the so-named
(and well-named) Chapel of the Princes, all whose ornaments
were the products of its Chinese industry and Turkish taste.
Mr. Greenough reminded Landor of a remark he had made upon
their having with such gewgaws brushed the very beard of the
sculptor of Moses, that it was 'as if a fellow in a laced coat
should start up to claim attention where Cæsar was and was
speaking; and what now would he say to the production that
had been sent over from Florence to represent the birthplace of
Buonarotti at the world's fair, which was neither more nor less
than a table in pietra dura that had cost a hundred thousand
francesconi, or, in other words, a day's work of four hundred
thousand Tuscans!
I cannot but think that such stolid impertinence as this calls for
justice at your hand. I know no one else who unites the knowledge and
feeling necessary to judge them, with the vigour and mastery required
for their execution. I pray you, sir, as you look upon that table, to reflect
upon the size of the grand duchy, the aptitude of its children for the
nobler development of art, the numbers devoted to its cultivation here,
their pitiable poverty; and I am sure that you will deal with the wrong
according to its deserts. The classic scourge of your Latin hexameters,
or the English whip bequeathed you by the dean, either of these, or both,
may do somewhat, as well in your country as in mine, to check osten-
tatious barbarism; may show that genius and sentiment can convert all
1
1829-1835.
349
AGAIN IN ITALY.
3
stone to precious stone; while the obscure diligence of years, uninformed
by art, makes but a monument of laborious idleness.'
Landor had indorsed this passage of the letter with a cha-
racteristic approval which its closing sentence not less deserved.
It spoke of the fame which Emerson had justly won since the
days in which they had met at Fiesole, and hinted at the only
disadvantage under which the wealth of his genius placed him,
of using often language so weighted with meaning as necessarily
to express of any given thing more than he could by any possi-
bility see in it. Perhaps Emerson is greedy in this way some-
times, but still "they be prave 'ords." I am sure that the
'Greek statues, though they are not tormented by an ambition
'to say all, yet include all; and I remember having heard you
remark, in my work-room, that their writers too were as pro-
found in fixing the limits of their art.'
(
เ
6
(
To the 'brave words' of the great American Landor had also
objections of his own to state, when, two or three years after
Greenough's letter was written, Emerson published his descrip-
tion of the meeting at Fiesole; and, to begin with, he protested
that the short conversations held at his Tuscan villa were in-
sufficient for an estimate of his character and opinions. But
one does not assume to give a man's character in putting forth
a few of his sayings, although in one or two recorded by Emer-
son, such as the preference of Giovanni da Bologna over Michael
Angelo, there was perhaps more character than either sayer or
listener knew at the time. To an outbreak of spleen at a neigh-
bour resident in Fiesole whom Landor had quarrelled with, and
who claimed to be Michael Angelo's descendant, the sculptor of
Bologna owed that momentary elevation. It did not last even
as long as the trumpery quarrel; for Landor's heaviest blow
against the offending Italian was delivered afterwards under
cover of the immeasurable supremacy of his ancestor. 'Deplor-
able,' he then exclaimed, 'that the inheritor of his house and
(
(
name should be so vile a sycophant that even the blast of Mi-
'chael's trumpet could not rouse his abject soul!' Assuredly
this trumpet was not one that to Landor at any time gave an
uncertain sound. He objected, now and then; I have even
heard him so irreverent as to compare a famous painting in the
350
Book VI.
AT FIESOLE.
Sistine-chapel to a prodigious giblet-pie; but he never really
faltered in his allegiance to the greatest master of Italian art.
Another of his complaints was that Emerson should have
ascribed to him the saying that the Greek historians were the
only good ones. He did not think so. Davila, Macchiavelli,
Voltaire, Michelet, had afforded him much instruction and
much delight; Gibbon he held to be worthy of a name among
the most enlightened and eloquent of the ancients; and he glo-
ried in his friend and countryman William Napier, who had
balanced with an equal hand Napoleon and Wellington. He
claimed also not to have been so indiscriminating as Emerson
supposed in his judgment of Charron. He had not compared
him with Montaigne, but he had found wisdom in him, and,
what was rare, sincerity. While he admitted that he did not
like Mackintosh, he yet professed (with perfect truth) to be
more addicted to praise than to censure: claiming in this to be
unlike the English in general, who were as fierce partisans in
literary as in parliamentary elections, and as ready to cheer as
to jostle a candidate of whom in actual truth they knew no-
thing. Of both parties in politics he had always kept himself
clear, possessing votes in four counties without ever giving one;
and in the turbulent contest for literary honours he had not
been less abstinent. In short (as he almost always ended such
personal confessions), he had never envied any man anything
but waltzing, for which he would have given all the acquire-
ments he had; and he had not failed in this because he was
inactive, or not accurate of ear, but because he was ashamed,
or rather shamefaced.
Socrates he had never undervalued. Incomparably the cle-
verest of the sophists, he had turned them all into ridicule ;
and for this he honoured him, though as a philosopher he
counted him inferior to Epicurus and Epictetus. He did not
despise entomology, but was only ignorant of it; as indeed he
was of almost all science; loving flowers and plants indeed, but
knowing less about them than is known by a beetle or a butter-
fly. He had no disposition to glorify Chesterfield, though he
thought him one of the best of our writers in regard to style ;
but only to put in a word in defence of his Letters, as to which,
1829-1835.
351
AGAIN IN ITALY.
!
I
for the statement that Archbishop Beresford had placed them
in the hands of his daughter, he alleged the authority of that
most reverend person's son. A polished courtier and a virtuous
prelate knew their value; and for his own part he thought that
perhaps the neglect of them in modern days was one reason why
a gentleman was become almost as rare as a man of genius.
What most had nettled him in Emerson's book, however,
was not the report of any saying of his own, but a remark upon
him made by Carlyle. 'Landor's principle is mere rebellion.'
He maintained that quite the contrary was apparent and pro-
minent in many of his writings. He had always been conserva-
tive; but he had the eager wish, wherever evil of any kind pre-
sented itself, political, moral, or religious, to eradicate it straight-
way, without reference to the old blockhead cry of what was to
be substituted in its place. When docks or thistles were plucked
up, was any such question asked? 'I have said plainly, more
'than once, and in many quarters, that I would not alter or
greatly modify the English constitution.' He had no fondness
for mere innovation. Whatever is changed should rest, if pos-
sible, on what has been tried. A foundation, if ever solid, was the
more solid the longer it had stood. It was because he approved
of the hereditary character of the bulk of the House of Lords
that he would have a better sort of life-peers introduced into it
than were there at present; for he thought it the worst place in
the world to put a bishop in, and would send a beadle after
every overlooker that left his diocese except on service for the
head of the church, his sovereign. As to such royal service,
too, when rendered by the higher nobility, he would not have
them paid for it as menials are paid: he had too much respect
for the order. Not that he included in this order the peerage
alone. Among the country gentlemen of England were men
whose ancestors were noble when the ancestors of half the peer-
age were nothing better than serfs.
Thus he came by degrees to the avowal of a republicanism
in which he recognised authority, as opposed to that mere de-
mocracy which he admitted to be 'the principle of rebellion.'
His views were not such as to propitiate either Carlyle or Emer-
son, but have an interest for us here. He did not believe that
352
Book VI.
AT FIESOLE.
we should rest where we are; and was equally uncertain, when
Enceladus should have shaken his shoulder and turned his side,
whether we should then rest long. Democracy as it existed in
America he declared to be his abhorrence. Lax and disjointed,
it always wore out the machine. Republicanism was quite other-
wise; but, alas, where did it now exist? Few had been the na-
tions capable of receiving, still fewer of retaining, that pure and
efficient form. The nations on the Ebro and the mountaineers
of Biscay had enjoyed it substantially for century after century.
Holland, Ragusa, Genoa, Venice, had been deprived of it by that
holy alliance whose influence had withered the Continent, and
changed even the features of England. One of the worst of
public calamities, in Landor's opinion, was the overthrow of the
Venetian republic. Then was swept away the oldest and truest
nobility in the world. 'How happy were the Venetian states
'governed for a thousand years by the brave and intelligent
'gentlemen of the island city! All who did not conspire
against its security were secure. Look at the palaces they
' erected. Look at the arts they cultivated.
6
:
And look now at
'their damp and decaying walls.' But at this point he checked
himself. The disbelief he indulged, while yet a resident of Italy,
in all hope for Italian regeneration, was replaced by a better
faith but a few years after his return to England; and it had
become his conviction, when he thus remarked on Emerson's
notices of Fiesole, that even within the damp and decaying
walls of Venice lay the pledge of her ultimate restoration.
Enter and there behold such countenances as you will never
see elsewhere. These are not among the creatures whom God
will permit any deluge to sweep away. Heretofore a better
race of beings has uniformly succeeded to a viler, though a
'vaster; and it will be so again.' The several races of Italians
had but to compose their petty differences, quell their discord-
ances, stand united, and strike high. Miles, faciem feri, he re-
minded them, was the cry of the wisest and most valiant of the
Roman race.
6
6
All this has carried me somewhat out of date; but the final
reference I have to make to Emerson will bring us back to the
exact time at which my narrative had arrived: that of Landor's
>
1829-1835.
353
AGAIN IN ITALY.
closing days in Fiesole. He was not displeased that Emerson
should have noted in him, at that early time, a taste for the
pre-Raffaellite painters of Italy, and he described the ignorance
of them among the Italians themselves to be such that he was
reckoned a madman for indulging his taste. He met a tailor
one day with two small canvases under his arm, and two others
in his hands; he had given a few paoli for them; and, when
offered as many francesconi for his bargain, he thought the
English signor must be fairly out of his wits. I was thought
a madman, too,' continued Landor, 'as I sat under the shade
of a vast old fig-tree, while about twenty labourers were extir-
pating three or four acres of vines and olives in order to make
'somewhat like a meadow before my windows. Matti sono tutti
gli Inglesi, ma questo poi... followed by a shrug and an
' aposiopesis.'
He might so have been engaged when, in the early spring
of 1834, he received a visit from another American as little
famous at the time as his former American visitor had been, but
reserved for a future fame altogether different from Emerson's.
This was Mr. N. P. Willis, whose fuss and fury of boundless
hero-worship found in Landor an easy victim. I shall make my
allusion to him as brief as possible. Upon quitting Florence,
after receiving much hospitality at the villa, he took with him
the manuscript of a new book by Landor, which, with a letter
of introduction to Lady Blessington who had now taken up
her residence in London, he was to deliver on his arrival there;
and he carried off with him at the same time not only the
author's copy, interleaved and enlarged, of all the published
volumes of the Conversations, but also the manuscript of that
additional unpublished volume of which already I have de-
scribed the subjects and speakers; both being designed for
publication, not in England but America. Landor's own ac-
count may be quoted.
At this time an American traveller passed through Tuscany, and
favoured me with a visit at my country-seat. He expressed a wish
to reprint in America a large selection of my Imaginary Conversations,
omitting the political. He assured me they were the most thumbed books
on his table. With a smile at so energetic an expression of perhaps an
undesirable distinction, I offered him unreservedly and unconditionally
AA
354
Book VI.
AT FIESOLE.
my only copy of the five printed volumes, interlined and interleaved in
most places, which I had employed several years in improving and en-
larging, together with my manuscript of the sixth unpublished. He wrote
to me on his arrival in England, telling me that they were already on
their voyage to their destination.'
They had sailed from Leghorn, and the sequel of their ad-
ventures will shortly be stated. A few lines of a letter from
Lady Blessington to Landor will tell us meanwhile of the other
packet also taken charge of by the traveller. 'I have received'
(9th June 1834) 'your manuscript, and am delighted with it.
'Mr. Willis delivered it to me with your letter, and I endea-
'voured to show him all the civility in my power, in honour
of his recommendation.' The manuscript was the book about
Shakespeare, of which we have seen mention in the family let-
ters from time to time, as 'curious' and even wicked;' which
was published in London in the autumn of 1834; and of which
some account is now due.
VI. EXAMINATION OF SHAKESPEARE FOR DEER-STEAling.
The letter in the foregoing section, dated at the close of
January 1835, is the last which Landor wrote to his sisters
from Italy; and I have retained in it an allusion quite un-
deserved to a youthful criticism of mine upon the Shakespeare
book, because it led to my acquaintance with the writer not many
weeks after his arrival in England. The opinion then formed
of that book I retain unaltered. One of the last things said to
me by Charles Lamb, a week or two before his death, was that
only two men could have written the Examination of Shake-
speare-he who wrote it, and the man it was written on; and
that is exactly what I think.
Landor's first notice of it to Lady Blessington had been in
a letter of the previous April, in which, after mentioning that
he had for some time been composing The Citation and Exami-
nation of William Shakespeare, Euseby Treen, Joseph Carnaby,
and Silas Gough, Clerk, before the Worshipful Sir Thomas Lucy,
Knight, touching Deer-Stealing on the 19th Day of September,
in the Year of Grace 1582, now first published from Original
Papers, he added, 'This is full of fun; I know not whether of
1829-1835.
355
EXAMINATION OF SHAKESPEARE.
'wit. It is the only thing I ever wrote that is likely to sell.'
This was a hint to his friend that she was to get him some
money for it, which indeed he had already promised, with un-
quenched ardour of hope and all his old splendour of benefi-
cence, to a school-fellow in distress. But by the time Lady
Blessington wrote back to him that she could by no means get
money for the anonymous venture (the joke of the Original
Papers turning of course on the reality of Mr. Ephraim Bar-
nett, their editor and reporter), Landor had discovered gaming
to be the cause of his school-fellow's distress, and no longer
cared to get money for him. Just as content, therefore, to
pay for printing as to be paid for printing, his book crept
into the world unrecompensed and unannounced in the autumn
of 1834.
I did my best then to draw attention to it; but the popu-
larity of the subject has not made it an exception to Landor's
works in general, and what has been done for them remains here
also necessary. By such passages as could be taken without im-
pairment of their beauty, however, I could not hope to convey
an approximate impression of what the book really is. Even if
its richness of humour could be displayed, the variety of its wit,
and what it presents of a very rare union of the higher order
of imagination to pathos as well as character of the simplest
kind, there would be something beyond all this, untold and still
to be discovered. As Marlowe defied the combined powers of
the poets to do justice to the face of his mistress, for that
the highest reaches of a human wit might be attained by
them, and
'Yet should there hover in their restless heads
One thought, one grace, one wonder at the best
Which into words no virtue can digest;'
so one finds here. There is a subtlety of genius as of beauty
that escapes when we would fix the expression of any special
charm; but at least one thing can be truly said of the book, that
with its very grain and tissue there is interwoven a purpose
profoundly human. It is steeped in the deepest waters of
humanity. It would have been characterised as gentle when
the word meant all that is noble as well as mild and wise.
356
Book VI.
AT FIESOLE.
There has been nothing written about Shakespeare so worthy.
of surviving; and whatever becomes of it now, its final place
will probably be found near that everlasting name.
Its plan is the simplest possible. Excepting the justice and
the culprit, the only persons present at the examination are the
justice's chaplain Sir Silas Gough, his clerk Mr. Ephraim Bar-
nett who reports it, and the two countrymen who watched
Shakespeare and his fellows in the forest and give evidence of
the offence, Joseph Carnaby and Euseby Treen. It is an hour
before noontide in the great hall at Charlecote, and the case is
proceeding as an ordinary sessions matter, when suddenly, one
hardly understands how, the offence of the culprit has become
nothing, and the culprit himself everything: for justice, chap-
lain, witnesses, reporter, all without seeming to intend it, are
but adding in their several ways to the interest he has contrived
to awaken; and even the anger of the worshipful knight, which
had fallen heavily on him at first for his girdings at the chap-
lain, only succeeds in so finding utterance as to foreshadow
something humorously different.
Young man, I perceive that if I do not stop thee in thy courses, thy
name, being involved in thy company's, may one day or other reach across
the county; and folks may handle it and turn it about, as it deserveth,
from Coleshill to Nuneaton, from Bromwicham to Brownsover. And who
knoweth but that, years after thy death, the very house wherein thou
wert born may be pointed at and commented on by knots of people, gentle
and simple! What a shame for an honest man's son! . . . But with God's
blessing the hundred shall be rid of thee, nay the whole shire. We will
have none such in our county: we justices are agreed upon it, and will
keep our word now and forevermore. Woe betide any that resembles
thee in any part of him!'
When the evidence comes to be taken, the witnesses have
less to tell of seeing Willy in Charlecote-park helping to carry off
the deer, than of hearing him with his wonderful talk frighten
his companions in its moonlit glades; and a few touches reproduce
the scene so vividly that we seem ourselves to have part in his
strange vagaries, his Windsor whimsies, his Italian girl's nursery
sighs, his Pucks and pinchings, his sleep under the oaks in the
ancient forest of Arden, and his waking from sleep in the Tem-
pest far at sea. But the witnesses have not more difficulty in
their effort to prove the offence than the worshipful Sir Thomas
1829-1835.
357
EXAMINATION OF SHAKESPEARE.
<
in his resolve to punish the offender. 'I cannot fix my eyes (as
one would say) on the shifting and sudden shade-and-shine,
' which cometh back to me, do what I will, and mazes me in a
6
manner and blinks me.' The end of it is therefore that the
warrant of commitment is put aside, and the lad has a lecture
read to him, instead, upon his ill character in the county;
that he is dissolute and light, much given to mummeries and
mysteries, wakes and carousals, cudgel-fighters, mountebanks,
and wanton women; also that it was said of him (his worship
hoped this might be without foundation) that he enacted parts,
and not simply of foresters and fairies, girls in the green-sick-
ness and friars, lawyers and outlaws, but likewise, having small
reverence for station, of kings and queens, knights and privy-
councillors, in all their glory. 'Reason and ruminate with thy-
'self now,' he adds, as the chaplain declares folks had been con-
sumed at the stake for pettier felonies, and Willy holds down
his head :
'Canst thou believe it to be innocent to counterfeit kings and queens?
Supposest thou that if the impression of their faces on a farthing be felo-
nious and ropeworthy, the imitation of head and body, voice and bearing,
plume and strut, crown and mantle, and everything else that maketh them
royal and glorious, be aught less? Perpend, young man, perpend. Con-
sider who among inferior mortals shall imitate them becomingly? Dream-
est thou they talk and act like checkmen at Banbury fair? How can thy
shallow brain suffice for their vast conceptions? How darest thou say, as
they do, Hang this fellow, Quarter that; flay, mutilate, stab, shoot, press,
hook, torture, burn alive? These are royalties. Who appointed thee to
such office?'
But I may not indulge myself by farther description. Pro-
fuse as are the striking thoughts and images in the book, and
wonderful everywhere the fitness and felicity of its style, its
higher wealth of imagination and wit is inseparable from the
subtlety of its art and design. A true book suffers and fades
when only the good things of its author are made prominent;
but, taken each at its worth, all here are so very masterly that
nothing remains to be said of a writer from whom such things
drop so abundantly on any subject that engages him, than that,
however distant be his full inheritance of fame, he can afford to
wait the time. One more extract alone shall be taken, and not
from the Examination itself. To it are appended by its reporter,
358
Book VI.
AT FIESOLE.
upon the relation of one of the retainers of the Earl of Essex,
not only a conference on the condition of Ireland between the
earl and Master Edmund Spenser, but also a delightful sketch of
the burial of Spenser shortly afterwards in Westminster Abbey.
What follows, on the common lot, is from the Conference.
'Look at any old mansion-house, and let the sun shine as gloriously
as it may on the golden vanes, or the arms recently quartered over the
gateway, or the embayed window, and on the happy pair that haply is toy-
ing at it; nevertheless thou mayest say that of a certainty the same fabric
hath seen much sorrow within its chambers, and heard many wailings :
and each time this was the heaviest stroke of all. Funerals have passed
along through the stout-hearted knights upon the wainscot, and amid the
laughing nymphs upon the arras. Old servants have shaken their heads,
as if somebody had deceived them, when they found that beauty and no-
bility could perish. Edmund, the things that are too true pass by us as if
they were not true at all; and when they have singled us out, then only
do they strike us.'
"
Landor justly valued this Dialogue, and was in great alarm
on hearing from England that the friends who had charge of the
printing could not understand why the same volume should con-
tain both it and the Examination. Expressly for this, he wrote
to Lady Blessington (11th of October 1834): 'I have written an
'Introduction which quite satisfied me; which hardly anything
'does upon the whole, though everything in part. Pray relieve
me, then, from this teasing anxiety, for the Examination and
'the Conference if disjoined would break my heart.' He had
his wish; yet wellnigh broke his heart notwithstanding, on see-
ing the printed book. 'I hope,' he wrote to Southey, 'my pub-
'lisher sent you the Examination of Shakespeare,-alas that I
should say
it the very worst-printed book that ever fell into
my hands. "Volubly discreet"! "slipped into" for "stripped
"unto"! "Sit mute" for "stand;" with many, many others!
And then there are words I never use, such as utmost ;" I
always write "uttermost." In fact the misprints amount to
forty of the grosser kind, and I know not how many of the
'smaller!' He added, with kindly allusion to the notice I had
written of it, that if a friendly report of the thing had not put
him in good humour before it reached him, he would have flung
it into the fire then and there, and dismissed it from his thoughts
forever.
6
6
6
j
:
1829-1835.
PERICLES AND ASPASIA,
359
The friendly report had outstripped the volume in Florence
by some days, and when the single copy afterwards arrived he
had to lend it round to all his circle. He carefully kept the little
notes from successive applicants for the loan, among them Milnes,
Brown, Leckie, Kirkup, and the novelist Mr. James, also for the
time his neighbour; and the flutter of pleasure and praise among
them had not been without pleasure for himself, and a flutter of
encouragement too. I did not believe such kind things would
´ be said of me for at least a century to come.' The effect sur-
vived even the less hopeful side of the picture; and when Crabb
Robinson wrote from London (10th of February 1835), that the
Shakespeare book would have fallen dead-born but for one re-
view, that, though this had proclaimed its beauties, others had
found it unintelligible, and that a paper of high character had
thrust it aside as a mere silly imitation of obsolete law proceed-
'ings and phrases,' Landor only replied to this part of the letter,
that he was busy with something else which he hoped might
have better fortune.
The 'something else' was Pericles and Aspasia, also written
for the most part in this last year of residence in Italy, which it
helps to make memorable.
VII. PERICLES AND ASPASIA.
LANDOR TO SOUTHEY (early in 1835).
My friend Mr. Robinson has not told me whether Charles Lamb has
left any writings behind him. Nothing can be more delightful than the
Essays of Elia; and his sister's style is perfect. I have read Mrs. Lei-
cester's School four times, and each time with equal if not fresh delight.
She is now far advanced in years, and no friend can be in the place of a
brother to her. He was a most affectionate creature, pleasurable and
even-tempered. Him too I saw but once, and yet I think of him as if I
had known him forty years.
Once, and once only, have I seen thy face,
Elia! once only has thy tripping tongue
Run o'er my breast, yet never has been left
Impression on it stronger or more sweet.
Cordial old man! what youth was in thy years,
What wisdom in thy levity, what truth
In every utterance of that purest soul!
Few are the spirits of the glorified
I'd spring to earlier at the gate of Heaven,
360
Book VI.
AT FIESOLE.
Is there anything yet left upon the earth? or is there only a void space
between you and me? . . . I began a conversation between Pericles and
Aspasia, and thought I could do better by a series of letters between
them, not uninterrupted; for the letters should begin with their first
friendship, should give place to their conversations afterwards, and re-
commence on their supposed separation during the plague of Athens. Few
materials are extant: Bayle, Menage, Thucydides, Plutarch, and hardly
anything more. So much the better. The coast is clear: there are nei-
ther rocks nor weeds before me. But I am writing as if I had not torn
to pieces all their love-letters and orations! Few were completed.'
So Landor wrote in the letter, the last addressed to his friend
from Italy, which Mr. Milnes brought over as an introduction
to the poet-laureate. But even while he wrote, the subject of
Pericles had recast itself in his mind; in the few more months
that remained to him at the villa Gherardescha it was brought
nearly to completion; and though, having carried the manuscript
to England in the December of 1835, it was published while he
resided there, it is to Italy the book belongs. Here therefore
brief account of it is given.
The first notion mentioned to Southey, of including conver-
sations in his plan, was thrown over afterwards; and he restricted
himself to a series of imaginary letters, opening at the arrival of
Aspasia in Athens from her native Miletus, and closing at the
death of Pericles in the third year of the Peloponnesian war.
He interspersed occasional speeches; and relieved his theme,
which he also adorns and illustrates, by a variety of fragments
of verse the most thoroughly Greek that any Englishman has
written. It was
a daring choice to select a time which
within the compass of a single life took in the lives of the fore-
most of the ancient poets, philosophers, historians, and men of
action, by whom humanity and the human race have been ex-
alted; and it was trebly daring to advance to such a task, trust-
ing solely to the force of his genius and unassisted but by the
treasures of his memory. In writing my Pericles and Aspasia,'
he says, in a letter of the 27th April 1836, 'I had no books to
'consult. The characters, thoughts, and actions are all fictions.
'Pericles was somewhat less amiable, Aspasia somewhat less
virtuous, Alcibiades somewhat less sensitive; but here I could
represent him so, being young, and before his character was
'displayed.' Besides these, his only leading persons are Aspasia's
<
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361
PERICLES AND ASPASIA.
6
friend and countrywoman Cleone, and the philosopher Anaxa-
goras; the figures in his foreground being wisely few, but their
grouping and accessories such as to surround with all the great-
ness of their age his hero and heroine, who vie with each other
in appreciation of the genius that is present with them, and in
their knowledge of the glories of the past. There are several ex-
quisite episodes; and that of Xeniades of Miletus, the rejected
lover of Aspasia, himself as vainly beloved by Cleone, invests
the latter with a softness and grace hardly second to Aspasia's
own. These two women fill the book to overflowing with sensi-
bility and tenderness, insomuch that one of Landor's American
admirers* has singled it out as in this respect preeminent
over all his writings, a book that we are frequently forced
to drop, and surrender ourselves to the visions and memories,
'soft or sad, which its words awaken, and cause to pass before
'the mind.' Yet a book also that perfectly sustains the interest
which it vividly awakens. Not mean is the exploit when a
writer can satisfy the most exacting scholarship while he re-
vives the forms or imitates the language of antiquity. But here
we have something more, resembling rather antiquity itself
than the most scholarly and successful presentation of it. We
are in the theatre when Prometheus is played; we are in the
house of Aspasia when Socrates and Aristophanes are there;
Thucydides is shown to us in the promise of his youth; we see
the last of the triumphs of Sophocles; and in speeches and let-
ters of Pericles upon the great affairs he is conducting, History
acts herself again. The political antagonism of Cimon, and the
war with its sad disasters, usher in the mournful close. Amid
the horrors of the plague the farewell to Athens and Aspasia is
written; and over a sun that is grandly setting the fiery star of
Alcibiades is seen to rise. Altogether a magnificent subject.
very nobly handled. Landor had chosen for trial the bow of
Ulysses, and it obeyed his hand.
Something to show manner and treatment might be added,
but it would not express the charm that overspreads the book
as with a wide and sunny atmosphere of clear bright air. It is
My old friend Mr. Hillard of Boston, who published in that city
nearly twenty years ago a volume of Selections from Landor.'
362
Book VI.
AT FIESOLE.
only to be understood from reading it how intensely Greek the
mind of Landor was. Here his faults became beauties. What
one inclines to object to very often in his writing, that his cha-
racters make too little allowance for human passions, that they
leave too little room for what in mechanics is called friction, that,
as during all his own life their inventor and maker was apt to
do, they too much believe what they wish and too readily sup-
pose to be practicable what appears to be desirable, is no objec-
tion here. What we forever associate with the Greeks, of buoyant
grace, elaborate refinement, precision of form, and imagination
more sensuous and fanciful than sentimental or spiritual, we shall
always find in most perfect expression where the impulsive pre-
dominates over the reflective part of the intellect. The mind of
Landor was not more Greek than his style was English, and here
it was at its very best; perfect in form, solid in substance, in
expression always concise and pure, and often piercing and ra-
diant as light itself. It was said of the book by one who was
herself a Greek scholar (Miss Barrett: 21st of August 1839),
that if he had written only this, it would have shown him to
be of all living writers the most unconventional in thought
' and word, the most classical, because the freest from mere clas-
'sicalism, the most Greek, because preeminently and purely
"English.'
At its close are three scenes in which Aspasia completes the
story of Agamemnon. The first, where the shade of Iphigenia,
unconscious of her mother's double crime, meets on his descent
from death the shade of her father, by whose hand she had her-
self perished, is for the originality of its conception unsurpassed;
and the second and third, representing the fate of Clytemnestra
and the madness of Orestes, are, in my judgment, for the in-
tensity and vividness of their dramatic expression, unequalled
in the dramatic writings of our time. Of the book containing
them he wrote to me afterwards: 'There is only one thought of
' another man beside myself in the whole of it, and this I have
given twice, wishing it to be the one that weighed most with
Pericles, that he never caused an Athenian to put on mourn-
'ing. In the rest, prose and poetry, wherever I detected a simi-
'larity to another, I struck out the sentence, however loath, and
6
(
1829-1835.
363
SELF-BANISHMENT FROM FIESOLE.
T
' however certain that it would have been mine. But, alas, the
'air we breathe is breathed by millions; so are the thoughts.'
Though scrupulous not to commit the offence, he could not avoid
the charge; and the reader will be amused to learn the effect
hereafter produced by it. Suffice it now to say that Pericles
and Aspasia was not published until the spring of 1836; and
that in the interval Landor had left the villa Gherardescha, and
taken up his residence in England.
VIII. SELF-BANISHMENT FROM FIESOLE.
'I leave thee, beauteous Italy! no more
From the high terraces, at eventide,
To look supine into thy depths of sky,
Thy golden moon between the cliff and me,
Or thy dark spires of fretted cypresses
Bordering the channel of the milky-way.
Fiesole and Valdarno must be dreams
Hereafter, and my own lost Affrico
Murmur to me but in the poet's song.
I did believe (what have I not believed?)
Weary with age, but unopprest by pain,
To close in thy soft clime my quiet day,
And rest my bones in the mimosa's shade.
Hope! Hope! few ever cherisht thee so little,
Few are the heads thou hast so rarely raised;
But thou didst promise this, and all was well:
For we are fond of thinking where to lie
When every pulse hath ceast, when the lone heart
Can lift no aspiration. Over all
•
*
The smiles of Nature shed a potent charm,
And light us to our chamber at the grave.'
W. S. L.
Among the unaccountable things in me, and many are so
even to myself, is this, that I admired Pindar somewhat more
' in youth than in what ought to be a graver age. However, his
wisdom, his high-mindedness, and his excellent selection of
‘topics, in which no writer of prose or verse ever equalled him,
' render him worthy to spend the evening with one who has
passed the earlier part of the day with Dante.' His old school-
fellow Cary had visited Italy, and to him these words were
addressed, thanking him for his translation of Pindar. What
also the course of my narrative requires that I should now relate,
the reader must be content to accept among the 'unaccountable
364
Book VI.
AT FIESOLE.
'things.' No account can as yet be given of it which he will
be able to regard as entirely intelligible.
In April 1835 Landor had left his villa, and was in Florence
waiting a letter from Armitage Brown, at this time on his way
to England. A few nights before his departure, when bidden
to his last dinner at the villa, he had been present at the scene
that had driven Landor from Fiesole; and in justification of this
extreme step an account of what he witnessed had been asked
from him. 'It was scarcely possible for me,' he wrote from
Genoa on the 4th of April, to make such a reply as your letter
required before I quitted Florence. As we have a day's rest
' here, I avail myself of it.' He grieves to have to be ungracious
to one who had uniformly treated him with the utmost courtesy
and kindness; but there are certain words, which, once ut-
tered, whether directed towards myself or my friend, cancel
6
<
(
(
6
every obligation; nor can I affect to feel their power lessened
on account of their being uttered by the wife of my friend.'
He then describes language used in presence of the elder child-
ren, which had constituted the unpardonable offence, and which
he declares to have had no provocation. It commenced by
'upbraiding you for conduct excessively bad towards herself;
' but her own statement, as well as your answer, certainly proved
'that you were blameless, and I ventured to point out her mis-
'take. Unfortunately no attention was paid to either of us;
' and still more unfortunately-' But the story is an old and
familiar one, that it is the very consciousness of our own injus-
tice which will make us add to the injury we inflict, and that,
by doing all we can to aggravate the wrong we commit, we seem
to justify ourselves for committing it.
•
•
'I am ashamed to write down the words, but to hear them was pain-
ful. I am afraid my patience would have left me in a tenth part of
the time; but you, to my astonishment, sat with a composed countenance,
never once making use of an uncivil expression, unless the following may
be so considered, when, after about an hour, she seemed exhausted: "I
beg, madam, you will, if you think proper, proceed; as I made up my
mind, from the first, to endure at least twice as much as you have been
yet pleased to speak." After dinner, when I saw her leave the room, I
followed, and again pointed out her mistake; when she readily agreed
with me, saying she was convinced you were not to blame. At this I
could not forbear exclaiming, "Well, then?" in the hope of bearing back
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SELF-BANISHMENT FROM FIESOLE.
to you some slight acknowledgment of regret on her part: but in this I
was disappointed. You conclude your letter with, "I feel confident you
will write a few lines, exculpating me, if you think I have acted with pro-
priety in very trying circumstances; and condemning me, if I acted with
violence, precipitation, or rudeness." For more than eleven years I have
been intimate with you, and, during that time, frequenting your house, I
never once saw you behave towards Mrs. Landor otherwise than with the
most gentlemanly demeanour, while your love for your children was un-
bounded. I was always aware that you gave entire control into her hands
over the children, the servants, and the management of the house; and,
when vexed or annoyed at anything, I could not but remark that you were
in the habit of requesting the cause to be remedied or removed, as a favour
to yourself. All this I have more than once repeated to Mrs. Landor in
answer to her accusations against you, which I could never well compre-
hend. When I have elsewhere heard you accused of being a violent man,
I have frankly acknowledged it; limiting however your violence to persons
guilty of meanness, roguery, or duplicity; by which I meant, and said, that
you utterly lost your temper with the Italians.'
It will not be supposed that these sentences, or even the en-
tire contents of the letter, if it had been possible to quote them,
are thought by me to afford the justification for which they were
sought by Landor and written by his friend: but what they tell
has the value of suggesting much that the writer had not the
power to tell; 'the gentlemanly demeanour' and the 'unbounded
'love' are significant of more than was intended by such con-
trasted expressions; and in the scene referred to, taken at its
worst, even in the step that followed, extravagant as it was, the
reader of former passages of this work may possibly see but the
sequel of what could not ever have been expected to have favour-
able issue. If, at the same time, I have delineated fairly the
character it was my purpose to express, it will seem that no in-
jury so fatal could be done, nor any offence so unpardonable be
committed, as one that might wound such a man in his self-love
by lowering him in his own opinion before others, with whom
especially he desired to stand well. He fled from his young wife
at Jersey, not because of her expressions, but because her little
sister heard them; and he had now the same reason for desert-
ing his home at Fiesole, without, alas, the same excuse for re-
turning. It was a home that must in future have always listeners
for such disputes; and perhaps, with every day that now passed,
disposed more and more themselves to take part in them.
6
• It
was not willingly,' he wrote to Southey, that I left Tuscany
366
Book VI.
AT FIESOLE.
' and my children. There was but one spot upon earth on which
'I had fixed my heart, and four objects on which my affection
'rested. That they might not hear every day such language as
no decent person should ever hear once, nor despise both pa-
' rents, I left the only delight of my existence.' The conclusion
nevertheless is forced upon us, that it was more for his own sake
than for theirs the extraordinary determination was taken. He
could not believe, if we are to trust the language always after-
wards used by him, that, with his own mere withdrawal from
his home, all indecency of language or temper was to cease there.
forever; and the more he condemns what had become unbear-
able by himself, the more he condemns himself for having left
his children exposed to it.
It is true that attempts were made for him by friends, in
which he took part more or less eagerly, to induce at least the
two elder children to join him in England; he had so far set-
tled as to engage to meet them at Verona with a hope of their
coming back with him; in negotiations having this in view, or
similar but more partial concessions, Francis Hare and his re-
lative Mrs. Dashwood, Miss Mackenzie of Seaforth, his friend
Ablett, and others very warmly engaged: there were even pro-
posals for his own return urged in the year of his flight by his
wife's relatives in England, pressed upon him two years after-
wards by Crabb Robinson when visiting Italy with Wordsworth,
and revived, at the instance of Mrs. Landor herself,* when Ken-
yon was at Fiesole with Mr. Bezzi two years later; but to these
last overtures the only answer was a peremptory negative, and,
under objections that would have seemed to me very far from
insuperable, all the other endeavours broke down. I am bound to
add, at the same time, that to an excessively urgent appeal from
Mr. Ravenshaw, who had married one of his wife's sisters, Lan-
dor made detailed reply of such a character as to elicit from his
brother-in-law frank admission of the strength of the grounds on
Their mother' (I quote Mr. Bezzi's letter to Landor, 19th Novem-
ber 1839), as you well know, does not-perhaps cannot-exercise any
'wholesome control over them' (the children); she plainly admits this:
and adduces it as a reason, among others, why she wishes and hopes
you will return.'
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SELF-BANISHMENT FROM FIESOLE.
C
which his refusal to comply was based; nor was the application
from that quarter ever renewed. 'I am sure you are wanted at
'home,' wrote Crabb Robinson to him from the villa itself in
June 1837, and that your presence might have the happiest
' effect on the character of your children. It might be decisive
as to the happiness of your daughter.' 'I wish to Heaven
'Julia were with you,' Mr. James had written to him in the
same month of the previous year 1836. 'It would be a com-
'fort to you and a blessing to her; for Italy, and Italy without
a father's care, is a sad land for young fair woman.' Between
these dates I ventured myself to make inquiry if there were any
chance of his consenting to return; and his reply gave me no
hope whatever. The condition he would have imposed rendered
it equally impossible that he should rejoin his children in Italy,
or that, with the decision at which the elder ones had arrived
respecting their mother, they should join him in England. He
enclosed to me with his letter at the time, I well remember, a
then unfinished Conversation in which he had just written these
sentences:
'Negligence of order and propriety, of duties and civilities, long en-
dured, often deprecated, ceases to be tolerable, when children grow up
and are in danger of following the example. It often happens that, if a
man unhappy in the married state were to disclose the manifold causes
of his uneasiness, they would be found-by those who were beyond their
influence to be of such a nature as rather to excite derision than sym-
pathy. The waters of bitterness do not fall on his head in a cataract,
but through a colander: one however like the vases of the Danaides, per-
forated only for replenishment. We know scarcely the vestibule of a house
of which we fancy we have penetrated all the corners. We know not how
grievously a man may have suffered, long before the calumnies of the world
befell him as he reluctantly left his house-door. There are women from
whom incessant tears of anger swell forth at imaginary wrongs; but of
contrition for their own delinquencies, not one.'
'Arrangements' continued nevertheless to be suggested, and
there were even active measures on foot to give them trial, go-
ing so far in one instance as the engagement of a house near Ply-
mouth, in which the mother might reside with all the children,
the father living in lodgings near ;* but I believe his own resolve
* The unceasing efforts of Francis Hare and his cousin Mrs. Dash-
wood brought matters thus far. The latter wrote, in November 1837, to
Landor's sister Elizabeth, that he had consented to allow the whole family
368
Book VI.
AT FIESOLE.
to have been now so decisively and so finally taken that at this
point I quit the subject. Whatever farther illustration it re-
ceives in these pages will be from circumstances or allusions
unavoidably incident to the narrative.
In the month when he quitted Florence he had a letter from
Francis Hare, at this time in Rome, full of pleasure and wonder
at his Shakespeare; telling him his genius had become stronger
of wing under the heights of Fiesole; hoping that his volume
of unpublished Conversations had been found; and suggesting
as a subject for a new conversation to be added to it, the meet-
ing and dinner of Pope Julius the Second, during his flight from
Rome, with the two cardinals that succeeded him as Popes Leo
and Clement. It was a good subject, but an unlucky time; and
as to the missing Conversations Landor had to reply even less
favourably. He had just received a letter from Mr. Willis giv-
ing doubtful hope of their recovery. The effusion was charac-
teristic.
'I have to beg that you will lay to the charge of England a part of the
annoyance you will feel about your books and мs. I was never more flat-
tered by a commission, and I have never fulfilled one so ill. They went
to America viâ Leghorn, and I expected fully to have arrived in New
York a month or two after them. But here I am still, and here I fear I
shall be for six months or a year to come. I will write immediately to
the United States for them.'
England was the culprit for having treated Mr. N. P. Willis
so well that he could not find it in his heart to quit the enter-
taining land. He was become Anglomane.
He was become Anglomane. 'I think no king
' in Europe lives half so well' as he had lived in Gordon-castle
and other Scotch houses, and in the hospitable halls of Lady
Blessington. As for what Landor had written to him in praise
C
to come to England in the following April. A more affectionate letter
than usual from Arnold, and a most kind and sensible one from my ex-
'cellent cousin Francis Hare, strongly advising the step for his children's
sake, have led to this.' Landor had written to her: 'I shall tell him
(F. H.) that they may all come next April, on condition that I never see
'her.' Of course it all went off; and in the next following month, at the
end of a letter describing a proposal of Dr. Conolly's to restore 'Shake-
'speare's chapel,' to which he had subscribed five pounds, he named Mrs.
Dashwood's scheme to me as a thing of the past, speaking at the same
time very highly of her kindness.
1829-1835.
369
SELF-BANISHMENT FROM FIESOLE.
|
of New England,-well, Mr. Willis thought that country really
did deserve 'not ill of his respect':
'But it is an ungracious people, and best judged at a distance. They
would offend your notions of what is due from one gentleman to another
every hour if you lived among them, while in the great outline (all that is
seen in the distance) they are a just and intelligent race, and good trus-
tees of one's birthright of national pride. The perfection of good fortune,
I think, is to be an American and live with Englishmen.'
Landor will be thought perhaps not without excuse for the
way in which he always afterwards spoke of Mr. N. P. Willis.
Before quitting Italy he stayed some time at the Baths of Lucca,
and he did not arrive in England until the autumn of 1835. He
stayed three months at Llanbedr-hall with Mr. Ablett, passed
the winter months at Clifton, and rejoined his friend at Llan-
bedr in the spring of 1836.
BB
BOOK SEVENTH.
1836-1857. ÆT. 61-82.
TWENTY-ONE YEARS AT BATH.
v. Death of
1. New and Old Friendships. II. The Pentameron of Boccaccio and
Petrarca. III. Writing Plays. IV. Visits and Visitors.
Southey. VI. Last Series of Conversations. VII. A Friend not Lite-
rary. VIII. Reviews, Collected Works, Poemata et Inscriptiones, and
Hellenics. IX. Summer Holidays and Guests at Home. x. Deaths of
Old Friends. XI. Fruit gathered from an Old Tree. x. Silent Com-
panions. XIII. Last Days in Bath, and Final Departure from Eng-
land.
I. NEW AND OLD FRIENDSHIPS.
I HAVE described on a former page the impression made upon
me by Landor when I met him first in the summer of 1836. He
and Wordsworth had come to town expressly to witness Tal-
fourd's Ion; with Crabb Robinson they occupied the same box
on the first night of that beautiful tragedy; and well satisfied
they seemed with themselves and with each other, as, to many
who watched them during the performance, they half divided
the interest with the play. We all of us met afterwards at Tal-
fourd's house; but, of the talk that might have made such a
night memorable, I regret that I recollect only one thing (im-
pressed upon my memory by what followed a little later), that
when the absence of Southey was deplored, in connection with
the domestic griefs that sadly occupied him at the time, there
was an expression of feeling from both Wordsworth and Landor
of unrestrained and unaffected earnestness. When a very few
weeks had passed after this, it was not a little startling to
receive a Satire on Satirists very evidently by Landor, in
which Wordsworth was handled sharply for alleged disrespect to
Southey.
It is hardly worth mention here. It made Crabb Robinson
very angry, and, to propitiate him, Landor good-naturedly called
1836-1857.
371
NEW AND OLD FRIENDSHIPS.
back his own copy of the satire already on its way to Southey;
but he stuck to his point that Wordsworth had been unjust to
Southey's poetry, and had indeed small appreciation generally
for the highest kinds of merit. To which Robinson made an
excellent reply; going wider and deeper than he meant to go,
or perhaps knew that he was going. What matters it that he
'is insensible to the astonishing powers of Voltaire or Goethe?
He is, after all, Wordsworth. In all cases I care little what a
man is not; I look to what he is. And Wordsworth has writ-
ten a hundred poems the least excellent of which I would not
'sacrifice to give him that openness of heart you require. Pro-
'ductive power acts by means of concentration. With few
exceptions those only love everything who, like me, can them-
'selves do nothing.' Nor was the satire itself all satire; for
not a few passages from it might be cited that rise equally above
the injustice committed and the anger provoked by it. Pericles
and Aspasia had at this time been published, and to Southey
thanks are given for having encouraged its writer to efforts of
which the fruit was its Agamemnon scenes.
C
Called up by genius in an after-age,
That awful spectre shook the Athenian stage;
From eve to morn, from morn to parting night,
Father and daughter stood before my sight;
I felt the looks they gave, the words they said,
And reconducted each serener shade. .
Ever shall those to me be well-spent days;
Sweet fell the tears upon them, sweet the praise.'
For some of the praise I was responsible; and very cordial
acknowledgment of it reached me in a letter written from Hei-
delberg (1st September 1836), whither he had gone in the vain
hope of being joined there by his elder children; when at
the same time he sent me a fresh scene of Orestes at Delphi,
and told me that those which had been most admired were writ-
ten at our friend Kenyon's before breakfast, but chiefly in the
'bedtime morning, while the sheets of Pericles were passing
through the press.' Not praise only fell, however, but here
and there a less kindly word for which he had little tolerance.
He wrote to me from Clifton, on the 29th of October :
C
'I returned from Germany a fortnight since, but found myself so
372
Book VII.
TWENTY-ONE YEARS AT BATH.
•
•
fatigued and spiritless that I remained only a night in London, not even
going to pay my respects at Gore-house. The splendid things you have
written of me have aroused, it seems, the choler of Blackwood. I never
have read until this moment (nor now) a single number of that worthy,
who, I understand, has the impudence to declare that I have stolen, God
knows what, from him and others. I am not informed how long this
Scotchman has been at work about me, but my publisher has advised me
that he loses 150l. by my Pericles. So that it is probable the Edinburgh
Areopagites have condemned me to a fine in my absence; for I never
can allow any man to be a loser by me, and am trying to economise to
the amount of this indemnity to Saunders and Otley. .
I think it pro-
bable that I shall fix myself at Clifton for a year.'
•
•
The Blackwood review was really not a bad one, and, with
a laugh for the absurdity of its parallel passages, might have
satisfied any man; he described it himself as a mere 'kick on
' the shin between two compliments;' yet what was here threat-
ened was soon afterwards actually done, and the hundred pounds
which Mr. James had obtained for the Ms. of Pericles was paid
back by Landor to its publishers. It may be held perhaps here-
after among the curiosities of literature that an author should
have done this. I am not acquainted with any other instance.
In the same letter he sent me a copy of the original edition
of Milton's Defensio, which had belonged to Swift's celebrated
uncle Godwin, one of whose lineal descendants was first husband
of his friend the Countess de Molandè: and here I may say,
once for all, that a continual and inexhaustible source of sym-
pathy between us was our common admiration of those chiefs
of our Commonwealth to whom early studies had led me; and
that even the glittering forms of antique gods and heroes never
took more radiant shape, in Landor's imagination, than the
homely iron helmets and buffalo cuirasses of our English Hamp-
dens, Iretons, Blakes, and Cromwells.
At Clifton the winter was passed; but before I mention his
meeting with Southey, who joined him there, an extract from
a letter addessed to that friend may be given.
C
I have been in Germany three months, hoping that some of my
family would meet me there. Here I am again at Clifton, and here I
think I shall finish my days; the climate suits my health so perfectly.
Again I hear the rumour, and this time I hope it is not a false one, that
you are coming amongst us. God grant that the expectation may arise
from some improvement in the health of Mrs. Southey... Nothing can
exceed the civilities I met with in Germany among the learned. No sooner
1836-1857.
373
NEW AND OLD FRIENDSHIPS.
had I reached England than I was informed of an attack made on me,
and a worse threatened, by some doctor or professor in Edinburgh. But
his labour is vain in regard to me. I have only to send back the 100l. I
got for my Pericles. Did you ever receive those two volumes? The short
letter of Pericles on the death of his sons will please you, and perhaps
some few others. I have been reading for the third time Charles
Elton's elegy on the loss of his two sons. It is not an elegy (though the
structure of the verse has nothing to do with the matter), but many parts
strike me as much as anything I ever read of the elegaic. Tears were in
my eyes the first time, the second time, and the third time, on reading
"That night the little chamber where they lay,
•
Fast by my own, was vacant and was still."
I do not like the Rhine so much as many parts of Italy. Como, Sorrento,
and Amalfi, to say nothing of Ischia and Capri, far surpass all without
the Alps, I mean on this side of them. Let me hear anything which gives
you satisfaction or hope.'
There was little of either, alas, left for Southey in this world;
but such lights and shadows of the pleasant past as were still
to be reflected from its old associations and memories, he now
for the last time enjoyed in company with his friend. Their
sympathies were close and affectionate as ever, widely as their
opinions had diverged; and even of some later Conversations,
in which idols of his own were overthrown, Southey had writ-
ten shortly before to another friend: 'What you have heard
me say of his temper is the only explanation of his faults.
'Never did man represent himself in his writings so much less
generous, less just, less compassionate, less noble in all respects
'than he really is. I certainly never knew any one of brighter
'genius or of kinder heart.** With this bright genius and kind
heart he now, accompanied by his son, walked for the last time
over the downs of Clifton, and revisited the places of his boy-
hood. The good old Cottle, who exactly forty years before had
published his Joan of Arc and advanced him the money to buy
his wedding-ring, entertained them in Bristol; they went to
the house of Southey's grandmother at Bedminster, and to the
* I will preserve here what he wrote to Caroline Bowles when the last
Conversations were sent over from Italy. Differing as I do . . . in some
'serious opinions, Landor is yet of all men living the one with whom I
'feel the most entire and cordial sympathy of heart and mind. Were I
a single man, I should think the pleasure of a week's abode with him
cheaply purchased by a journey to Florence, though, pilgrim-like, the
'whole way were to be performed on foot.'
374
Book VII.
TWENTY-ONE YEARS AT BATH.
church which with her and his mother he had attended half a
hundred years before; they went to his aunt Tyler's in College-
green; they included in their pilgrimage the house in which he
was born, the schools he had been sent to, and what had been
his father's shop. Nothing was omitted, and Southey seemed
to have forgotten nothing; not even a short-cut, or by-way, of
that strangely-unattractive city; and as he darted down some
alley, or threaded some narrow lane, he would tell his com-
panions that he had not traversed it since his schoolboy days.
'Ah,' said Landor to him, as they stumbled over some workmen
in turning away from College-green, 'workmen some day may
'be busy on this very spot putting up your statue; but it will
'be twenty years hence.' 'Well,' was his friend's rejoinder,
' if ever I have one, I would wish it to be here.' The wish has
not had fulfilment, though more than thirty years have passed
since then. This was a pleasant visit,' writes Mr. Cuthbert
Southey, and my father's enjoyment was greatly enhanced by
'the company of Mr. Savage Landor, who was then residing at
' Clifton, and in whose society we spent several delightful days.
'He was one of the few men with whom my father used to
'enter freely into conversation, and on such occasions it was no
mean privilege to be a listener.'
6
Landor quitted Clifton in the early spring of 1837, was
again for a time at Llanbedr, visited Lady Blessington in Lon-
don and his sisters at Warwick, joined Kenyon at Torquay, and
passed some of the later days of summer with his friend Brown
at Plymouth. Yet, idle as such a life might have been to an-
other man, to him it was not so. Wherever he went, creatures of
his fancy went with him; amid crowds, were present with him
most; and were much more real to him, when he cared to
converse with them at all, than any living companions. Wher-
ever pen and ink and a sheet of paper were accessible, he was
equipped for every enterprise. When I think of writing on
any subject, I abstain a long while from every kind of read-
ing, lest the theme should haunt me, and some of the ideas
'take the liberty of playing with mine. I do not wish the chil-
'dren of my brain to imitate the gait or learn any tricks of
'others.' All the time I have named was one of rich and ready
(

1836-1857.
375
NEW AND OLD FRIENDSHIPS.
productiveness; conservative' letters, conversations, dramatic
scenes, came forth abundantly; and a work was brought to com-
pletion which he had begun before quitting Italy, in which
Boccaccio and Petrarca were the speakers, and which with the
Shakespeare and the Pericles formed a trilogy so filled with the
greatness and variety of his genius, that it may be called, upon
the whole, its most complete expression. My account of the
Boccacio book may be preceded by a few notes from letters
written in the interval, telling us something of the friends seen
or works read by him while he had it in hand.
At an old bookseller's in Bristol he picked up some of the
writings of Blake, and was strangely fascinated by them. He
was anxious to have collected as many more as he could, and
enlisted me in the service; but he as much wanted patience
for it as I wanted time, and between us it came to nothing.
He protested that Blake had been Wordsworth's prototype, and
wished they could have divided his madness between them;
for that some accession of it in the one case, and some diminu-
tion in the other, would very greatly have improved both.
What follows is dated 9th December 1837, while he was still
angry with his old favourite; but there was more mirth than
malice in his little parody.
(
Yesterday a Mr. Moreton, a young man of rare judgment, read to
me a manuscript by Mr. Tennyson, very different in style from his printed
poems. The subject is the death of Arthur. It is more Homeric than
any poem of our time, and rivals some of the noblest parts of the Odyssey.
There are two kinds of simplicity: this exhibits one. If I have time be-
tween the present hour and the postman, I will attempt the other, the
more popular.
I met a little boy on the canal,
And he was singing blithely fal-de-ral.
Now Heaven has placed it high 'mid human joys
To talk with elf-lock girls and ragged boys.
'Have you a father?' 'Plenty,' he replied.
A mother?'
C
She was yesterday a bride.'
A brother?' 'One too many.'Any sister?'
'She's dead; I never (till you named her) mist her.'
At these quick answers, as was meet, I smiled,
And tapped the shoulder of the clever child."
'I shall be at Gore-house on Monday,' he says in a letter of
about the same date to Crabb Robinson; 'pray come in the even-

376
Book VII.
TWENTY-ONE YEARS AT BATH.
6
ing. I told Lady Blessington I should not let any of her court
'stand at all in my way. When I am tired of them, I leave them.
'But if you come, I can fly to you at once in case of annoyance.
Courtesy is not an unpleasant exercise for a little while. It is
like riding a spirited horse well enough to show we can keep
our seat and do it gracefully, but there is no occasion to be at
'it all day long. It is quite enough to let the beast know that
' he has a master who is up to him and the worst of his curvets
and prances.' Not after the visit did he so speak of the house
in which his happiest London life was passed. Of all others it
was that in which he felt the least constraint, and found al-
ways the warmest welcome. Its attraction was even less the
accomplishment or grace of its mistress, than her constancy
and trueheartedness in friendship; and, of all who had familiar
access there, none had better reason to know it than Landor.
Again and again he dwells upon it in letters to his sister. From
the splendour of the mansion, the taste and order of its in-
terior, the extent and beauty of its pleasure-grounds, its com-
pany of men the most distinguished and of opinions the most
various and opposed, he comes always back to its central
charm, the unaffectedness and warmth of heart that presided
over all, and formed its highest enjoyment to every one who
entered it. He had himself at last quite a tender friendship for
two lilac-trees that flowered under the terrace where he had his
favourite seat, overlooking what tradition still eagerly claimed
as the birthplace and deathplace of the two greatest of English
sovereigns, Elizabeth and Cromwell; and if he did not, as each
year came round, appear when those lilacs were in bloom, he
was playfully reminded that they waited and were drooping for
him. All are gone now; a public garden has swallowed up
house and terrace, and Cromwell-roads and Cromwell-houses
have covered once-memorable spots with mere shadows of a
name; but there are some who never pass where they once were
without thinking of her to whom their pleasantest associations
belong, and who merited so well the grateful affection which
Landor was always eager to express for her.
'White and dim-purple breath'd my favourite pair
Under thy terrace, hospitable heart,
1836-1857.
377
NEW AND OLD FRIENDSHIPS.
Whom twenty summers more and more endear'd;
Part on the Arno, part where every clime
Sent its most graceful sons to kiss thy hand,
To make the humble proud, the proud submiss,
Wiser the wisest, and the brave more brave.
Never, ah never now, shall we alight
Where the man-queen was born, or, higher up,
The nobler region of a nobler soul,
Where breath'd his last the more than kingly man.
Thou sleepest, not forgotten nor unmourn'd,
Beneath the chestnut-shade by Saint Germain.'
From other letters written to myself at this time I take one
or two notes. The first arose out of some remarks made by me
on his Pericles; and never, I think, was there better refutation
of a common fallacy that great men who have succeeded to the
great, and are mounted as it were on their shoulders, must ne-
cessarily be of taller stature and wider vision than their prede-
cessors.
'Critics, in supposing that improvements were constantly made in
poetry by the successors of the first great masters, add an apex to the ac-
cumulated foolery of ages. Thus not only was Virgil preferred to Homer
(and especially in those very qualities in which he is most signally the in-
ferior), but Euripides to Sophocles, and Sophocles to Eschylus. Whereas
there is enough of materials in Eschylus to equip a troop of the first of
these rivals, and a squadron of the second... Nothing is more skilful in
the Attic scheme than the dramas of Eschylus, nude as the heroes and
gods, and as well-proportioned and potent. . . In him there is no trickery,
no trifling, no delay, no exposition, no garrulity, no dogmatism, no de-
clamation, no prosing; none of the invidious sneers, none of the captious
sophistry of the Socratic school; but the loud clear challenge, the firm
unstealthy step, of an erect broad-breasted soldier. Depend on it that
the reader to whom is granted an ardent mind with a clear judgment,
will discover in Eschylus a far higher power of poetry than in those an-
cients who drug us with soporific apophthegms, or in those moderns who
mystify us with impenetrable metaphysics. Our best sympathies rest
ever among the generous, among the brave, among those who are fallen
from the summits of the world; and our hearts are the most healthily
warmed when they are drawn before their sufferings and wrongs. I
scarcely dare lift up my eyes when I remember that on this subject I
differ, although but in a degree, from Aristoteles. He however had seen
only a few headlands: the continent of Shakespeare, with its prodigious
range of inextinguishable fires, its rivers of golden sands, its very desarts
paved with jewels, its forests of unknown plants to which the known were
dwarfs, this unpromised and unexpected land, in all its freshness and va-
riety and magnitude, was to emerge.'
In connexion with the same book and the specimens it con-
378
Book VII.
TWENTY-ONE YEARS AT BATH.
tains of orators, I had asked him what he thought the finest
thing in that kind, modern or ancient; and he answered with-
out hesitation by naming these dozen words of Chatham: The
'first shot that is fired in America separates the two coun-
'tries.'
'What searching sagacity! what inevitable truth! The surest sign
of a great prophecy is the coincidence of admiration and unbelief. For
any thing like this of our last and almost only grand minister, we must
press through the crowd of orators, we must pass Cicero, we must pass
Demosthenes, we must raise up our eyes to Pericles, when he tells the
childless of the Athenians that "the year hath lost its spring."
Another of his supreme favourites was Romilly, for whom
his love and admiration never changed or faltered. One of his
letters to me written after his 80th year expressed the delight
with which he had again been reading the memoir of him by
his sons; and almost the earliest letter I had from him contained
these sentences.
'No ministry ever thought of raising Romilly to the peerage, although
never was a gentleman of his profession respected more highly or more
universally. The reason could not be that already too many of it had
entered the house of lords; since every wind of every day had blown
bellying silk gowns to that quarter, and under the highest walls of West-
minster was moored a long galley of lawyers, chained by the leg to their
administrations, some designated by the names of fishing-towns and bath-
ing-machines they had never entered, and others of hamlets and farms
they had recently invaded.'
II. THE PENTAMERON OF BOCCACCIO AND PETRARCA.
When Armitage Brown thanked Landor for this little volume,
saying that never had he devoured a book with fiercer appetite,
he also reminded him that already he had heard some portion
of it under the hills of Fiesole. There it had been begun, and
on every lustrous page of it will be found the genius of the
country that so gave it birth. I have spoken of the memories
of Boccaccio that were on all sides of Landor in his new home,
from whose gate up to the gates of Florence there was hardly a
street or farm that the great story-teller had not associated with
some witty or affecting narrative. The place was everywhere
peopled by his genius with creatures that neither seasons nor
factions had been able to change. Landor had but to look
1836-1857.
379
PENTAMERON OF BOCCACCIO AND PETRARCA.
around him from his villa to see fulfilment of the prediction he
puts in the mouth of Petrarca, that long before the Decameron
would cease to be recited under those arching vines, the worms
would be the only fighters for Guelph or Ghibelline; and that
even under visitations as terrible as are described in its pages,
they would remain a solace to all who could find refuge and
relief in letters.
Such a refuge and relief had they been to Landor in every
plague by which he had been visited, and this book was pay-
ment for a portion of the debt. Boccaccio is its hero; and the
idea of it was doubtless taken from his letter to Petrarca accom-
panying the copy of Dante transcribed by himself for his use,
inviting him to look more closely into it, and if possible to ad-
mire it more. In his illness at Certaldo he is visited by his
friend; during interviews that occupy five several days, the Di-
vine Comedy is the subject of their talk; and very wonderful
talk it is that can make any subject, however great, the centre
of so wide a range of scholarship and learning and of such
abounding wealth of illustration, can press into the service of
argument such a delightful profusion of metaphor and imagery,
can mingle humour and wit with so much tenderness and wis-
dom, and can clothe in language of consummate beauty so much
dignity and variety of thought. But amidst it all we never lose
our interest in the simple and kindly old burgess of Certaldo
and his belongings; his little maid Assunta and her lover; even
the rascally old frate confessor, who suggests his last witty story:
and not more delightful is the grave Petrarca when his eloquence
is at its best, than in the quaint little scene where Assuntina
has to girth-up his palfrey for him.
The title of the book should be given in full. The Penta-
meron; or Interviews of Messer Giovanni Boccaccio and Messer
Francesco Petrarca, when said Messer Giovanni lay infirm at
Viletta hard by Certaldo: after which they saw not each other
on our side of Paradise: shewing how they discoursed upon that
famous Theologian Messer Dante Alighieri, and sundry other
matters. Edited by Pievano D. Grigi. And here I may remark
that Mr. Kirkup, the greatest authority in everything relating
to Dante, thinks it as much an error of his friend to have called
题
​380
Book VII.
TWENTY-ONE YEARS AT BATH.
him Messer as if some Italian critic had called himself Sir
Landor.
'In all the legal documents I have of the sale of Peter Dante's estate
he is called Dominus Petrus filius Dantii Allighierii: Dominus being the
Latin for Lord or Messire, the title applied to a judge in the republic,
while poor Dante is named as a common citizen in the same legal deeds
in which his son is always styled Messire, or Dominus.'
All which might be perfectly true, said Landor pleasantly, but
perhaps the prete Grigi, who thought Dante memorable only
for his theology, did not know it; and as on the title-page of
the Shakespeare we find only Mr. Ephraim Barnett's name, so on
this stands only Domenico Grigi's.
:
Landor had no ground for complaining of the reception of
this book, by the few whose good opinion he valued and for
the rest he had but to remember, what is said in the course of
it, that what makes the greatest vernal shoot is apt to make the
least autumnal; that what was true of the fame of Marcellus,
'crescit occulto velut arbor ævo,' is true of every other fame;
and that since we can hardly hope for this, and enjoy immediate
celebrity besides, the few may be held supremely fortunate to
whom a choice between the two has been given. Upon the
same subject, in that highest aspect of it which takes the form
of admonition to the worshippers of immediate ascendencies, this
very volume contained a saying remarkable for its beauty. It
occurred in a note to the five dramatic scenes which originally
closed the Pentameron with a Pentalogia; one of them being
the quarrel of Bacon and Essex, where Bacon's proud belief in
his own superiority to all living men, drawn from him by the
contempt of Essex, is thus checked by Landor.
'Bacon little knew or suspected that there was then existing (the only
one that ever did exist) his superior in intellectual power. Position gives
magnitude. While the world was rolling above Shakespeare, he was secn
imperfectly: when he rose above the world, it was discovered that he was
greater than the world. The most honest of his contemporaries would
scarcely have admitted this, even had they known it. But vast objects
of remote altitude must be looked at a long while before they are ascer-
tained. Ages are the telescope-tubes that must be lengthened out for
Shakespeare; and generations of men serve but as single witnesses to his
claims.'
'I was at Talfourd's yesterday,' wrote Kenyon soon after the
volume appeared, and was condemned to listen on all sides to
1836-1857.
381
PENTAMERON OF BOCCACCIO AND PETRARCA.
(
'the praises of your Pentameron. My friend Miss Barrett, too,
says of it that if it were not for the necessity of getting through
a book, some of the pages are too delicious to turn over.' Leigh
Hunt reckoned it to be, on the whole, Landor's masterpiece ;*
and Julius Hare said that literature had nowhere so delightful
a picture of the friendship of two supposed rivals, Goethe's ac-
tual intercourse with Schiller being the only thing to compare
with it in beauty. To Crabb Robinson also, who found it wait-
ing for him on his return from Italy with Wordsworth in the
autumn of 1837, it seemed as if no other of Landor's books had
given him so great a pleasure; and the generality of prose writ-
ing, by the side of it, seemed to him but as the murky fog of
London during Michaelmas term compared to the pure atmo-
sphere on such summer nights as he had spent between Fiesole
and Florence with Parigi for my protector.' Parigi was Lan-
dor's favourite Italian dog. In the same letter there is allusion
to some lines, in a book alleged to have been found in Boccac-
cio's desk, that are in fact a very exact picture of Landor's farm
at Fiesole and the imagined pursuits of his children, which Mr.
Layard will forgive me for quoting in unexpected illustration of
what he lately told me himself of his still vivid recollection of
those scenes.
<
<
* There is something so characteristically pleasant in a little note from
Hunt to Landor in which his opinion of the Pentameron is incidentally
expressed, that I here print it. The book it accompanied was the volume
by Hunt entitled Imagination and Fancy. Kensington, Nov. 14, 1844.
My dear Landor (for, after the most kind message you sent me through
'Forster, I feel that you will allow me to break through the formality of
Sir"), I beg your acceptance of a book which it is no immodesty in me
'to say you must like, for many exquisite reasons, both poetical and picto-
'rial (vide the notion of a Spenser Gallery). There is—for a wonder, as
'far as my impulses are concerned--no mention of yourself in it, the plan,
as you will see by the preface, studiously omitting living poets; but I am
glad you saw, and felt as I meant then, the various notices of you in the
· little edition of my poems; and I have a book in hand (Stories from the
• Italian Poets, with Notices, dc.) in which I make use of my beloved book,
• the Pentameron, to aid me in some hearty knocks at the great but infernal
Dante, whom I am inclined to worship one minute, and send to his own
• devil the next. God bless you. If you can find a bit of corner in your
next letter to Forster to say you have received and relished my Spenser-
isms,you cannot conceive the pleasure it will give me. Ever most sin-
cerely yours, LEIGH HUNT.'
382
Book VII.
TWENTY-ONE YEARS AT BATH.
i
By the bye, there was with me yesterday a remarkable young man
with whom I travelled a few years ago, and who was a schoolfellow of
your son's.
To him the locale of those lines is very familiar.
He says
you perhaps will not recollect him, though he remembers you and yours
so well. His name, Layard. He recognised at once the pool, as I did
the myrtles.'
I may add the mention of another of Landor's kindest friends,
Miss Mackenzie of Seaforth, to whom he had introduced Crabb
Robinson, who passed a month with her in Rome, accompanied
by Wordsworth. She fell in love with the poet, calling him
' however a dear old man; and has promised to spend a month
with him at Rydal-mount.' She died, alas, in less than two
years: not visiting England again.
6
Of the genius of the great Florentine depicted in the book it
should be said that no merely one-sided view is taken, for never
by any single hand has he had censure and praise dealt out to
him in such equally exalted measure; if indeed the doubt may
not arise whether censure itself be other than a form of praise,
when it has the character of greatness that often accompanies it
here.
'Alighieri is grand by his lights, not by his shadows; by his human
affections, not by his infernal. As the minutest sands are the labours of
some profound sea or the spoils of some vast mountain, in like manner
his horrid wastes and wearying minutenesses are the chafings of a turbu-
lent spirit, grasping the loftiest things and penetrating the deepest, and
moving and moaning on the earth in loneliness and sadness. . . . He is
forced to stretch himself, out of sheer listlessness, in so idle a place as
Purgatory: he loses half his strength in Paradise: Hell alone makes him
alert and lively; there he moves about and threatens as tremendously as
the serpent that opposed the legions on their march in Africa.'
The more delicate graces of his astonishing genius are at
the same time not overlooked, nor his claim to be remembered
as a master of pathos. Very opportunely observed too is the
distinction, most necessary to be remembered, between the pro-
saic treatment of an appalling subject and such treatment as
Dante's. What is horror in prose becomes terror in poetry,
and in the most dreadful circumstances the soul is kept from
sinking by the buoyancy of imagination. But, above all, Dante
receives in the Pentameron the supreme distinction which be-
longs to him pre-eminently, which removes him far beyond the
reach of either the praise or censure that may otherwise now be
1836-1857.
383
PENTAMERON OF BOCCACCIO AND PETRARCA.
applied to him, and sets his name ' on a hill apart' with the three,
or at most four, out of all known literatures, which are imperish-
able on earth.
'I cannot but think again and again how fruitlessly the bravest have
striven to perpetuate the ascendancy or to establish the basis of empire,
when Alighieri hath fixed a language for thousands of years and for my-
riads of men: a language far richer and more beautiful than our glorious
Italy ever knew before in any of her regions, since the Attic and the
Dorian contended for the prize of eloquence on her southern shores.
Eternal honour, eternal veneration to him who raised up our country from
the barbarism that surrounded her! Remember how short a time before
him his master Brunetto Latini wrote in French; prose indeed; but what-
ever has enough in it for poetry has enough for prose out of its shreds and
selvages.'
Nor is Dante the only attraction of the book. Its highest
value consists in the wealth of thought and fancy that with
almost boundless variety of illustration enriches its principal
theme, and of which unhappily I can find space for only two
or three examples here.
'Middling men, favoured in their lifetime by circumstances, often ap-
pear of higher stature than belongs to them; great men always of lower.
Time, the sovran, invests with befitting raiment and distinguishes with
proper ensigns the familiars he has received into his eternal habitations:
in these alone are they deposited: you must wait for them.'
'The very things which touch us the most sensibly are those which
we should be the most reluctant to forget. The noble mansion is most
distinguished by the beautiful images it retains of beings past away; and
so is the noble mind. The damps of autumn sink into the leaves and
prepare them for the necessity of their fall: and thus insensibly are we,
as years close round us, detached from our tenacity of life by the gentle
pressure of recorded sorrows.'
•
'Amplitude of dimensions is requisite to constitute the greatness of a
poet, besides his symmetry of form and his richness of decoration.
We may write little things well, and accumulate one upon another; but
never will any be justly called a great poet unless he has treated a great
subject worthily. He may be the poet of the lover and the idler, he may
be the poet of green fields or gay society; but whoever is this can be no
more. A throne is not built of birds'-nests, nor do a thousand reeds make
a trumpet.'
C
A great poet may condescend to an obligation at the hand of an equal
or inferior: but he forfeits his title if he borrows more than the amount
of his own possessions. The nightingale himself takes somewhat of his
384
Book VII.
TWENTY-ONE YEARS AT BATH.
song from birds less glorified; and the lark, having beaten with her wing
the very gates of heaven, cools her breast among the grass. . . Imitation,
as we call it, is often weakness, but it likewise is often sympathy.'
'Petrarca. Why cannot we be delighted with an author, and even feel
a predilection for him, without a dislike to others? An admiration of
Catullus or Virgil, of Tibullus or Ovid, is never to be heightened by a dis-
charge of bile on Horace.
'Boccaccio. The eyes of critics, whether in commending or carping,
are both on one side, like a turbot's.'
To the many perfect pieces of poetry, idyls in the purest
form, scattered through the book, were added, as I have said,
five scenes in blank verse of which the speakers were, Essex
and Bacon during their quarrel; Walter Tyrrel and William
Rufus immediately before the king's death; the Parents of Lu-
ther shortly before his birth; and Electra and Orestes, from
among the pieces sent to me from Heidelberg. Every one of
these scenes has that vividness and force of reality which gave
to all the forms of Landor's writing its mastery of dramatic ex-
pression; and there is one in particular, the Parents of Luther,
quite unsurpassed for character and delicacy, from the first
blushing avowal of the young mother to her dream about a com-
ing boy that follows, the naming him Martin because that saint
clothed the poor, and the guessing what her dream might por-
tend of the lad's possible rise in life, from chorister to sacristan,
sacristan to priest, and priest to abbot, till the father's irrepres-
sible faith and boisterous confidence bursts out, 'Ring the
'bells! Martin is Pope, by Jove!' The scenes were dedicated
to Southey in a few words, saying that only he and two others,
Mr. James and myself, would care for them.
Nor did many more care for the book containing them,
which, fascinating as it proved to the few, to the many fell
still-born; and at the close of the year of its publication he
wrote to me of the fine he had to pay for it. I have just this
'moment paid a fine of a hundred and forty pounds to Saun-
'ders and Otley for having a hand in printing, and probably of
'the eighty I still owe them I shall have to pay sixty next
year.' 'I have a great love for Clifton, above all other places
' in England,' he had written to Southey from Torquay a month
1836-1857.
385
PENTAMERON OF BOCCACCIO AND PETRARCA.
(
or two before (18th September 1837), 'yet I cannot endure the
sight of flowers or fields where I had ever spent pleasurable
'hours. So, instead of Clifton, I think I shall go to Bath in
'the middle of next month :' to the very place, that is, where
he had spent all the most pleasurable hours of his early life. If
the same wisdom had but guided him in all his contradictions!
He really liked Bath; the choice was the happiest he could
have made; and what led him to it was not the dislike but the
love of pleasurable associations, hardly then to be obtruded on
Southey. Some very old friends made it still their home, and
it had become recently the home of others of later date. Colo-
nel William Napier lived there, with whose brother Henry he
had been intimate in Florence; and among its more recent re-
sidents were Mrs. Paynter and her children, members of that
Aylmer family formerly so dear to him, who had themselves
been the visitors last received at his villa before he quitted
Italy, and among whom he was to find another Rose,* happier
and not less fair than the first. Here then he pitched his tent;
and the city which he said always reminded him most of Flor-
ence, became his last English home. I passed with him there
his sixty-third birthday, and with hardly an intermission for the
next twenty years we dined together on that memorable 30th of
January. It was our Calves'-head-club day; though Landor
had commonly in hand too fierce a quarrel with some living
sovereign, to trouble himself much with one who had paid with
his life the penalty of his misdoing.
The letter to which I have referred told me also of the re-
covery of his corrected copy of the published Conversations and
of the manuscript of the new ones which he had placed in Mr.
N. P. Willis's hands, which had crossed and recrossed the At-
lantic, and at last, not even addressed to Landor, had found
their way to Lady Blessington. He had not been sorry to re-
cover them, he said; for though he should not have minded
the loss of a volume that had never been published, he did
not wish his corrections of himself to be ineffectual.
The cor-
rections in this particular copy, however, he found to have
been so much interlined that they would only have wearied
Rose Paynter, since and now Lady Sawle.
CO
386
Book VII.
TWENTY-ONE YEARS AT BATH.
out my patience; and he had therefore seriously set about a
fresh copy in which many additional insertions had been made
that it had required a good deal of attention, contrivance, and
delicacy to engraft in the trunk and branches: but the weari-
some work would shortly be completed, and thenceforward he
proposed to place them, with whatever else he had written, or
might write, at my disposal. 'I am resolved to hold no inter-
course with publishers, to claim no notice from the public,
' and never even to announce what I have done, am doing, or
'may do.' I already knew his temper well enough to receive.
this kind of statement at its worth; but at least it was clear
that for the sort of intercourse with publishers of which I lately
gave an illustration, or indeed for business of any kind requir-
ing prudence and patience, he was dangerously unfit.
His reply to my half-jesting remonstrance was very charac-
teristic. He admitted there was a future day, though probably
a distant one, when his books would be rightly estimated, and
that it was certainly in their favour not to have been too much
extolled.
'Marmion was at first too much applauded; it is now too much un-
derrated. Such trash of Byron's as the Giaour kept women from sleep
and almost from scandal, and who reads it now? whereas such lines of
his (I forget the title) as "A change came o'er the spirit of my dream,"
few people cared for, yet they live, and will live always. I have no reason
to complain, and never did. I found my company in a hothouse warmed
with steam, and conducted them to my dining-room through a cold cor-
ridor with nothing but a few old statues in it from one end to the other,
and they could not read the Greek names on the plinth, which made them
hate the features above it. This only amused me; for the guests in good
truth had a better right to be displeased with the entertainer than he
with them. God grant I may never be popular in any way, if I must
the price of self-esteem for it. I do not know whether my writings are
ever to emerge above those of my contemporaries, but if they do I am
sure it will be after my lifetime; and some seem to think they will. Read
the enclosed.'
ture.
pay
It was a letter from the author of the Curiosities of Litera-
It touched a chord of the very earliest years of his life,
even the days of his friendship with Mocatta; and it was
indeed an expression of opinion he might fairly be proud to re-
ceive. Dated from Bradenham-house, Wycombe, on the 29th
September 1838, it had been written after reading the Penta-
1836-1857.
387
WRITING PLAYS.
meron. Various circumstances, it is said, had prevented the
writer doing this before.
'I have now just closed it, to be opened however hereafter. It has
happened to me, from early years in my life, to have been acquainted
both with your name and your writings. I have been your constant
reader. I have never turned over a page of your works but with a
pause of reflection. In the present imaginary conversations you have if
possible excelled yourself; so perfectly have you personated the spirits
of your two great actors, such novelty have you given to a searching and
exquisite criticism on the three finest geniuses of modern literature. You
have shown the caustic smile of Petrarch on Dante; and surely Boccaccio
himself would have laughed heartily, as at least I did, at the lovely girl
so kindly watchful over our corpulent sentimentalist girthing his mule.
All that you have written has been masterly, and struck out by the force
of an original mind. You have not condescended to write down to the
mediocrity of the populace of readers. You will be read hereafter. I know
not whether you have written a century too late or too early: too late, if
the taste for literature has wholly left us; too early, if the public mind
has not yet responded to your sympathies. Believe me with great regard
faithfully yours, I. D'ISRAELI.'
III. WRITING PLAYS.
Thirteen days after the date of Mr. D'Israeli's letter, on the
12th October 1838, I received what follows:
'He who sprains an ankle breaks a resolution. I sprained my ankle
a week ago by treading on a lump of mortar which a beast of a mason
let drop out of his hod in Milsom-street. It twisted under my leg, and
down I came. Nevertheless I resolved to walk home, after I was picked
up, two gentlemen having run across the street and helped me for as to
getting up by my own efforts, that was out of the question. With great
difficulty I reached my lodgings. And now for the breach of resolution I
have committed. I am a great admirer of Mrs. Jameson's writings. So
I sent on Saturday night for her Female Sovereigns. On Sunday after
tea I began a drama on Giovanna di Napoli (God defend us from the hor-
rid sound, Joan of Naples!); and before I rose from my bed on Monday
morning, I had written above a hundred and seventy verses as good as
any I ever wrote in my life excepting my Death of Clytemnestra. Of
course I slept little. In fact, I scarcely sleep at all by night while the
people of my brain are talking. While others are drinking I dose and
dream, and sometimes snore peradventure; at least those have told me
so who know best. Now, not a word to any one about this drama, which
I promise to send you before a month is over. Since the first day I have
done nothing in the composition of it, so many people have been calling
on me. However, nobody shall come in before two nor after three for the
future. But I must return the calls as soon as I can get out, and these
are grievous losses of time. It is odd enough that I had written a good
388
Book VIL
TWENTY-ONE YEARS AT BATH.
many scraps of two Imaginary Conversations in which Giovanna is a
speaker; but I cannot remember a syllable of them, nor would they do.
She and Vittoria Colonna are my favourites among the women of Italy,
as Boccaccio and Petrarca among the men. But, to have clear percep-
tions of women, to elicit their thoughts and hear their voices to advantage,
I must be in the open air, in the sun-alas, in Italy, were it possible.
My sprained ankle will not let me take my long and rapid strides. I am
an artificial man. I want all these helps for poetry. Quiet and silent
nights are the next things needful. How happy is Southey, who can do
all things better than any of us, and can do them all in the midst of noise
and interruption! He is gone into Brittany. May he return in health
and spirits! . . . God bless you. Do not think it necessary to condole
with me on my sprain.'
Five days later came another letter. I had meanwhile, after
expressing my delight that out of such a nettle as a sprain he
was plucking the flower of a tragedy, endeavoured to point out
to him that a drama, if it meant anything, should mean what
could be acted; and that if he had not something to say which
the theatre would enable him to say best, it was unwise to adopt
a form that surrendered obvious advantages without correspond-
ing return.
'My drama will never do for the stage. Besides, why should I make
so many bad men worse? Is there any poet, beside Southey and perhaps
our Paracelsus (Mr. Browning), who would not suffer from blue devils at
any success of mine?
The best of our living dramatic writers, Sheridan
Knowles, gets grudgingly praised. I would not be mobbed, present or
absent. Even Macready's genius and judgment can hardly bring together
half a dinner-party to see living Shakespeare. Yet Shakespeare not only
keeps poetry alive, but Christianity. When people see one inspired man,
inspired to delight and elevate them, they may believe that there may be
another inspired and sent to save them from the devil. My scenes fall in
the natural order. What is plot but trick? However, my team is strong
enough to carry my materials from one part of the field to the other, if
need be. You must tell me about it. You shall not have any of it before
you have the whole; and it shall not be a fortnight first.'
The promise was kept; all the scenes composing the tragedy
known afterwards as Andrea of Hungary were in my hands
on the 2d of November; and the subjoined characteristic letter
accompanied them.
'Conceived, planned, and executed in thirteen days; transcribed (the
worst of the business) in six. Any man, I am now convinced, may write
a dozen such within the year. The worst of it is, in anything dramatic,
such is the rapidity of passion the words escape before they can be taken
down. If you lose one, you lose the tone of the person, and never can
1836-1857.
389
WRITING PLAYS.
recover it. Desperation! And the action is gone too. You have a dead
man before you, but galvanised.
'How a sprained ankle helps a poet in getting over the ground! It
should not have hindered me, had the weather been finer and the walks
less slippery, from creeping along through my favourite lanes, and in-
haling the incense round the dying hawthorn-leaves, the viaticum of their
departure. They quit the world without sprained ankles, happy souls!
'Make the best of my phantasmagoria; shift the glasses as you will,
and toss as many of the figures as you will aside. I will have no farther
concern or thought about the matter. I have enjoyed my sunshine once
more in pleasant Italy, and am ready for my siesta. If your opinion is a
favourable one, let me hear it-se, no, no, as the Arragonese say to their
king...
'Write me one line as soon as you receive the parcel. My hodge-
podge was completed on Friday night just before twelve. I have not had
leisure to count the verses. There should not be many more than 1800;
at least there are not, if I remember, in tragedies or mixt dramas. How-
I have weeded out and weeded out, and have rejected as much as
would furnish any friend for another piece-as good as this.
ever,
'Any of my worthy critics may tell me that I do not know the differ-
ence between an act and a scene. Very true; I have said something
about this in my Milton and Marvel. So I have merely markt out the
scenes, as they are called, and leave the acts to the curious.
I had my-
self a fanciful division of them into five; but their length was not sym-
metrical by any means. Now adieu, my dear friend; I have given you
but a tough and dry radish as a whetting for your entertainment.
'A capital prologue has this instant come into my head, if hereafter
the piece should be licked into shape:
'No prologue will our author's pride allow
If you can do without it, show it now.
Observe, I have made Andrea rather tolerable; at last rather in-
teresting; ductile; quite uneducated: but gentle-hearted, compliant, com-
passionate, and, above all, a graceful rider. These qualities, taken
together, are enough to make a sensible woman of great generosity love
him even.
Such a woman would be more likely than another. I never
knew a very sensible woman, once excepted, love a very sensible man.
There never was one who could resist a graceful and bold rider, if there
was only one single thing about him which would authorise her to say,
"It was not merely for his horsemanship."
In the characters generally I have avoided strong contrasts. These
are the certain signs of a weak artist. There are however shades of com-
plexion, diversities of manner, and degrees of height. It would be ridi-
culous to tell you this after you have read the thing-less amiss, before.'
Hardly had I written what I thought of the scenes, or sug-
gested what seemed to me required for their orderly arrange-
ment, when tidings of another completed portion reached me;
the second of a trilogy on the theme he had chosen. I had
390
Book VII,
TWENTY-ONE YEARS AT BATH.
written on the 3d of November, and five days later had the
startling announcement:
'Thursday, Nov. 9. Your praises, which came this day se'nnight,
created the last drama I shall ever write. It contains about 1100 verses!
'I only write now to tell you that I completed (just before dinner)
the second of my trilogy. I will not ever write the third, tho' I have a
scrap or two for it. No, the easy part, the part that anybody else would
have taken, shall be left for somebody to try his hand against me. Gio-
vanna is absolved by Rienzi, and returns to Naples. Let another kill her;
let another make her cry out against the ingratitude of Durazzo. Un-
luckily I have not the life of Rienzi. I had it in Italian by a contem-
porary. What was his wife's name? Was he married? Had he a mis-
tress? Pray let me know; perhaps I may want it, but probably not. I
am a horrible confounder of historical facts. I have usually one history
that I have read, another that I have invented.'
Observing so resolute an asseveration that he would never
write the third in the trilogy, I half expected to receive it before
even the completion of the second; but I had to wait a little.
On the 13th of November he wrote again :
'Gratifying as your praises are, I like your objections still better, and
would rather have the utmost of your severity. My division of the acts
(an arbitrary one) would probably be the same as yours. The first would
contain 366 verses, the second 255, the third 448. My fourth was inor-
dinately long; my last little more than one scene. I want you to make
some insertions in the first, where the queen speaks of her husband to her
sister Maria, and afterwards to her foster mother Filippa. After "I will
earn," paste in
Maria. How can we love-
Giovanna (interrupting). Mainly by hearing none
Decry the object; then by cherishing
The good we see in it, and overlooking
What is less pleasant in the paths of life.
All have some virtue, if we leave it them
In peace and quiet: all may lose some part
By sifting too minutely bad and good.
Where Andrea follows Fra Rupert, after "he went in wrath," I would add
He may do mischief, if he thinks it right;
As those religious people often do.
And where Filippa says that he deserves their pity, let this follow:
Giovanna. O, more than pity. If our clime, our nation
Bland, constant, kind, congenial with each other,
Were granted him, how much more was withheld !
Sterile the soil is not, but sadly waste.
What buoyant spirits and what pliant temper !
How patient of reproof! how he wipes off
1836-1857.
391
WRITING PLAYS.
All injuries before they harden on him,
And wonders at affronts and doubts they can be!
Then his wild quickness! O, the churl that bent it
Into the earth, colourless, shapeless, thriftless,
Fruitless, for ever! Had he been my brother,
I should have wept all my life over him:
But being my husband, one hypocrisy
I must put on, one only ever will I.
Others must think, by my observance of him,
I hold him prudent, penetrating, firm,
No less than virtuous: I must place myself
In my own house (now indeed his) below him.
Filippa. I almost think you love him.
Giovanna. He has few,
Even small faults, which small minds spy the soonest;
He has, what those will never see nor heed,
Wit of bright feather, but of broken wing;
No stain of malice, none of spleen, about it.
For this, and more things nearer... . for the worst
Of orphancy, the cruelest of frauds,
Stealth of his education while he played,
Nor fancied he could want it; for our ties
Of kindred; for our childhood spent together;
For those dear faces that once smiled upon us
At the same hour, in the same balcony;
Even for the plants we rear'd in partnership,
Or spoil'd in quarrel; I do love Andrea.
But, from his counsellors!
'The Second Part is more regular; but in this the first act is longer
than any of the rest: it contains 448 verses. Yet the whole piece is little
more than 1100, I think; but I have not counted farther than I have
transcribed, which is one page beyond the first act. If you should really
be contented with the First Part when your changes are made, you
might ask Macready whether he thinks it adapted to the stage, and whe-
ther he can suggest any improvement. We English have done less for
the stage in the last two centuries and a quarter than any other nation in
Europe; less than an acted tragedy in a century! The best, I think,
since Venice Preserved, are Virginius and the Hunchback. We want the
coming-out of character: we want more than side-faces. In a grand his-
torical picture all the faces must not be painted in profile, nor all the
figures come with the best leg foremost.'
His next letter, four days later, brought me more of the scenes
of the second play, and some inserted passages of extraordinary
beauty. I at first doubted whether it was right thus to exhibit
a work of art in the process of construction, with its scaffolding
around it; but as with Count Julian, so here, both the charac-
ter and the genius of Landor receive illustration from the inti-
392
Book VII.
TWENTY-ONE YEARS AT BATH.
mate view thus afforded, not merely of his rapid and impulsive
composition, but of the rare power he possessed of putting into
his numberless additions, insertions, and corrections, into his se-
cond and third and fourth and twentieth thoughts, all the heat
and glow of his first noble fancy. The inspiration has never
dropped. There is nothing finer in the tragedies than the after-
insertions sent in these letters.
'You shall not be disappointed in my Rienzi as far as vigour goes. I
represent him as a very imperfect character; he was so. But his wife, or
mistress, whichever was the best of the two, says great things to him...
I have made the changes you wished at the deaths of Caraffa and Carac-
cioli, and you must add to where Andrea says "he is gone:"
To think of this; to think how he has fallen
Amid his pranks and joyances, amid
His wild heath myrtle-blossoms, one might say,
It quite unmans me.
Sancia. Speak not so, my son:
Let others, when their nature has been changed
To such unwonted state, when they are call'd
To do what angels do and brutes do not,
Sob at their shame, and say they are unmann'd:
Unmann'd they can not be; they are not men.
At glorious deeds, at sufferings well endured,
Yea, at life's thread snapt with its gloss upon it,
Be it man's pride and privilege to weep.
This week I shall transcribe little more' (the first two acts came with the
letter); 'before the end of next, you shall have the whole. Should not
the title of the first be Andrea? the second, Giovanna?—or, Giovanna of
Naples? and the other, Andrea of Hungary?'
I had not had time to reply when the following day brought
another letter:
The packet was sent to the coach-office, and my letter in it; and
now, five minutes afterwards, I find I am about to trouble you again, as
usual. In fact I seldom write straight on end as the hunters say, or in
the house, but generally while I am walking or riding, or sitting out in
the air; sometimes in a very small pocket-book, sometimes on a scrap
of paper. Do, in your long-suffering, paste in this where Giovanna and
her sister are together, and she talks of life being made almost as wel-
come to her as death itself. The other will reply:
When sunshine glistens round,
And friends as young as we are sit beside us,
We smile at Death . . one rather grim indeed
And whimsical, but not disposed to hurt us .
And give and take fresh courage. But, sweet sister,
The days are many when he is unwelcome,
1836-1857.
393
WRITING PLAYS.
And you will think so too another time.
'Tis chiefly in cold places, with old folks,
His features seem prodigiously amiss.
But Life looks always pleasant, sometimes more
And sometimes less so, but looks always pleasant,
And, when we cherish him, repays us well.
And when, in the first part, they are talking of the good king Robert, I
would have this:
Fiammetta (to Filippa). Have you not prais'd the king
your very self
For saying to Petrarca, as he did,
'Letters are dearer to me than my crown,
And, were I forced to throw up one or other,
'Away should go the diadem, by Jove!'
Sancia. Thou art thy very father. Kiss me, child:
His father said it, and thy father would.
When shall such kings adorn the throne again?
Fiammetta. When the same love of what Heaven made
most lovely
Enters their hearts; when genius shines above them,
And not beneath their feet.'
On the last day of November the whole of the second tra-
gedy was in my possession, and I had sent him farther objec-
tions to portions of the first which it seemed desirable to alter.
His reply came next day :
'Your objections are so admirably just, that it is almost a shame to
deprive the world of them: yet I resolved from the first moment to
abolish the whole scene of the old women; there is quite enough without
it. Draw your pen unsparingly over every other passage that in any
manner is discreditable to me. I wrote the songs in Italian because it is
so incomparably easier than English, in which Moore alone writes short
things gracefully. Mine were on a level with what are sung about the
streets at Naples and elsewhere. There are so many conspiracies in
tragedies, that nothing new could be devised. I have varied the old
scheme by the diversified tones and feelings of Psein and the other two
Hungarians, then of Maximin, then of Caraccioli and Caraffa. My frate
Rupert has a slice of old Falstaff in him, not very perceptible. He is
never at fault: this is the resemblance. . . In the scene toward the close,
where Andrea speaks of the mulberries, it should be, "I wish the mul-
berries were not past," because they not only were ripe, but over by above
a month, in Naples; the marriage being on the 20th of September. The
greater correction of substituting English for Italian I finished before I
sent away my breakfast, and you will see it at length on the opposite
side. You are right in what you say of the theatre. I shrink from the
acting. We will give up that idea, both for one and other of the dramas;
and as to printing, you know I said openly I would publish no more.'
What I replied on this latter point, Landor took as good-
TWENTY-ONE YEARS AT BATH.
Book VII
394
naturedly as Benedick when rallied on his change of intention,
and the tragedies were printed without waiting for comple-
tion of the trilogy. Few know anything of them; but enough,
even in these letters, has been shown of their singular and ex-
ceptional beauty of thought and language, to justify such farther
explanatory words as may increase the reader's interest in them.
They have no single figure of such grandeur of conception as
Julian; but in another kind I doubt whether Andrea may not
claim a place as distinct and separate, nor in a lower rank of
poetical creation. Poetry has indeed few conceptions more
touching than this boy-prince. Of Giovanna Landor takes the
favourable view, as it was fairly open to him to do. She is to
Italy what Mary Stuart is to Scotland, and different judgments
of her will always exist; but any man may be justified in ac-
cepting her character from the two Italians who were the most
illustrious of her contemporaries: Boccaccio, who calls her the
singular pride of Italy, so gracious, gentle, compassionate, and
kind, that she seemed rather the companion than the queen of
those around her; and Petrarca, who, in a strain hardly less
affectionate, compares her and her young husband, surrounded
by the Hungarians, to two lambs in the midst of wolves. No
bad description of the first tragedy.
What indeed no one disputes to have been her position on
the death of her grandfather, gives warrant for the view taken
by Landor. Ill-fated as the marriage was, it originated in king
Robert's desire to compose the differences between Naples and
Hungary by restoring the throne of Naples to the elder branch
in the person of Andrea, without prejudice to the existing rights
of Giovanna: but several years after the betrothment he dis-
covered that Andrea, placed by the king of Hungary under the
sole care of a wicked monk, had grown up into his helpless vic-
tim; indolent, idle, pliant, half silly it was supposed, certainly
altogether ignorant; and it was resolved, as a protection to the
youth, that Giovanna should be proclaimed queen in her own
right. She was however but fifteen when the king died, An-
drea being seventeen; and by the time of her accession and
marriage the monk fra Rupert had so employed the two years'
interval of regency, in supplanting Neapolitan by Hungarian
1836-1857.
395
WRITING PLAYS.
influence, that Giovanna and Andrea were become little better
than his prisoners.
At this point the tragedy opens; and with the greatest deli-
cacy the position of both queen and husband is perfectly ex-
pressed in the first scene. She, with wonderful beauty, is already
a woman in fulness and generosity of soul, and wise beyond her
years; he, a mere boyish stripling, is in mind and manners
more boyish still, but ductile, gentle-hearted, compliant ; and it
is the triumph of Landor's achievement to have shown the in-
fluence of two such characters on each other. One sees that her
expression of love at the outset is only a sweet hypocrisy, in-
deed she loves another; yet she is so bent on being true to
Andrea that her tenderness and compassion, trembling but on
love's outermost verge, soon borrow from his glad simplicity and
sprightly fondness something of his own affection; and still, as
his mind opens under love for her, and new beauties of disposi-
tion respond to her influence over him, her own eyes brighten
more and more. But there is of course little for the stage in
this; nor has the play otherwise the kind of contrasts required
by tragedy. There are plenty of shades of complexion, and di-
versities of manner, to show the artist sufficiently; no one could
mistake Sancia's gentle wisdom for Filippa's lofty intellect:
but the women are all so good and generous that it takes a
second reading, such as one cannot have at a theatre, to under-
stand the niceties that separate each from the other; and, for
even the motive that leads to the catastrophe, the same sort of
study is required. No doubt, in actual life, this would be enough.
We should want no more than our knowledge of the probable
effect, upon the mind of fra Rupert, of the growing change in
Andrea. But we cannot thus receive things for granted on the
stage; we want a plot; character and motive must be in visible
collision; and it will not do to have the agents of a catastrophe
in as much apparent unconsciousness as ourselves of what they
have in hand, until the catastrophe itself is upon us. This is
the case with fra Rupert's Hungarians. They prowl about the
court avenues and entrances like hungry wolves: each with his
mark upon him; Zinga not to be mistaken for Klapwrath, or
Psein for Maximin: but all of them mere shadows of something
396
Book VII.
TWENTY-ONE YEARS AT BATH.
else, of which neither they nor we know anything except by re-
mote suspicion. A power opposed to fra Rupert's might fairly
have been found in the two gallant Neapolitan nobles who love
Giovanna; but they are killed in the third act, and he remains
the solitary genius of the scene. That this is what in life might
have been probable, does not of course dispose of the question of
the stage; here, as in Julian, Landor fails in its necessary re-
quirements; yet there are no finer studies in dramatic writing
than are afforded by both, in the rich fulness as well as easy
flexibility of the verse, in the extraordinary beauty of the de-
tached thoughts and sayings, and in the individual traits of
character. The very want of passion in his wickedness which
repels interest from fra Rupert in these earlier plays, and al-
together unsuits him for the stage, helps to make him a won-
derful creation, as we follow and track him out in the study.
Present or absent, he is master of the scene. We see his hor-
rible shadow, if not himself. We think him baffled by the
modest firmness of Giovanna, or the light-hearted resistance of
Andrea; but already his web encircles both. By the unexpected
defiance of Caraffa and Caraccioli, we fancy him struck to the
earth; but as he steals out from his cell through one passage,
their lifeless bodies encumber the other. Resource never fails
him: When all seems gay and joyous in the revels at Aversa,
and we half incline to think the danger past, his crooked figure
disguised and masked crawls in, joy gives place to terror, the
lights at the brilliant balcony are extinguished, and, displacing
suddenly the roses and festoons suspended there, the lifeless
body of the poor Andrea swings heavily down. Even after the
scene has closed we do not know the actual murderer. As in
ordinary life, though not in ordinary tragedies, doubt remains
with us.
We know the heart that prompted, but not the hand
that did the deed. There is nothing so fine as all this in the
second part of the trilogy, which yet contains single passages.
superior to any in the first, and has a scene of Rienzi and his
wife that would act greatly on the stage. This middle play is
wholly occupied by Giovanna's appeal to the Pope and the Tri-
bune, by her exculpation from the charge of Andrea's murder,
and by her second marriage. Fra Rupert is on the scene, en-
1836-1857.
397
WRITING PLAYS.
deavouring to fix suspicion on Giovanna; but he plays an unim-
portant part.
Hardly had the Andrea and Giovanna appeared however,
with intimation that the profits of the publication were to be
given to a very humble but very noble heroine of that day who
lives also in the page of Wordsworth, Grace Darling, when I
received an intimation from Landor that he was busy on the last
of the trilogy, of which fra Rupert was to be hero.
'Being here alone for several days' (written from Bath in the autumn
of 1840), 'I was resolved to do what I was told would be very difficult, if
not impossible: to give a little more interest to the character of Giovanna
after her second, nay even after her third marriage. Certainly it is some-
what unromantic and unpoetical. Racine, in his Andromache, has made
sad work of it, although he had but two to deal with. I had indeed ma-
liciously lain in wait thus long for somebody to attempt it. Well, I must
do it myself, I see. I have written now the last drama of the trilogy;
imperfect no doubt, as you will discover, but better, I promise you, both
as poetry and drama, than the two first. You will like what one of my
characters says on reading Dante's story of Francesco da Rimini:
Piteous, most piteous, for most guilty passion.
Two lovers are condemned to one unrest
For ages. I now first knew poetry,
I had known song and sonnet long before :
I sail'd no more amid the barren isles
Each one small self; the mighty continent
Rose and expanded; I was on its shores.
I felt something like this when disposing at last of my old friar. You
shall see.
But mind, I will not be damned for it. In other words, it
shall never be offered to the stage. Popularity is not what I want, or care
for. I have received from it all the pleasure and gratification I ever can
receive; tender emotions, sweet and strong excitement, and the hope that
it will communicate these to others.'
The manuscript reached me a few days later, with what
follows:
'Well, now I have netted my purse, have I drawn the two ends to-
gether as they should be? Have I kept up the frate's character, chang-
ing only by the change of fortune and pressure of circumstances? It was
requisite to show Giovanna as mother and friend. Thus her character is
completed by a few touches. Stephen and Maximin I hope and trust are
not too light. It was the custom of the Athenian dramatists to make the
last piece in the trilogy a farce, or farcical. This is the only thing in
their literature inelegant or injudicious. We imitate it in some degree,
by acting an after-piece to our tragedies. This however is not quite so
bad, though bad enough.'
I found a fair reason for this exulting tone on reading the
398
Book VIJ.
TWENTY-ONE YEARS AT BATH.
play. My preachments to him on stage-requirements had not.
been without effect. It was the most dramatic of the three.
Not so rich in poetry, and having fewer single sayings conspicu-
ous for beauty; but with greater vigour of treatment, with cha-
racters more broadly contrasted, and with a hero not tragical in
guilt alone, but also in remorse and suffering. It made a corre-
sponding impression on those who read it; nor did any opinion
expressed of it please Landor more, or with better reason, than
his brother Robert's.
Birlingham, 26th Dec. 1840. I cannot say that anything which you
have written since has given me more pleasure than Pericles and Aspasia;
for I am unable to imagine greater strength and originality of thought
united with greater elegance and purity of language than that book con-
tains. But I rejoice nevertheless at the publication of these dramas
as fresh evidences that your powers are increased by time. Many men
appear to have larger capacities and greater reasoning powers than they
had in the middle of life, even at a greater age than yours; but I can
remember no instance beside, at such an age, where the imagination
was more energetic, and its manner of expression more original. I will
not suppose, that in giving me your Fra Rupert, you have also given a
right to trouble you with my opinion; bnt I must say that it appears a
far greater work than Count Julian, written just thirty years ago. The
power of communicating so much meaning beyond what is expressed
directly by words, is the most extraordinary difference.'
Crabb Robinson had struck the same note, eight days before,
in contrasting the unimpaired power of Fra Rupert with the
many instances that were happening around to impress him with
a sense of the danger to which all genius is exposed of decay-
ing prematurely; Macready told him that the last part of
the trilogy had taken stronger hold of him than either of its
predecessors; Mr. James wrote with boundless enthusiasm of
all the three; Julius Hare, more temperately describing his de-
light at receiving such a visitor 'through the snow' to cheer him
with visions of Neapolitan warmth and beauty, said to Landor
that it now rested with him, Henry Taylor, and George Darley,
to preserve the life of tragedy in England;' and George Darley
himself, whose fine dramatic genius well deserved that compli-
ment, asking him where he got the power that gave to his com-
monest words an effect so magical, singled out, amid infinite
praise of the last of the tragedies, those very portions referred
to by Landor as 'light,' but it was hoped not farcical, in his
1836-1857.
399
WRITING PLAYS.
letters to me. What especially delighted Darley, was the scene
where the wily friar wins to his black purpose Stephen the far-
mer by arguments enchanting to the bucolic mind.
C
Pleasant, too, are farms
When harvest-moons hang over them, and wains
Jolt in the iron-tinged rut, and the white ox
Is call'd by name, and patted ere pull'd on.'
I should perhaps add, with deference to so great an autho-
rity, that my old friend appears to have been in error in suppos-
ing that the third drama in a Greek trilogy was ever farcical. He
probably confounded with it the satirical play subjoined to the
trilogy, for the most part by way of contrast, though it might
sometimes be connected with it in subject. The only remaining
example of a part of a trilogy belonging to a continuous theme
is the Eumenides; but, as it is plain that the Prometheus, the
Seven against Thebes, and the Suppliants of Eschylus may all
have been the middle dramas in trilogies, we may fairly derive
from them what must have been the subjects of the third plays,
and that they must have been grave, solemn, and reconciling.
What I have to add, in quitting the subject of Landor's tra-
gedies, concerns his brother Robert equally with him; but the
facts to be stated have a curious interest apart from their illus-
tration of character, and may be related by Mr. Robert Landor
himself without comment from me. I will merely premise that
to his above-quoted letter of thanks for Fra Rupert, it was
added as what people call a strange coincidence, that he should
have heard of dramas printed by his brother Walter while print-
ing some of his own.
Two of them have been written many years, and were the amuse-
ment of hours which I could not employ more usefully, for I can some-
times write when I cannot read. This indeed is no reason for publishing
them; but a book may serve as a small legacy, better adapted than any
other to remind those whom you have known in early life of your thoughts
and feelings. I will direct that a copy shall be sent to you without re-
quiring that you should read one half of it. Nevertheless I am vain
enough to think that, as tragedies generally are now, the first of them
may prove worth the trouble.'
What Landor thought of them will be seen hereafter. Not
in the first only, The Earl of Brecon, but in the last, The Ferry-
man, there is enough to give the writer distinguished place
400
Book VII.
TWENTY-ONE YEARS AT BATH.
A
6
among the poets who have written in this form; and a volume
altogether of purer English or loftier purpose, 'high passions
' and high actions' more worthily describing, has seldom issued
from the press in England than The Earl of Brecon, Faith's
Fraud, and the Ferryman: Tragedies by Robert E. Landor.'
But the writer's first dramatic attempt had been of earlier date,
and the anecdotes now to be related have no reference to the
publication of 1841. Mr. Robert Landor thus wrote to me on
the 26th January 1865:
There is a strange history, of which you have heard nothing, and
for which I am unable to account. Among Walter's later publications,
perhaps the most original and powerful, certainly the most characteristic
as a specimen of his genius, his poetical genius, are the three tragedies
published in 1839-40; and, however unsuited to the drama for repre-
sentation, very admirable as poems. When we first met after their pub-
lication, at Birlingham, I asked whether he was aware that a tragedy
had been published, without preface or author's name, the plot of which
must seem to have been borrowed in many of its scenes from his Andrea
of Hungary. However different in all other respects, however poor and
feeble the apparent imitation, yet, besides many of the scenes, some of
the events and some even of the names corresponded. Both tragedies
were dated at Naples, and both in the royal palace. The characters were
principally the royal family. There was a conspiracy in both, and the
conspirators were monks. The catastrophe was in the palace, at a masked
ball; and in both, though language was never copied, there were many
of the same passions, emotions, and other smaller correspondences of de-
scription, especially in this masked ball. My brother was much surprised:
supposing that some audacious imitator had borrowed the only part within
his reach; much of the plot, some of the characters, but none of the
power; many of the incidents and contrivances, but none of the genius.
His astonishment was still greater when I referred him to the title-pages
of both tragedies: his publication being dated 1839, and the supposed
copy 1824, just forty years from this now present time. Greater yet was
his wonder, when I told him that I was the author of this supposed imi-
tation, written almost twenty years before the original, and published
sixteen. It happened that we were interrupted by some visitors before
he had time to finish my work, or there could be any explanation on the
subject; and he never afterwards referred to it, nor did I. Southey had
noticed, in his Doctor, what he called a family likeness; and my brother
has been often mortified by the mistake of one for the other. Infinite as
the difference may be in ability, there may be some resemblance in feel-
ing and the mode of expressing it; but this would not account for the
mechanism, the plot, the many correspondences of the two tragedies.
My brother indeed would never have borrowed consciously from any man,
and least of all from me; but I know that he continually forgot what he
had written, and denied (till they were produced) that he had ever seen
various passages in his printed books. Possibly he may have read this
+
1836-1857.
401
WRITING PLAYS.
tragedy of mine, without any remembrance afterwards that he had seen
it; or met with a review of it without knowing who had written either
the tragedy or the criticism, for at that time we had no correspondence
or communication: and so, many years after, he may have mistaken me-
mory for invention.
'Thus much has been said by me to account for his denial, on many
occasions, of what he had himself written. A lady, with whom he had
become acquainted through me, used to prepare for his visits by reading
such of his publications, verse and prose, as contained moral and philo-
sophical maxims, or thoughts beautifully and pointedly expressed. Ming-
ling them with other quotations, she recited very correctly, on one occa-
sion, what he had so written; and in return, he complimented the lady
by supposing that she had composed them, declaring that no one else
could have equalled them! and at the last protesting, while he avowed
that he had utterly forgotten them, that even still he could hardly believe
he had himself written them—which I believe to be true. I have as good
a memory as most people who have lived eighty-four years, and I am not
careless about the truth; but I am often reminded by my servants, not
only of things forgotten by me, but of intended directions which I had
neglected to give. Add to this confusion of memory my brother's activity
of imagination, and much will be accounted for. Fact and fancy become
also easily confounded; and there are infirmities, apart from those of old
age, for which none of Walter's friends could otherwise account, but by
wanderings permitted to the imagination.'
'You suppose rightly' (Mr. Robert Landor wrote again 12th Feb.
1865) 'that the tragedy I had referred to in proof of my brother's
imperfect memory was the Count Arezzi. As there is an introduction
to this curious history which may help in explaining it, I will venture on
your patience once more. I had written the tragedy two years earlier
than the date in the title-page (1824), not knowing who would undertake
its publication. At last it was intrusted to Mr. Booth, of Duke-street,
Portiand-place. Mr. Booth had a relative connected with one of the
theatres, to whom he showed the manuscript; and this gentleman was on
familiar terms with Mr. Young, a tragic actor of high reputation, con-
temporary with Kean, I think: but no one knows less of the theatre than
I do. Mr. Young thought that the principal character, Arezzi, might be
undertaken by himself; he wished that the more comic part, Cimbella,
should be committed to one of the Kembles, either Charles or Stephen;
and he said that if the author would allow him to make such reductions
and alterations as were necessary, he would bring it on the stage. Never
having had the slightest thought of its representation, I at once declined
the offer; and thereupon it was published, at the close of 1823, without
any name.
Mr. Booth was as much surprised as I was at its success, a
large part of the edition being very speedily sold; it was also favourably
noticed in several critical papers; and Mr. Booth informed me that if I
proposed to make any change or corrections, I must prepare them for a
second edition. At the same time he said that inquiries and rumours
had reached him, supposing the tragedy to have been written by Lord
Byron and I had seen, in one of the reviews, that probably it was an
experiment on the public taste by a distinguished author, whose other
DD
402
Book VII.
TWENTY-ONE YEARS AT BATH.
tragedies were composed with motives and feelings totally different, but
who would soon reveal himself. All Lord Byron's dramas had been pub-
lished before; Werner, the last of them, less than a year before. At once,
then, my success was accounted for! I was so unjust as to suspect that
Mr. Booth had encouraged the report, or at least permitted it by his
silence. But not wishing to partake in a fraud from which both Lord
Byron and the public must suffer, I immediately directed that the tragedy
should be again advertised, with my name; and also that there should be
a title-page prefixed to all the copies that were yet unsold. Mr. Booth
remonstrated earnestly, disclaiming all knowledge; but as the copyright
was mine, I prevailed. I cannot tell how many copies remained, but I
do not think that, in the forty years since then, so many as forty more
have been sold. I was extinguished at once. To be sure, Lord Byron
survived; but it may be doubted whether he would have forgiven any man
who had confounded the authorship of two such dramas, even supposing
them to have been written experimentally. These of my brother are as
unlike mine (excepting in the instances arising from a bad memory), and,
I think, as much superior to Werner as Werner is to the Count Arezzi. But
it seems scarcely possible to account for so many resemblances in the me-
chanism, without supposing that Walter may have read either my tragedy
or some account of it; and, many years after, may have mistaken memory
for invention. Assuredly he had no knowledge of the author, or suspicion
of him; but, after having read most of the drama, and learnt from me its
history, he never said another word on the subject. It is to free his cha-
racter from distressing imputations that I have given this long history.
He continually denied that he had written what was to be found in his
own books, or spoken what had been heard by twenty people. He once
related to me a long conversation with a friend of yours, with many minute
particulars, on a very important subject; and two years after, when it was
referred to by me accidentally, he declared that nothing of the kind had
ever occurred, and that I must have dreamed. Your history of him must
excite much attention, because it is yours; and perhaps some passing ob-
servation on this infirmity might anticipate what it would not be very pos-
sible to disprove, or otherwise to account for.'
Any remark upon the question thus raised by Mr. Robert
Landor I have not thought necessary. The likeness of the later
to the earlier tragedy, apart from that indefinable likeness to
each other which would seem to have been as inseparable from
the poetry of the brothers as it often is from the voices of sisters
singing, turns chiefly on the management of the catastrophe in
each; and, though raising the strongest presumption that Lan-
aor had seen his brother's work, is only of interest for the illus-
tration to which his brother applies it. That is just, unques-
tionably; and of the fact that such failures of memory involved
no wilful departure from truth, strongly insisted on by me in
former pages, there occurred soon after the present date an ex-
1836-1857.
403
WRITING PLAYS.
ample as decisive as could be given. Upon Blackwood making
some objections to his Pericles and Aspasia, he had sent back
to his publishers, as we have seen, every shilling paid for the
copyright; yet, only three years after a proceeding so remark-
able, he had forgotten, not merely that anything had ever been
paid him for the book, but, more marvellous still, that he had
himself sent the money back. I published Pericles and As-
'pasia on my own account,' he reiterated; and was sending
farther remittances in satisfaction of the supposed loss, when I
stopped him by a statement from Mr. Saunders himself.*
Nor was it his failing commonly to remember a review that
might have vexed him, any more than the turn his vexation
might have taken; though he was really anxious that his own
general discredit with the critical fraternity should not extend
to his brother's tragedies. 'The literary congress have condemned
me to St. Helena,' he wrote to me, but I hope my name will
cause no prejudice to my brother's. For a quarter of a century
เ
C
(
we have had no correspondence until now: the last was an
angry one. However, he has shown himself by far the greatest
'dramatic poet of our time.' It is right to add that whether
he thus quietly accepted the treatment extended to himself, or
wasted anger on it, it was the rarest of all possible things with
him to venture upon anything like reply. There are only two
instances known to me in which he attempted it; and, by a re-
markable chance, though both replies were written, both were
suppressed. I have referred on a former page to the first; and
though I printed the second in my first edition, its illustrations
of my friend's character are not so proportioned to its length as
to justify the repetition of it here. It originated in a review of
the Pentameron in the British and Foreign Quarterly, which he
persisted, quite wrongly, in ascribing to Hallam, against whom
was I so surprised
* Never, in the course of my life,' he wrote to me,
as at the verification of my account with Saunders; for such it is. Cer-
tain I am that no part of the money was ever spent by me, nor can I pos-
sibly bring to mind either the receiving or the returning of it. But never
in my lifetime have I kept any accounts, and every autumn I save some-
thing, because, in the months of December and January, I give to poor
'families half the income of those two months. A person unerring in her
'judgment and boundless in her goodness helps me to find them out.'
404
Book VII.
TWENTY-ONE YEARS AT BATH.
he had a grudge. They had met at his friend Sir Charles Elton's;
he had come off second-best in an argument, as most people did
with Hallam; and he had laughingly repeated to me, with half-
humorous application to himself, what Lord Dudley told Francis
Hare, of his having dined with Hallam and his son in Italy,
when it did my heart good to sit by, and hear how the son
'snubbed the father, remembering how often the father had
'unmercifully snubbed me.'
V. VISITS AND VISITORS.
Charles Armitage Brown, his friend of the old Florence days,
was now a settler in England, and as long as he remained Lan-
dor visited him from time to time at his house near Plymouth.
Here, in 1837, he was lecturing his neighbourhood on Keats
and his treatment by the Reviews; was enlightening them on
Shakespeare and his Sonnets, and the probability of the poet's
having visited Italy; and was otherwise busying himself in writ-
ing for newspapers. With his lectures he does not seem to
have made much impression, until, with the view of proving that
Shakespeare must have had ample means for visiting Italy, he
undertook to show that at the age of forty-three the great poet was
worth nearly seven thousand pounds: when a burst of glad ap-
plause, sudden as a pistol-shot, shook the lecture-hall. Brown
mentioned this to Landor as quite a good anecdote in the history
of human nature, showing the delight of those west-country folk
at the rewards bestowed, even in his lifetime, on the author of
Othello; but Landor declared with his hearty laugh that it only
showed they comprehended seven thousand pounds much better
than a wilderness of Othellos. The friends agreed however in
most things: and Brown said to Landor, after one of his visits,
that all his womankind had fallen in love with him; that the
daughters of his friend Colonel Hamilton Smith declared their
craze openly; that it would have to be said of him, as of the
other great Warwickshire poet, that no woman could safely
go nigh him; and that for his own part he had not been hap-
pier when twenty years younger, and with Keats for his com-
panion in that same western county, than Landor had made
1836-1857.
405
VISITS AND VISITORS.
him in those late 'white days' in their walks by the Laira and
the Tamar. In the same letter (27th April 1838) he said he
was coming to London shortly, like parson Adams with his ser-
mons, to try and find a publisher for a volume about Shake-
speare; and before that year the volume also was out, with
dedication to Landor as the best lover of the poet and the best
living writer of the English language. Two years later, family
hopes took Brown to New Zealand; and not long after his ar-
rival, one of the sudden fits to which he had become subject
after leaving Italy, closed, in the streets of New Plymouth, the
life of this kindly original man, whose name cannot be forgotten
as long as a reader remains for the most sorrowful story in our
language, the brief life and pitiable death of the author of En-
dymion.*
All who remember Landor at this time will understand, if
they have not shared, the delight his visits gave. Brown has only
expressed what everyone felt. His fine presence, manly voice,
and cordial smile, the amusing exaggerations of his speech, the
irresistible contagion of his laugh, and the subtle charm of his
genius diffused over all, made him quite irresistible. Nor was it
possible to have him more at his best than under the hospitable
roof of Kenyon, whether at Torquay, where he frequently went
at this time, or in London, or in later years at Wimbledon or
Cowes. Of this excellent man Southey wrote in 1827 that
everybody liked him at first sight, and liked him better the
longer he was known; that he had himself then known him
three and twenty years; that he was of all his friends one of
the very best and pleasantest; and that he reckoned as one of
his whitest days the day he first fell in with him. Not without
strong opinions himself, Kenyon had that about him which re-
pelled no opinion whatever; and to this rare quality Southey
hardly did justice on another occasion, when, rallying him on
his regret at having no occupation, he told him he was happier
so, than if sitting on the bench all berobed and bewigged, or
* See Milnes's admirable Life and Letters of Keats: a book that one
reads with the same miserable anguish of foolish impatience at the de-
crees of providence, with which such tragedies as Romeo and Othello are
read.
406
Book VII.
TWENTY-ONE YEARS AT BATH.
flitting like the bat in the fable between the two contending
parties in the house of commons, not knowing to which he pro-
perly belonged. It was the fact of Kenyon's knowing well to
which he belonged that gave peculiar charm to the catholicity
of his tastes and tolerance; nor could his love of pleasure, or
his frank confession of the pursuit of it, have other effect than
to raise him in the respect of all who knew how much of it
consisted in doing good and giving pleasure to others. It is
material to add besides, that Kenyon had accomplishments of
no ordinary kind, and could give and take with the best who
assembled at his table. He wrote manly English verse, was a
fair scholar, a good critic of books and art, an observer on whom
unusual opportunities of seeing much of the world had not been
thrown away; and, in a familiar friendship with him of a quar-
ter of a century, I never saw him use for mere personal display
any one advantage he thus possessed. He was always thinking
of others, always planning to get his own pleasure out of theirs;
and Landor in this respect was an untiring satisfaction to him.
He displayed his enjoyment so thoroughly. The laugh was en-
couraged till the room shook again; and, while Landor would
defend to the death some indefensible position, assail with pro-
digious vigour an imaginary enemy, or blow himself and his
adversary together into the air with the explosion of a joke, the
radiant glee of Kenyon was a thing not to be forgotten. I have
seen it shared at the same moment, in an equal degree, by Arch-
deacon Hare and Sir Robert Harry Inglis. Of another friend
to whom regular visits were made at this time, who had married,
during his absence in Italy, an old school-and-college compa-
nion's sister, whom we have seen that Landor remembered as
long ago as her childhood during happy days at her father's
house, I will leave Mr. Robert Landor to speak.
'Mr. Rosenhagen was of a Danish family, and the son of a clergyman
intimately connected, I cannot tell how, with statesmen high in office and
influence about the time of Lord Chatham. Oue son died young, but he
had gained the rank of post-captain in the navy. Our friend rose still more
rapidly in the Treasury, of which he became first clerk; and was often
mentioned in the house of commons, though he never sat there. From the
Treasury he was transferred as private secretary to Mr. Perceval; and he
was joined, after the battle of Waterloo, in the same commission with the
Duke of Wellington and Lord Castlereagh to negotiate the peace at Paris.
1836-1857.
407
VISITS AND VISITORS.
His part was especially financial, and he seems to have acquired the Duke's
esteem in no common degree. But his attention to business almost en-
tirely destroyed a sight which was always weak, and on his return to Eng-
land he retired on a pension of twelve hundred a year; having married, as
his second wife, the daughter of an old Worcestershire family connected
with the Fortescues and Dormers, Miss Parkhurst, whose eldest brother
was Walter's schoolfellow at Rugby, and went up to the same college at
Oxford. Though they were very discordant, they were much together some
years later, visiting each other's friends and travelling together; but with
old Mr. Parkhurst, Walter was much the greater favourite, and he had
been always very happy at Ripple, on the banks of the Severn. Many
years had passed away from that time, during which there was no inter-
course between the schoolfellows. My brother Henry had been often at
Ripple, but until the marriage of Miss Parkhurst none of us had seen Mr.
Rosenhagen. She reunited the two families while Walter was still at Flo-
rence. She and Mr. Rosenhagen had established themselves at Chelten-
ham, shortly before my removal to Birlingham thirty-six years ago.
Till
then I had not seen either of them; but, living then at the distance of
only fourteen miles, every possible kindness was shown to me. My sisters
and nieces were often their guests; and on Walter's arrival from Florence,
when you became acquainted with him, he visited both me and them. Mr.
Rosenhagen was almost blind and very deaf, but a delightful companion
nevertheless. There was no danger of any disagreement between the high
tory and the black jacobin, between the high churchman and the disbeliever
in all churches, for they eschewed controversy, and it would have been very
difficult indeed to irritate a man so courteous, so forbearing, and of such
easy politeness. Besides a fine person, he had much unassuming dignity,
treating with an impressive kindness, even as more than friends and equals,
such of his guests as he liked: and he liked Walter greatly. My brother
spoke of him in his Last Fruit as the best and wisest man whom he had
ever known. I think that it was I who suggested this character by saying
that Walter may have known some few men of equal ability, some few of
equal virtue, but I doubted whether he had seen one man who equalled
our friend in both. Very highly and sincerely, on the other hand, did Mr.
Rosenhagen value Walter's better qualities; and of the worse he would
neither speak nor hear. When quite blind, he lost the best of wives, sud-
denly (1844). I was with him a few days after her death. "I have lost,
"or am losing, all my senses," he said, "but all amounted to very little
"indeed compared with this loss." It is now fifteen years since he died,
leaving me some very valuable books. He always believed that the Letters
of Junius were written by his father, but felt no wish to prove the fact.'
Few names for praise and liking were oftener in Landor's
mouth than Rosenhagen's: and in the same year (1840) in
which he wrote to me that the Fanny Parkhurst whom he re-
membered as an infant was become the providence of her hus-
band, and that old Parkhurst and his son-in-law Rosenhagen
were the men who united most of virtue and most of politeness
that he had ever met with, I find a letter from her, acknow-
408
Book VII.
TWENTY-ONE YEARS AT BATH.
ledging the gift of his Fra Rupert and alluding to some lines
in one of its scenes, in which she tells Landor that he had made
the 'blind but cheerful old man' very grateful for embalming a
thought of his in verse so beautiful; that he had received no
honour equal to this since the great Duke named him in his
despatches; that he had directed her to place the three trage-
dies on the same shelf with Shakespeare and the Greek trage-
dians; and that he had long felt his adoption into the friendship
of the Landor family as one of the happiest consequences of his
marriage.
Mention also should be made, among those with whom
Landor had frequent intercourse in the earlier years after his
return, of Mr. James, who at this time dedicated one of his
romances to him, and to whom in Hampshire and on the Dor-
setshire coast he made some joyous visits. The kind-hearted
and not too vigorous novelist compared himself, on such occa-
sions, to a still calm lake brushed by the wing of the whirlwind;
and boundless was his enjoyment of the unaccustomed pleasure.
'I stagnate when I do not see you,' is the cry of his letters,
which promise Landor wild-flowers and wood-walks in Hampshire,
with hills to ring back his joyous laugh, and, at Lyme Regis,
cliffs that will remind him of Italy though of different colour.
The joyous laugh attracted Thomas Moore too in these days,
and he tells us in his Diary what a different sort of person
Landor was from what he had expected to find him; that he
had all the air and laugh of a hearty country gentleman, a gros
réjoui; and that whereas his writings formerly had not given
him a relish for the man, the man now had given him a relish
for his writings. To another and finer artist, dear to both of
us alike, my old friend had also at this time to sit for a picture
which I shall be pardoned for transferring to these pages, since
it has added even to Landor's chances of being remembered here-
after.
'We all conceived, before seeing him, a prepossession in his favour;
for there was a sterling quality in his laugh, and in his vigorous healthy
voice, and in the roundness and fulness with which he uttered every word
he spoke, and in the very fury of his superlatives, which seemed to go off
like blank cannons and hurt nothing. But we were hardly prepared to
have it so confirmed by his appearance. .
•
He was not only a very hand-
1836-1857.
409
VISITS AND VISITORS.
some old gentleman, upright and stalwart as he had been described to us,
with a massive gray head, a fine composure of face when silent, a figure
that might have become corpulent but for his being so continually in earn-
est that he gave it no rest, and a chin that might have subsided into a
double-chin but for the vehement emphasis in which it was constantly re-
quired to assist; but he was such a true gentleman in his manner, so chi-
valrously polite, his face was lighted up by a smile of so much sweetness
and tenderness, and it seemed so plain that he had nothing to hide, but
showed himself exactly as he was, incapable of anything on a limited scale,
and firing away with those blank great guns because he carried no small-
arms whatever; that really I could not help looking at him with equal
pleasure as he sat at dinner, whether he smilingly conversed, or was led
into some great volley of superlatives, or threw up his head like a blood-
hound, and gave out that tremendous Ha! ha! ha!'
The world did not make this pleasant acquaintance till some
years later; but the Boythorn of Bleak House was the Landor
of this earlier time, from a few of whose many attractive and
original qualities, omitting all the graver, our great master of
fiction drew that new and delightful creature of his fancy. In
the letter thanking me for my Life of Cromwell (April 1839)
Landor had sent his first message to Dickens. 'Tell him he
'has drawn from me more tears and more smiles than are re-
maining to me for all the rest of the world, real or ideal.' It
cannot be always the Boythorn laugh, in the world either of
fact or fancy; Landor in both had his ample share at all times
of the tears as well as of the smiles; and neither few nor tran-
sient were the shadows that fell across his present enjoyments,
as well in summer as in winter days, from remembrances of
Italy.
The change from Fiesole had of course tried him the most in
winter. With amusing heat he wrote to me of one of his Bath
Novembers: We have had only four hours of sun in six
'weeks; never since the creation of the world has this hap-
(
pened before.' And this had befallen him after a July which
he had thus described to me: 'I could not get salt-bathing
'quite so near at hand as yours' (I was then at Brighton); ' but
'I can get a fine fresh bath, or even swim, every day before my
'window. Never had we such continued rain. I doubt whe-
´´ther there are any trout in the grand canal before my house,
but its ripples would tempt any stranger to look over his col-
•lection of flies and try his tackle.' Nor was his trouble al-
410
Book VII.
TWENTY-ONE YEARS AT BATH.
ways from the climate merely, but sometimes from the ill-pro-
vision made against it. When Francis Hare came over to
England the year before his death, and Landor visited him
(January 1839) for the last time at Westwood-Way house in
Berkshire, he described it as a house that would have done
passably well for Naples, but better for Timbuctoo. Every-
thing around him but his friend's cheerful greeting was con-
gealed; and into so enormous a bed was he put to sleep, such
a frozen sea of sheets stretching out on every side of him, that
for once he envied the bed of Procrustes. Those were country
inconveniences, and town-streets were worse.
On another occa-
sion (21st December 1840) he wrote to me:
myself, an oddly-mixt
'In this weather nobody can be quite well.
metal with a pretty large portion of iron in it, am sensible to the curse of
climate. The chief reason is, I cannot walk through the snow and slop.
My body, and my mind more especially, requires strong exercise. Nothing
can tire either, excepting dull people, and they weary both at once.
The
snow fell in Italy at the end of November, and the weather was severe at
Florence. Lately, from the want of sun and all things cheerful, my sad-
dened and wearied mind has often roosted on the acacias and cypresses I
planted. Thoughts when they're weakest take the longest flights, and
tempt the wintry seas in darkest nights. How is it that when I am a
little melancholy my words are apt to fall into verse? Joy has never such
an effect on me. In fact, we hardly speak when we meet, and are at best
but bowing acquaintance.'
It was always so when he thought of Fiesole, from which,
let me add, after many disappointments in that direction, he
heard, a few months later, of a proposed visit to him, and at
once eagerly went over to Paris to meet and bring back his se-
cond son; when occasion was taken, in the French capital, to
show him some civilities that pleased him. Imagine my sur-
'prise,' he wrote to me (6th May 1841), that any among the
Nothing can exceed
(
literary men knew even of my existence.
'the attention I received from them. If their civilities are suf-
'ficient to make a place agreeable, I ought to be quite contented
'at Paris. Mignet has invited me this evening to a sitting of
'the Institut.' Victor Cousin was in the chair, Mignet de-
livered the oration, and Thiers was among those who attended.
Beyond all others in the gay city, however, one visit gave him
the greatest satisfaction. Playfully replying to a remonstrance
1836-1857.
411
VISITS AND VISITORS.
of kind Bath friends against the old hat he had taken with him
on his journey, he thus wrote to Miss Rose Paynter :
'Being somewhat hot-headed, is not an old hat likely to fit me better
than a new one? I wish you had seen it in all its glory. What think you
of my talking with a king and queen, and displaying it before them? Such,
in the most legitimate sense, are the Prince and Princess Czartoryski, he
having been proclaimed King of Poland by the deputies of the nobility and
people. Knowing my devotion to royalty, but probably more attracted by
my hat than by me, he conversed with me the greater part of the evening.'
On his return from Paris with his son, who, upon arrival in
London, paid a promised visit to his aunts at Richmond, Landor
passed some days with me, while the whigs were making their
last unsuccessful resistance to Peel; and it was in my library,
as he always afterwards said, he composed the shortest of all his
Conversations. It was sent to Kenyon.
Landor. Kenyon, I've written for your delectation
A short Imaginary Conversation.
Kenyon. Landor, I much rejoice at the report;
But only keep your promise-be it short.
FATHER AND CHILD.
Father. What, my boy, is the rhyme to whig?
Can it, papa, be whirligig?
Child.
This was the time also, he would amusingly protest, when he
failed in the only attempt he ever made on ministerial patron-
age. He had written to tell Lady Blessington that, now the
tories were coming in and he was growing old, he should like the
appointment of road-sweeper from Gore-house across to Hyde-
park: nobody could dispute his claims, because he had in print
avowed himself a conservative; he knew however there must be
many names down, and he could wait; only she was to be par-
ticular in saying that the place he wanted was for removing dirt,
or else there might be some mistake. The mistake must have
occurred after all, he said, for the thing was not given to him.
(
He visited at Richmond, before his return to Bath, the
mother and sisters of his wife. I might have expected some
degree of shyness, at the least on her mother's part. How-
ever, nothing of the kind. Neither she nor any one of her
daughters was less cordial with me than they had been for-
merly. Not a single word on those matters which rendered
<
412
Book VII.
TWENTY-ONE YEARS AT BATH.
<
C
my stay in Italy quite impossible, and equally so my return
to the only habitation in which my heart ever delighted.'
'Excellent creatures !' he wrote to Kenyon. They received me
' with indescribable kindness, and gave me a couple of dormice.
'These are great blessings.' The reader will remember Mr.
Boythorn's canary.
VI. DEATH OF SOUTHEY.
Southey's last letter to Landor was dated at the close of
March 1839. He told his friend that the portrait of Savona-
rola which he had sent was safely lodged at Keswick; spoke of
an epitaph for a proposed monument to Chatterton; and made
another announcement, for which the proper place will shortly
present itself. His wife Edith had died two years before, having
been for many previous years dead to him: but, long as the
event had been looked for, it fell heavily at last, and it was to
help in bringing back some shadow of his wonted cheerfulness
that a little excursion had been projected in the autumn of
1838; when his old friends, Kenyon, Senhouse, and Crabb
Robinson, accompanied him and his son to Paris, through Nor-
mandy, Brittany, and a part of Louvaine. Kenyon described it
to Landor:
'We made a prosperous journey, good weather, good roads, good temper
throughout. We travelled five weeks, did all we had intended, and reached
Paris on the day we proposed. The only drawback on our journey was that
Southey's spirits were not up to the mark, except occasionally, when we
passed through the country of Joan of Arc; and that, not having cultivated
catholic tastes, pictures, statues, and streets have not much charm for him.
We separated at Paris, which Southey declares he will never enter again,
and which I had hardly the heart to quit after a month's stay.'
Kenyon's letter closed with a whisper of an expected mar-
riage of one of the travelling party, neither himself, nor Crabb,
nor Cuthbert, nor Senhouse; but it was not a thing to talk
about till more assured. Though a very rational match, you
'heretic !' The news being at first not a little startling, the
same kind-hearted correspondent hastened to suggest what might
better reconcile Landor's thoughts to his friend. It was no fool-
ish doting, he assured him, no probable or even possible intru-
1836-1857.
413
DEATH OF SOUTHEY.
sion of a second family among the first; but rather an act in its
nature considerate to those around him.
'I know no man so nobly and honourably helpless as to all transactions
of this world, all its butcherings and bakings and bankings and fendings for
himself (out of a library), as Southey; and his daughters, I am sure, could
never quit him if the consequence were a solitary life for him. Alone, no
man would be so pitiable; and altogether, if a man is to marry again, I
should think this a wise match. Never suspecting that he would ever do
such a thing however, I asked him the other day whether he had approved
or disapproved the marriage of his uncle Hill, who took a wife at sixty. He
said, I approved it.'
Kenyon added something as to the lady; naming her age, her
frail health, and her unconquerable spirit. He had himself been
able to judge of her courage and highmindedness by a truly
Spartan letter of hers which Southey had shown him many
years ago.
'It was in the time of the stack-burnings, and never was bitter contempt
for what she esteemed a cowardly generation of magistrates more strongly
expressed than by Caroline Bowles. Southey told me too that in her dis-
trict they had nominated her for constable, hoping that she would draw off.
No such thing. She offered to serve, but they could not for shame swear-
in a woman. Yet her writings (for, although you and I in our ignorance do
not know her works, she is an authoress) are full of beauty, tenderness, and
feminine feeling; as her life, I doubt not, has also been. She has for years
been a great friend of Southey's, and he has rarely come south without
paying her a visit.'
The impression thus conveyed to Landor determined the
course taken by him in some painful disputes that followed;
and, sharing his high opinion of some friends of his friend to
whom it placed him for a time in antagonism, I thought then,
and think still, that he was right. Caroline Bowles deserved
all that the good Kenyon says of her, and she forfeited none of
her titles to admiration or esteem when she became Caroline
Southey. In genius and character she was worthy to have in-
spired an affection for which she sacrificed far more than it
was possible she could ever receive.
Between the time of his return from abroad and the incident
of his marriage, Southey wrote to a friend that he had heard of
Landor during his last transit through London, and had seen at
Kenyon's an excellent portrait of him by a young artist named
Fisher. As a picture too he thought it not less good than as a
likeness; though the same artist had also painted Kenyon, and
ہو
414
Book VII.
TWENTY-ONE YEARS AT BATH.
made him exactly like the Duke of York. This Landor portrait
became the property of Crabb Robinson, by whom it was be-
queathed to the National Portrait-Gallery; and characteristic ast
in some respects it is, nor undeserving of Southey's praise, its
expression is too fiercely aggressive, and, as Landor himself used
to say, its colour too like a dragon's belly, to be entirely agree-
able or satisfactory. It certainly had more in it of the opening
than of the closing lines of the little poem which Landor, during
a visit at this time made to me, addressed to its painter.
'Conceal not Time's misdeeds, but on my brow
Retrace his mark :
Let the retiring hair be silvery now
That once was dark:
Eyes that reflected images too bright
Let clouds o'ercast,
And from the tablet be abolisht quite
The cheerful past.
Yet Care's deep lines should one from waken'd Mirth
Steal softly o'er,
Perhaps on me the fairest of the earth
May glance once more.'
Not many days later, in March 1839, I heard that he had re-
ceived the letter written by Southey from the house of Caroline
Bowles at Buckland, for which Kenyon had prepared him.
Southey has written. He tells me of his intended marriage: that he
has known the lady for twenty years; that there is a just proportion be-
tween their ages; and that having but one daughter single, and being
obliged to leave her frequently, she wants a friend and guide at home.
Nothing is more reasonable, nothing more considerate and kind. Love has
often made other wise men less wise, and sometimes other good men less
good but never Southey.'
The marriage followed within a few days; then, a brief interval
before the return to Keswick; and then, the mournful close. Of
the wisest of our human plans and designings the issues are not
ours. The very day that joined newly-wedded wife and husband
on the threshold of their Cumberland home, witnessed the close
on earth of all that was happy in their loving intercourse. The
tragedy is to be written in other words than mine. The lines
are incomplete, but all that for the present can be given.
Come, friend! true friend! join hands with me, he said.
Join hand and heart for this life's latest stage,
And that to come unending. I engage,
1836-1857.
415
DEATH OF SOUTHEY.
1
God being gracious to me, as we tread
The dim descent, to be to thee instead
Of all thou leav'st for my sake! On our way,
If not with flowers and summer sunshine gay,
Soft light yet lingers, and the fadeless hue
Of the Green Holly. Be of courage! Come!
Thou shalt find friends, fear not: warm, loving, true,
All who love me.-He said, and to his home
Brought me. Then sank, a stricken man. . . . .
Before his consciousness departed, he had received and read
Landor's last letter to him, assuring him of gratitude and affec-
tion unalterable.
'God, who has bestowed on you so many blessings, and now the greatest
of all in that admirable woman who watches over you like a guardian-angel,
will never let you be forgotten even by the least worthy of your friends; and
will vouchsafe to you at last, I hope and trust, such blessings as neither
friendship nor health itself is sufficient to afford. If any man living is
ardent in his wishes for your welfare, I am : whose few and almost worthless
merits your generous heart has always overvalued, and whose infinite and
great faults it has been too ready to overlook. I will write to you often,
now I learn that I may do it inoffensively; well remembering that among
the names you have exalted is WALTER LANDOR.'
But, for a little while, still the mind was to shine and be
visible above the mists and dimness creeping over it.
My and
'your dear friend,' wrote Mrs. Southey, thanks you for your
'letter. But, alas! he no longer says, I will write soon to
'Landor; for when I proposed to answer in his stead, he said,—
'Yes, yes, do so, pray do. Landor has indeed a true regard for
'me.' She resumed after a few days:
'You are often with him still in spirit; his affectionate remembrance of
you is unfading. The volume of poetry still oftenest in his hand is Gebir.
It lived upon the sofa with us all last week; and he often exclaimed in de-
light, struck as by a first reading with something that charmed him, Why,
what a poem this is! If at such times you could see him, you would still
see the glorious mind all undimmed in those lustrous eyes of his. He took
up
his Book of the Church to-day, and, turning its leaves over and over,
looked up at me and said, Well, thank God, I have written a book that may
do good to somebody.'
Not very frequently did even such fitful glimpses of the
fast-fading intelligence appear; but with them still returned
the recollection of Landor. 'It is very seldom now,' wrote
Mrs. Southey on the 24th of December 1841, 'that he ever
names any person but this morning, before he left his bed, I
416
Book VII.
TWENTY-ONE YEARS AT BATH.
'heard him repeating softly to himself, Landor, ay, Landor.'
For many months beyond that Christmas-eve, life lingered, but
without that which alone makes it precious; and it was not
until the 22d of March, 1843, Landor heard that at 8 o'clock on
the previous morning Southey had passed away. On that day
he sent me some noble verses which the event had suggested to
him; and in the efforts that followed to raise a fitting memorial of
this famous man it is needless to say that his friend took zealous
part. With characteristic feeling Southey had himself desired
a simple marble slab in Redcliffe-church, bearing upon it his
favourite Daniell's proud yet modest lines:
'I know I shall be read among the rest
So long as men speak English; and so long
As verse and virtue shall be in request,
Or grace to honest industry belong.'
But many difficulties were presented to this; and, in the end,
a memorial was proposed that should take the form of a bust
by Baily, with an inscription underneath, to which Landor at
once sent twenty pounds and the inscription. The first was
taken, but not the last; which may therefore find a place here.
ROBERT SOUTHEY, BORN IN BRISTOL, OCTOBER 4, 1774;
DIED IN KESWICK, MARCH 21, 1843.
IN MAINTAINING THE INSTITUTIONS OF HIS COUNTRY
HE WAS CONSTANT, ZEALOUS, AND DISINTERESTED.
IN DOMESTIC LIFE HE WAS LOVING AND BELOVED.
HIS FRIENDSHIPS WERE FOR LIFE, AND LONGER.
IN CRITICISM, IN DIALOGUE, IN BIOGRAPHY, IN HISTORY,
HE WAS THE PUREST WRITER OF HIS AGE;
IN THALABA, KEHAMA, AND RODERICK, THE MOST INVENTIVE POET;
IN LIGHTER COMPOSITIONS THE MOST DIVERSIFIED.
RARELY HATH ANY AUTHOR BEEN SO EXEMPT
FROM THE MALADIES OF EMULATION;
RARELY ANY STUDIOUS MAN SO READY TO ASSIST THE STUDIOUS,
TO RAISE THEIR REPUTATION AND TO PROMOTE THEIR FORTUNES.
WONDER NOT THEN, O STRANGER, THAT OUR FELLOW-CITIZEN
HATH LEFT AMONG US THE RESOLUTION TO COMMEMORATE,
AND, UNDER THE SAME GOOD PROVIDENCE WHICH GUIDED HIM,
THE EARNEST WISH TO IMITATE, HIS VIRTUES.
A less perishable memorial than any of brass or marble re-
mained to be erected, but this led to divisions among those who
had most loved and been beloved by Southey. Perhaps there
1836-1857.
417
DEATH OF SOUTHEY.
never existed, for a suitable and enduring as well as a delight-
ful monument to the memory of a great author, such materials
as in this case were afforded by his own letters; but, upon the
question to whom they should be intrusted so much dispute
arose, that the writer of the noble poem of Philip van Artevelde,
Sir Henry Taylor, whom all should have desired to select, and
whom Southey during life had not only chosen to be his exe-
cutor with his brother, but had singled out as the one man living
of a younger generation whom he had taken into his heart of
hearts, had no alternative but to impose silence on himself, and
leave the task to others. Then was lost to us a book that might
worthily have handed down to later generations a conspicuous
example of some of the highest qualities that have adorned the
profession of literature in England. No one more than Landor
deplored this, though in the objections which mainly brought it
about he had taken unavoidable part; and he had certainly no
cause to regret that an opinion which he shared with the brother
of Southey should have brought him also to the side of Southey's
son-in-law, Mr. Wood Warter, the accomplished man by whose
careful editorship of his father-in-law's unpublished writings a
part at least of the literary debt due to his memory was very
shortly to be discharged. To Southey's son was at last in-
trusted his father's life and letters.' One of those letters,
written upon Marmion, which had passed into the exclusive
possession of Lockhart, has been described by him in his Life of
Scott.*
'Towards its close, immediately after mentioning a princely act of gene-
rosity, on the part of the writer's friend Mr. Landor, to a brother poet, he
has a noble sentence which I hope to be pardoned for extracting, as equally
applicable to his own character and that of the man he was addressing.
"Great poets have no envy. Little ones are full of it. I doubt whether
any man ever criticised a good poem maliciously who had not written a
"bad one himself."
The reference was to Jeffrey: but death is a great reconciler;
C
I cannot refer to this excellent book without remarking upon Lock-
hart's disproof, in the last edition, of a statement of Scott's authorship of a
song exulting in the death of Fox, which Mr. Walter Savage Landor, a
man of great learning and great abilities, has in a recent collective edition
' of his writings reproduced.' But already this error had been pointed out,
to Landor's great delight; for Scott had no heartier, no more loyal admirer.
EE
418
Book VII.
TWENTY-ONE YEARS AT BATH.
6
and in the letter which old Cottle had written to Landor while
the subscription for the Bristol monument was in progress, he
had taken pains to mention Lord Jeffrey as having behaved.
better then anybody. He had at once requested his name to be
inserted for ten pounds, and had characterised Southey as one
of the best writers and most amiable and estimable men of our
generation: 'I do not know,' he also wrote at the time to another
promoter of the subscription, 'into whose keeping the represen-
'tative dignity of literature, and the jealous care for its interests,
are now to go.' Jeffrey there struck the right chord. Not more
by the astonishing variety of the studies which had been to him
the business, exercise, and recreation of a long and blameless
life, than by excellence of achievement in all, Southey was the re-
presentative man of letters of his day; and the subject to which
Jeffrey refers, the position and the claims of writers by pro-
fession, had engaged his earliest thoughts, as it was among those
that occupied his latest. One of the very last to which he gave
expression, for example, was his bitter dislike and contempt for
that sort of support which the Literary Fund bestowed upon
such men, 'relieving them like paupers, and waiting till they
'become paupers before any relief is bestowed.' Another of his
later public appeals, in a like spirit, was to claim the only true
help for the writer which consists in obtaining for him his own,
by juster legislative arrangements as to copyright; and on the
very eve of the refusal of the baronetcy which Peel would have
bestowed upon himself, he declared that the state had no such
efficient servants as men of genius, and none who had higher or
better title to all its honours and rewards.
Two more subjects connected with his last years, hardly
known in connection with him, but which many personal asso-
ciations make memorable to me, will farther show how strongly
and steadily the fire that lighted his youth had survived to sus-
tain and inspire his age. The social reforms which have en-
deared to the working millions of England the name of Lord
Shaftesbury, were the subject of his last, almost daily, corre-
spondence with Lord Ashley during the days of the agitation
of political reform; and the last great book published in his
lifetime, wherein he recognised at once the presence of a new
1836-1857.
419
LAST SERIES OF CONVERSATIONS.
literary potentate, was Carlyle's French Revolution. Never had
he read a history, he declared, which interested him so much;
and doubtless all the more because of the emotion which the
tremendous course of events it describes had excited in him,
when, in his own and Landor's youth, he read of them day by
day. Not a few opinions, indeed, he found rising to the surface
in that book to which he hardly knew what reception to give;
but with wisdom and with feeling he found it to be full to
overflowing, nor could he rest satisfied till he had seen and
spoken with the author.
VII. LAST SERIES OF CONVERSATIONS, AND SOME LETTERS.
The entire number of new Conversations added to the old
during the twenty-one years now under description, written be-
fore Landor's return to Italy, and excluding only the five which
belong to the last six years of his life, were thirty-nine; and
the additional subjects may here be named. Eighteen belonged
to the domain of modern foreign politics, and of these I will
give little more than the titles. They were, Bugeaud and an
Arab chieftain on the eve of the marshal's massacre in Algeria;
-Talleyrand at his last confession to the Archbishop of Paris ;
the Queen of Tahiti, the English consul Pritchard, Louis
Philippe's envoy de Mitrailles, and the French officers and
sailors who were present when the envoy struck the Queen in
the face;-Louis XVIII and Talleyrand conversing on the genius
of Wellington, as to whom it is finely said that his loftiest lines
of Torres Vedras, which no enemy dared assail throughout their
whole extent, were his firmness, his moderation, and his pro-
bity, which placed him more opposite to Napoleon than he
stood in the field of Waterloo ;-Thiers talking to Lamartine of
the foreign policy of the House of Orleans;-Louis Philippe
expounding to Guizot the moral of the Spanish marriages;-
Antonelli and Gemeau conversing twice on the Occupation of
Rome; President Louis Napoleon characterising to M. de
Molé the policy of his uncle;-King Carlo-Alberto discussing
with the Duchess Belgioiso the prospects of Italy, and local
jealousies in the way of unity;-Larochejaquelin receiving Bé-
420
Book VII.
TWENTY-ONE YEARS AT BATH.
<
ranger before the second Empire;-Garibaldi giving honour to
Mazzini for the defence of Rome ;-three dialogues of Nicholas
and Nesselrode on the policy of the Crimean War ;-the Arch-
bishop of Florence sentencing for heresy the bible-reading family
of Francesco Madiai;-and two final dialogues on the conten-
tions of religion, contributed respectively by Antonelli and Pio
Nono, and by brothers Martin and Jack of the family of the Dean
of St. Patrick. 'Both parties,' says Martin, call themselves.
catholic, which neither is; nor indeed, my dear Jack, is it desir-
' able that either should be. Every sect is a moral check on its
neighbour. Competition is as wholesome in religion as in com-
merce. We must bid high for heaven; we must surrender
'much, we must strive much, we must suffer much; we must
'make way for others, in order that in our turn we may suc-
'ceed. There is but One Guide. We know him by the gentle-
'ness of his voice, by the serenity of his countenance, by the
'wounded in spirit who are clinging to his knees, by the chil-
'dren whom he hath called to him, and by the disciples in
'whose poverty he hath shared.'
(
Of subjects more strictly biographical there were four. The
speakers were, Eldon and his grandson Encombe, played off
against each other with exquisite fooling; Wellington and Inglis
after the Somnauth proclamation of Lord Ellenborough, where
it is shown how small was the fear of Juggernaut coming down
St. James's-street; Romilly and Wilberforce talking of the Abo-
lition of the Slave-trade; and Wyndham and Sheridan in dis-
cussion about the Irish Church, Sheridan maintaining that the
only feasible reform of her was to abolish her bishops and en-
dowments, sell the whole of her lands, and devote all the pro-
ceeds, in a just proportion between papal and protestant com-
municants, to the religious and moral education of the people.
With these may be named the imaginary talk of two others of
the most illustrious of Englishmen: Blake on his quarter-deck
passing judgment on his delinquent brother Humphrey; and
Oliver Cromwell with his Ironsides at his uncle Sir Oliver's
in Hinchinbrook. On the old knight's noteworthy career per-
haps a word is worth adding at Landor's suggestion. It did not
close until Sir Oliver had reached his ninety-third year, and it
1836-1857.
421
LAST SERIES OF CONVERSATIONS.
had by that time covered a space which included all the men of
great genius, excepting Chaucer and Roger Bacon, whom Eng-
land had then produced: not the Bacons and Shakespeares only,
but the prodigious shoal that attended those leviathans through
the intellectual deep. Raleigh, Spenser, Marlowe and the drama
tists of Elizabeth and James; Cromwell, Eliot, Milton, Selden,
Hampden, and Pym; Hooker, Taylor, Barrow, and Newton;
Hobbes, Sidney, Locke, and Shaftesbury; all had lived in some
part or other of that single life.
The Italian subjects were four: Macchiavelli and Michael-
Angelo on the suitability of Federal Republics for the govern-
ment of Italy; Titian and Cornaro on the glories of Venetian
art; Leonora, in her last confession to Father Panigarola, avow-
ing her love for Tasso; Alfieri's experiences of English literature
and manners, in a conversation with Metastasio of delightful
wit and eloquence, which has elicited on a former page the
admiration and sympathy of Carlyle; and Michael-Angelo and
Vittoria Colonna on the poets and artists of elder and later
Italy. Besides these, there were two brief prose poems on the
affecting double marriage of Count Gleichem, and on the un-
rewarded services to humanity of the noble English soldier by
whom infanticide in India was abolished: there were four, to
be named below, in which Landor takes personal part, with
Southey, Porson, and Julius Hare: and four Greek and Roman
conversations completed the extraordinary catalogue. The
speakers in these last were Menander and Epicurus, in two dia-
logues composed after the writer's eightieth year, and not un-
worthy of the exquisite Epicurus and Leontion to which they
are the sequel; Epicurus and Metrodorus on the writers and
the gods of Greece; and Asinius Pollio and Licinius Calvus on
the heroes and histories of Rome. If to this list I were to add
the subjects also of the dialogues written in verse by Landor,
some already named and more to be named hereafter, it would
bring up the number of his compositions exclusively of this
class to no less than one hundred and ninety; in their mere
number wonderful, and in their variety as well as unity of treat-
ment still more memorable.
Of the four to which Landor contributes notices of personal
422
Book VII.
TWENTY-ONE YEARS AT BATH.
opinion I am now to speak; and first of that in which Southey
and Porson are interlocutors. Landor's faith in Wordsworth
had again been rudely shaken by his unyielding attitude in the
Southey family dispute, and he had probably never felt less
kindly to the great poet than during the final illness of their
common friend. Hence therefore, taking him for the subject of
a second dialogue between Porson and Southey which was to
comprise what he thought of the later English poets, he was led
to dwell less on the merits than on the defects of the author of
the Lyrical Ballads. Even from Southey is drawn the admis-
sion of his friend's weakness for reciting his own poetry, which
yet his friend himself might have forgiven for the exquisite
truth of the description of it. 'He delivers them with such a
"
summer murmur of fostering modulation as would perfectly
delight you.' But he is not the more inclined to spare his
critics. In this, as in the first Porson dialogue, the critics of
poetry are sharply handled; and as true in its application now,
as it was then, is what is said of their fashion of dandling their
favourite for the time and never letting him off their knee, feed-
ing him to bursting with their curds-and-whey, while any other
they warn off the premises, and will give him neither a crust
nor a crumb, until they hear he has succeeded to a large estate
' in popularity, with plenty of dependants.' Against all that
is thus grudging and ungenerous, there is eloquent protest;
from which as earnestly, but whether as truly may be doubted,
Southey is made to put in a claim of exemption for genius itself
which is at least in keeping with the speaker's character. The
curse of quarrelsomeness, of hand against every man, was in-
'flicted on the children of the desert, not on those who pastured
'their flocks on the fertile banks of the Euphrates, or contem-
plated the heavens from the elevated ranges of Chaldæa.' Alas
that experience should ever seem adverse to this! but it is only
too certain that the large estate in popularity, long and wearily
expected, does not therefore bring content to its inheritor; and
that poets of the highest rank will not be found readier to do
justice to others, because they have had to wait long for justice
to themselves.
<
•
There is much besides very truly said in this dialogue as to
1836-1857.
423
LAST SERIES OF CONVERSATIONS.
English poets of the second class. Delightful praise is given to
Cowper; Byron and Scott are well discriminated, the last with
a hearty cordiality; and, where the greater masters are inci-
dentally named, language not inferior to their own arises to do
them homage. A great poet represents a great portion of the
'human race. Nature delegated to Shakespeare the interests
' and direction of the whole. To Milton was given a smaller
part, but with plenary power over it; and such fervour and
majesty of eloquence was bestowed on him as on no other
'mortal in any age.' In the three others also wherein Landor,
Southey, and Julius Hare were interlocutors, Milton continued
to receive critical treatment of the most striking kind: all his
works, and eminently his Latin poems, being laid under con-
tribution for subjects and illustration, and readings being fre-
quently suggested that add unexpected beauties to even his
noblest verse. An instance has been cited for admiration by De
Quincey, at the line of the Agonistes which depicts Samson in
his fall:
'Ask for this great deliverer now, and find him
Eyeless, in Gaza, at the mill, with slaves ;'
where, by the comma which Landor would thrice repeat, Sam-
son's agony is presented to us with increased vividness, under
blindness, inability of farther triumph over enemies, toil for
bread, and association with slaves, in all the accumulated aggrav-
ation of its unendurable misery. A rib of Shakespeare would
' have made a Milton,' says Landor in conclusion; 'the same
'portion of Milton, all poets born ever since.'
The talk with Julius Hare reintroduces Wordsworth, from
whom, often and often as Landor takes leave, he is but the
more and more loath to depart; and happily only quits him at
last with wise and reconciling words. He would have all re-
spect, all reverence even, short of worship, paid to him; speaks
with delight of the series of enchanting idyls into which the
Excursion would subdivide, with help of a judicious enclosure-
act; places Virgil and Theocritus below him for everlasting fresh-
ness of description; and admits that no man has ever had such
mastery over Nature in her profoundest relations to humanity.
This includes more than Landor meant to concede, but is neither
+
424
Book VII.
TWENTY-ONE YEARS AT BATH.
less nor more than true. It puts Wordsworth, in regard to the
special influences he has exercised, in what I believe to be his just
place. No effect comparable in its kind to that which his writ-
ings have bequeathed, no such fruits of spiritual insight applic-
able as well to his own time as to coming times and changes with
which he would himself have had small sympathy, have attended
those of any poet within living memory. The influence of his
genius on his immediate contemporaries has been surpassed by
its authority over their successors, whose ways of thought have
been mainly fashioned by his, and not in poetry alone.
Other views of Landor's as to books and men, which find
expression in letters written at this date to me, may properly
be represented by one or two sentences here. Wordsworth and
other kindred subjects reappear; and in them, or in similar
detached sayings that may be given hereafter, the reader will
not judge hardly such small contradictions or inconsistencies
as are incident to the freedom of friendly correspondence. The
animating spirit is always the same, and there is no mistaking
Landor's voice in any.
A JUDGMENT OF THREE ORATORS.
'I have often heard them, Grattan as well as Pitt and Fox; and, though
I might otherwise be angry with him, I preferred always the plain-spoken-
ness of Fox, even when hammering repetition upon repetition, to the
sounding inanities of Pitt and the gaudy barbarism of Grattan.'
EDUCATION.
'Education does not control or greatly modify the character. It brings
out what lies within : vim promovet insitam: and that is nearly all it does.'
HAZLITT.
'Hazlitt's books are delightful to read, pleasant always, often eloquent
and affecting in the extreme. But I don't get much valuable criticism out
of them. Coleridge was worth fifty of him in that respect. A point may
be very sharp, and yet not go very deep; and the deficiency of penetrating
may be the result of its fineness.'
CHARACTERISTIC.
'Faults very often drop from us by thinking about them. I was re-
marking to a friend one day the common negligence of writing "I never
should have thought to have seen you here," when he smiled and showed
me that I myself had done it in the Examiner. I thought I should have
dropt at the shock !'
1836-1857.
425
LAST SERIES OF CONVERSATIONS.
A LOST THOUGHT (8th Nov. 1843).
'It is hardly possible to recover a lost thought without breaking its
wings in catching it. I got up in the middle of last night to fix one on
paper, and fixed a rheumatism instead. Night is not the time for pinning
a butterfly on a blank leaf.'
NOT TO BE READ AT ONCE.
'There are admirable poems which demand relays. You cannot lay
down Chaucer or Shakespeare. Spenser falls out of your hands in the
midst of his enchantments. The longest of Wordsworth's poems I can
get through without a relay is Michael; and there is not much in the old
poets that we call the classic (sincę Ovid) which is worth this.'
FAULTLESS WRITERS.
'La Fontaine, Catullus, and Sophocles, are perhaps the writers who
have fewest faults. Strange companions! But there are pages in Shake-
speare and Milton worth all the works of all three.'
Two-WORD RHYMES.
'How is it possible that so serious a writer as Miss Barrett should not
perceive that the two-word rhyme is only fit for ludicrous subjects:
These rhymes appear to me but very so-so, .
And fit but for our Lady del Toboso.
But we are so much in the habit of seeing the common law of the land
in poetry infringed and violated, that nothing shocks us.'
INVITATION TO BATH (1843).
'I have an antique ring, long prized in our family, which I want to put
upon your finger. For this express purpose it has been newly set over the
ancient gold, and here are the lines I have written for it. It is a mask:
Forster! though you never wore
Any kind of mask before,
Yet, by holy friendship! take
This, and wear it for my sake.'
PROSE RUNNING INTO VERSE.
*
'While writing the Tancredi dialogue, I had the greatest difficulty to
prevent my prose running away with me. Sundry verses indeed I could
not keep down, nor could I afterwards break them into prose. Here is a
specimen, not in the Conversation as it stands at present, which was writ-
ten while I fancied I was writing prose:
* Several such instances have been given, and I could multiply them
from his correspondence, light as well as grave, if it were worth the while.
Here is one of the lighter sort from an invitation to me to visit him in
Bath in the April of his 81st year. 'What weather! Some demon seems
to shuffle months together! March came for April, April comes for March.
'Here are two verses for you, with a rhyme to boot: no thanks to me, for
I never intended it. And now, when will you come ?'
426
Book VII.
TWENTY-ONE YEARS AT BATH.
Can certain words pronounced by certain men
Perform an incantation which shall hold
Two hearts together to the end of time?
If these were wanting, yet instead of these,
There was my father's word, and there was God's.'
PROPERTY OF AUTHORS IN THEIR WRITINGS.
'It seems to me that no property is so entirely and purely and religi-
ously a man's own as what comes to him immediately from God, without
intervention or participation. It is the eternal gift of an eternal being.
No legislature has a right to confine its advantages, or to give them away
to any person whatsoever, to the detriment of an author's heirs. To the
rights of another
"His ego nec metas rerum nec tempora pono.'
THE CHURCHYARD ELEGY.
'Gray's Elegy will be read as long as any work of Shakespeare, despite
of its moping owl and the tin-kettle of an epitaph tied to its tail. It is the
first poem that ever touched my heart, and it strikes it now just in the
same place. Homer, Shakespeare, Milton, Dante, the four giants who lived
before our last Deluge of poetry, have left the ivy growing on the church-
yard wall.'
SOUTHEY'S SMALLER PIECES.
'How delightful is the humour that runs through his smaller pieces!
I am quite astonished at the Gridiron. It is the only modern piece that
reminds me heartily of Aristophanes-that admirable poet whose choruses
have levity at one end with gravity at the other, like Apollo's arrow and
indeed every arrow that can hit the mark. Are any poems of our time
more animated or fanciful than the smaller pieces of Southey?'
POETRY IN GENERAL (1843).
'I have rather a dislike to all poetry except the very highest; nearly
all of it appears to me impure and false: strong expressions on subjects
that cannot support them; the macula on the smaller stars that were above
the horizon in Shakespeare's time. There is so much too that is incon-
gruous, and I require the unmixed. Salt and sugar ought to be kept sepa-
rate. Coffee should not taste of cheese, nor tea of mustard. Wordsworth
has none of this bad housewifery; nor has Southey, in whose mind there
are at least more mansions than in father Wordsworth's. Tennyson has
too many summer-houses and pavilions for the extent of his grounds; but
everything in them is pleasing and suitable. And what fine poems are such
as his Ulysses and his Godiva!
THE PRELUDE OF WORDSWORTH.
'You have indeed given me a noble passage from Wordsworth's Pre-
lude: O si sic omnia scripsisset! Higher it would be difficult to go. Here
the wagoner's frock shows the coat of mail under it. Here is heart and
soul. Here is the εἰκὼν βασιλική of poetry.'
'Such creatures as
ASSAILANTS OF GENIUS.
may pelt young Keats as he climbs the tree :
1836-1857.
427
LAST SERIES OF CONVERSATIONS.
but that Gray should be insensible to the fervour of Rousseau is quite
astonishing, quite deplorable. I wonder how people dare to lie in the pre-
sence of such a train of detectives, reaching from their own doors to the
very limits of space and time.'
A SHAKESPEARE CELEBRATION (1844).
'A herd of clownish Warwickshire squires of the purest breed, and in
no county of England is the breed so pure, was resolved to celebrate Shake-
speare's birthday at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was invited: I declined. I
told them he was not only the greatest glory of their county but the great-
est work of God's creation, but I should hardly testify my love and vene-
ration by eating and drinking, and I had refused all such invitations when
I might meet those who knew me, of whom in Warwickshire there is now
scarcely one. I could not help doubting whether any of the party ever
read a single page of his writings; but I entertain no doubt whatever that
if he were living and had come into the party, they would have butted him
out. As the rocks that bound the sea are formed by the smallest and most
inert insects, so celebrity seems to rise up from accretions equally vile and
worthless. This idea has occurred to me many times before, and may per-
haps be found in my writings; but never did it come forward with so lumi-
nous a stare as on the present occasion.'
BYRON AND WORDSWORTH (Bath, 1845).
A lady here, a friend of yours, has been lecturing me on my hostility
to Wordsworth. In the course of our conversation I said what I turned
into verse half an hour ago, on reaching home. No writer, I will again in-
terpose before transcribing them, has praised Wordsworth more copiously
or more warmly than I have done; and I said not a syllable against him
until he disparaged his friend and greatest champion, Southey. You should
be the last to blame me for holding the heads of my friends to be inviol-
able. Whoever touches a hair of them I devote diis inferis, sed rite. Here
are the lines:
Byron's sharp bark and Wordsworth's long-drawn wheese
Issue alike from breasts that pant for ease.
One caught the fever of the flowery marsh,
The other's voice intemperate scorn made harsh.
But each hath better parts: to One belong
Staffs for the old and guide-posts for the young:
The Other's store-room downcast eyes approve,
Hung with bright feathers dropt from moulting Love.'
BARRY CORNWALL (1840).
'Give the admirable Procter one [a copy of his Andrea and Giovanna].
What delightful poetry he writes! How fresh and sweet and pleasant the
old-world flavour which he gives to modern life! Nobody writes with more
purity. As to my own, jam satis terris nivis. I think it cold languid stuff
for the most part beside his. I have read XXI. and XLIV. of Procter's Songs
six or seven times; and how beautiful XIII. v. LXXXII. CVIII.-in fact all of
them I'
ROBERT BROWNING.
'You were right as to Browning. He has sent me some admirable
428
Book VII.
TWENTY-ONE YEARS AT BATH.
things. I only wish he would atticise a little. Few of the Athenians had
such a quarry on their property, but they constructed better roads for the
conveyance of the material.'
AGAIN: SOMEWHAT LATER (1845).
'I have written to Browning; a great poet, a very great poet indeed,
as the world will have to agree with us in thinking. I am now deep in the
Soul's Tragedy. The sudden close of Luria is very grand; but preceding
it, I fear there is rather too much of argumentation and reflection. It is
continued too long after the Moor has taken the poison. I may be wrong;
but if it is so, you will see it and tell him. God grant he may live to be
much greater than he is, high as he stands above most of the living: latis
humeris et toto vertice. But now to the Soul's Tragedy, and so adieu till
we meet at this very table.'
Luria had been dedicated to Landor, who in later years, as
will be seen hereafter, was to receive from its writer a graver
service; and though the fame is now Mr. Browning's by rightful
inheritance which but a few claimed for him when this letter
was written, a tribute may be still matter of just pride to him
which connects, with a man so remarkable as Landor, a wish
so earnestly uttered, and a prediction so well fulfilled.
VIII. A FRIEND NOT LITERARY, AND OTHER FRIENDS.
Every autumn, as long as the last of Landor's sisters lived,
took him upon a visit to her in Warwick, at the house in which
he was born; and the only drawback from his pleasure, on these
as on all occasions when he quitted Bath, was his inability to
take with him a favourite companion claiming honourable men-
tion in this history. 'Daily,' he wrote to me from Warwick in
1844,
'do I think of Bath and Pomero. I fancy him lying on
'the narrow window-sill, and watching the good people go to
'church. He has not yet made up his mind between the An-
'glican and Roman-catholic; but I hope he will continue in
' the faith of his forefathers, if it will make him happier.' This
was a small white Pomeranian dog that had been sent to him
from his Fiesolan villa the previous autumn; visiting by the
way myself, to whom he had been consigned for safer delivery;
and at first sight dazzling me, as I well remember, by the eager
brightness of his eye and the feathery whiteness of his coat, as
he pushed his nose through the wicker-basket in which he had
1836-1857.
429
A FRIEND NOT LITERARY.
travelled the last stage of his journey. Eighteen shillings for
'me, padrone,' was the message sent me in Landor's next letter,
informing me that already they were on speaking terms, and
that I was to be reimbursed his fare from Florence. For many
years from that day they were inseparable; and Landor's own
figure, as it trudged up and down Bath streets, was not better
known than his little bright-eyed companion's became. They
were faces, both of them, that most people turned to look
after; and Pomero certainly had the better coat. His master
was quite conscious of this; and not long after his arrival told
me, on sending me his 'love and a bite,' that the young rascal,
not content with the advantage he already had, was always
trying to make it greater. He will have to pay at least half
my tailor's bill, besides the mending of my new silk stock-
ings.' On another occasion he writes to me:
<
'Pomero was on my knee when your letter came. He is now looking
out of the window; a sad male gossip, as I often tell him. I dare not take
him with me to London. He would most certainly be stolen, and I would
rather lose Ipsley or Llanthony. The people of the house love him like a
child, and declare he is as sensible as a Christian. He not only is as
sensible, but much more Christian than some of those who have lately
brought strife and contention into the church. Everybody knows him,
high and low, and he makes me quite a celebrity.'
C
As time went on, his value to his master went far beyond
Ipsley or Llanthony; for on a lady asking whether he was in-
clined to part with him, 'No, madam,' was his answer, 'not for
a million of money!' 'Not for a million!' she exclaimed;
whereupon I added, that a million would not make me at all
happier, and that the loss of Pomero would make me miser-
´able for life.' Nor perhaps will the reader object to another
mention of this little hero at the house of one of his master's
earliest heroines and dearest friends, as I saw her myself in
Bath, looking nearly as young as her grandchild.
เ
'Pomero is sitting in a state of contemplation, with his nose before
the fire. He twinkles his ears and his feathery tail at your salutation.
He now licks his lips and turns round, which means Return mine. The
easterly wind has an evident effect on his nerves. Last evening I took
him to hear Luisina de Sodre play and sing. She is my friend the Countess
de Molandè's granddaughter, and daughter of de Sodre, minister of Brazil
to the Pope a few years ago. Pomero was deeply affected, and lay close
to the pedal on her gown, singing in a great variety of tones, not always
430
Book VII.
TWENTY-ONE YEARS AT BATH.
in time. It is unfortunate that he always will take a part where there is
music, for he sings even worse than I do.'
(
Hardly a letter now came without some such mention of the
small fond creature. But one other must suffice. At six last
night,' wrote Landor to me the morning after one of his sum-
mer absences from Bath, 'I arrived, and instantly visited Pomero
en pension. His joy at seeing me amounted to madness. His
'bark was a scream of delight. He is now sitting on my head,
'superintending all I write, and telling me to give his love.'
This kindly impression of my old friend will not be weak-
ened by such brief notice as I can afford to give of his inter-
course during these early Bath years with his oldest friend, his
sister Elizabeth. Nothing was such pleasure to him always as
to have the country in some form near, in shape of trees, plants,
or flowers; he rarely omits in his letters to remind her of some
association they have in common with the old garden in War-
wick; and, through three successive changes of lodging during
his first thirteen years in Bath, he clung to the square in which
he first lived mainly because of a plane-tree and a mountain-ash
in its enclosure, of which he was extremely fond. When an
accident happened to one of his sister's cedars he grieved as he
would have done for some friend of his youth. 'You tell me,'
he wrote to her, 'it is broken into splinters. Surely about the
root there must be some pieces large enough to make a little
box of. Pray keep them for me. Here is a man at Bath who
' will contrive to form them into something which I may keep
' in my bedroom.' His sister had anticipated the wish: a writ-
ing-case of cedar, already put in hand for him, reached him on
his next birthday and I was witness to the delight with which
he received it. He was seventy that day, and had risen at his
usual hour of nine, though he had stayed at the subscription.
ball the previous night till close upon the third hour of morn-
ing. I rallied him on his dissipation, and warned him, even
though Medea's cauldron might still be boiling in Bath, that
to give such advantage to the enemy might bring him down.
some day into the very middle of the brew. 'I don't invite
' him,' was his laughing reply; but I shall receive him hospit-
'ably when he comes.'
:
1836-1857.
431
A FRIEND NOT LITERARY.
In the same year (1845) he described to his sister his way
of life.
'I walk out in all weathers six miles a day at the least; and I gener-
ally, unless I am engaged in the evening, read from seven till twelve or
one. I sleep twenty minutes after dinner, and nearly four hours at night,
or rather in the morning. I rise at nine, breakfast at ten, and dine at five.
All winter I have had some beautiful sweet daphnes and hyacinths in my
windows.'
C
(
Inquiring in another letter after her dahlias, which he fears
the fogs will abolish, he tells her he never sees or hears the
name without recollecting a story told of one of Sir Lucius
O'Trigger's countrymen, to whom a lady said, 'Mr. Flanagan,
'I am quite certain you are an admirer of dahlias! Why then,
faith, madam,' was his reply, 'they accuse me very wrong-
fully. I know enough about 'em; but sure, on my conscience,
'I have had mighty little to say to 'em.' The experience of
Mr. Flanagan, like that of Sir Lucius, had been limited to De-
lias, which the Irish pronounce the same.' This 1845 was
the year of his brother Robert's publication of the Fawn of Ser-
torius, which, while everybody praised, nearly all persisted in
throwing into the elder brother's lap, and Walter in another of
his letters had to tell his sister that he had declared to a
'dozen of them at least' that he neither wrote it nor was cap-
able of writing it, nor had seen a single page of it before it was
in print.
But having here anticipated somewhat, I go back for a few
notices of earlier days. In 1841 he describes to his sister a
visit to the rectory at Birlingham, of all places seen by him
since his return to England that which had pleased him most;
and where he had found their brother Robert the owner of fine
pictures, and of grounds laid out with consummate taste, ‘liv-
ing like a prince-bishop.' In the same year he tells her, as
already he had told his brother, of the delight and wonder with
which he had read Robert's Tragedies, protesting that, 'in this
century or the last,' there had been nothing like the Ferry-
man: and he tells her, too, of the singular grief and low spirits
he was in at losing his greatest friend in Bath, with whom he
usually spent some hours of every day, General William Napier,
just appointed governor of Guernsey. In another letter he ex-
(
432
Book VII.
TWENTY-ONE YEARS AT BATH.
(
presses the wish that there should be a celebration of Robert's
having reached his grand climacteric and got well into the six-
ties, by invitation from her to all the brothers, himself and
Charles, Henry and Robert, to spend one more Christmas-day
together. It could scarcely be so merry as several of the former
ones had been, and perhaps the recollection of those might a
little sadden them; but was not there something of sadness in
all such days? Not at this latter part of life only, but at every
other, he had himself been most inclined to melancholy on days
of festival. My birthday, as long as I can remember, was a
'day of strange and unaccountable emotion to me; and in all
my pleasures there has been more of softness than of serenity.'
But, enjoyment may be just as keen for being shaded with a
touch of sadness; and I had too frequent and large a part in
the grave glad pleasures of that day not to know that he was able
to get out of it, even to the very last of them enjoyed by us toge-
ther, more mirth than melancholy. Acknowledging this letter,
his sister gladly accepted its proposal, and in farther hospit-
able greeting sent him (his favourite dish at her Warwick break-
fasts) a dried salmon. 'It has come,' he replied, 'in all its
'glory. At first I doubted whether it might not be an alli-
'gator, from the size of it; and I thought of opening my sash
and calling a chairman to carry it to the Museum. But re-
collecting what you had promised me in a former letter, I staid
'my steps.'
(
<
6
In the next year (1842) he sets her upon searching the old
Warwick house for papers of his boyhood, remembered still.
Anciently there were some bits of my Latin poetry and other
' such stuff in a chest of drawers which stood in my bedroom,
now a dressing-room. Most of these were translations of Cow-
ley into Latin verse, and correcting his extravagance. This is
'curious at so early an age, for I did it at about sixteen.' In
the same letter he speaks pleasantly of the marriage of his niece
Teresita Stopford to Lord Charles Beauclerc; tells of an ex-
pected visit from Fiesole of his daughter and second son; and
bids her inform his brother Henry that he beats him in flowers,
having to boast in that October month of a tube-rose five feet
high. I have also a young kitten; but she mews eternally,
1836-1857.
433
A FRIEND NOT LITERARY.
' and tells me in plain language that old people and young never
'do well together.' The way for Pomero had been prepared by
this failure of the young kitten; in her place, after a very few
months, the little hero was installed; and his sister heard as
much of him in all the later years as I did. He wrote to her in
the summer of 1844:
'Let me congratulate you on the accident that deprives you of your
carriage-horses. Next to servants, horses are the greatest trouble in life.
Dogs are blessings, true blessings. Pomero, who sends his love, is the
comfort of my solitude and the delight of my life. He is quite a public
character here in Bath. Everybody knows him and salutes him. He
barks aloud at all-familiarly, not fiercely. He takes equal liberties with
his fellow-creatures, if indeed dogs are more his fellow-creatures than I
am. I think it was Saint Francis de Sales who called birds and quadrupeds!
his sisters and brothers. Few saints have been so good-tempered, and not
many so wise.'
And in the same kindly spirit to all dumb creatures he speaks
in another letter of field-sports.
'Let men do these things if they will. Perhaps there is no harm in it;
perhaps it makes them no crueler 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 one to another,
and even the old ones do not dream of death.'
The reader will understand why I thus desire Landor to be
judged as well by his gentler sayings in private intercourse as
by his louder public utterances. They in some sort explain
each other, and certainly will help to the better understanding of
each other. Sir William Napier well remarked to a friend offended
by his intemperate assaults on King Bomba or some other fa-
vourite aversion:
'You do not know Landor. In matters of that sort he is reckless in ex-
pression only. What is savage in his speech does not spring from anything
savage in his nature. Those wild cries of his at seeing his fellow-creatures
overridden by injustice or tyranny are but the sign of an honest human
feeling and a deep compassion. He has the lion-heart that springs forward
to tear the wrong-doer, and the chained lion's roar of fury when he finds
that he cannot reach him. Yet, if he saw tyrannicide lifting the knife, I
am well convinced he would rather himself receive the blow than let it fall
on the man it was aimed at.'
Upon such outbreaks, as generally upon his vehement con-
tributions to matters of public controversy during both his early
FF
434
Book VII.
TWENTY-ONE YEARS AT BATH.
and later years in Bath, I do not care to dwell, though I was
chiefly responsible for giving them to the world. The Napier
apology is worth much; but the evidence and the witness must
be taken together, and the testimony is not without a flaw. Na-
pier himself had much in common with his friend, not merely of
chivalrous spirit, disinterested aims, and a character incapable
of meanness, but also of arrogant temper, resentful impatience
of differences of opinion, and a proneness to express with vio-
lence views somewhat recklessly formed. But having said this,
there is nothing more to be said. A never-ceasing and quite
unwearying hatred of oppression animated both; and whatever
else was to be remarked of Landor's comments on passing events,
the charge was not at any time to be made of siding with the
strong against the weak, or of passing over the neglected and
unregarded. Somebody at this time compared his weekly on-
slaughts on what he took to be scandals in church or state, to
the growls of an ancient cynic worried by the sight of purple and
fine linen, describing him as tame and civil before, nay as even
fawning on, the tatters of adversity: and when that is nearly
the worst that can be urged of an ungovernable temper, it is
hardly an unpardonable sin. I will only add, before quitting
this subject, that he wrote frequently on the condition of Ire-
land, and for the most part with a gravity and impartiality into
which faults of temper entered rarely. He remonstrated with
O'Connell, when at the height of his repeal agitation, for wasting
upon a design both foolish and impracticable powers that might
have forced upon attention the true and attainable remedies;
and to Mr. Thomas Davis, the creator and leader of the party
which subsequently broke down O'Connell's influence, he ad-
dressed truths not less unpalatable. Davis had, in my judg-
ment, qualities that would have made him incomparably the
ablest politician produced by Ireland in our day; and his pre-
mature death, before what was crude and immature in his
opinions had time to ripen, was a great calamity. He had much
admiration for Landor, and was especially grateful to him for the
help he had given in various ways to Father Mathew's crusade
against intemperance. Landor had indeed an excessive admi-
ration for that worthy parish priest, to whose noble enterprise
1836-1857.
435
COLLECTED WORKS.
he was never tired of sending money and other active help. I
am not sure that he did not think the humble and reverend
father to be the only true successor of the apostles living in our
age.
IX. REVIEWS, COLLECTED WORKS, POEMATA ET INSCRIPTIONES,
AND HELLENICS.
In August 1842 Robert Landor wrote to his brother that he
had been reading with unusual satisfaction two reviews lately
written by him, on Catullus and on Theocritus; and that besides
the pleasure he had derived from the completeness and refine-
ment of the criticism, they had given him a pleasure of another
kind which he could hardly specify without implying something
a little disrespectful.
They are as remarkable for their candour and moderation as for other
qualities of which I felt more certain; and, in speaking of our own poets
now living, there is the same freedom from prejudice as in your observa-
tions on those who have been dead these two thousand years. Nor can I
believe that there is an idyl of Theocritus more tender or graceful, or even
more classical, than that of the Hamadryad. The conclusion appears to me
more like the sweetest parts of Gebir than anything you have written, and
much more delicate in its pathos than any other person has written, since.'
6
These essays, as well as a later one on Petrarch, were written
for a review at my request, and they well deserve what is thus
said of them. For Pindar and Horace he also collected materials,
and there is a passage in the Petrarch paper which makes it
matter of special regret that they were not written. It was not
his habit to be quite just to Horace, but here he says: 'One
'poet is not to be raised by casting another under him. Catul-
'lus is made no richer by an attempt to transfer to him what
belongs to Horace, nor Horace by what belongs to Catullus.
'Catullus has greatly more than he; but he also has much, and
let him keep it.' No injustice more grave is committed in
criticism than when one writer is thus pitted against another.
The genius of Catullus you may think supreme, but that Horace
is more of a favourite with greater numbers of people is a fact
as little to be doubted. A critic, if unable otherwise to account
for the fact, should consider this power to engage and delight
many minds as no small merit in itself; if nothing else, as at
436
Book VII.
TWENTY-ONE YEARS AT BATH.
least a proof that the master of it is in sympathy with the world.
Some writers have a charm beyond the reach of criticism; some-
times perhaps opposed to its conclusions, and certainly often
wanted by others of superior excellence. There are a hundred
readers of Virgil and Horace to one of Catullus.
From letters written to me during the composition of the
essays, some characteristic traits may be drawn. Catullus was
the first subject chosen; and the necessary rendering of portions
into English he found to be extremely difficult, glibly as the
work has been since done by more hands than one.
'I have attempted in vain to translate the extracts from Catullus. My
version of the Description of Morning, of which the original verses, as mere
verses, are the finest to be found anywhere out of Milton, is infamously bad.
Where the waves wakened by the zephyr are said to move, pray correct
thus:
Slowly and placidly, with gentle plash
Against each other, and light laugh; but soon
The breezes freshening, rough and huge they swell,
Afar refulgent in the crimson east.
But no man has ever been able to translate this writer, and no man ever
will be.'
Pindar he meant next to have tried, but to his surprise he
found the language, after some years' abstinence, so unfamiliar
as to render his undertaking too much of a task. He would
always say he was never more than a boy in Greek, though he
grew up to adolescence in Latin, and bore a strong beard in Eng-
lish. But even while he was complaining that he must learn
the language over again, it came gradually back to him; and I
remember well, when we next met, his likening that resumption
of the reading of Greek to the sensation of entering a cathedral,
where at first you find it dark, until use leads you on, and at
last you become once more conscious of all the grand magnificence
to which your eye dilates. After one day's reading he discarded
his lexicon, and though he did not go on with Pindar he took
up with another Greek favourite. The result was the paper on
Theocritus, as delightful a piece of writing as any that ever fell
from him; and the day after the manuscript reached me I had
this letter:
'At the account of the first idyl where the herd offers Thyrsis his most
magnificent goat for a song, insert this:
1836-1857.
437
COLLECTED WORKS.
""
"We often hear that such or such a thing is not worth an old song.
Alas, how few things are! What precious recollections do some of them
"awaken! what pleasurable tears do they excite! Not only do they purify
"the stream of life, but they can delay it on its shelves and rapids, they
can turn it back again to the soft moss amidst which its sources issue."
I have been trying a version of the famous lines in that idyl, so weakly
imitated by Virgil, so beautifully by Milton, which yet does not please me.
Fine as are the verses of Theocritus, the Greek language itself cannot bear
him above Milton in his Lycidas.
Where were ye, O ye nymphs, when Daphnis died?
For not on Pindus were ye, nor beside
Penëus in his softer glades, nor where
Acis might well expect you, once your care.
But neither Acis did your steps detain,
Nor strong Anapus rushing forth amain,
Nor high-brow'd Etna with her forest chain.
I shall also add what I think is somewhat of an idyl; but you will judge.
I took the idea from a note in your Pindar. I had forgotten the story.'
The story was the Hamadryad; and at no period of his life
had he written a short poem in feeling belonging more intensely
to the antique world, in the spirit of it more youthful, or with
a more enchanting grace and delicacy of expression, than this
in his seventieth year. Its subject is a wood-nymph's love for
a young forester who has forborne to fell the oak that is her
home and what a poet who was less of a Greek would have
turned into sentiment or allegory, is made to interest us here by
its absolute simplicity and reality. The time of light, clear, de-
finite sensation; when, to every man, the shapes of nature were
but the reflection of his own; when marvels were not explained
but believed, and the supernatural was not higher than the na-
tural, or indeed other than a different development of the attri-
butes and powers of nature; is reflected in every line. Not
human, yet not above humanity, the fairy doubts if her lover
will be constant; perplexed between her natural heart and her
shadowy non-natural ways, the mortal has his doubts as well;
and in making us thus become conscious alike of the pains and
pleasures, the enjoyments and the misgivings, of such unequal
intercourse, there is a wonderful fascination. A bee is always
sent to him when she specially desires his presence in long
summer days, and longer winter nights, still sent forth by her,
To bring that light which never wintery blast
Blows out, nor rain nor snow extinguishes,
:
438
Book VII.
TWENTY-ONE YEARS AT BATH.
The light that shines from loving eyes upon
Eyes that love back till they can see no more:'
(
and he has engaged himself never to own that he has tired of
her, if ever such a calamity should befall. He is only to drive
the bee away. Then shall I know my fate, and, for thou must
'be wretched, weep at thine.' Nor does he really in any heart-
less fashion tire or cease to be fond of her. But he is a mortal,
not a dryad; and, mortal habits resuming their control, it hap-
pens one day that, annoyed by a little insect, too importunately
buzzing in his ear at an inconvenient time, he lifts his hand im-
patiently, and in the same moment breaks the wing of a bee
and the heart of the hamadryad. Landor liked his idyl so much
that it may be worth adding a characteristic correction of it sent
me not long before his death, in which he removed a bit of sen-
timent, a reflection, from it.
'Whenever you revise my poems do not forget to strike out two verses
from my Hamadryad, which ought to have been omitted by me. The verses
I mean are in the dialogue where first she prays of Rhaicos to spare her
oak, complains of him and his father slaying the innocent trees, and to his
inquiry whether her flock is anywhere near, replies:
I have no flock; I kill
Nothing that breathes, that stirs, that feels the air,
The sun, the dew. Why should the beautiful
(And thou art beautiful) disturb the source
Whence springs all beauty? Hast thou never heard
Of hamadryads?
Now these are obscure; I had corrected them to
Whence springs all beauty.. Life. Hast thou not heard, &c.
But I afterwards thought that the hamadryad should have cut across this
little piece of reflection, and should have said:
I have no flock; I kill
Nothing that breathes, that stirs, that feels the air,
The sun, the dew.
Of hamadryad.'
Thou never, then, hast heard
The third of these Critical Essays, all of them written with
more care than he ordinarily bestowed on matters of the kind,
had for its subject Petrarca; and precisely the remark made to
him by his brother Robert of the Catullus was made to him of this
by Carlyle. 'That piece on Petrarca,' he said, 'surprises me (I beg
many pardons) by its impartiality to that wearisome creature ;
and looks, in my mind, like a perfect steel engraving in the
1836-1857.
439
COLLECTED WORKS.
' way of portraiture.' The biographical portion is indeed a little-
masterpiece; and the letter accompanying the essay, when sent
to me, told me of the progress of another and more important
literary labour also undertaken at my suggestion, and to which
I gave such help as he invited from me during the next three
following years.
This was the Collection and Revision of all his Writings; a
part of the design of which was that it should be completed
with the completion of his seventieth year. But, by the labour
involved in the preparation of it a delay of more than six
months after he had seen his seventy-first having intervened,
he laughingly declared that this had freed him from a certain
other resolution he would else have kept. 'I have youth on
'my side,' he wrote to Lady Blessington in November 1844:
'I shall not see seventy for nearly three months to come. Once be-
yond seventy I will never write a line in verse or prose for publication. I
will be my own Gil Blas. The wisest of us are unconscious when our facul-
ties began to decay. Knowing this I fixed my determination many years
ago. Meanwhile I am acting religiously on Forster's advice. I pluck out
my weeds all over the field, and leave only the strongest shoots of the best
plants standing.'
To me he wrote in another letter a few weeks later:
'I am working very hard at the Collection, and will be mindful of your
warnings. Old men are apt to stumble and fall flat when they totter into
poetry. We all are archbishops at a certain age; but some can bear Gil
Blas better than the others can. Yet I hope you will not have to repent
of your wish to draw the world's attention to my grave. People will not
read my writings until then; and then, if they like to do so, they may per-
haps find, both in prose and poetry, what may enlarge their minds and cor-
rect their taste; and here I speak of those whose minds are already the
largest, and whose taste is the most correct. There are some seeds that
will germinate in gravel; but there are none of that species in my sack. I
will scatter none on the road-side. Throw me open the garden, and I will
try to do something for the well-ordered and clean parterre. Allow me one
French word; you shall never have another from me: border would not do,
nor bed. Cicero and Atticus blow a few Greek bubbles across to one an-
other. . . not that I am to be swayed by the authority of either; but when
I acknowledge a fault I hope for pardon. I began with self, and will end
with self, as most men do. The literary world is a dram-drinking world
at present; but it is quite possible that the next generation will relish a
cooler and better-flavoured drink. My Conversations, whatever their de-
merits, will exhibit more qualities and postures of the human mind than
any other book published in my day. Above two hundred men and women
will live again; and, among the rest, neither Cicero nor Solon will be
440
Book VII.
TWENTY-ONE YEARS AT BATH.
proved to have spoken more eloquently or more wisely in his former state.
Nec meus hic sermo est. But of my poetry what shall I say? In fact I
care little about it, though I have always been nursing it assiduously. I
go on correcting and correcting, adding and adding, all my life through,
and nobody (as might be expected) is less satisfied at last. Will this ans-
wer do for our friend, and is it worth retaining?
Yes; I write verses now and then,
But blunt and flaccid is my pen,
No longer talkt of by young men
As rather clever.
In the last quarter are my eyes,
You see it by their form and size;
Is it not time then to be wise?
Or now or never.
Fairest that ever sprang from Eve!
While Time allows the short reprieve,
Just look at me! would you believe
'Twas once a lover?
I can not clear the five-bar gate;
But, trying first its timber's state,
Climb stiffly up, take breath, and wait
To trundle over.
Thro' gallopade I can not swing
The entangling blooms of Beauty's spring:
I can not say the tender thing,
Be 't true or false;
And am beginning to opine
Those girls are only half-divine
Whose waists yon wicked boys entwine
In giddy waltz.
I fear that arm above that shoulder;
I wish them wiser, graver, older,
Sedater, and no harm if colder
And panting less.
Ah! people were not half so wild
In former days, when, starchly mild,
Upon her high-heel'd Essex smiled
The brave Queen Bess.'
Hardly any letter now reached me from him without a verse
in it of some kind, grave or gay, to add to our Collection,
thrown off with as much ease as if it were but ordinary speech,
and seeming to prove beyond question that if he had only given
to his poetry the same kind and amount of care bestowed upon
his prose, he might in both have had few superiors. Among
the verses that thus came to me, struck out amid the wearisome
correction of proofs, were some that rank with his best in their
kind. The Cymodameia, a charming Greek legend of two lovers.
who obtain by their fidelity the favour of Apollo, is one of
them; and several smaller pieces that owed their inspiration to
the before-named lady of the Aylmer family, who, both by her
accomplishments and by her name of Rose, had brought back to
him a dream of his youth, expressed delightfully his gratitude
for the happiness her society had given him. From a letter to
this lady dated a few weeks subsequent to the publication of
the Collected Works, in which he had written of a harvest-
scene witnessed with Kenyon (or rather with 'all that is left of
'Kenyon-scarcely three quintals: a mule now could carry him
'up-hill'), I take a few words which express much. 'Between
1836-1857.
441
COLLECTED WORKS.
6
'the hay-harvest and the corn-harvest there is a lull of nature,
a calm and somewhat dull quiescence. Autumn then comes to
'tell us of the world's varieties and changes. At last the white
pall of nature closes round us. In the last seven or eight
years, I seem to myself to have passed through all the seasons
' of life excepting the very earliest and the very latest. I doubt
'whether I have ever been so happy in any other equal and con-
'tinued space of time. Italy would sometimes flash back upon
'me; but the lightnings only kept the memory awake, without
disturbing it. How much, how nearly all, of this contentment
'do I owe to your friendship, to your music and your conversa-
'tion!' (To Rose, Lady Sawle, 6th July 1846.) To the same
friend were addressed the lines 'To a Bride' which stand last but
one in the collection; with the date of the day, '17th Feb. 1846,'
on which she had changed her name.
Something also of a biographical interest may be found
hereafter in other personal poems clustering thick at the close
of the work, which were mostly written while it passed through
the printer's hands. Among these were the lines to his daugh-
ter Julia, to his niece Teresita Stopford, to Charles Dickens, to
Robert Browning, to John Kenyon, and to Julius Hare; the
latter name and my own standing together on the dedicatory
page of the first volume, and on the final page of the second a
poem to myself concluding the work, which reached me so late
that the final sheet had to be cancelled to admit of its insertion.
I hope to be forgiven for preserving it here, with the letter in
which it came. Some allusions in it are explained by the fact
that, as the person to whom the lines are addressed (and who
had, by way of a good-humoured Landorian imitation, just sent
him some congratulatory verses on the completion of their joint
labour in editing) was in those days an Edinburgh Reviewer,
the author not unreasonably expected, for his now gathered and
completed writings, a little praise from that cold quarter to set
against less genial talk in former years.
'As the volumes begin they must end with you. A te principium, tibi
desinet. These verses must be added; and here are two or three words
to enrich the index: red-poll'd, siller-grasping (siller, Scotch for silver).
Now, these I think must be my very last; for would it not be a scandal,
442
Book VII.
TWENTY-ONE YEARS AT BATH.
my dear Forster, that a man in his seventy-second year should be running
with his tongue out after the Muses?
FORSTER! Whose zeal hath seiz'd each written page
That fell from me, and over many lands
Hath clear'd for me a broad and solid way,
Whence one more age, ay, haply more than one,
May be arrived at (all through thee), accept
No false or faint or perishable thanks.
From better men, and greater, friendship turn'd
Thy willing steps to me. From ELIOT's cell
Death-dark; from HAMPDEN's sadder battle-field;
From steadfast CROMWELL's tribunitian throne,
Loftier than king's supported knees could mount;
Hast thou departed with me, and hast climbed
Cecropian heights, and ploughed Egean waves.
Therefore it never grieved me when I saw
That she who guards those regions and those seas
Hath lookt with eyes more gracious upon thee.
There are no few like that conspirator
Who under prétext of power-worship, fell
At CÆSAR'S feet, only to hold him down
While others stabb'd him with repeated blows:
And there are more who fling light jibes, immerst
In gutter-filth against the car that mounts
Weighty with triumph up the Sacred Way.
Protect in every place my stranger guests,
Born in the lucid land of free pure song,
Now first appearing on repulsive shores,
Bleak, and where safely none but natives move
Red-poll'd, red-handed, siller-grasping men.
Ah! lead them far away, for they are used
To genial climes and gentle speech; but most
CYMODAMEIA: warn the Tritons off
While she ascends, while through the opening plain
Of the green sea (brighten'd by bearing it)
Gushes redundantly her golden hair.
The lines, I think, will conclude the book becomingly and ornamentally,
and help us hand in hand down to future generations. The men of our
Commonwealth indeed will never permit us to be separated, if only you re-
main faithful to their woods and pastures. But take care, take care you
do not make me as jealous of you in poetry as I have often been in prose.
Do not let me catch you again among
Those trackless forest glades, those noble hills,
And those enchanting but sequestered valleys
Which broad-browed Landor rules as his domain.
And now come and make your peace for having invaded that country.'
Other invasions into his territory there also were, incident
to the help I gave in preparation of the volumes, out of which
1836-1857.
443
COLLECTED WORKS.
arose conflicts that ended sometimes doubtfully, but always
peacefully. Against his intended reformation of spelling I waged
a successful war. If the language was ever in that respect to be
amended, it seemed to me that it must be done by a great work
designed for no other purpose, and that what Johnson had seen
to be impracticable was not likely now to succeed. Books had
multiplied too much; the literature had become too extensive for
change; even Shakespeare and his successors had submitted to
the strength of custom; and any attempt to resist such deter-
mination of the language could only avail to distract the reader's
attention and vex him in vain. Right or wrong, habit was too
strong for us, and there was nothing left us but to abide by that
which was least likely to vary any more.
To this argument he
yielded at last, reserving only a few words defensible on Milton's
authority. But upon another point I was not so fortunate. I
would fain have omitted nearly all the political dialogues, and
shortened some of the others; sufficient for another man's repu-
tation, it might be, but adding nothing to his; for I would have
had no alloy, even of silver, where there was so much pure gold.
Here however he was not to be moved. If I dismiss my Fer-
dinands and Don John Marys, he would say, the book ceases to
represent all the parts of life which I proposed to exhibit in it.
'You say that where conversations begin with heroes and con-
'tinue with men, it is a violation of the rules of art that they
'should terminate with something lower. But that is exactly
'what I intended.' He had also another argument:
'The volumes belong to you and Hare, without whom they could never
have appeared, and I shall omit all the old dedications,-for Mina gave
orders to kill a woman; Bolivar was a coxcomb and imposter, having been
two hundred miles distant from the battle he pretended to have won; and
Wilson is worse than a whig. But you failed to convince me (and who,
then, shall succeed in persuading me?) that I ought to cancel a single one
of the Conversations. Lord Dudley told Hare that out of ninety there were
not nine which any other man in England could have written. And he
spoke the truth. There is a particle of salt in the very poorest of them
which will preserve it from decomposition. Beside, this is to be considered,
which nobody has considered sufficiently. If Shakespeare had written but
Othello, the noblest of human works, he would scarcely have been half so
great as the having written many dramas in addition, even inferior ones,
has made him. Genius shows its power by its multiformity. After the
great poet had written half his plays, the writing of the other half would
444
Book VII.
TWENTY-ONE YEARS AT BATH.
This is
make him not merely one half greater, but three hundredfold.
because he has brought into activity so many powers of mind, and be-
cause there are so many systems all shining in their greater or their lesser
spheres, throughout his vast creation.'
Of the book thus given to the world it will not need that I
should add anything to what already has been said of the seve-
ral parts composing it. Its reception by the public was very
favourable, and it had private greetings of unusual warmth. It
was hailed as a double gift, to the age and to after ages, by
some whose good word Landor reckoned to be fame; and per-
haps he would himself have singled out, as the most welcome to
him of all, the praise of William Napier. This friend wrote more
than once, as he made his way through the volumes, in language
of unfeigned astonishment.
'You have two or three crotchets which you know I laugh at, though I
never dispute with you on them; and which I believe you laugh at yourself
in your sleeve, though it is a large sleeve that would hold your laugh. How-
ever, there they are, and they belong to you, in the same manner that
Cromwell's wart belonged to him, and he would be a fine fool that judged
Oliver's genius by his wart! I do declare, notwithstanding your Napoleon
wart, that your work is marvellous. . . . When I consider that the whole of
these volumes is original, the pure production of your inventive brain, it
is astounding. The variety and purity of your language, the vigour and
wit of your thoughts, the extent of the ground you travel over, are all
causes of amazement. . . . I know not what the temper of the different
people, made eloquent by you, may have been, and therefore I know not if
they would have listened to you; but they must all have had, in a greater
or less degree, genius, and wit in the high significance of that word, and
therefore I suppose would have bestowed an hour or two on you; and if so,
you have shown that you could have talked well and wittily to the greatest
men and women of every nation and of every age, since history took the
place of fable, and perhaps better when fable was history. To the women
you certainly could, you cunning knave, for you have adorned them with
all the graces that poetry, the best and finest of fables, could invent. And
yet you have borrowed nothing from former poets; unless it be the Olym-
pus-shaking laugh of Homer's Jupiter, and that you keep for yourself. I
would you could throw his lightnings also! I know where they would fall,
and the world would soon be purged of all knaves and sneaking scoundrels.'
The great soldier had perfectly understood what it was that
formed the greatness as well as the charm of this collected series
of writings. It was the range and the variety of its power; of
which Julius Hare spoke hardly in excess, when, at this time
also, he wrote of the book to its author, that it seemed to him to
1836-1857.
445
COLLECTED WORKS.
'contain more and more various beauty than any collection of the
'writings of any English author since Shakespeare.' The widow
of Shelley, to whom he sent the volumes, again took occasion
to tell him how endeared to her by old associations all his early
poetry had been; to relate that her husband's passionate love
for Gebir had outlived his young college-days, remaining with
him to the last; and to add for herself that she had thus been
led, since his death, to Landor's later works, in which she had
ever found ‘the noblest sentiments, the most profound remarks
and the most exquisite imagery, expressed in words that ought
'to be studied for the welfare and cultivation of our language.'
One more opinion only I will quote, from a man of rare genius
still living, out of those that Landor sent me on receiving them.
'Nothing has been published,' said Mr. Browning, 'that I can
' remember in which the display is so altogether extraordinary,
' of the rarest intellectual powers, I do believe, that were ever
brought together in one man. It is certain that no book had
been published containing both poetry and prose, by the same
writer, of such equal and extraordinary merit.
There was nevertheless one thing wanting in it that left
Landor thoroughly dissatisfied till the defect was otherwise
supplied. His Latin poetry and prose, in his own esteem not
inferior to his English compositions, were not there. He had
yielded to my reasons for not including them. Right or wrong
he could not deny that there had long ceased to be, with rarest
exceptions, readers for Latin poetry as poetry and not as Latin
merely; our college systems having at least done this for us.
Not for years only, but generations, Latin poems had been read
for literally nothing but their Latinity, just as pictures are fre-
quently bought for their frames; the painting and the poetry alike
going for nothing. What number of readers, then, could he
hope to interest, who had made his Latinity but the vehicle for
his poetry, and finished his picture as of greater worth than its
frame? I might have resisted even the publication in a separate
small volume, of the Poemata et Inscriptiones, novis auxit Sava-
gius Landor, which followed the Collected Works in the succeed-
ing year, could I have foreseen all the troubles that attended the
proper correction of its proofs. For, an acquaintance with the
446
Book VII.
TWENTY-ONE YEARS AT BATH.
(
6
niceties of the language, which he should have valued least, was
exactly that on which my old friend prided himself most; and
I should have said to anyone who wished to torment him, Don't
question his morals or steal his money, but make him answerable
for false quantities or other bad Latin. He raged against the
poor printers for such innocent lapses as Angelina for Aufedina,
and, not all at jocosely but quite angrily, asked what business
the fools had to be thinking of their Angelinas of the Strand?
Yet he knew that he ought to have been more patient. Truth
'is that unless I write with rapidity, I write badly, and unless I
'read with rapidity, I lose my grasp of the subject. It is curi-
ous that the word μsrávora, which is chiefly used for repent-
ance, is primitively after-thought; and the Italian painters
'call a correction a pentimento.' He gave forcible illustration of
this the day after writing it by sending, in amendment of a
poem that had been in print more than fifty-four years, a cor-
rection which he had intended to make at its first publication,
and through all those years had recollected. 'I left my bed
'this morning at six, after lying awake since three, when I
'suddenly remembered a correction which I ought to have made
'fifty-four years ago.' Withal there was a lurking dread, an
always-present fear, that he was less familiar with the language.
than formerly, which made him often self-distrustful without
occasion; and I have had as many as half-a-dozen letters on the
same day correcting in as many ways a correction found at last
to be itself not necessary. Even yet I remember with a tender
pity his sufferings, ludicrous in their exaggeration as they were,
in connection with the first syllable in flagrans. He made it
short, but, visited with a sudden fear that it was long, had sent
me three several emendations of it. In his anguish he declared
that he would have to cancel four pages, for now he felt only
too certain of his deplorable oversight, stupidity, ignorance-no
name could be too hard; but nobody else must ever know of it.
It had kept him awake the whole previous twenty-four hours !
and as he wrote he could no longer bid me good-night, for it
was already far into morning. But, by the side of the letter of
which this was the purport, and brought to me by the same post,
lay another letter winding-up the story. The second night had
1836-1857.
447
COLLECTED WORKS.
proved sleepless as the first, and for some hours he had tossed
restlessly about under torture of a fresh misgiving that he might
at first have been right after all; when suddenly, as the clock
struck four on that winter morning, relief came in a remembered
line from Virgil, and he sprang out of bed repeating the 331st
verse of the first Georgic,
• ille flăgranti,
Aut Atho, aut Rhodopen, aut alta Ceraunia telo,' &c.
which he then and there set down, in the letter that announced
to me the close of his trial. He might as well have waited until
daybreak, for he gained nothing by so sacrificing rest; but it
was his old impetuous way. He was always inflicting a need-
less trouble on himself and on me, and pleading still that each
should be the last. 'Extremum hunc, Forstere, mihi concede
‘laborem. A week later, a strophe was added to one of the
poems in the middle of the night, of which I had next day the
quite illegible pencil-scrawl; and I may remark, of one of the
best of his Latin poems subsequent to this volume, written Ad
Heroinam amid the Italian excitements of 1849, and as much
admired by Whewell of Trinity as by Aubrey de Vere, that this
also was written with the like impetuosity, scrawled with pencil
in the dark in the middle of the night, aud in that condition
sent to me.
We got through our printer's trials at last, so successfully
that he believed the quickest eyes would not discover eight
faults in the whole eight thousand lines; and then he was
all eagerness for the publication, alleging two special reasons.
Leipsic fair was coming on, the very market for such a book;
and before it could be taken notice of in England it must be got
into France and Germany, if we would not have it prohibited
in both! Alas, he might have spared himself such anxieties.
I never heard that anybody asked for it at Leipsic fair; and,
sharp as were its epigrams against foreign as well as native
rulers and statesmen, it may be doubted whether anyone noticed
them save a few ripe scholars. High opinions from Whewell,
Macleane, and others, to the effect that there had been no better
Latin poetry since the Virgilian age, were sent him by Julius
Hare; who added, for himself, that in spite of Landor's praise
་
448
Book VII.
TWENTY-ONE YEARS AT BATH.
;
of Robert Smith, he suspected the greatest Latin poet since Lu-
cretius and Catullus to be not Bobus, but a countryman of his.
6
6
(
The special result of the publication was rather for English
than Latin readers. It led to the Hellenics. Its reception had
justified my warning to him that the day was passed in which
imagination or fancy could count for anything in a Latin com-
position, and that, if he desired a judgment on his poetry rather
than his Latinity, he must go before another bench. You were
right,' he now suddenly announced to me. My resolution is
'taken to send you a translation of all the Latin idyls, includ-
ing my Gebirus, out of the Poemata et Inscriptiones. You shall
' have one a week; and a project starts up before my mind.
This is, to print them hereafter, together with the English' (he
means the Hellenics already included in the Works), 'in one
'small volume. It is better, if we can, to breathe life into such
'figures as Pygmalion's than into such as decorate our London
tea-gardens.' He kept his word, and the result was one of the
most delightful of his books. The Latin became English idyls,
retaining no trace of the coldness of translation, but all glowing
and warm with original life. The Cupid and Pan, the Altar of
Modesty, the Espousals of Polyxena, Dryope, Corythus, Pan
and Pitys, Coresus and Callirhoë, Catillus and Salia, the Chil-
dren of Venus, and the Last of Ulysses, were among those that
thus took their place as English poems; and a collection so rich
and various of classical scenes and images, limiting the word as
we do in sculpture and painting, and associating it with Greece
and Rome, does not exist in any other single book in our lite-
rature. Let the Corythus be studied, to understand the full
value of its contents. Besides its beauty and wealth of imagery,
there is also much beauty of form. Each idyl is for the most
part exactly what the word implies, a short poem of the heroic
cast, a small image of something great, epic in character, and in
treatment too. There is a splendid touch in the Ulysses, where
you see that by depriving Circe of her youth and restoring hers
to Penelope it is meant to show how Vice loses her charms and
perishes, and how impotent is Time against Virtue; but such
meanings are never by way of sentiment obtruded. They are
everywhere, but you must find them. It is not the eagerness
1836-1857.
SUMMER HOLIDAYS AND GUESTS AT HOME. 449
to say everything, but the care to reject as much as possible,
which impresses the reader throughout; and there is always
the absence of exaggeration. When Jove looks, there is no
need that he should frown.
Wide-seeing Zeus lookt down; as mortals knew
By the woods bending under his dark eye,
And huge towers shuddering on the mountain tops,
And stillness in the valley, in the wold,
And over the deep waters all round earth.
Certainly this little book, which appeared at the close of
1847, gave convincing proof that up to this date Landor's powers,
even of fancy, had not ebbed a hand's-breadth on the sands of
time, seventy-three years wide.
IX. SUMMER HOLIDAYS AND GUESTS AT HOME.
When I first visited Landor in Bath the city was only ac-
cessible by coach, and no coach left after eight o'clock in the
morning. But these difficulties in the way of intercourse soon
disappeared, and the travelling that had occupied two entire
days took up little more than double the same number of hours.
The first time Mr. Dickens went with me the railroad was open,
and it had become possible to leave in the afternoon, dine and
pass the evening with Landor, and breakfast the next morning
in London. Still vividly remembered by us both are such even-
ings, when a night's sleep purchased for us cheaply the pleasure
of being present with him on his birthday; and it was at a
celebration of this kind in the first of his Bath lodgings, 35 St.
James's-square, that the fancy which took the form of Little
Nell in the Curiosity Shop first dawned on the genius of its
creator. No character in prose fiction was a greater favourite
with Landor. So interesting and pathetic did she seem to him,
that he thought upon her, for a moment, Juliet might have.
turned away her eyes from Romeo, and Desdemona found her
hair-breadth escapes almost witching as Othello's; so that when,
a little later, the occasion and place of her birth were recalled to
him, he broke into one of those whimsical bursts of comical ex-
travagance out of which arose the fancy of Boythorn. With tre-
mendous emphasis he confirmed the fact I have named, and added
G G
450
Book VII.
TWENTY-ONE YEARS AT BATH.
that he had never in his life regretted anything so much as his
having failed to carry out an intention he had formed respecting
it; for he meant to have purchased that house, 35 St. James's-
square, and then and there to have burnt it to the ground, to
the end that no meaner association should ever desecrate the
birthplace of Nell. Then he would pause a little, become con-
scious of our sense of his absurdity, and break into a thunder-
ing peal of laughter.
Another of these evenings, when Mr. Dickens and myself
had travelled to him expressly to celebrate his birthday, return-
ing the same night to London, is worth recalling because of our
talk having led to his writing the fine quatrain adopted after-
wards as the motto to his Last Fruit. It was his own version
of the moral of his life in its aims and enjoyments; and, to all
who could so accept it, a very terse and conclusive summing-up
of Epicurean philosophy. But, on another subject, Landor also
talked that night in a way that hardly befitted a true disciple
of Epicurus, enlarging on the many tears that David Copper-
field had caused him to shed; to which the author of that de-
lightful book himself replied by a question, which, from so
powerful and so gentle a master of both laughter and tears,
startled us then, and may make the matter worth allusion still.
'But is it not yet more wonderful that one of the most popular
'books on earth has absolutely nothing in it to cause anyone
' either to laugh or cry?' Such, he proceeded to say, was to be
affirmed with confidence of De Foe's masterpiece; he instanced
the death of Friday, in that marvellous novel, as one of the least
tender, and, in the true sense, least sentimental things ever writ-
ten; and he accounted for the prodigious effect which the book
has had upon an unexampled number and variety of readers,
though without tears in it, or laughter, or even any men-
tion of love, by its mere homely force and intensity of truth.
Not every schoolboy alone was interested by it, but every man
who had ever been one. I may add, though- connected with
the night referred to solely by the subject thus introduced, that
six years later, when a project was on foot to make provision
for a then living and destitute descendant of the author of
Robinson Crusoe, Landor sent a letter to the Times which
1836-1857. SUMMER HOLIDAYS AND GUESTS AT HOME. 451
brought us all the help we sought. A line or two only can I
give from its eloquent and touching appeal.
•
•
'De Foe has left one descendant-a Crusoe without a Friday-in an
island to him a desert. There are men who may be warmed by the
reflected glory of their ancestors; but, however elevated and unclouded, it
falls feebly on the deathbed of the forsaken. Daniel De Foe wants
•
•
no statue, and is far beyond any other want; but, alas, there is one behind
who is not so. Let all contribute one penny for one year: poor James De
Foe has lived seventy-seven, and his dim eyes can not look far into an-
other.. It was in the power of Johnson to relieve the granddaughter
of Milton; Mr. Editor, it is in yours to prop up the last scion of De Foe.
If Milton wrote the grandest poem and the most energetic and eloquent
prose of any writer in any country; if he stood erect before Tyranny, and
covered with his buckler not England only, but nascent nations; if our
great prophet raised in vision the ladder that rose from earth to heaven,
with angels upon every step of it; lower indeed, but not less useful, were
the energies of De Foe. He stimulated to enterprise those colonies of
England which extend over every sea, and which carry with them, from
him, the spirit and the language that will predominate throughout the
world. Achilles and Homer will be forgotten before Crusoe and De Foe.'
The poor old man soon after died; but the money obtained
comforted his last days, and has since contributed to his daugh-
ter's wants. The pennies did not come in very freely, but some
larger gifts were generously made. The late Lord Lansdowne
sent me fifty pounds, and Lord Palmerston gave a hundred out
of the Queen's bounty.
The visit to Landor last described was made in 1849, five
years after he had crossed the bridge of seventy; and the post
of the day following our return brought me the quatrain I have
mentioned, which it may interest the reader to see, on the pages
following, in fac-simile as it came. My thanks were not spoken
'to you and Dickens for your journey of two hundred miles
upon my birthday. Here they are-not visible on the surface
'of the paper, nor on any surface whatever, but in the heart
that is dictating this letter. On the night you left me I wrote
'the following DYING SPEECH OF AN OLD PHILOSOPHER :
'I strove with none, for none was worth my strife;
Nature I loved, and, next to Nature, Art;
I warm'd both hands before the fire of Life;
It sinks, and I am ready to depart.'
In a previous section Landor's summer visits to his sister
Elizabeth have been named. To her at Warwick he gave al-
ways, in each year, the largest part of all the time he passed

ежд
My dear Toyster, My thanks
were not spher to you an
miles per in-
for
т
your
hundred
ühen my birthday. Here
ирт
are
on
not visible
shiver
ce of the paper for
the
surface for that is dictating.
"They
aviy the
letter
this
دل
ски
night Kenny, and
رہے
شد

حمد
you may ingest or not in the
Examiner
Dyry
For affectinaley Jes
гад
speech of
philosphon
trip.
I strove to none for none was worth mu
Nature I loved and next to Nature
warmid both hands before the
Vader of the f
It suntry; and I an teady 18 degr
Won surge Landes
31.Jan. 1849.
ہا
454
Book VII.
TWENTY-ONE YEARS AT BATH.
away from Bath; but some small portion of every summer holi-
day, for many years, he gave to me in London, and of his ever-
cordial reception at Gore-house I have already spoken. He
made visits regularly (and few gave him so much happiness) to
Lady Sawle in Cornwall, and often to his friend Sir William
Molesworth at Pencarrow; North Wales was familiar to him as
long as Ablett lived; and deserving to be marked and set apart,
for the pleasure they yielded as well to his friends as himself,
were such visits as he paid to Archdeacon Hare at his living of
Hurstmonceaux, to his brother Robert at his rectory of Birling-
ham, to Lord Nugent at The Lilies near Aylesbury, to Kenyon,
at his villa in Wimbledon or in the Isle of Wight, and to Ge-
neral Napier at Blackheath or Clapham-park. He exerted on
these occasions a fascination that few could resist; enjoyment
and good-humour so abounding, flashes and thunderbolts of
wrath so harmless; and, whether a guest himself or receiving
guests, attracting everyone at such times by the courtliness of
his manner, by an old-fashioned dignity never absent from his
bearing, and withal by an absence from it, to a curious degree,
of the self-assertion often loud and excessive in his writings.
As on a former page Mr. Kirkup said of him, he was chival-
resque of the old school; or, as I heard a more unsparing ob-
server say, after a visit made to him in Bath, he was truly a
royal kind of man. 'I am expecting Mr. Carlyle on Wednes-
day,' Landor wrote to me on the 25th of July 1850: it will
'be a holiday, a gaudy-day, for me.' It was after that visit the
remark just quoted was made to me.
The evening so passed in
Bath has to the survivor seemed always memorable. He brought
away from it an impression never since effaced, not of the wrath
only of the divine Achilles, though it thundered and lightened
over many subjects, but of the manners that should belong also
to such a leader of men; of a hospitality and courtesy in its way
quite noble; and of scholarship, in the old fine and beautiful
sense that the word once had, such as Carlyle had met with in
no other man. Nor was the liking this meeting left behind it
less strong on the other side. 'I am a great advocate for hero-
worship,' Landor wrote to me two years after the visit; and
'when you have looked closely into Carlyle you may discover
'him to be quite as much of a hero as Cromwell.'
<
1836-1857.
455
SUMMER HOLIDAYS AND GUESTS AT HOME.
From a hero cast in a different mould, but who has since
had one of the greatest parts to play in the world which can
be appointed to any man, he received also a visit in Bath that
dates a few years earlier, very shortly after the escape from
Ham of the Prince Louis Napoleon. Colonel Jervis told me
yesterday,' Landor wrote to me on the 28th of August 1846,
'that Prince Louis Napoleon was in Bath, and had done me
'the favour to mention me, and I shall therefore leave my card
' at his hotel.' The office of master of the ceremonies was in
those days not extinct in the city of Beau Nash, and Colonel
Jervis was the last who held it. Three or four days later he
wrote again. 'Yesterday I had a visit from the Prince Louis
'Bonaparte, who told me he had completed his military work
' and would give me a copy. In return for this civility I told
'him I should certainly have requested his acceptance of my
'Works, only that they contained some severe strictures on
'his uncle the emperor. He said he knew perfectly well my
opinions, and admired the honesty with which I expressed
' them on all occasions. He came on purpose to invite me to
'meet Lady Blessington to-morrow. He had called once before.
'I told him, in the course of our interview, that he had escaped
' two great curses—a prison and a throne. He smiled at this,
but made no remark.' The Prince kept his promise; and upon
the book which he gave to Landor, Etudes sur le Passé et l'Avenir
de l'Artillerie par le Prince Napoléon-Louis Bonaparte, and which
is now in my possession, had thus written on the fly-leaf.
d
A Monsieur M. S. Landor
d'estime de la fort on
ідна
für Napolin Louis B. qui apprécie le
Vihi mente
quelque opposi yu
Ant
à ses sentiment of à su opinion.
Bush's Lyst. 1565
456
Book VII.
TWENTY-ONE YEARS AT BATH.
It has since doubtless happened to the Emperor of France
to think there might be truth in what Landor then said to him,
and that a throne was not, after all, the supremest of earthly
blessings; but, even before the last dark cloud fell upon his
splendid fortunes, it must surely have occurred to him, if ever,
amid the horrors of the Orsini massacre. Two years before that
miserable attempt, in the same city of Bath, Orsini had been
Landor's guest. He had gone to him with letters from Pied-
montese in London of high character and moderate opinions;
and there is no doubt that up to and beyond that date (1856)
the unhappy man did really believe in Piedmont as the hope of
Italians, that he quarrelled with Mazzini on this ground, and that,
during the early part of his residence in England, he had been
honestly exerting himself to discover, in that sole direction, help
for the rest of Italy. Baffled in this hope, he projected, under
other influences, the enterprise at once so cruel and so wicked:
cruel, because, even supposing him capable of justifying to him-
self, which certainly no man could to another, an enterprise
aimed at what he held to be a guilty life, this involved also
innocent lives, and among them those of women and children.
In the excitement of the time Landor was publicly named as
friendly to Orsini's later opinions, and he was at some pains
himself as publicly to declare that the imputation was grossly
unjust.
I satisfied myself then that it was so. It is true that Orsini
dined with him; but another gentleman still living* was present,
and it is certain that nothing could have passed at that inter-
view respecting the French emperor inconsistent with the strong
opinion which Landor undoubtedly entertained at the time, that
his death would then be a calamity both to England and France.
He had joined in an address from Bath sent up to Napoleon on
his visit to England, and this appears to have been the subject
of some remonstrance on Orsini's part; whereupon Landor's
friend, Mr. Sandford, well known also to myself for moderation
as well as wisdom in his opinions, joined Landor in advising
the Italian to forbear from any present declaration against the
Mr. William Sandford; dead since the first edition of this book was
published.
1836-1857.
SUMMER HOLIDAYS AND GUESTS AT HOME.
457
ruler of France. 'Miserable Orsini !' Landor wrote to me in
January 1858, the day after the fatal attempt: 'he sat with me
'two years ago at the table on which I am now writing. Dread-
'ful work! horrible crime! To inflict death on a hundred for
'the sin of one! Such a blow can serve only to awaken tyranny,
reverberating on the brass helmets of her satellites.'
C
(
In the same letter to which this was a postscript he had re-
minded me of an evening passed with me in London eight years
before, when he met Macaulay, whose History he had now only
lately made acquaintance with, and found to be less satisfactory
than his Lays of Rome. 'I sat next him at your table and tried
' to enter into conversation with him, telling him that he and Livy
were under mutual obligations; and that I doubted whether
' in his Ballads of Rome he was most indebted to Livy or Livy
'to him. It would not do. Yet it was no small compliment,
'for there was hardly a genius so exalted as Livy's in all the
interval between Eschylus and Dante. But there are some
'who do not know it, and this was probably the case with Ma-
caulay. I knew at Florence his uncle General Macaulay, an
'excellent man, who showed me a very elegant Imaginary Con-
'versation by his nephew, which must have been one of his
'earliest writings; and which he said was written in conse-
quence of mine. My first two volumes had been published
only a few months before.' He was better pleased with Mil-
man, who delighted him on one occasion by repeating very
humorously a suppressed stanza of the Devil's Walk, written by
Southey at a time (already referred to in this memoir) when
Lord Lonsdale had greatly exasperated both him and Words-
worth, wherein the devil was compared to the lord of the dale.
Landor's prolonged roar of laughter at this, and Milman's own
enjoyment of those peals of mirth as they rose and rose again,
were things rememberable. But one of Landor's greatest Lon-
don favourites, of those who were not among his intimate
friends, was the author of the Pleasures of Memory. He always
got on well with Rogers, of whom he saw something at nearly
all his visits to London, as well at St. James's-place as at Ken-
yon's house, Dickens's, and mine; and with whom kindly mes-
sages were frequently interchanged. Poor Rogers!' he wrote
<
เ
458
Book VII.
TWENTY-ONE YEARS AT BATH.
<
on hearing of his accident: I think of him much in that sad
' and silent captivity of his bedroom. When he goes, if a star of
'the first magnitude will not have set, a bright lamp at the
'dinner-table will have gone out. No man told a story better,
or loved art so well.'
His own love of art he indulged on these ocassions by pass-
ing a portion of nearly every day in the National Gallery, where
his chief favourite was Hogarth. What nonsense I see written
' of Hogarth's defects as a colourist,' he wrote to me after one of
his visits. 'He was in truth far more than the most humorous,
than the most pathetic and most instructive, of painters. He
'excelled at once in composition, in drawing, and in colour-
'ing; and of what other can we say the same? In his portraits
'he is as true as Gainsborough, as historical as Titian. It is
equally fortunate and wonderful that we have good examples
' of him in our National Gallery.' At the Academy exhibitions
he had great enjoyment. If I pluck up courage to move Lon-
'donward this spring,' he wrote in 1851, it cannot be earlier
than July, when I have promised Kenyon to spend a week
with him at Wimbledon. I shall stand again before the won-
'ders of Landseer, Mulready, and Maclise, and look once more
on the waves about Ischia, over which your Neptunian friend
' motos præstat componere fluctus. For surely Stanfield is god
' of the sea.
But perhaps it is because my heart lies usually
among the animals (so do men call them, not intending any
'compliment), that the dying solitary stag of Landseer made an
impression upon me beyond them all. There are two men,
'Hogarth and Landseer, who affect my heart the most deeply
' of all painters, and Raffael alone can detain me so long a time
'before him.' Of music he was also passionately fond and
though he gave away, from time to time, almost every book
possessed by himself, he had extraordinary enjoyment in wan-
dering up and down a library belonging to a friend.
6
This pleasure always awaited him at Julius Hare's house
and at mine, with welcomes, he would truly add, counted by as
many thousands as our books: our Dii Lares and Dii Penates,
as he told me it was Parr's unvarying custom to say (though he
never could explain the difference between them), all bowing
1836-1857.
SUMMER HOLIDAYS AND GUESTS AT HOME.
459
down before him; and such attentions paid him on every side
as he would protest that he had never received since what he
called his heroic age, when epistles were written him by con-
quered heroines. I heard from him during his first visit to
Hurstmonceaux (I think in 1843), when Hare and his friend
Bunsen were engaged in the pious duty of doing honour to the
memory of Arnold, and had solicited Landor's help towards a
Latin inscription, which was to have for its model the famous
one on the Scipios. It was Landor's belief, in which he was
surely right, that there was not only much difficulty, but a want
of keeping and of fitness, in applying classical Latin to the
commemoration of Christain thoughts and Christian relations:
but his corrections of what had been written were gratefully
received, and, in the state wherein finally it left his hands, it
expressed worthily two of the most marked characteristics of
Arnold's life; his constant effort to uphold the liberty of the
Christian laity against all hierarchal usurpations, and his un-
wearying endeavour to make Christianity not a dead form of
words, but a living and actuating principle in the minds and
hearts of his pupils. Landor's old schooldays at Rugby gave
him a personal interest in everything connected with the place,
and with infinite gratification he received, some years later, a
famous record of Rugby schooldays very wonderfully contrast-
ing with his own, which had been sent as a tribute from Tom
Brown to the most famous of living Rugbæans. 'I am sure,'
wrote the author of this delightful book, 'you will feel that the
approval of no living man can give the author more pleasure
'than that of the oldest and most distinguished of those who
' have been educated at the same school with himself.'
<
The enjoyment of one of his visits to Hurstmonceaux had
been greatly enhanced by meeting there the hero of Scinde, the
brother of his friend the historian. His admiration for both
these extraordinary men amounted almost to a passion. After
Wellington, his ideal of a great captain, he thought Charles the
most illustrious of soldiers; and after Livy, to him the very
genius of history, he thought William the most powerful and
the most picturesque of historians. Their particular bearing
towards each other had also a wonderful charm for him, by its
460
Book VII.
TWENTY-ONE YEARS AT BATH.
very contrast with their general attitude towards nearly all the
world beside; and I well recollect with what a glow of emotion
he repeated to me almost the first words addressed to him by
the elder of the brothers, declaring that the antique world had.
nothing to show of the Scipios or the Gracchi more touching.
Modestly disclaiming his title to the homage which Landor was
offering him, the great soldier bade him reserve it for his bro
ther William alone. This brother,' he said, 'is indeed an extra-
ordinary man. All his fame he has earned by the unaided
'force of his genius. My soldiers fought me through my work
' and errors.' In such a saying one may find some clue to the
devoted attachment felt for both the brothers by all who had
kindly or near association with them. With frailities of temper
that too often presented to the outer world only what seemed
arrogant or self-willed, in all the inner relations they were un-
selfish to a fault, tender and humane as the gentlest of women,
chivalrous, simple, brave. Not that Landor was much prone to
observe any such distinctions in his liking for them. It is more
probable that he did not admire them least when their judge-
ments were warped the most, for he made all their quarrels his
own; though it is only fair to add that the heat of temper and
impetuosity of language with which he fought their battles, were
as free as their own from anything ungenerous or unworthy.
'You don't draw your ale mild,' wrote William Napier to him
on one occasion, 'any more than I do; but if Pam or Johnny
'call you out, I will be your second.'
There was indeed, between Landor and the younger of the
brothers, a liking confirmed by long personal intimacy which
was hardly capable of increase on either side; and which had be-
gun, on the part of William Napier, before Landor was personally
known to him. No fame had been dearer to the Peninsular
captain than that of his old chief who fell at Corunna. By the
splendour of his life, the glory of his death, and the injustice
done to his memory, the career of Sir John Moore had fulfilled,
to the ardent young soldier's imagination, the uncommon exploits
as well as common fate of a hero; and in his maturer years
Napier never forgot, that, when Moore's rude grave had hardly
closed, Landor was in the field to do battle for him against one
1836-1857.
SUMMER HOLIDAYS AND GUESTS AT HOME. 461
of his own dearest friends. Differences of opinion Napier had
with Landor, and some not slight, but none that were not covered
by a kindly tolerance. He could forgive him his onslaughts on
the soldiership of Napoleon, though he would never let them
disturb his own faith in it; as to which, he would say, he was as
a rock, around which Landor, like the occan, might rage as he
would. 'If you will, you may submerge me, but you cannot shake
'me.' Nay, he could even tolerate an allusion of Landor's which
he thought unfair to the memory of Charles Fox. 'I own to
'having been grieved for the moment,' he wrote, 'but we differ
as to so many public men, that this passed away instantly;
'because there is one public man upon whose character we are
entirely and always agreed, namely, Walter Savage Landor.
'I know he is all truth, and sincerity, and honour, in feeling;
' and therefore his opinions, though as in the instance of Mr.
Fox they may grieve, can never make me angry.
It is a dif-
'ferent way of looking at a picture, nothing more.' In another
letter to Landor of the same date (1851) he protests against a
comparison of him to an American writer, made in one of the
journals. Your vagaries, if I may without offending you use
'the word, are, in comparison with this man's, the gambols and
boundings of a lion from light to shade and back again, to the
mere mouthings and grimaces of a monkey at the moon.' Nor
was Landor ever left in doubt of the value of his own good
word to Napier, who repeatedly assured him, with affecting
earnestness, that his genius was not a greater pleasure for all the
world than his friendly feelings toward himself were a delight
to him personally. I need not,' he wrote in one of the last of
his letters written with his own hand (18th of April 1857), 'I
'need not tell you now, my dear Landor, that your praise is
'manna to me; for, though I am not in a desart as to praise,
'most of it appears dry and unprofitable in comparison with
'yours. Not all, though; some others there are who give me
quails.'
C
Such grateful offerings made directly to Landor himself re-
quire no confirmation, but for other reasons a few more words
may be added. Napier had occasion to defend Landor, to a friend
who did not know him, from a charge of having favoured assas-
462
Book VII.
TWENTY-ONE YEARS AT BATH.
sination in an epistle on tyrannicide; and the feeling of his
letter is as touching as it is noble. He wrote on the 10th of
November 1856 :
'This is the anniversary of the battle of the Nivelle, in which I won my
lieut.-colonelcy. I was then strong and swift of foot; only one man got
into the rocks of La Rhune before me, and he was but a step; yet eight
hundred noble veterans, strong as lions, were striving madly to be first. I
am now old, feeble, bent, miserable, and my eyes are dim, very dim, with
weeping for my lost child; and my brain is weak also; I cannot read with
pleasure, and still less can I think and judge of what other people write.
You must not therefore expect from me an essay on Landor's noble letter;
and it would require an essay, it is so full of meaning. I call it noble while
differing on many points pushed out by him like needles against the world
and its opinions and conventionalism. I call it noble, I say, because it is
not Landor's writing, but Landor himself, bold, generous, brave, and reck-
less where his feelings as a human being are stirred. I have myself no
objection to the death of King Bomba, or any other ruffian like him; hang
them as high as Haman: but once allow tyrannicide, and the best man in
the world is no longer safe. Well, but this mistake does not make Landor
obnoxious to anybody who knows him, because it is not his feeling; he is
reckless in expression only, not in deeds. And again I say his letter is
Landor, bold, original, and vigorous, his right and his wrong alike. He is
an oak with many gnarled branches and queer excrescences, but always an
oak, and one that will be admired for ages.'
In the summer of the year before this letter was written,
Landor had paid his final visit to London, and seen Napier there
for the last time. It had become very difficult now to persuade my
friend to leave Bath. He was readier than formerly with reasons
for not visiting us; and his excuses were sometimes the reverse of
complimentary, as when he explained (1853) his disinclination
to come to the great city, because there if he saw three men he
might be pretty sure that a couple of them were scoundrels,
while out of the same number in the country it might be doubted
if the villanous proportion would be more than one. The fol-
lowing year he gave a more touching reason, somewhat nearer
the truth. 'I too often think at night of what I had been see-
ing in the morning, poor mothers, half-starved children, and
girls habitually called unfortunate by people who drop the
'word as lightly as if it had no meaning in it. Little do they
'think that they are speaking of the fallen angels; the real
C
ones, not the angels of mythology and fable.
' heart-aches always leave me one.'
So many
1836-1857.
SUMMER HOLIDAYS AND GUESTS AT HOME. 463
6
At last however he again came to us in 1855. He desired
to see the palace at Sydenham, and my old friend Sir Joseph
Paxton had promised to set the great fountains playing in his
honour. I took rooms for him in the hotel adjoining; and a
part of the time he passed with Napier, dining with him at
Clapham-park, and inducing him to come over to his hotel. A
few lines from a letter to Lady Sawle, written at the close of
this visit, will very succinctly describe it, and the persons it
enabled him to see. 'I found my old friend,' he writes (July
1855), 'in better health than I expected. He had never seen
'the Crystal-palace. Lame as he is, he came over the following
day with Lady Napier, and we went together over the whole
of it. And only fancy, the great fountains were set playing
'for me! The beautiful N. showed me her little girl, who was
very amiable with me, as little girls always were: I mean very
' little ones.
I was obliged to declare to Lady Napier that if
'she spoilt her grandchild, I would never make her a proposal.
I spent some hours too with Kossuth, who could not dine with
me and Forster, because he had to receive a deputation quite
unexpected; and by no means the smallest part of my plea-
sure was the introduction to me, the following day, of Mr.
Lytton. None of the younger poets of the present day breathes
'so
so high a spirit of poetry. Of what impressed me most in the
palace itself I should tell you that I saw the statue of Satan
• by and the wonderful picture of Cimabue and Giotto by
Alas! alas! every name flies off from my memory when
I would seize it. Leighton, I should have said, is the painter:
'the sculptor is Lough.' In making this holiday visit, it was
his intention to have gone with me at its close to pass a few
days with Kenyon at Cowes; but when the time came he
pleaded his eighty years, and, with amusing exaggeration of
Southampton Water into a rolling tempestuous sea, protested
that if he were to indulge his wish to accompany me, I should
have to borrow a shroud from some sailor, and a couplet from
Tibullus, made to fit:
C
<
Hic jacet immiti consumptus morte viator,
Forsterum terrâ dum sequiturque mari.'
This was his last visit to London: indeed his last absence
464
Book VII.
TWENTY-ONE YEARS AT BATH.
from Bath, until he quitted it for ever, with one exception. He
went once more to Llanthony. Alas, my dear friend,' he wrote
in January 1856, 'I would rather undertake a voyage to Baby-
'lon than to London. One sorrowful task is imposed on me-
to take two ladies to my Abbey. Sad scene! sad remem-
'brances! Forty-three years have passed since I saw the place,
' and never had I wished to see it again.' A few days later
brought me nevertheless my usual summons on his birthday:
C
'I am, but would not be, a hermit;
Forster! come hither and confirm it.
I may not offer "beechen bowl,"
But I can give you soup and sole,
Sherry and (grown half-mythic) port.
·
Wise men would change their claret for't;
Quince at dessert, and apricot . .
In short, with you what have I not?'
Even our meetings on that day were now to close, as he too
surely predicted in a touching letter after our last celebration of
it. 'It appears to me that neither of us will have anything
6
·
more to say on that subject. However, I have enjoyed better
'health this winter, such as it has been, than in almost any
' other since I left my paradise in Italy. Strength alone fails
me in the corporeal, and memory in the mental. I remember
'what I would forget, and I forget what I would remember. I
'have nothing to do now but to look into the fire, and see it
'burn down, as I myself have done. Solitude was always dear
to me; and at present more than ever; once a playful friend,
and now a quiet nurse. Scarcely a soul of my old acquaint-
ance is left in Bath. All have departed; the most part to that
country where there neither are nor ever will be railroads. I
'must perforce remain where I am. I have only one more
'journey to make, and I hope it may be by an express train. I
6
6
6
6
6
was very near taking my ticket a little while ago, and now
stop only in the waiting-room.' Within the last few years,
death had indeed been busy around him; and it remains that
I should give brief mention of his losses in this way, and the
penalties he was paying for extreme old age.
1836-1857.
465
DEATHS OF OLD FRIENDS.
X. DEATHS OF OLD FRIENDS.
The first loss by which Landor suffered keenly was that of
Joseph Ablett, to whose generous kindness he first owed his
Fiesolan villa. We were under promise together to visit Llan-
bedr in the spring of 1848; when, early in the January of that
year, our loss was announced to us. 'Poor dear Ablett ! Landor
wrote: at whose house we were to meet in the spring, died on
'the 9th, and I can remember few things that have caused tears
'to burst forth from me as this did. Never was there so kind-
'hearted a man. His manner (though never to us) often seemed
'cold: but even then there was a hot spring gushing from a
vast depth through a giacier. I heard almost at the same time
' of the death of a companion of my early childhood, on whose
marriage I think I wrote my first verses; but her loss has
grieved me incomparably less than that of my later friend.
'Good, generous Ablett! one more tear for thee!' He never
would admit that age, which remembered its sorrows longer
than youth, had even the poor advantage of feeling them less
acutely.
(
The following year carried off the brother next to himself in
years. 'My brother Charles,' he wrote to me on the 8th of
July 1849, the liveliest, wittiest, most energetic and independ-
'ent of men, is lying on his death-bed. This very instant a
' letter tells me he is dead.' The handsomest of the family
in person, Charles Landor had singularly genial and agreeable
manners, and, though too passionately fond of field-sports and
outdoor occupations to have time for cultivation of the pur-
suits that attracted his brothers, had many of the accomplish-
ments in which they excelled, with a much keener observation
in the affairs of life. Exactly a month before this death of his
brother there had come the news of Lady Blessington's, and the
way in which this affected her old friend has been seen. 'Yet
why,' he wrote to me, 'call it sad? It was the very mode of
departure she anticipated and desired: as I do too.' Before
the year closed he had also himself a warning. Death had taken
aim at him and missed him, he said; but let the next be more
successful, if so he might be spared the sorrowing over friends.
C
6
HH
466
Book VII.
TWENTY-ONE YEARS AT BATH.
'Let him take another as soon as he pleases, but pass by those
'I love.' A vain wish, as he knew well.
Ah! he strikes all things, all alike,
But bargains: those he will not strike.
After not many months he lost another friend for whose sum-
mons to a promised visit at Aylesbury in the autumn of 1850
we were both waiting when the sad intelligence came. During
the two preceding years Landor had seen much of Lord Nugent,
and his allusions to him in casual verses were frequent. The Hun-
garian war had roused the warmest zeal of both, and they took
unwearying delight in rendering service to such of the leaders
of that gallant people as were in England after the struggle. I
was witness to Landor's grief when he heard that our friend was
taken from us, and I strongly sympathised with an opinion he
expressed publicly at the time that Nugent had deserved better
treatment than his party gave him. Some public men are un-
lucky, and he has been longer remembered by a joke of Can-
ning's than for qualities of his own deserving the highest respect.
He was a courageous and consistent politician, and few men had
been so at the cost of greater worldly sacrifices. To Landor he
was farther endeared by social characteristics of the pleasantest
kind; and perhaps by some resemblances in temperament, which
made them both, as the survivor confessed, apt to be ardent after
impracticable things.
We schemed such projects as we might
In younger days with better right.
Athens was ours; and who but we
Shouted along Thermopyla!'
More of his Irish than of his English stock was indeed to be ob-
served in Nugent. He did not inherit from his mother his title
only. Her father was Lord Clare, to whom the Haunch of Veni-
son was written; and his grandson had not a little of the genial
nature, the cordial tastes, the respectable talents for literature,
even the reported portliness of person, which distinguished Gold-
smith's friend, who had himself written that ode to Pulteney
containing the masterly verse quoted by Gibbon in his charac-
ter of Brutus.
The next of Landor's friends who passed away had been the
1836-1857.
467
DEATHS OF OLD FRIENDS.
heroine of much of his minor poetry. To her were addressed,
amid many others as tender and graceful, the lovely lines in
which he describes himself, when first she separated from him
and crossed the sea, as having no power to rest
But on the very thought that swells with pain.
O bid me hope again!
O give me back what earth, what (without you)
Not heaven itself can do,
One of the golden days that we have past;
And let it be my last!
Or else the gift would be, however sweet,
Fragile and incomplete.
'I have lost my beloved friend of half a century, Jane the Countess de
Molandè,' he wrote to me on the 3d of August 1851. She died at Ver-
sailles on the last of July after sixteen hours' illness. This most afflicting
intelligence was sent me by her son William, who was with her at the last
hour. She will be brought over to the family vault, in county Meath, of
her first husband, Swifte, great-great-grandson of the uncle of the Dean
of St. Patrick. I hoped she might have seen my grave. Hers I shall
never see, but my thoughts will visit it often. Though other friends have
died in other days (why cannot I help this running into verse?) One grave
there is where memory sinks and stays.'
It was to see Landor at his very best to see him in the pre-
sence of this lady. In language, manner, look, voice, even in
the minutest points of gesture and bearing, it was all that one
could possibly imagine of the perfection of chivalrous respect.
Even when I first saw her, a bright good-humoured Irish face
was all her beauty, but youth still lingered in her eyes and hair;
and a little scene between her and Landor at the interview was
perfectly expressed in a few lines of dialogue written by him
next day.
M. Why, who now in the world is this?
It cannot be the same.. I miss
The gift he always brought . . a kiss.
Yet still I know my eyes are bright,
And not a single hair turn'd white.
L. O idol of my youth! upon
That joyous head gray hair there's none,
Nor may there ever be! gray hair
Is the unthrifty growth of Care,
Which she has planted-you see where.
Two years later brought the same fatal summons for one who
during many years had been held in high esteem by all the
468
Book VII.
TWENTY-ONE YEARS AT BATH.
Landor family. Mr. Rosenhagen died in the middle of the De-
cember of 1853; and when my old friend wrote to me as usual
on Christmas-day, the event was painfully affecting him.
'Merry Christmases (that is the right word, and no other will do) are
mostly over with childhood, though they sometimes boisterously burst into
the circle when they ought to be a-bed. I am in perfectly good health,
but my upper teeth are as useless as the fleets in the Euxine; and of all
infidelities the worst is their secession. I have been very sad too since the
loss of my friend Rosenhagen. In writing the name my hand trembles.
Never was there a better man or more perfect gentleman. With his fa-
ther and himself and Thomas Grenville have passed away any remaining
chances of discovering the writer of Junius. However, it matters little,
-Johnson's letter to Chesterfield is worth them all, admirable as they are.'
6
But the year then beginning, his eightieth, was to be the
saddest of all to him. It opened with the death of the last sur-
vivor of those who had known him at Bath at the beginning of
the century. My earliest Bath friend,' he wrote to me on the
6th of February 1854, Miss Caldwell, sister to good dear Lady
* Belmore, of whose death I so lately wrote to you, died a few
days ago.
I had known them since the beginning of the cen-
tury. Alas! I feel that I am gone very far down the vale of
years a vale in which there is no fine prospect on either side,
and the few flowers are scarcely worth the gathering.' Nor
had the month thus mournfully opened come to its close before
a much sadder loss had fallen on him. The companion of his
childhood, his eldest and only surviving sister Elizabeth, died in
the family house at Warwick. Her illness had not been serious
at first, and to the end there seemed to be hope: but on the
2d of March he wrote to me that he had lost his earliest, dear-
est, and nearly his last friend; and that grief had taken away
his sleep, appetite, digestion, everything. It was indeed a hard
and heavy blow, though there was much to soften it in the
many memorials she left of a tender regard that had survived
and been true to him through all his life's vicissitudes.
His letters for some time bore the trace of grief in even the
tone with which they spoke of ordinary things; and one of
them, written little more than a month after this last great loss,
in which he described himself watching the lights of a Bath
sunset disappear, and thinking of the friends who like them had
gone out as suddenly, I felt to be very touching.
1836-1857.
469
DEATHS OF OLD FRIENDS.
}
'What delightful weather! Last evening' (8th April 1854) 'I walked
in the park, and saw the sun gradually illuminate the whole of Marl-
borough-buildings, window after window, six or seven at the time. Many
of my old friends lived there, and went away in like manner, one after an-
other. This evening I took my usual walk a little earlier, and, sitting
afterwards without candles for about an hour as I always do, I have had
the same feeling as I watched the twilight darken on my walls, and my
pictures vanish from before me. I make no change in these lines, but
write them as they have risen to my mind:
My pictures blacken in their frames
As night comes on,
And youthful maids and wrinkled dames
Are now all one.
Death of the Day! a sterner Death
Did worse before:
The fairest form and balmiest breath
Away he bore.'
As the same year wore on, he saw too surely another grief
preparing for him. He wrote to me in July of the illness of
Julius Hare; and soon after, on his friend's expressed wish to
see him, he went to Hurstmonceaux, from which I received
soon after some verses written by him on his friend's having
placed in his hands a small unpublished poem of Wordsworth's.
They closed thus:
<
Hail, ye departed! hail, thou later friend,
Julius! but never by my voice invoked
With such an invocation . . hail, and live!
It was, alas! rather fear than hope that had suggested this ear-
nest prayer for, though the good archdeacon had rallied some-
what, Landor left him with the feeling that they would not
meet again; and the last letter addressed to him by Julius he
received not many weeks later.
It spoke of matters they had talked about together, and
especially of an old mulberry-tree in the garden at Warwick ce-
lebrated in Landor's verse. The ancient gods and heroes, said
Julius, had each his favourite plant; and there were other rea-
sons, which he had tried himself to express in unaccustomed
verse, why Landor should have the mulberry.
Of yore in Babylon the mulberry
Changed colour at fond lovers' misery;
In England, to her noblest poets dear,
It keeps the records of glad friendships here:
470
Book VII.
TWENTY-ONE YEARS AT BATH.
'Twas SHAKESPEARE'S, MILTON's, now 'tis LANDOR's tree;
Precious to those who love the gifted three.
Julius's letter, which also made pathetic reference to the effect on
Sir William Napier of the death of his brother Charles in the
previous year, ended with words very memorable, and worthy
to have closed the intercourse of two such friends.
'The great men of England seem to be passing away, those at least
of that great generation whose youth was kindled and stirred by the first
French Revolution. But one of them remains, my friend Walter Landor,
and may he still remain as long as his spirit is not too impatient to escape
from the decay of the body! It is perhaps well that the influence which
first moved you to the resentment of injustice should be with you to the
end.' (Landor had sent him a new Conversation having for its subject the
politics of the day). There are still so many painful things in the actual
state of the world, so much wrong and so much folly, that it may probably be
the duty of those who see these evils clearly, and feel the mischief of them
strongly, to do all they can to expose and redress them. But it is the very
pressure of such evils that makes me desire more earnestly to be borne away
from them by some of those visions of beauty and tenderness which you in
former times raised up for me, or by more of that intercourse with sages
and heroes which led me not to the treasures of antiquity alone, but to those
that lie in our own native speech. The Greek and Roman dialogues you
have printed separately; but I have always had a strong wish to see a se-
lection made of the more purely poetical and dramatic dialogues, including
almost all in which there are female speakers. It would be one of the
most beautiful books in the language, or, what is the same thing, in the
world.'
Hare survived only until the middle of January 1855. He
had been again a prisoner from illness for a month, but nothing
immediately dangerous was apprehended; when suddenly he
grew rapidly worse, and died on the morning of Tuesday the
23d in his sixtieth year. From one of the mourners at his death-
bed Landor heard the sad intelligence, in a letter written two
days later. 'How often your friend spoke of you. Dear Lan-
'dor! he used to say; I hope we shall meet once more. Yes,
but not on earth.' It was to this Landor referred in lines sent
to me on the 27th.
'I sit up in bed to write what pressed upon me this morning. Poor
Julius was hardly sixty. In three days I shall enter on my eighty-first
year. Superfluous lags the veteran on the stage. I am outliving all my
friends, and it is time for me to go and join those who are gone before me.
Already memory and strength are gone, and surely my days are numbered.
1836-1857.
471
DEATHS OF OLD FRIENDS.
Julius! how many hours have we
Spent with the sage and bard of old!
In wisdom none surpassing thee,
In truth's bright armour none more bold.
By friends around thy bed in death
My name from those pure lips was heard.
O Fame! how feebler all thy breath
Than Virtue's one expiring word!'
Towards the close of the same year, too, he lost a friend for
whom he had a thoroughly genuine admiration and regard, and
of whom, on the 25th of October 1855, he thus wrote to me:
'I am grieving, and shall grieve long, for Sir William Molesworth.
When, on that desert heath the house of commons, will three such men for
honest and useful work, as himself and Hume and Peel, ever meet again?
Poor Sir William ! The last time we met was at Pencarrow. We started
a stote near the pool, and both ran after it, might and main. I ran faster
than stote or baronet; but the creature must have been bred on whig land,
for he doubled, and fairly escaped us.'
The following year brought a much graver loss, and the
name with which my melancholy list must close is that of one
very dear to us both. The good, joyous, generous Kenyon died
in December 1856, thinking of his friends to the last; and
finding it his happiness in death, as it had been through life, to
provide for the welfare and enjoyment of all who had ever been
associated with enjoyments of his own. 'This indeed is a sad
grief,' Landor wrote to me, after a quarter of a century's
friendship. He was the kindest, the most genial of men ever
known to me. I never saw a cloud upon his face. There was
'not a word he uttered, not a letter he wrote, that did not carry
• on its surface some ray of light from the happiness he was
spreading around him.'
(
(
(
Yet why should I scruple to add another name? Landor
had lost in this year also the little Pomeranian dog who had
been for more than twelve years his constant and sprightly com-
panion.
'Pomero, dear Pomero died this evening' (10th March 1856) 'at about
four o'clock. I have been able to think of nothing else. Everybody in this
house,' he wrote a few days later, 'grieves for Pomero. The cat lies day
and night upon his grave; and I will not disturb the kind creature, though
I want to plant some violets upon it, and to have his epitaph placed around
his little urn.
472
Book VII.
TWENTY-ONE YEARS AT BATH.
O urna! nunquam sis tuo eruta hortulo:
Cor intus est fidele, nam cor est canis.
Vale, hortule! æternumque, Pomero! vale.
Sed, si datur, nostri memor.'
XI. FRUITS GATHERED FROM AN OLD TREE.
To a republication in 1853 of Conversations, Critical Essays,
Poems, and Miscellaneous Prose Pieces, all of which had been
written, with few exceptions, in the interval of seven years since
the collection of his Works, Landor gave the title of Last Fruit
off an Old Tree; and allusion has already been made to such of
it as consisted of new Conversations, or of critical studies on
Theocritus, Catullus, and Petrarch. It remains, however, gener-
ally to speak of its other contents, and to bring under the same
pretty and pathetic title, to which it more strictly applies, the
yield of still later fruit from the old tree; or, in other words,
such additions to Landor's writings as were either published, or
collected with a view to publication, under the titles respectively
of Scenes for a Study, Dry Sticks, and Hellenics Enlarged, be-
fore he finally departed for Italy in 1858.
The principal prose pieces of the Last Fruit, apart from its
reviews, were nineteen chapters on 'Popery British and Foreign,'
and ten letters of a true believer to Cardinal Wiseman, laughing
at the public alarm in 1850 over papal aggression, and condemn-
ing more gravely the legislation that followed. 'As if fifty car-
'dinals in England,' he wrote to me (and the remark will suffi-
ciently describe his view of the case), 'could do us damage to
' the amount of five farthings!' The high-church view in either
communion, protestant or popish, had nevertheless small com-
fort or support from him. In the course of his chapters there
is an eloquent passage on the services of Methodism in reclaim-
ing, at a critical time, the most profligate of the people from
turbulence and crime. On one side is the gentle and virtuous
Wesley, bringing about him as great multitudes as ever sur-
rounded the earlier apostles, and working as great marvels in
their hearts; while on the other are the beneficed clergy every-
where setting their faces against him, and angry faces they are,
เ
1836-1857.
473
FRUITS GATHERED FROM AN OLD TREE.
'partly from old prejudices, and partly from old port.' At
nearly the time when these chapters were written, Landor had
been corresponding about one of his Llanthony livings with the
bishop of St. David's, Dr. Thirlwall, for whose character and
learning he had high respect; and he has some excellent re-
marks on the inadequacy of the payment of curates, which were
probably suggested by that correspondence. His conclusion
upon the whole matter is to counsel moderation on all sides;
and this he enforces in language not undeserving of respect,
though little likely to have hearing as matters stand at present.
'It would grieve me to foresee a day when our cathedrals and our
churches shall be demolished or desecrated; when the tones of the organ,
when the symphonies of Handel, shall no longer swell and reverberate
along the groined roof and painted windows. But let old superstitions
crumble into dust; let faith, hope, and charity be simple in their attire ;
let few and solemn words be spoken before Him to whom all hearts are open,
all desires known.'
A similar set of letters or chapters written two years after-
wards in the assumed character of an American, and dedicated
to Mr. Gladstone, had for their subject the outset of the Crimean
war, which was sharply criticised. These were issued separately:
but, collected in the same volume with those on Popery, were
others calling attention to Southey's services in connection with
the neglect of his family; and of these last the sequel may be
worth relating.
They had been published in a paper I had long been con-
nected with, and at that time conducted; not better known for
its liberal opinions, than for the incomparable wit and ability
which the dear friend whom I followed as its editor, Albany
Fonblanque, had associated with its name. Nor had only the
letters been given. Comments had been made on the subject
of them from time to time; and I had very strongly directed
attention to the fact, that though a tory administration was in
power when Southey died and until three years after his death,
his son was still suffered to languish on less than a hundred
a-year, in the church of whose interests his father had been so
zealous a champion. This was a duty that should hardly have
been left to a journal differing so strongly from many of Sou-
they's views; but it was nothing to what occurred a little later,
474
Book VII.
TWENTY-ONE YEARS AT BATH.
when I found myself-the editor of a paper of what was then
called extreme liberal opinions-defending Southey against the
Quarterly Review. At this very time however, in January 1851,
unexpected help came from another quarter. The whig chan-
cellor, Lord Truro, resolved that Southey's son should have a
chancery living; and as his interest in the case had been awak-
ened by a newspaper, he made its editor, throughout, the chan-
nel of his kindness. Not disdaining to seek information where
great officials are apt to turn away in fright lest they should
find it, he applied privately for such suggestion as I could give
on the subject that had attracted his notice: having thus satis-
fied himself that the living would be worthily bestowed, he
made me the means of conveying it; and at the close of the
month I handed over to Mr. Cuthbert Southey the presentation
under the great seal to a rectory of the value of upwards of
three hundred a-year, besides house and glebe. Even the fees
had been paid by Lord Truro. The transaction altogether, I
need hardly add, was a wonderful surprise as well as pleasure
to Landor.
The most important of the poetical pieces in the volume I
am now noticing, were five dramatic scenes on a subject fami-
liarised already to poetical readers by a very great genius. Lan-
dor had been much moved by the story of Beatrice Cenci, of
which he wrote to me in 1850, thinking it the most deeply
pathetic of any in the annals of the world.
‘When I was at Rome I visited frequently Lady Mary Deerhurst, after-
wards Lady Coventry; and yet more frequently I forgot the object of my
visit to palazzo Barberini, and turned impulsively to the room containing
the portrait of Beatrice. Nothing else could fix my attention: my heart
rose violently with more than one emotion. Shelley has shown great
delicacy in overshadowing the incest, but the violent language he gives to
Beatrice somewhat lowers her. Alas, alas, poor Cenci! she never told her
grief. Of this I am certain. In her heart was the same heroism as that of
Prometheus: no torture could extort the dreadful secret: she would have
died without disclosing it. I had once an inclination myself to write a few
scenes of this sad and sacred drama.'
Not only his inclination is expressed here, but the manner
in which he intended to treat his theme; and very soon he was
at work upon it. At first the scenes were not to be in verse,
but the passion and imagination of a subject of this kind over-
1836-1857.
475
FRUITS GATHERED FROM AN OLD TREE.
:
flow almost necessarily the low banks of prose. The first three
scenes show Cenci's character and home, and the last two ex-
hibit his daughter's sufferings and death. Of Italian character,
in its highest and lowest grades, a singular and intimate know-
ledge is displayed; and there is marvellous skill in revealing
just enough, and only enough, to render a horrible story intel-
ligible but what is said by himself of the scenes is other-
wise perfectly true, that they interfere very little with Shelley's
'noble tragedy.' When first sent to me they were inscribed
to the memory of Beddoes, a man who wasted on wild and im-
practicable subjects a genius only second to the highest in tragic
poetry. In laying these scattered lines of mine,' Landor wrote,
on the recently-closed grave of Beddoes, fungar inani munere ;
'but it is, if not a merit, at least a somewhat of self-satisfac-
tion, to be among the earliest, if among the humblest, in my
' oblation. Nearly two centuries have elapsed since a work of
'the same wealth of genius as Death's Jest-Book hath been
given to the world.' This he replaced afterwards by a dedi-
cation to Miss Lynn (since Mrs. Lynn Linton), a lady for whose
character and attainments he had an extreme admiration, whose
books gave him high pleasure and enjoyment of the most un-
affected kind, and from whose visits and correspondence he de-
rived not a small portion of his happiness in these later years.
(
6
Of the other poems included in Last Fruit, or in the two
later issues of Dry Sticks and Hellenics Enlarged, those that
alone require present allusion from me are such as had any per-
sonal significance or interest. Some had formerly been printed
in less perfect shape; a much larger number should never have
been printed at all; a few, upon grave subjects, had his old ex-
quisite grace of diction; and another few, even upon subjects
almost too trivial to put into verse, were so good as to take rank
with the best things of that sort to be found in books before
book-making was. They are of what may be called the old
style, in which he printed his first imitation of the manner of
his favourite Latin poet.
Aurelius, sire of Hungrinesses!
Thee thy old friend Catullus blesses,
And sends thee six fine watercresses.
476
Book VII.
TWENTY-ONE YEARS AT BATH.
There are who would not think me quite
(Unless we were old friends) polite
To mention whom you should invite.
Look at them well; and turn it o'er
In your own mind. . I'd have but four..
Lucullus, Cæsar, and two more.'
Something of that style we may also discover in these little
following pieces, where he sketches the popular Matho; where.
he gives a hint to his own critics; and where he rebukes our
good Kenyon for deserting his cottage at Wimbledon.
'Deep forests hide the stoutest oaks;
Hazels make sticks for market-folks;
He who comes soon to his estate
Dies poor; the rich heir is the late.
Sere ivy shaded Shakespeare's brow;
But Matho is a poet now.'
'Wearers of rings and chains!
Pray do not take the pains
To set me right.
In vain my faults ye quote;
I write as others wrote
On Sunium's height.'
'Wimbledon has all charms for me!
Per Bacco, I would rather see,
Than all the crowds that crowd the gate
Before the greatest of the great,
The gander and the goose upon
Your little mere at Wimbledon.'
Nor is it absent from such graver moods as I may illustrate
by three other poems of equal brevity, in which, though with
also equal simplicity and directness of expression, there is a tone
half-soothing in the sadness, and a colouring as of autumn sun-
sets, rather soft and rich than sorrowful or mournful.
'False are our dreams, or there are fields below
To which the weariest feet the swiftest go;
And there are bitter streams the wretched bless,
Before whose thirst they lose their bitterness.
'Tis hard to love! to unlove harder yet!
Not so to die--and then, perhaps, forget.'
The place where soon I think to lie
In its old creviced nook hard-by
Rears many a weed:
1836-1857.
477
FRUITS GATHERED FROM AN OLD TREE.
If parties bring you there, will you
Drop slily in a grain or two
Of wallflower-seed?
I shall not see it, and (too sure!)
I shall not ever hear that your
Light step was there;
But the rich odour some fine day
Will, what I cannot do, repay
That little care.'
The grateful heart for all things blesses
Not only joy, but grief endears:
I love you for your few caresses,
I love you for my many tears.'
That last is very perfect. Nor less beautiful in its tender-
ness and delicacy, as well as very affecting for other reasons,
are his many recollections of his earliest friend, his sister Eliza-
beth. Old age ever links to the present the most distant past;
and, in his memories of her, their old schoolroom not seen for
nearly eighty years is overshadowed by her still-unchanged cedar
seen only yesterday. Among these fruits too, the produce of
old age thus gathered, there is not wanting, at times, an aus-
terer flavour; and there was as yet no weakness in his voice
when he uplifted it against tyranny or wrong. There are few
of his lines on Kossuth that have not the ring of the true metal.
As in the descriptive touch of his passage of the desert after
the Sultan had unlocked the gates for him; or where he thanks
the Turk for having done that fearless deed of justice and hu-
manity.
'In vain two proud usurpers side by side,
Meschid! would shake thy throne:
Sit firm; these outlaws of the world deride,
And fear thy God alone:
The Merciful and Mighty, Wise and Just,
Who lays the proud man low,
Who raises up the fallen from the dust,
And bids the captive go.'
Belonging also to these latest years are several critical poems ;
and from one of them descriptive of contemporary poets, written
in hexameters at the request of Hare, who had a strange liking
for such ungainly intruders upon a language entirely unsuited
478
Book VII.
TWENTY-ONE YEARS AT BATH.
to them, I take some lines on Wordsworth confirmatory of what
was lately said as to Landor's final belief in regard to him.
'Wordsworth, well pleas'd with himself, cared little for modern or ancient,
His was the moor and the tarn, the recess in the mountain, the woodland
Scatter'd with trees far and wide, trees never too solemn or lofty,
Never entangled with plants overrunning the villager's footpath.
Equable was he and plain; and tho' wandering a little in wisdom,
Ever was English at heart. If his words were too many; if Fancy's
Furniture lookt rather scant in a whitewashed and homely apartment;
If in his rural designs there is sameness and tameness; if often
Feebleness is there for breath; if his pencil wants rounding and pointing;
Few of this age or the last stand out on the like elevation.
There is a sheepfold he rais'd which my memory loves to revisit,
Sheepfold whose wall shall endure when there is not a stone of the palace.'
Another poem in the collection was addressed to his brother
Robert, and is not now to be named without sorrowful addition.
Both Landor's surviving brothers were living in the autumn of
1865, when this biography was begun; and at this Easter of
1869, when it approaches to its tardy completion, both are passed
away. Henry died three years ago; and it is little more than
three weeks since I stood at the grave which closed over Robert,
the last of this family of remarkable men. * Without him the
book could not have been written; he took a natural interest
in what he had helped so much; and I should hardly else have
persisted against the many difficulties of my task. To his writ
ings, and to the extraordinary likeness between his genius and
his brother's, many references have been made; and what I may
now permit myself to say of his character will be said least ob-
trusively in connection with this poem. One allusion in it,
which had given him pain, I shall transcribe with his own mar-
ginal comment upon it, sent me at the time.
'Thine is the care to keep our native springs
Pure of pollution, clear of weeds; but thine
Are also graver cares, with fortune blest
Not above competence, with duties charged
Which with more zeal and prudence none perform.
There are who guide the erring, tend the sick,
Nor frown the starving from a half-closed door;
* Charles Landor was in his seventy-third year, when he died of an
illness rendered serious only by his too great confidence in his strength.
Henry survived to his eighty-seventh year, Robert to his eighty-eighth,
and Walter to his ninetieth.
1836-1857. FRUITS GATHERED FROM AN OLD TREE.
479
But none beside my brother, none beside,
In stall thick-litter'd or on mitred throne,
• Gives the more needy all the Church gives him.
Unaided, tho' years press and health declines,
By aught of clerical or human aid,
Thou servest God, and God's poor guests, alone.'
C
'Few things of little consequence have ever given me so much morti-
fication as this praise; the more painful because it was kindly intended.
Neither my brother, nor any other person, ever heard me say what I had
given to the poor. If I had given only all the Church gives me,' they
would not have received, in sixty years, so much as sixpence. I never re-
ceived a farthing from the Church in my life. The income arising from
my living, which is less than the income arising from the 6,0001. my
mother had previously given me to purchase it with, does not pay my
curate and other such expenses. I lose 2001. a-year by being a clergyman.
I am that much poorer than I should have been as a layman, after bring-
ing my own private property into the Church; and what little I can spare
for charity is from my other personal resources. It is not an uncommon
case. The vicar of a parish adjoining mine, equally unaided, has spent
8001. in building one church, and 500l. in restoring another. But how
could my brother have learnt my virtues but from me? and how can I
escape the contempt which such boasting must provoke? I would rather
be thought deserving of a halter for my rapacity than of commendations
for charity claimed by myself.'
What is implied in this remonstrance (addressed also at the
time to his brother in almost the same words), not merely of
independence, conscientiousness, and the sense of justice, but
of their never-failing accompaniment of self-denial, attended
Mr. Landor through every part of his long life. At its outset,
when an income placing him above want had been secured to
him, he resigned his fellowship at Oxford because he believed
such endowments to have been intended only for gentlemen or
scholars who had no other sufficient means. At its close, and
the close of his ministry in an establishment which had with-
held from him all her worldly rewards, and had accepted for
sixty years his labour unpaid even by labourer's hire, his only
desire was, by such bequests as he could make on his death,
to improve the church of his vicarage for its next successor.
* At a cost of between six and seven thousand pounds, entirely paid
by his estate, this pious work has been accomplished since his death; and
I quote a few sentences from the brass tablet in the renovated church
which records the fact and preserves his memory. The Rev. Robert Eyres
Landor, Master of Arts in the University of Oxford and sometime Scholar
' and Fellow of Worcester College in the same University, was instituted
6
480
Book VII.
TWENTY-ONE YEARS AT BATH.
I stood myself by his grave; and amid the entire parish, the
poor, the well-to-do, and the children of his schools whom the
great lady of the place had put into mourning, I saw no face
unmoved. For all the forty years while incumbent of Birling-
ham, he was never, for a single Sunday, absent from his parish,
nor, until he had passed his eightieth year, absent even from
his pulpit. Yet, by the mere character of his accomplishments,
to speak of nothing higher, society must have had for him the
charms which it always yields to one fitted to shine in it. He
had travelled in early life, had taken part in many public dis-
cussions as a writer in journals and reviews, was a really bril-
liant talker up to the year but one before he died, and had an
amount as well as variety of knowledge of a quite uncommon
kind. Nor was there anything he knew that he had not ready
for use; and I remember how much he surprised me, in the last
conversation I had with him, by his homely social pictures and
illustrations of a period beyond all others least authentically
known to us, which he had drawn, besides graver matters of
higher importance, from the writings of the Fathers. He had
the quick gray eyes of his brother Walter; had a wonderful
resemblance to him in his voice, in a laugh as frequent and
genial though less loud and prolonged, in modes of expressing
himself, even in turns and tones of Warwickshire speech which
we may fancy Shakespeare himself to have had; but he was
much taller, and had more refined and handsome features. Alto-
gether he was a man, this quiet rector of a sequestered country
parish, who by natural gifts as well as great acquirements might
have been expected to make a figure in the world; but there
was a wisdom also possessed by him which explains the life he
preferred to live.
It was impossible for any man to be more sensitive on points
of honour, but he had obligations to faith and duty higher than
even this, and one allegiance which was always supreme. The
object of one of his tragedies was to show, how, by a Christian,
'Rector of Hafford with Birlingham in 1829. He diligently executed the
priest's office in this parish until he departed this life on Jan. 26, 1869,
' in the 88th year of his age. By his last will he directed this church to be
' rebuilt out of his estate, which was perfected in the year 1872.’
•
1836-1857.
481
FRUITS GATHERED FROM AN OLD TREE.
dishonour itself might be borne; and to him was expressed, in
that, all human trial. Truth in the very smallest things he
thought of equal importance as in the very greatest and we
have seen that when another of his tragedies was obtaining un-
expected success by having been ascribed to Lord Byron, he
insisted on being announced as its writer; just as, when his
Fawn of Sertorius was universally ascribed to his brother, he
at once had the error publicly corrected. He would have re-
jected with as infinite scorn any advantage to be purchased by
silence as any gain to be got by a lie. He would rest in nothing
that he did not think to be true; and it was the impregnability
of his belief in the religion whose minister he was, that had very
early rendered distasteful to him the kind of worldly success which
he had seen for the most part to consist in adhering to the forms
and giving up the substance as well as guidance of Christianity.
The drift of his noble romance of the Fountain of Arethusa is a
comparison of the results of revelation in the modern world with
those of reason in the ancient; and the end is to show that if
the moral and religious institutions of men have become happier
through divine illumination, so much the more feeble would
seem to have become their ability to appreciate the benefit aud
profit by its splendour. The old world and the new are brought
face to face; and the ancients, exerting the reason which was
their unassisted guide, bring the moderns to the test of the
Christianity they profess, and find their conduct in unceasing con-
tradiction to their faith. Of the wit and philosophy with which
that fine fancy is worked out, or of the vividness of imagination
with which his tale of Sertorius is told in all its beauty, mystery,
and tragedy, this is not the place to speak. But posterity will
find these books, if it has time to attend to anything done in our
day; in its gallery will be a place for both the brothers; and not
far from the plinth that bears WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR's name,
will be that which is inscribed with the name of ROBERT EYRES
LANDOR.
We met them in the street and gave not way;
When they were gone we lifted up both hands,
And said to neighbours, These were men indeed!
Those lines, which are from Scenes for a Study, recall me
I I
482
Book VII.
TWENTY-ONE YEARS AT BATH.
to that work. 'I will hope,' Landor wrote to me in December
1855, 'to send you on my birthday, when I shall enter on my
(
6
eighty-second year, some scenes for the study. I write one
day and correct the next, and some days do a little of both.
The Muses, we hear, are the daughters of Memory. In the
'nature and course of things, the mother should go first. With
me it is so. But I doubt whether you will find the young
“ladies looking so fresh and active as they should do.' The
doubt was not justified. Rarely had anything better been done
by this extraordinary old man than these dozen scenes in which
he had told again the ancient story of the two gamblers in am-
bition and love who threw between them for the stake of the
world. The place (excepting only of the last dialogue) is Egypt;
the time, that of the victory of Actium; the principal incidents,
the deaths of Antony and of Cleopatra, the murder of Cæsarion,
son to Cleopatra and Julius Cæsar, with the capture of Lucius
and Marcus, children of Cleopatra and Antony; and the lead-
ing peculiarity of the whole, great force and distinctness of cha-
racter. The two triumvirs, victorious and vanquished, are as
finely contrasted as their fortunes. The one, in his success.
waiting and far-seeing, but crafty, selfish, and calmly treacher-
ous; the other, rougher in his adversity, with louder laugh and
less tolerant speech, become less patient and more reckless, but
still generous and trustful as well as proud and bold, Roman
soldier and lover to the last. Octavius has a false friend in
Dolabella, who unsuccessfully tries to undermine him; and An-
tony has a loyal adversary in Agrippa, the conqueror at Actium,
who vainly strives to serve him: the one meant to be as typical
of the new empire that is coming, as the other of the old re-
public that is gone. But this is done without strain. We are
only conscious of it as of the contrasting influences of Egypt
and of Rome, which are all the more strongly felt as the art of
them is never obtruded. Rome herself seems dwarfed with her
turbulent victories and deities, in the huge silent presence of
those
'Mild Gods both arms upon the knees;'
and there is a very fine effect in the scene where the death of
Antony is announced, and Octavius is at the summit of his
1836-1857.
483
FRUITS GATHERED FROM AN OLD TREE.
triumph, when, from the poet who is his friend and fellow-cap-
tain, Cornelius Gallus, there falls upon him unexpectedly, like
a cold blast from a sepulchre, elegiac verses on the mighty of
the earth, to tell him they are only earth, and that death claims
earth for its heritage. Not all I have thus described, however,
is what most of all deserves remembrance in these fine Scenes.
Undoubtedly their masterpiece is the character and death of
Cæsarion. Everything beyond even poetic warrant in making
this boy and his mother so young* is to be freely forgiven for
the extraordinary beauty it imparts to the sketch. The lad has
never left the side of Cleopatra and her women, but nevertheless
he is the son of Julius; and his manly, almost martial confi-
dence, displayed with all the feminine enjoyment of a nature
which is nothing without something it can trust to and love,
has an enchanting effect. Cleopatra herself has such belief
in it, and is so confident that in the presence of Romans the
son of Cæsar will be safe; nay, she has such faith in his power,
protected by his father's name, also to save even the sons of
Antony; that she trusts him into his cousin's camp. This of
course is fatal to Cæsarion; but the opportunity for the poet is
a fine one, and the scene where the boy, betrayed and murdered,
yet trusts and loves to the last the man who murders him, is as
pathetic as anything ever written by Landor.
To this account, that the reader may to some extent judge
whether the power to sustain so masterly a conception had been
weakened by the strain of the poet's eighty-two years, I will
* I remonstrated with Landor on this point; and here was his reply.
I don't think the point so certain as you appear to think it is. There were
'differences between Cleopatra and her brother at the time when Julius
'Cæsar went into Egypt; and he settled them on his arrival. She was car-
ried up into his bedroom on a man's shoulders in a coverlet. She and her
'brother were minors, under tutelage. Eastern kings and queens are not
'minors after twelve. At twelve girls are marriageable. I doubt if Cleo-
patra was much above thirteen when Cæsarion was born; certainly not
fourteen. Now it is easy to know at what time Antony came into Egypt,
and when he died.' Unfortunately it is the very ease with which dates
may be computed that overturns altogether Landor's theory. She was, I
fear, as certainly born B.c. 69 as the battle of Actium was fought B.C. 30.
The story of the coverlet is no more than a tradition preserved by Plutarch
of the way in which she got herself carried, in the form of a bale of goods,
into the chamber of Cæsar, whom she was bent on fascinating to her will.
484
Book VII.
TWENTY-ONE YEARS AT BATH.
add some illustrations from the Scenes themselves, now not
easily obtainable by any one.
I.
Antony.
CLEOPATRA CONSENTS TO DIE WITH ANTONY.
Generous, pious girl!
Daughter of Ptolemies! thou hast not won
A lower man than they. Thy name shall rise
Above the pyramids, above the stars;
Nations yet wild shall that name civilise,
And glorious poets shake their theatres
And stagger kings and emperors with applause.
Cleopatra. I was not born to die; but I was born
To leave the world with Antony, and will.
The greatest of all eastern kings died thus,
The greater than all eastern kings thus died.
Antony.
II.
Mecanas.
MECENAS ADVISES OCTAVIUS.
All
All may be won, well handled; but the ear
Is not the thing to hold by. Show men gold,
Entangle them in Gallic turquoises,
Tie stubborn necks with ropes of blushing pearls,
Seat them on ivory from the realms of Ind,
Augur them consulates, pro-consulates,
Make their eyes widen into provinces,
And, gleaming further onward, tetrarchies.
Octavius. It strikes me now that we may offer Gallus
The prefecture of Egypt.
Mecanas.
Better consult Agrippa.
Octavius.
III.
Octavius.
Sometime hence;
None more trusty.
Yet our Agrippa hath strange whims; he dotes
Upon old Rome, the Rome of matted beards
And of curt tunics; of old Rome's old laws
Worm-eaten long
WHAT THE ROME OF AUGUSTUS IS TO BE.
I wish this country settled, us return'd.
Resolved am I to do what none hath done,
And only Julius ever purposed doing;
Resolved to render Rome, beneath my rule,
A second Alexandria. Corinth, Carthage,
One autumn saw in stubble; not a wreath
Enough to crown a capital was left,
Nor capital to crown its pillar, none;
But here behold what glorious edifices!
What palaces! what temples! what august
Kings! how unmoved is every countenance
1836-1857. FRUITS GATHERED FROM AN OLD TREE.
485
Above the crowd! And so it was in life.
No other city in the world, from west
To east, seems built for rich and poor alike.
In Athens, Antioch, Miletus, Rhodes,
The richest Roman could not shelter him
Against the dog-star; here the poorest slave
Finds refuge under granite, here he sleeps
Noiseless, and when he wakens, dips his hand
Into the treasured waters of the Nile.
Mecanas. I wish, Octavius, thou wouldst carry hence
For thy own worship one of those mild Gods
Both arms upon the knees: 'tis time that all
Should imitate this posture.
IV.
A POET-SOLDIER'S PREFERENCES.
Cæsar! what commands?
Octavius (to a Guard). Call Gallus hither.
Gallus.
Octavius. I would intrust a legion, more than one,
To our friend Gallus: I would fix him here
In Egypt: none is abler to coerce
The turbulent.
Gallus.
Octavius.
Gallus.
V.
Let others flap their limbs
With lotus-leaves when Sirius flames above;
Give me the banks of Anio, where young Spring,
Who knows not half the names of her own flowers,
Looks into Summer's eyes and wakes him up
Alert, and laughs at him until he lifts
His rod of roses, and she runs away.
And has that lovely queen no charm for thee?
If truth be spoken of her, and it may,
Since she is powerless and deserted now,
Tho' more than thrice seven years have come and stolen
Day after day a leaf or two of bloom,
She has but changed her beauty; the soft tears
Fall, one would think, to make it spring afresh.
DOLABELLA COUNSELS ANTONY TO SURRENDER CESARION.
Dolabella. Create a generosity of soul
Antony.
In one whom conquest now hath made secure ;
Bid him put forth his power, it now is greater
Than any man's: consider what a friend
Cæsarion hath in Julius, all whose wounds
Will bleed afresh before the assembled tribes
On the imperial robe thy hands outspread
With its wide rents, for every God above
And every Roman upon earth to number.
Ah! those were days worth living o'er again.
486
Book VII.
TWENTY-ONE YEARS AT BATH.
Dolabella.
Antony.
VI.
Antony.
Agrippa.
Antony.
My Cleopatra! never will we part;
Thy son shall reign in Egypt.
Much I fear'd,
O Antony, thy rancour might prevail
Against thy prudence. Cæsar bears no rancour.
Too little is that heart for honest hatred.
The serpent the most venomous hath just
Enough of venom for one deadly wound;
He strikes but once, and then he glides away.
ANTONY SPEAKS OF HIS FRIENDS TO AGrippa.
But many yet are left me, brave and true.
When Fortune hath deserted us, too late
Comes Valour, standing us in little stead.
They who would die for us are just the men
We should not push on death or throw away.
Too true! Octavius with his golden wand
Hath reacht from far some who defied his sword...
I have too long stood balancing the world
Not to know well its weight: of that frail crust
Friends are the lightest atoms.
Agrippa.
Antony.
Not so all.
I thought of Dolabella and the rest.
VII.
Agrippa.
Antony.
Agrippa.
Antony.
VIII.
ANTONY'S LAST REQUEST TO AGRIPPA.
Thy gladness gladdens me,
Bursting so suddenly. What happy change!
Thou hast a little daughter, my old friend,
And I two little sons-I had at least—
Give her the better and the braver one,
When by thy care he comes to riper age.
O Antony! the changes of our earth
Are suddener and oftener than the moon's;
On hers we calculate, not so on ours,
But leave them in the hands of wilful Gods,
Inflexible, yet sometimes not malign.
They have done much for me, nor shall reproach
Against them pass my lips: I might have asked,
But never thought of asking, what desert
Was mine for half the blessings they bestow'd.
I will not question them why they have cast
My greatness and my happiness so low;
They have not taken from me their best gift,
A heart for ever open to my friends.
CÆSARION.
Octavius. Agrippa, didst thou mark that comely boy?
Agrippa. I did indeed.
1836-1857. FRUITS GATHERED FROM AN OLD TREE.
487
་
Octavius.
Agrippa.
Octavius.
Agrippa.
IX.
Agrippa.
Mecanas.
Agrippa.
X.
Octavius.
Octavia.
There is, methinks, in him
A somewhat not unlike our common friend.
Unlike? There never was such similar
Expression. I remember Caius Julius
In youth, although my elder by some years;
Well I remember that high-vaulted brow,
Those eyes of eagle under it, those lips
At which the Senate and the people stood
Expectant for their portals to unclose;
Then speech, not womanly but manly sweet,
Came from them, and shed pleasure as the morn
Sheds light.
The boy has too much confidence.
Not for his prototype. When he threw back
That hair, in hue like cinnamon, I thought
I saw great Julius tossing his . .
AGRIPPA PLEADS TO MECENAS FOR CESARION.
My gentle Cilnius,
Do save this lad! Octavius is so calm,
I doubt he hath some evil in his breast
Against the only scion of the house,
The orphan child of Julius.
Think, Agrippa,
If there be safety where such scion is,
Safety for you and me.
The mother must
Adorn the triumph; but that boy would push
Rome, universal Rome, against the steeds
That should in ignominy bear along
The image of her Julius. Think; when Antony
Show'd but his vesture, sprang there not tears, swords,
Curses? and swept they not before them all
Who shared the parricide? If such result
Sprang from torn garment, what must from the sight
Of that fresh image which calls back again
The latest of the gods, and not the least,
Who nurtured every child within those walls,
And emptied into every mother's lap
Africa, Sicily, Sardinia, Gaul,
And this inheritance of mighty kings.
No such disgrace must fall on Cæsar's son.
Spare but the boy, and we are friends for ever.
OCTAVIA INTERCEDES FOR ANTONY'S CHILDREN.
Are children always children?
O brother! brother! are men always men?
They are full-grown then only when grown up
488
Book VII.
TWENTY-ONE YEARS AT BATH.
Above their fears. Rome never yet stood safe;
Compass it round with friends and kindnesses,
And not with moats of blood. Remember Thebes:
The towers of Cadmus toppled, split asunder,
Crasht in the shadow of her oleanders
The pure and placid Dirce still flows by.
What shatter'd to its base but cruelty
(Mother of crimes, all lesser than herself)
The house of Agamemnon, king of kings?
Octavius. Thou art not yet, Octavia, an old woman;
Tell not, I do beseech thee, such old tales.
Octavia. Hear later; hear what our own parents saw.
Where lies the seed of Sulla? Could the walls
Of his Præneste shelter the young Marius,
Or subterranean passages provide
Octavius.
Octavia.
Escape? he stumbled through the gore his father
Had left in swamps on our Italian plains.
We have been taught these histories together,
Neither untrue nor profitless; few years
Have since gone by, can memory too have gone?
Ay, smile, Octavius! only let the smile
Be somewhat less disdainful.
'Tis unwise
To plant thy foot where Fortune's wheel runs on.
I lack not wisdom utterly; my soul
Assures me wisdom is humanity;
And they who want it, wise as they may seem,
And confident in their own sight and strength,
Reach not the scope they aim at.
Worst of war
Is war of passion; best of peace is peace
Of mind, reposing on the watchful care
Daily and nightly of the household Gods.
These Scenes were in my hands three weeks before the day
he had promised them to me, and were indeed published on that
very day (30th of January 1856), in a tract exactly resembling,
as to size and price, that in which Gebir had appeared nearly
sixty years before. That such attributes and powers of mind
should so long have retained their freshness, that their unceas-
ing exercise over so wide a space of time should have left them
neither weakened nor strained, and that at its close this most
delicate of all intellectual fruit should exhibit nothing of the
chill of more than fourscore winters, may hereafter be accounted
one of the marvels of literature. Nor did it pass without notice
at the time; not publicly, for the Scenes had small acceptance
1836-1857.
489
FRUITS GATHERED FROM AN OLD TREE.
from the critics, but in quarters from which praise was more
grateful. What an undaunted soul before his eighty years,'
Mrs. Browning wrote to me (March 1856) after infinite praise
of the Scenes, and how good for all other souls to contemplate!
'It is better than any treatise on immortality!' 'What a won-
'derful Landor he is,' was written by another hand in the same
letter. 'The eye is not dim, nor the natural force abated. That
'is to live one's eighty years indeed. I wish, if you have a
way, you would express our veneration for what he is, has
'been, and we trust long will be.' Not that any undue con-
fidence in this undimmed intellect ever blinded Landor to the
sense of how near he stood to the inevitable presence; in these
Scenes very frequently, and scattered over all his last fruit, is
the lesson, not unwisely at any time enforced, of the tranquillity
with which the rest of death may be waited for; he was ever
ready to contemplate calmly in his own case what arises to the
thought of Antony,
6
I have been sitting longer at life's feast
Than does me good; I will arise and go:
and for that especially Mr. Carlyle at this time thanked him.
'You look into the eyes of Death withal, as the brave all do
'habitually from an early period of their course; and certainly
'one's heart answers to you. Yea, valiant brother, yea, even
so! There is a tone as of the old Roman in these things which
'does me good, and is very sad to me, and very noble.'
Little more remains to be said of Landor's last literary la-
bours in England. The old tree was to go on shedding fruit as
long as there was life in trunk or bough, and the last was never
to mean anything more than the latest. Of those under imme-
diate notice the latest was the enlargement of his Hellenics ;
several new ones being added, and several of the old ones re-
written; but enough will have been said of it if I add that it
had been especially his study, with advancing years, to give
more and more of a severe and simple character to all his writ-
ing after the antique, and that this was exclusively the object,
here, of the most part of his changes or additions. For this
reason they deserve close attention. It was an old sagacious
warning to a young writer, that if he should happen to observe
490
Book VII.
TWENTY-ONE YEARS AT BATH.
in his writing at any time what appeared to him to be particu-
larly fine, he would do well to strike it out; and, in revising
those pieces on classical subjects, Landor was following the ad-
vice as implicitly after he had passed his eightieth year as if he
had not reached his eighteenth. I remember a close he had put
to the exquisite Paris and Enone which I thought extremely
striking. But no, he said; it ended the poem too much in a
flash, which we below were fond of, but which those on the
heights of antiquity, both in poetry and prose, avoided. And
of course he was right.
The incidents that led to his final departure from, England
are now briefly to be named. But as in these latter years, when
he had ceased to visit much, he had been deriving no incon-
siderable enjoyment as well from the reading as from the writ-
ing of books, some notices of that kind of use of his leisure may
have also some interest for the reader, and will here be properly
interposed.
XII. SILENT COMPANIONS.
All the recent years, as they passed, had found my old friend
content with his few associates in Bath, and more and more in-
disposed to other society. He made exception only for that of
his books, and here it became my privilege still to have part.
There was rarely a week in which he did not write to me of
some book as of a friend he had been talking with; and often
so characteristically, that any account of this portion of his life
would be incomplete which did not borrow illustration from at
least one or two of these letters. Dialogues not imaginary I
may call them, with but one listener until now; and my only
regret in presenting them is that space can be found for so few.
To the first I shall name he had been attracted, by remem-
bering that when Southey visited him at Como, in 1816, he
mentioned Blanco White with much affection as the most inter-
esting character he had left behind him in England. But he
never mentioned him as the best dialectician and the most dis-
'passionate reasoner. He rated less highly than I now perceive.
to be his due both his abilities and the beauty of his language.
1836-1857.
491
SILENT COMPANIONS.
'I had always thought Whately his superior; but I am converted
to the side of Blanco, who unites the graces of poetry and the
refinements of criticism, and superadds to both a passionate.
'love of truth. He is indeed the very opposite of a character
on which he discourses in one of the volumes; a man so fond
' of lying that he lies to himself, as men sing to themselves who
are fond of singing.' The volumes were the Life and Letters
of Blanco White, of which the more he read the higher his
opinion became. They opened a California to him, he said,
' all gold below, and all salubrity above.' This admiration did
not surprise me. The book has always seemed to me to hold a
high place among the few in our language of a biographical kind
that have a purely and keenly intellectual interest; and Blanco
himself was so uncommon a man, though the name is unfamiliar
now, that the reader may thank me for prefacing what Landor
has to say by a few words of my own.
It is nearly thirty years since Blanco White died, and for
thirty years before that time there were few names better known
than his in the society of London and Oxford. He was a Spani-
ard, born in the same year as Landor; his father of an Irish
stock, settled in Seville, then the most bigoted town in Spain ;
and his mother an Andalusian so ardent for her church, that
she dragged her son from his father's counting-house to turn
him into an ecclesiastic. The career unhappily proved to be so
conflicting with the character of his mind, that by the time he
obtained rank as a priest, its unfavourable influences affected
him with such keenness as to render flight his only escape from
infidelity. He came to England in 1810, then so imperfectly
acquainted with English that he had to support himself in Lon-
don by setting up a Spanish newspaper; which he did by the
kindness of Lord Holland. He rendered in this way much
public service, up to the expulsion of the French from Spain in
1814; became gradually meanwhile a master of our language;
lived very familiarly in Holland-house for a part of the time;
and settled ultimately at Oxford, where he was no mean figure
among even the extraordinary group of men who then met in
the common room of Oriel. He received from the university a
mastership of arts, and was led to take English orders. These
492
Book VII.
TWENTY-ONE YEARS AT BATH.
were his not least happy years. He corresponded with Southey
and Coleridge, explained the Roman-catholic breviary to Pusey
and Hurrell Froude, and delighted equally in Newman and
Whately. But, tempted into controversy with members of his
former communion, he threw himself over-zealously into the
strife, and shocked Lord Holland not a little by declaring in
the Quarterly against catholic emancipation. Soon, however,
the larger liberality of his nature re-asserted itself, and, upon
the schism that made broad division in Oriel, he stood fast by
Whately. He accompanied his friend to Dublin; was unhap-
pily not strengthened in his new belief by what he saw of the
Irish Establishment; and, shaken by his own doubts at the
very time when he was hoping to settle the wavering faith of a
unitarian, became unitarian himself. His sincerity no one could
doubt. He proved it by the most painful sacrifices; nay, by
what is entitled to be called even heroism, touching and noble.
The real truth was that his ardent impulsive nature had never
actually recovered the shock of its recoil from the jesuit disci-
pline. What followed, in successive stages, was compromise;
and compromises only last for a time. He did not remain in
unitarianism. But to the very last he seems to me, in a certain
construction of his mind, in its close union of the moral with
the intellectual faculties, even in some of its weaknesses, but
above all in its restless desire for truth, a nonconformist Doctor
Arnold. Perhaps. however he will be remembered longest for
the extraordinary intellectual achievement of having so mastered
our language, some time after he had passed middle life, as to
have made it thoroughly his own. He literally recast his mind
in an English mould; after a few years never thought but in
English; wrote an admirable English style, strong and simple;
and is the author of an English sonnet called 'Night and Death,'
of surpassing beauty of expression, and subtlety as well as gran-
deur of thought.
What first attracted Landor, apart from his spiritual insight
or force of reasoning and conviction, was the discovery in every
part of his mind of an extreme of sensitiveness and elegance.
Landor had a special abhorrence for the loud, swaggering, roy-
stering style of criticism, much in vogue in his time, which

1836-1857.
493
SILENT COMPANIONS.
revelled in nothing so much as making havoc of names that
should have had nothing but honour; and Blanco's comparison
of its heroes to a 'set of half-drunken noblemen and their para-
'sites at Oxford showing the world what freedoms they can use
with it,' enchanted Landor. To the same character of refine-
ment in his mind belonged even the occasional errors he com-
mitted in criticism; as where he objects to Gil Blas, and thinks
that Falstaff should have been made comfortable for the rest of
his life. Yes,' says Landor, if Shakespeare had been a novel-
'ist. But Shakespeare was resolved on showing that the levity
' and even the heartiness of princes is failing to their favourites
' in the hour of need.' And so of the objection to Le Sage's
hero that he is a scoundrel. So he is; but the scoundrel we
laugh at we should no more think of taking for imitation, than
of taking into our service. 'Show me any style in any language
so diversified, so easy, so graceful as Le Sage's. He wanted
the painter's eye, the poet's invention, fire, and energy; but
life had opened to him all its experiences, and he carries round
about him a perpetual carnival, pelting incessantly at every-
body, and hurting none.'
6
A large class of sayings in the book, arising out of, or reflect-
ing, the doubts and misgivings that shook Blanco's mind in his
later years, have expression in the next extract made from it:
66
'At p. 300 I find this: "I have heard a man of great talents, and con-
"scientious besides, speak of the immortality of the soul as if virtue were
absolutely dependent upon it. But for the happy inconsistency which
in such cases corrects the evil tendencies of mischievous abstract princi-
ples, I would not give a straw for that man's virtue. Men who check
their appetites upon speculation; who lay out their abstinence or moder-
"ation (as they think) at a high interest, are most unsafe to deal with: for
if, by some mistake or other, they were to believe that there was a cent-
per-cent of happiness to be earned by a bold stroke, they would not hesi-
"tate a moment to sacrifice one half of mankind to their own private gain.
"The name of virtue is desecrated by its being given to that truly gross,
though perfectly disguised, selfishness." Was there ever anything, in
even the sayings of Bacon, better or more wisely said than this?'
What follows on the Protestant church in Ireland has an
interest surviving even its disestablishment.
At p. 247 of the second volume we have these remarks on the Church
Establishment in Ireland, where Blanco had lived so long with his friend
Archbishop Whately: "I have arrived at the conclusion that were it not

494
Book VII.
TWENTY-ONE YEARS AT BATH.
"for the Irish Church Establishment, the indirect influence of English
"civilisation would have produced a tacit reformation on Irish Popery. I
am indeed fully aware that the Romanist system is incapable of a real
"reform for its principle, submission to a priesthood, is essentially wrong
"and mischievous. But, had it not been for the constant irritation pro-
"duced on both the priesthood and laity of Catholic Ireland by the po-
"litical ascendancy enjoyed and asserted by a small minority of Protes-
tants, Irish Popery would by this time be but an empty name for all the
"efficient intellect of Ireland." How true is all this page! how worthy
of remembrance!'
My old friend here gets upon a favourite theme:
'It appears to me that you are perfectly right in preferring the idiom
to the grammar, for idiom is not founded on grammar, but grammar on
idiom. How would some of our fashionable writers stare if they could
read Thucydides or Plato! The best authors had no authority before
them. Pascal and Madame de Sévigné wrote before there was any French
grammar, I believe; Demosthenes and Cicero before there was a Greek or
a Latin one. Never in my life did I open, much less read, any of ours.
This is among God's mercies to me. Blanco White, whom I continue to
read with increasing interest, makes the most just remarks upon our Eng-
lish style in pp. 386 and 387 of the volumes edited by Thom. How admir-
ably he himself writes in what is rapidly to us becoming a dead language,
and is to him a foreign one! Honour to the women! I say with him. The
French have no better author than Madame de Sévigné; we very few bet-
ter than Mrs. Inchbald and Mrs. Barbauld. What is taken for the style
of Addison is indeed not his style, but his temperament, his graceful mind,
his easy humour, and, in the Vision of Mirza, a calm quiet genius borne
upward by a warm but not a fiery imagination.'
More and more the book delighted him as he read, more and
more lucid seemed the depth of Blanco's thought:
'What a profound observation is this of Goethe's, quoted by Blanco!
"Time is infinitely long, and each day a vessel into which a great deal
may be poured if we really desire to fill it" (p. 320). Certainly the man
who said this was the wisest man of his time. . . I can judge of him by
translations only; but I admire much of his poetry and all his prose.-
What a just remark is this on free institutions ! "Civil liberty is morally
"useful only inasmuch as it makes individuals respect themselves. When
66
66
liberty does not produce this effect, it is mere license, its end anarchy,
and, through anarchy, slavery. Despotism is then preferable to liberty;
"for despotism is at all events order" (p. 330). Vol. ii. p. 19. "The moral
"world presents upon the whole a most hideous and distorted appearance.
But it happens here, as in some pictures. Looked at with the naked eye,
they are a perfect mass of confusion; but the moment you look through
a lens constructed to unite the scattered lines in a proper focus, they
"show regularity and even beauty. My favourite lens is a virtuous man:
it brings into harmony the discordant parts of the moral world." Philo-
sophy and piety were never more beautifully blended than here; and a fine
spirit of poetry pervades the whole.'
·
1836-1857.
495
SILENT COMPANIONS.
Space is left for only one example more of this loving talk
with a silent friend, and it shall be taken from the last of the
letters Landor sent me about him:
'He has just remarks on our architects. In my own opinion every
Englishman ought to be restrained, by act of parliament, from building
anything above a pigsty. . . Architecture should be modified by the cli-
mate. We have Whitehall before our eyes, if indeed we have any eyes
before Whitehall. Inigo Jones was one of our great glories. The arts
will readily place him with Hogarth, Wilson, Woollett, Flaxman (the great-
est man of all), and your friends Landseer, Stanfield, and Maclise. I think
even Reynolds and Gainsborough may be proud of such companionship.
There is, by the way, something in the portraits of Gainsborough which I
am disposed to think unrivalled in his time or since. Blanco, in a follow-
ing page says truly: "A quick and deep perception of the beautiful is of
"the utmost importance both for our virtue and our happiness." And he
adds, that he generally closes his day with Shakespeare. Poor Blanco!
poor Blanco! I have now gone along with him through all his perplexities,
all his bodily pains and mortal sorrows, and have left him at the gates of
heaven. Hope has already thrown them wide for him, the Hope that never
trembles. There is more goodness, as there is more knowledge and wis-
dom, in our days than in any past; but it is diffused among many: we find
nowhere much concentrated; there is no man preeminent in sanctitude,
none a half-head above the rest in genius. Again poor Blanco! If his
genius was not indeed of the very highest order, his knowledge, his judg-
ment, his disinterestedness, his many virtues, above all his noble conscien-
tiousness, have left him hardly an equal upon earth.'
Of course Landor read with eager attention the volumes of
Southey's Life and Letters as they successively appeared; but
from his many letters referring to them only a very few extracts
can be taken. They show how steady, on the whole, was his
poetical faith that there have been four magic poets in the world,
Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, and Milton, and that we are still
awaiting the Fifth Monarchy.
Of Himself, as he appears in Southey's Letters.
'Here I stand, brought to life by a dead man. Few people would ever
have known that I had written poetry, if Southey had not given his word
that a sort of poetry it really and truly was. I must have waited until
Pindar and Eschylus had taken me between them, and until Milton had
said, "Commonwealth's man, we meet at last." Well, I would rather
meet him and Southey hereafter than any of them; though I know he will
ask me why I have done so little. My answer will be, Because I wrote
chiefly to occupy the vacant hour, caring not a straw for popularity, and
little more for fame.'
496
Book VII.
TWENTY-ONE YEARS AT BATH.
Of the great Masters of our Language. (March 1850.)
'Dear Southey, like Julius Hare, was fond of English hexameters, my
abhorrence. As I see that word it makes me shudder. What could I
have written that Southey should believe I felt it for the gentle Spenser ?
I may have expressed abhorrence for his method, never for himself. Partly
the dreariness of allegory, and partly the reduplication of similar sounds
in the stanza, made me as incapable of reading a hundred or half hundred
of them consecutively as of reading two hundred ten-syllable couplets.
Never in my life could I perform that feat. He (Southey) represents me
as thinking we had little poetry which was good for anything before Mil-
ton. Not so. Othello had agonised my heart, before Milton had reacht my
ear. For the best poetry, as for the best painters and statuary, we must
be disciplined. I had read the Iliad twice over before I had well studied
Paradise Lost. Then the hexameter, even Homer's, fell upon my ear as
a ring of fine bells after a full organ. There are a few passages in Lucre-
tius, a few in Catullus, and very many in Virgil, which it is delightful to
read and repeat; but our heroic measure is fuller and more varied. Not
only Milton has shown it, but Shakespeare too, as often as strong passion
demanded it. Southey and Wordsworth have caught up the echo from a
distance, and repeated the cadence in a feebler voice. It is impossible for
me to judge fairly of Shakespeare's satellites. I have not read, and never
shall read, a tithe of their dramas, such is my abhorrence of dirty cut-
throats and courtly drabs. Ben Jonson I have studied, principally for
the purity of his English. Had it not been for him and Shakespeare, our
language would have fallen into ruin. Hooker too lent his surpliced shoul-
der to its support, and Bacon brought some well-squared massy stones to-
wards the edifice those masters were building. Southey also has contri-
buted much to the glorious work.'
Of Southey and Cowper.
'How could Southey praise such harsh sounds following one another so
closely as in Lamb's line, "calls strangers still"? What an ear-ache they
have given me! Southey's heart protected his ear. He always found a
little good poetry in much good feeling. I would have given Cowper a
hundred pounds for permission to strike out half that number of verses
from the Task. I hope he and Southey have met in heaven. Two such
men have seldom met on earth. Who is worth the least of them? None
among the living. I have been reading also lately' (April 1856) the Life
of Cowper for the fourth or fifth time. No author's life ever interested me
so deeply. How sublime must have been the devotion of that man who
could sacrifice the purest and tenderest love to gratitude! A sacrifice in
his case of heart and soul, leaving Venus Urania for morose Saturn. Ah!
why did she who loved Cowper ever love again? How could she?'
Of William Gifford.
C
'I am reading' (July 1856) another volume of Southey's Letters. What
an invidious knave it shows Gifford to have been, and how much trouble
he took to spoil Southey's reviews! This cobbler cut away so much of
leather, The shoe would neither fit nor hold together. His tastes were de-
testable. He ought to have kept his nose eternally over Juvenal's full
cesspool.'
1836-1857.
497
SILENT COMPANIONS.
Of Tennyson's Maud.
'I am delighted' (Aug. 1855) 'with Tennyson's Maud. In this poem
how much higher and fresher is his laurel than the clipt and stunted ones
of the old gardeners in the same garden! Poetry and philosophy have
rarely met so cordially before. I wish he had not written the Wellington
ode. He is indeed a true poet. What other could have written this verse,
worth many whole volumes: "the breaking heart that will not break"?
Infinite his tenderness, his thought, his imagination, the melody and soft-
ness as well as the strength and stateliness of his verse.'
Of Aubrey de Vere's Masque of Proserpine and of the Envy of Poets.
'
'Have you the Masque of Proserpine? If not, I will lend you mine'
(23d October 1848). He has raised her not only up to earth again, but to
heaven. It is delightful to find one figure who has escaped the hairdresser
and the milliner. . . . I had written thus much last night, and am de-
lighted to find in the Examiner this morning that poets or half-poets are
imitating me in praising one another. I do not believe there is a grain of
sincerity among all I know of the number; but the outside of the filbert
looks just as well as if there were no grub within it. The most envious of
them does not envy me more than I envy Aubrey de Vere; but Envy with
me lowers her shoulder to let a Love mount upon it. These are indeed re-
volutionary times, when not only old forms of government, but old forms
of poetry start up again. I can imagine Milton reading to Proserpine the
beautiful Masque, and Proserpine saying in her simplicity, "You have suc-
"ceeded with me."
Of Scott and Keats, our Prospero and Ariel.
C
'I have been reading' (24 March 1850) Scott's Kenilworth, and think
I shall prefer it, on a second reading, either to the Bride of Lammermoor
or my old favourite The Heart of Mid-Lothian. It appears to me now to
be quite a fine epic. We ought to glory in such men as Scott. The Ger-
mans would; and so should we, if hatred of our neighbour were not the
religion of authors, and warfare the practice of borderers. Keats is our
Ariel of poetry, Scott our Prospero. The one commands, the other capti-
vates the one controls all the elements, the other tempers and enlivens
them. And yet this wonderful creature Keats, who in his felicities of
expression comes very often near to Shakespeare, has defects which his
admirers do not seem to understand. Wordsworth called his ode to Pan
a very pretty piece of Paganism when my friend Charles Brown read it to
him; but Keats was no more pagan than Wordsworth himself. Between
you and me, the style of Keats is extremely far removed from the very
boundaries of Greece. I wish someone had been near him when he printed
his Endymion, to strike out, as ruthlessly as you would have done, all that
amidst its opulence is capricious and disorderly. The truth is, and indeed
I hardly know an exception to it, it is in Selection that we English are
most deficient. We lay our hands upon all, and manage very badly our
dependencies. A young poet should be bound apprentice to Pindar for
three years, whether his business be the ode or anything else. He will find
nothing in the workshop which he expected to find, but quite enough of
highly-wrought tools and well-seasoned materials.'
KK
498
Book VII.
TWENTY-ONE YEARS AT BATH.
Of his Portrait by Boxall.
'No author, living or dead' (December 1852), 'ever kept himself so
deeply in the shade throughout every season of life. Perhaps when I am
in the grave, curiosity may be excited to know what kind of countenance
that creature had who imitated nobody, and whom nobody imitated: the
man who walked thro' the crowd of poets and prose-men and never was
toucht by any one's skirts: who walked up to the ancients and talked with
them familiarly, but never took a sup of wine or a crust of bread in their
houses. If this should happen, and it probably will within your lifetime,
then let the good people see the old man's head by Boxall.'
Of Sydney and Bobus Smith.
'Never was I more interested in any book than I am now' (26th of
August 1855) 'in reading the Life of Sydney Smith. The English lan-
guage has had few such writers; happily there are flashes of wit flying yet
over his grave. Curious that great men should so run in pairs: the two
Napiers, the two Smiths, &c. Will they ever talk of the two Landors,
myself and Robert? According to what appear to be the laws of nature
and of society in regard to authors, I ought especially to hate Bobus and
Sydney for beating me out and out: Bobus in Latin poetry, and Sydney
in English prose. But Bobus has had no rival in Latin this 1800 years.
You seem to place Jeffrey, Horner, Mackintosh, and Brougham more nearly
on a level than I should ever do. Of those qualities which they had in
common, Sydney had greatly more than all those people put together; and
how many more parts, both shining and solid, had his rich mind! Why do
we, by the by, drop our good word parts for talents? Even talents are
dropt for talent. To talk about a "man of talent" is to talk like a fool.'
Of Sydney on Demosthenes and Plato: old Heresy.
'Sydney Smith unluckily attributes wit to Demosthenes. Quinctilian
very justly says, "Non displicuisse ei jocos, sed definisse." He takes up
the tradition of Plato's animation. He is often grandiose, but never ani-
mated deliberately I say never. I have read him carefully twice over.
What other man of men now living has done the same? He moves wonder
far oftener than admiration; and there is all the difference. Wonder is
sudden and transient: admiration the reverse. I have pointed out forty
or fifty gross faults in his language, and I could have added a dozen more.
Demosthenes is animated, Milton is animated; Plato at best is but em-
phatical, and not often that. Even in language there are finer things in
Bacon, things more imaginative and poetical. He is to Plato what a
wrestler is to a rope-dancer, but very few men have a grasp capacious
enough to comprehend his muscles. The hand more easily goes round the
full rotundity of Plato's.'
Reading De Quincey on Serjeant Hill and Bishop Watson.
'I am reading his Essays and Recollections' (Oct. 1854). 'He does
not tell his stories well. How few there are who can carry a story without
dropping the best part of it! There is one he tells very badly which has
carried my memory back nearly sixty years.
back nearly sixty years. It is that (p. 175) about the
absent Serjeant Hill, who had managed, as he sat next a lady at dinner,
1836-1857.
499
SILENT COMPANIONS.
to tuck into his fob, without being in the least degree conscious of it, all
the apron she wore except the strings, and was in ludicrous perturbation
when she rose and said, "Mr. Serjeant, I must sue you for a bill of di-
"vorce." I remember it repeated at my father's table by old Counsellor
Wheler, who was present with his wife when it happened. De Quincey
is stronger in his essays, and it seems to me he has seldom written better
than in his remarks on your Goldsmith. But his account of Watson is
rather amusing. Watson was made a hypocrite not by choice but by ne-
cessity not that goddess Necessity whom Horace represents with the
clavi trabales, but the blander with the clavi episcopales. Imagine him
to yourself standing before Pitt and asking to be made archbishop. This
he could do conscientiously; he had said nolo episcopari, he never had said
nolo archi-episcopari. I can bring before my eyes the premier, bolt-up-
right, with his head steady and stiff upon his crane-like neck, and his hard
gray eyes looking down the triangular declivity of his dawn-bright nose;
and I can fancy his deep sonorous voice as he wishes my lord bishop a
good day. Damn the fellow!" cries the bishop the moment the hall-door
is shut behind him.'
Of some Novels.
CC
'I have been' (Aug. 1856) 'cushioning my old head on the pillow of
novels. What a delightful book is Bulwer's Caxtons! I have done him
injustice, for I never thought he could have written such pure Saxon Eng-
lish as may be found here; and Sterne himself, whom he has chosen to
imitate as to manner, is hardly better in the way of character. Esmond,
too, is a novel that has surprised me. Never could I have believed that
Thackeray, great as his abilities are, could have written so noble a story
as Esmond. On your recommendation I have since been reading the whole
of Humphrey Clinker. It seems to me that I must have read a part of it
before. Every letter ends with a rigmarole, then much in fashion, and
thought to be very graceful. By rigmarole I mean such a termination as
this: "It had like to have kindled the flames of discord in the family of
yours always, &c." A tail always curls round the back of the letter-writer,
and sticks to his sincerely, &c. How would Cicero and Pliny and Trajan
have laught at this circumbendibus! In the main however you are right
about the book. It has abundant humour; and how admirable are such
strokes as where the jailer's wife "wishes there was such another good
"soul in every jail in England"! But I find it rather wearisome, and stuffed
with oddities of language. P. 191. "I have no doubt but your parents
"will in a little time bring you into the world." If the parents did not
bring her into the world (one of them at least), I wonder who did? By the
world he meant society; as Young did in saying of the God Sleep, “He,
“like the world, his ready visit pays" &c. card-case in hand.
"He lights
"on lids unsullied by a tear" but I warrant he squeezed one out. P. 175.
"Penetrated the uttermost recesses :" he meant the innermost. "Between
vanity, methodism, and love:" between is only for two, by and twain.
Neither seen, heard, nor felt:" here again neither applies to two, not
more. You see I have been carrying the cross you laid upon my shoulders.
I must now run to Dickens for refreshment. He is a never-failing re-
source; and what an astonishing genius he is l'
500
Book VII.
TWENTY-ONE YEARS AT BATH.
Of the Edinburgh Review on his Hellenics.
'You know with what feeling I read a review in the Edinburgh four
years ago, and here is another which makes me proud of being reviewed
by such a writer' (April 1850). Yet I could not but smile at the imputa-
tion of mannerism. Whose manner? I resemble none of the ancients,
and still less the moderns. My merits, if I have any at all, are variety
and simplicity. Cowper is the only modern poet who is so little of a man-
nerist as I am; and even he has somewhat of it. A little of sweet bile
rises up in his stomach from the crudity of his religion. I am obscure;
this is too certain; everybody says it. But are Pindar and Eschylus less
so; I am unable to guess what proportion of their poetry the best poets
have cancelled. Wordsworth and Byron, and most now living, leave no
traces of erasure: I wish they had. I have rejected quite as much as I
have admitted, and some of it quite as good. Order and proportion always
were my objects. My real strength, I believe, lies in the dramatic, and
I think I could have composed a drama suitable for the stage, if I had
willed it but intricacy, called plot, undermines the solid structure of well-
ordered poetry. There is nothing of it in the Iliad, or in Eschylus; once
only in Sophocles is there much of it. The Spaniards are known for little
else; and they brought over to England these instruments of mental tor-
ture in their poetical Armada. Only think that I am suspected of under-
valuing Dante! The proportion of bad poetry to good in him is vast in-
deed; but never was man, excepting Shakespeare alone, so intensely a
poet. Another objection made to me, not in this but another review I
have been reading of my Hellenics, is that allusions may be found in
them to modern men and events. In ancient poets we find many such
allusions, and wish for more. In Virgil the palace of Cæsar is the palace
of Latinus: "Arboribusque obtecta recessit." And the most august praise
ever conferred on man is conferred here " (quis deus incertum est) habitat
"deus." But one thing is quite certain, and you know it well. I shall
have as many readers as I desire to have in other times than ours.
shall dine late; but the dining-room will be well-lighted, the guests few
and select. I neither am, nor ever shall be, popular. Such never was
my ambition. Thousands of people, for centuries to come, will look up
at the statues of the Duke of York, George III, Canning, Pitt, and others
of that description; but in no centuries to come will fifty in any one
generation feast their eyes in silent veneration on the marbles from the
Parthenon.'
Of the Quarterly on Steele. (1855.)
I
'I would rather have written what is here quoted from Steele than
all the criticism and philosophy of all the Edinburgh Reviewers. What
a good critic he was! I doubt if he has ever been surpassed. Somehow
I cannot but connect Steele and Goldsmith, as I do Cowper and Southey.
Of all our literary men, they interest me the most. . . . . Dear good faulty
Steele! The Quarterly was not sent to me before nine last night. I
would not, I could not, go to bed until I had read it through. My eyes
are the weaker for it this morning.'
Of the Dramatists of Elizabeth and James.
I have been reading what Lamb and Hazlitt say of these men, and
1836-1857.
501
SILENT COMPANIONS.
trying vainly, once more, to read steadily some of their writings. I call
them circum-circa Shakespearians, and find them to be as unlike as pos-
sible to Shakespeare. There is crudeness on one side of the fruit, and
rottenness or overripeness on the other, in almost every one. A wine-
glassful of pure water for me, rather than a bucket of turbid: one scazon
of Catullus rather than all the poetry of the Shakespearian age-beside
Shakespeare's! Yet there are strong throbs in the breasts that heave in
those tarnisht spangles, and there are crevices that let fresh air into
those barns and brothels. But Shakespeare! who can speak of him!
Antiquity fades away before him, and even Homer is but a shadow."
After Reading some recent Poems. (1856.)
'We are living in a poetical world where atoms are flying up and
down where explosions are incessant: where bright buttons and un-
threaded epaulettes, and laces of pantaloons, and broken limbs in minute
particles, are scattered through the air. Granular sparkles in profusion,
but nowhere a cubic inch of solid poetry. I venture to say this to you:
to others I am a sad dissembler, and put on my sweetest smiles and pret-
tiest behaviour.'
Of the Apple of Discord: suggested by reading a Review.
'I have been reading' (January 1851) the notice of Southey; and it
brought a reflection into my mind which I shall put into Hare's mouth in
a Conversation I am writing. Here it is.-Envy of preeminence is uni-
versal and everlasting. Little men, whenever they find an opportunity,
follow the steps of greater in this dark declivity. The Apple of Discord
was fullgrown soon after the Creation. It fell between the two first bro-
thers in the garden of Eden: it fell between two later on the plain of
Thebes. Narrow was the interval, when again it gleamed portentously
on the short grass of Ida. It rolled into the palace of Pella, dividing
Philip and "Philip's godlike son:" it followed that insatiable youth to the
extremities of his conquests, and even to his sepulchre; then it broke the
invincible phalanx and scattered the captains wide apart. It lay in the
gates of Carthage, so that they could not close against the enemy: it lay
between the generous and aguate families of Scipio and Gracchus. Ma-
rius and Sulla, Julius and Pompeius, Octavius and Antonius, were not
the last who experienced its fatal malignity. King imprisoned king,
emperor stabbed emperor, pope poisoned pope, contending for God's
vicegerency. The roll-call of their names, with a cross against each, is
rotting in the lumber-rooms of history.-Perhaps you may think this
too grave? Well, then, here is something lighter for you, touching upon
the same subject.
Poets hate poets the world over.
Wisely will Clio's favour'd lover
Keep to the woods, nor dream of clover.
Rash, rash, to offer such advice!
Did ever housewife teach the mice
To keep from sugar and from rice?
"
Tennyson ?" True; him none can hate,
Yet all are envious of his state
And wish he were not quite so great.'
502
Book VII.
TWENTY-ONE YEARS AT BATH.
Of Swift's Tale of a Tub. (1858.)
'I am reading once more' (he was now 83 years of age) the work I
have read oftener than any other prose work in our language. I cannot
bring to my recollection the number of copies I have given away, chiefly
to young catholic ladies. I really believe I converted one by it uninten-
tionally. What a writer! not the most imaginative or the most simple,
not Bacon or Goldsmith, had the power of saying more forcibly or com-
pletely whatever he meant to say!'
Of Sir Robert Peel's posthumous Memoir. (1853.)
'I am reading Peel's Memoir. I think him the wisest politician since
Walpole. Shall we ever have a third Sir Robert? This second of them
knew business better, and had a finer scent, than any other of either
pack, foxhound or beagle. He starts the old question, Is fame worth
having? No, say I; but we are born with an appetite for it, and at worst
there is no great harm in its indulgence. It is certainly well that states-
men should desire it. Many grave men, and most politicians, think of
fame as Castlereagh did, and aim only at the expedients of the hour.
Entertaining no passion for glory, he looked at the future with indiffer-
ence, and, armed against himself, he leapt across its boundary-line. After
all, unless we deem posthumous glory a promise made in earnest to our
labours and aspirations, nothing is there true and real beyond the imme-
diate grasp of our fingers. It is impossible that a great man should be
contented with the greatness which a less man can confer, or that a pru-
dent one should think the best fortune consists in a life-annuity. Nothing
is less selfish than a desire of fame, since its only sure acquisition is by
labouring for others. And yet I will still add, for myself, that I care not
for it: though the good Southey went so far as to say that literary fame
was the only fame of which a wise man ought to be ambitious. What-
ever works of imagination I have composed might have perished the next
hour without a regret. My pleasure was in the conception and formation:
excitement, not hope, interior glory, not external, animated and sustained
True indeed is what you have often told me, that I shall have to
wait long before I get my higher audience, and rule over the See ap-
pointed for me. My indifference about it is therefore fortunate for me;
and being so, to this effect I give you my benediction, and pray God to
have you in his holy keeping,
WALTER EPISCOPUS.'
me.
<
The remark as to fame there quoted from Southey was one
of the points made by the Quarterly Review against him in the
paper referred to in the last section. It is only half given by
Landor, the entire passage standing thus: Literary fame is the
only fame of which a wise man ought to be ambitious, because
it is the only lasting and living fame.' This the reviewer
turned into a declaration by Southey of his belief that literature
is by far the grandest object of human concern,' and laughed
at him for having expressed such an opinion. Southey did not
1836-1857.
503
SILENT COMPANIONS.
say so, but gave his reason for thinking that literary fame was
the only fame of which a wise man ought to be ambitious. And
is it so, or is it not? What is the fame that the majority of
sensible men perceive to be the most durable? Would the re-
viewer himself have chosen to be Augustus or Horace? Is the
fame of Elizabeth or Essex preferable to that of Shakespeare or
Bacon? Who would not rather have been De Foe than the
statesman who put him in the pillory? Is it Johnson or Lord
Chesterfield who at present stands waiting in the anteroom ?
Southey's proposition is surely indisputable, when properly
understood. A man who rightly values literary fame does not
value it for the empty and noisy applause it reverberates, but
for the solid and silent good it represents. The reviewer's state-
ment that literature is by far the grandest object of human
concern, is a very different thing from Southey's belief that the
grandest objects of human concern can have no promoter so
effectual as literature, nor any monument so enduring. To such
a man literature is the means, and not the object or the end.
Milton had no thought of personal vanity when he spoke of the
perpetuity of praise which God and good men had consented
should be the reward of those whose published labours had ad-
vanced the good of mankind. Great writers who understand
their vocation are entitled to speak as the world's unacknow-
ledged legislators; and even the reviewer has to admit, of Sou-
they, that he gave the first successful impulse to not a few of the
most marked ameliorations effected in recent years.
On the subject of orthography and language, supremely
Landor's favourite, which he kept steadily before him in all his
reading, and which entered very largely into almost all his letters
in later life, I have not thought it necessary to add many illus-
trations to the remarks on a former page. He showed a whim-
sical resentment when anything like comparison was irreverently
made between his and the phonetic style of spelling. Of the
latter, Bath was in some sort the head-quarters at this time, its
most intelligent advocate residing there; and Hartley Coleridge
had so much excuse for a statement he made that Landor had
504
Book VII.
TWENTY-ONE YEARS AT BATH.
become a convert to this foolery.' But it was about as well
founded as Landor's reply that there were not three words in all
his proposed new spellings unauthorised in their formation. I
'appeal to Ben Jonson. He is a magistrate in language, and I
only wish a few of our street-walking ladies and gentlemen
were brought before him, and obliged to undergo his sentence.'
I have already sufficiently shown that this appeal would not
have availed my old friend much, and that with all his toil and
pains he has gone but a little way towards the correction of
anomalies very gravely disconcerting to foreigners as well as to
all intelligent Englishmen; but it was nevertheless this firm.
belief that in the changes he proposed he was only restoring the
legitimate forms of the language, added to his knowledge of
English literature, and guided by his unusual mastery of the
ancient as well as of many modern tongues, which enabled him,
even while arguing for the maintenance of principles and posi-
tions the most unstable and untenable, to make sound and im-
portant contributions in aid of what he so much desired. The
language is indebted to him for suggestions of the greatest
value.
Of Grote's History.
I am reading' (October 1852) Grote's History. Wonderful it seems
to me that a writer so fresh from the Attic, and particularly so conversant
with Thucydides, should stand up to his chin among the greengrocery of
Covent-garden! It would however be ungrateful to collect blemishes of
language from an author to whom we are indebted for so much diligence
and information, so much learning and wisdom. The days of pure Eng-
lish are over. We now break loose and get among "ambitions" and
"peoples," and many other such formidable features, repulsive as those
which Æneas met on entering the gates of hell. But everybody now is
playing with these frightful cobras, and putting them into his bosom. As
people do not perceive the loss of freedom until it is utterly gone, neither
do they the loss of language: nor would they be persuaded though such
a prophet as Milton rose from the dead.'
Of Corruptions of Language.
'Here is a gentleman at Bath, Mr. Ellis, an excellent and most intel-
ligent man, I hear, who has published a book recommending us to spell
phonetically. Elphinstone, seventy or eighty years ago, wrote in this
fashion. Imagine my surprise at being told that a work was composed
on my principles of spelling. All my principles are merely the adoption
of the best spellings of the best writers, and the rejection of the fop-
peries introduced with Charles the Second. The cavaliers (as fops were
1836-1857.
505
SILENT COMPANIONS.
called) wished to make the ladies believe that they or their fathers had
emigrated to France, and thought it as glorious to be unruly in their
language as in their conduct. Cowley and Dryden were courtiers. Pope
hated kings, who really were hateful; but he imitated the spelling of
ladies, beautiful as his language is; and before he died he had read and
ridiculed Middleton, some of whose peculiarities, good and bad, I also
have noted. For several years subsequently there were but few innova-
tions. People threw into the lumber-room their old bandy-legged chairs,
and would have nothing that was not stuffed with Latin and quilted into
stiffness. It was hardly to be expected that dons and doctors would go
into a dame's school; but Mrs. Inchbald and Mrs. Barbauld made them-
selves greater authorities than all Oxford and Cambridge. We have rarely
had two better writers of English in the best of times. What I had in
view when I began my letter is this. You have the power of a sanitary
commissioner, and can command the stopping-up of several open sewers
in our language. Do order that paling to be removed which shuts up
perhaps, indeed, and too when too means also. This has no parallel in
any other language; and even those who commit the folly would abstain
from it in writing French or Italian or Greek or Latin. The last innova-
tion is every where and no where in two words, as if where were a sub-
stantive. I find also every body: while body is inviolate, why should
everybody be sawed asunder, like St. Bartholomew? I have now said my
say and filled my sheet; so adieu.'
Of his proposed Amendments.
•
•
'I have read attentively' (1854) Mr. Ellis's observations on ortho-
graphy. Different authors have given different reasons for varieties.
Southey told me when he visited me at Clifton, now some twenty years
since, that it would ruin him to spell right, for that fifty copies of his
book would never sell. Archbishop Hare, not inferior to Archbishop
Whately in purity of style and correctness of thought, had the courage
to follow my preterites and participles and other words. Mr. Ellis
quotes a learned gentleman who reproves his son for ill orthography.
What is ill orthography but ill right-spelling? He tells us that we no
longer use ill as an adjective. The ill is ill-used. Do we not continue
to say an ill-turn? and ill-recompensed? and ill-taught? and ill-man-
aged? In the same line be adds, "nor insert do." Surely we do insert it
when we desire to lay stress on what we say. I do love; I do hate. In
the next line he objects to th as the final letters of the present tense in
the third person, where s would serve. Generally such a termination
should be avoided, but never or very rarely when the next word begins
with s.
I dissent altogether from Mr. Ellis's proposition, that there is
no one who would dream of altering a great writer's language.
"Yet we
expect to find the spelling of the new book somewhat different from that
"of the old." Rusticus, and only Rusticus, expectat. Scholars and sound
laborious critics have been careful in collating the editions of both ancient
and more recent authors. Aulus Gellius tells us that Virgil wrote differ-
ently the same word. He wrote but twenty years after Catullus, yet
although they were also of the same province, their spelling was unlike.
Virgil never wrote quoi, as Catullus did uniformly; and although he
506
Book VII.
TWENTY-ONE YEARS AT BATH.
wrote vernacularly in the person of a peasant, he wrote cujum, not quor-
jum. Catullus employed the language of Cicero and Julius Cæsar; Virgil
that of Augustus and his court. Fortunately we possess the comedies of
Terence and of Plautus, the richest treasures of Latinity. We there see
the very handwriting of the Scipios and the Gracchi. I much commend
the publisher of Milton's works who observed his orthography. The same
had already been done by Tyrwhitt in his Chaucer; and Spenser has been
thought as capable of spelling as Dyche . . . Mr. Ellis asks, "Does not
common sense revolt against Tillotson's alterations of Bacon to make
"him more eloquent?" But change of spelling can produce no such effect;
and it is laughable to think of Tillotson working such a miracle. Mr. Ellis
also speaks of Wordsworth; but, though a poet of the highest claims, it
is neither in the same kind nor in the same degree as Chaucer, whose in-
vention, spirit, and variety are equalled by Shakespeare and by Milton
only. Some sonnets Wordsworth has written that Milton might have
owned, but he could no more have written the Canterbury Tales than he
could have written Paradise Lost, the Samson Agonistes, the Allegro, the
Penseroso, the Sonnet to Cromwell, or that sublimest of psalms, the Invo-
cation to God on his murdered saints in Piedmont. Is it not perilous,
Mr. Ellis asks, to let our spelling change with every generation? Yes
indeed. Therefore I would set my foot against these changes as they are
rolling on and accumulating. He "puts it to the mass of writers even
among ourselves, whether they would wish to have their own punctua-
"tion preserved in their printed works." I know little about the mass of
writers. I can only say that, to my certain knowledge, those who are
not the mass have complained to me that theirs was not preserved; Sou-
they in particular, and our English Thucydides, the illustrious historian
of the Peninsular War: I will add myself; for you know, my dear Forster,
that I yielded to you in the preparation of my collected works.”
CC
XIV. LAST DAYS IN BATH, AND FINAL DEPARTURE FROM
ENGLAND.
'I have been out of doors,' Landor wrote to me in the
autumn of 1856, 'not more than twice in fifty-nine days, a few
'minutes in each. I think I will go and die in Italy, but not
' in my old home. It is pleasant to see the sun about one's
'deathbed.' It was only a passing wish he thus expressed, but
it was destined to have sad fulfilment.
Knowing the condition of health in which he was at the
opening of 1857, it was a great shock to me to find that he had
been summoned to give evidence in the Bath county-court upon
a miserable squabble about a governess. The case came on in
January, when, in spite of a doctor's certificate of his unfitness
to appear, he was brought to the court; and such was the ex-
+
1836-1857.
507
LAST DAYS IN BATH.
citement that followed and the exhaustion consequent upon it,
that there was for some time reason to apprehend a very grave
result. He could hardly have put any part of this affair into a
conversation that should pair-off with his Epicurus, Ternissa,
and Leontion; and yet, with all its miserable sequel, it must
be said to have had its origin in desires and tastes closely akin
to those expressed in that dialogue, where the love of the very
old for the society of the very young is made enchanting by all
that the Graces can surround it with. Poor Landor had always
the belief, that, after the fashion of the ancient philosopher, and
with the same sort of charming help, he might be able to
smoothen and adorn, for himself also, the declivity of age; and if
for the moment, to avoid mention of the names of the ladies who
now make brief appearance in his story, I borrow for them the
old Greek names, they at least will have no cause to complain.
It is not the reality, but the fiction, which such a comparison
will place at disadvantage; for, disastrous as the end was here,
it does not therefore follow that Epicurus was wrong. Un-
happily everything depends in such a case upon the choice of
your Ternissa and Leontion.
This was nearly the first year in which we failed to meet on
the 30th of January. Landor had found himself able however
to write to his brother Henry on that day. Some question as
to the burning-down of a barn at Llanthony had been referred
to him; to which he replied, with even more than his usual
unreason as to such things, that neither his cousin Walter Lan-
dor of Rugely (co-trustee with Henry of the Llanthony estate
since his brother Charles's death) nor the manager of the pro-
perty, Mr. Edwards, had mentioned the incident to him, know-
ing well his wish never to hear anything about his estate, and
acting upon his repeated instructions that they should tell him
nothing. He added that before he left England seventy-two
thousand pounds had been sunk on Llanthony, and in the last
thirty years three hundred a-year on an average, including a
small part on Ipsley; and that there was nothing he now so
little desired as that any more money should be laid out on any
part of it in future.
Three months hence I shall once more purchase a landed property,
508
Book VII.
TWENTY-ONE YEARS AT BATH.
•
situated in the parish of Widcombe, and comprising by actual admeasure-
ment eight feet by four, next adjoining the church-tower in said parish.
No magpie drapery, no lead, no rascals in hatbands, no horses in full
feathers for me. Six old chairmen are sufficient. I thought once of com-
plying with your kind wish that I should lie at Tachbrook, but I am not
worth the carriage so far.' (He alluded then to the illness that had borne
down upon him so heavily; mentioned a bequest from Kenyon of a hun-
dred pounds; and grieved that so hearty and genial a man, thirteen years
younger than himself, should have died before him.) 'And now again
about dying. Out of my hundred pounds, when I get it, I will reserve ten
for my funeral, with strict orders that the sum may not be exceeded; and
the gravestone and grave will amount to nearly or quite ten more. As I
can live without superfluities, surely I can die without them.'
Not long after this letter was written I sent him the legacy ;
and soon discovered that even as much as ten pounds of it had
not been reserved to himself, either for festivity or funeral. The
whole of it went as a 'new-year's gift' to the youthful Ternissa,
by whom one-half of it was subsequently transferred, without
the knowledge of the original giver, to the less youthful Leon-
tion, for part payment of costs incurred at the trial about the
governess; and some differences arising thereon took afterwards
a character of bitterness such as never can possibly belong to
any but a woman's quarrel. Hardly had the strife broken out
when Landor flung himself headlong into it; not by any means,
wildly inconsiderate at all times as his conduct was, out of any
impulse at the time to be called unworthy. Though the part
he took could not at any stage of it be pronounced right, there
were many excuses to be suggested for it until he had himself
rendered it ignoble. He chose to assume, but less gratuitously
in the particular case than was usual with him, not merely that
he had himself suffered wrong (on which point a great deal
might have been said, if he had not taken from his friends all
power of saying it), but that a very young lady who had claims
on his friendly protection had been made the victim of injustice
by another lady not so young; and that upon him, in such
circumstances, devolved the duty of hurling vengeance at her
oppressor. An obligation of which he straightway proceeded to
discharge himself, after no other than his most ordinary method.
Believing that he saw on one side a fiend incarnate and on
the other an angel of light, he permitted his astounding credu-
lity to work his irascibility into madness; and there was then
1836-1857.
509
LAST DAYS IN BATH.
as much good to be got by reasoning with him as by arguing
with a storm off Cape Horn. It was vain to point out to him
that he had nothing himself to gain from so sordid a dispute;
that what he had lost was gone irrecoverably; that the angel
and the fiend had some points in common; and that there was
no such mighty difference between that which he championed and
that which he assailed, to justify or call for interference. Why
should I once more repeat what this narrative has told so often?
He rejected every warning, rushed into print, and found him-
self enmeshed in an action for libel.
On hearing this I proceeded to Bath, and he was extricated
for a time; but I quitted the place with a sorrowful misgiving
that the last illness of the old man, while it had left him subject
to the same transitory storms of frantic passion, had perman-
ently also weakened him, mentally yet more than bodily; and
that, even when anger was no longer present to overcloud his
intellect, there had ceased to be really available to his use such
a faculty of discrimination between right and wrong, or such a
saving consciousness of evil from good, as is necessary to consti-
tute a responsible human being. He had now not even memory
enough to recollect what he was writing from day to day; and
while the power of giving keen and clear expression to every
passing mood of bitterness remained to him, his reason had too
far deserted him to leave it other than a fatal gift. He could
apply no gauge or measure to what he was bent on either doing
or saying; he seemed no longer to have the ability to see any-
thing not palpably before him; and of the effect of any given
thing on his own or another's reputation, he was become wholly
powerless to judge. Changes in him also there were which
otherwise painfully affected me. He had so long and steadily
consented to act on my advice exclusively in the publication of
his writings, that here I believed I had still some efficient con-
trol. Unhappily it proved to be not so. There had come to be
mixed up with the miserable quarrel a question as to a portfolio
containing a great many scraps of his poetry, either of very old
or of very recent date, in effect little more than the mere sweep-
ings and refuse of his writing-desk; which he had lent to one of
the parties in the squabble for transcription of some portion of
510
Book VII.
TWENTY-ONE YEARS AT BATH.
its contents, and which he professed to have been unable to get
back until he had publicly advertised its unauthorised deten-
tion. The whole of this collection of pieces, for the most part
entirely unworthy of him, I left him determined to put into
print, against my earnest and repeated remonstrance.
It was
his plan to publish them as dry leaves; and they became ulti-
mately the book called Dry Sticks. He grieved to do anything.
in the teeth of my advice, he said; but, if he did not publish
the poems, others would. He had for the time persuaded him-
self that he had really no other motive: yet I could not but
suspect that another, quite unconsciously to himself, lurked be-
hind; and that he thought he might thus find excuse for occa-
sional covert allusion to occurrences which the result of my
interference had bound him, not indeed by express agreement
on my part (as erroneously supposed at the time), but by hon-
ourable understanding on his, no longer to notice openly.
C
6
I left Bath in the September of 1857, and to the close of
that year he never recovered strength. My weakness,' he wrote
to me in the middle of October, 'is excessive. With extreme
'difficulty do I weigh myself up from my arm-chair. My good
and most intelligent friend, Dr. Watson, is very attentive to
me, and says my constitution will bear me through. I doubt
' whether this is good intelligence. The same spasms, in that
case, will come over again some other time, and I wish it were
'all at an end now.' He had nevertheless persisted in his deter-
mination to print what I thought worthless as well as objection-
able, having found a publisher to undertake it in Edinburgh, on
my declining to have anything to do with it in London; he had
farther availed himself of my continued opposition to withhold
any sight of the proofs; and by the merest accident it came to
my knowledge that the publication would be unworthy of him
in more senses than one, for that certainly allusion would be
made in it to what he ought to have felt himself bound not to
reopen. I wrote upon this to his solicitors, and to a kindly and
zealous friend (Captain B——); by whom again the case was
stated to him, with all that a persistence in his disastrous course
would involve; and from them came an assurance to me shortly
afterward that everything wrong would be erased. Never, at
1836-1857.
511
LAST DAYS IN BATH.
any previous period of our twenty-two years of uninterrupted
intercourse, had it occurred to me to doubt him, when once his
word had been given; often as I had seen him put passion be-
fore reason, there was yet a nobler part of his character which
as often had asserted itself; and the foreboding of calamity
which now pressed itself upon me, against all the comforting
reassurances I received, arose simply from a feeling it was im-
possible to resist, that age and illness had conquered him at last,
and left him other than the Landor' whom we knew.' It was a
sorry satisfaction afterwards to feel that nothing had happened
to him which had not been foretold, nor anything in the way of
warning omitted that could possibly have saved him. But this
undoubtedly was the case, and I had only to guard myself
then against other consequences. 'I bear you no ill-will, Lizzy,'
says Mr. Bennet in Miss Austen's delightful novel, 'for being
justified in the warning you gave me. Considering how mat-
'ters turned out, I think this shows magnanimity.' Whether
my old friend was ever to have enough of his old self restored
to enable him to show this magnanimity, will in due time be
6
seen.
Let the reader meanwhile take this additional evidence of
the strange state of Landor's mind at the moment. He persisted
for some time in making it a condition with his new publisher,
Mr. Nichol of Edinburgh, that his name should appear on the
title-page of his book as 'the late W. S. Landor.' I learn this
from the very earnest remonstrance (17th of December 1857)
of Mr. Nichol.
'I take the liberty of begging you to allow me to make the title stand
thus, Dry Sticks, Faggoted by W. S. Landor, and not, as you still con-
tinue to write it, the late W. S. Landor. It will sufficiently pain many,
when, in God's good time, you will be spoken of as the late: and I think
the expression would jar on the ear of all your friends, as it does on mine.'
The good publisher carried his point, and it was well that
he should; but in the strange suggestion so persistently made,
there was, alas, some truth, for much that had constituted the
Landor known to his friends had for the present departed.
Whether it was destined ever to return, none might say; but it
had become, at this time, a thing of the past. I had greatly
512
Book VII.
TWENTY-ONE YEARS AT BATH.
desired to visit him in the January of 1858, but the character
and tone of his letters dissuaded me; and the book to which I
had so strongly objected was at last on the eve of its appearance
when he thus wrote:
'All this illness is too surely coming over again. What a pity that
Death should have made two bites of a cherry! He seems to grin at me
for saying so, and to shake in my face as much of a fist as belongs to him.
But he knows I never cared a fig for his menaces, and am now quite ready
to let him have his way. Alas, alas! as we have talked together for so
many years, we shall never talk again. Why can not this swimming of
the head carry me to the grave a little more rapidly? This is the only
thing I now desire. I remember faces and places, but their names I
totally forget. Verses of the Odyssea and Iliad run perpetually into my
mind, after the better part of a century, and there seems to be no longer
room there for anything else.'
I believe him now indeed to have become, for the mere time at
least, impatient for the close, and to have had the sense that it
might have been happier for him to have seen it earlier. As
he finely said in his ode to Southey :
"We hurry to the river we must cross,
And swifter downward every footstep wends:
Happy who reach it ere they count the loss
Of half their faculties and half their friends!'
<
Soon I was told what occasioned me no surprise, that the
book just published contained in other forms the objectionable
passages on whose erasure I had insisted, as well as all the
scrapings and rubbish of his desk; the only shadow of an ex-
cuse made for the appearance of such 'levities' being a notifica-
tion at the back of the title-page that none would have been
' collected but that a copy of the greater number was without
the knowledge or consent of the author procured from a per-
'son who had engaged to transcribe them,' thereby rendering ne-
cessary such precaution as only publication could afford against
subtraction, or what is worse, addition.' It is hardly necessary
to add that very shortly, with even less surprise, I learnt that
friends of my own in Bath had already heard whispers of an-
other contemplated action for libel. But a graver announce-
ment made to me only a few days later threw everything else
into the shade. On the 28th of March one of Landor's nieces
wrote to me that she had been called suddenly to her uncle
<
1836-1857.
513
LAST DAYS IN BATH.
Walter. He had been found insensible on the previous morn-
ing, and had continued in that state twenty-four hours. During
the four hours before she wrote, he had begun very slightly to
rally; but his condition continued to be extremely precarious.
During the next week accounts were sent me daily; skilful
physicians, Dr. Watson and Dr. M'Dermott, and his kind good
nieces, were in constant attendance; and few dared to hope
against hope in such a case. But the struggle was short though
sharp; the grim visitor was beaten off once more
and my
friend's first letter to me after getting again into his drawing-
room was in the old characteristic vein. It told me of books
he had been reading, of Shelley's life, and of his old favourite
Swift; and closed thus: 'I take it uncivil in Death to invite
' and then to balk me. It was troublesome to walk back, when
'I found he would not take me in. I do hope and trust he
' will never play me the same trick again. We ought both of
us to be graver.' I had expressed a wish that he would-as
soon as possible try change of scene, and, by way of bringing
round us some old and pleasant memories, had told him of a
cottage I proposed to take at Wimbledon. With such quick-
ness he replied, and in such genial temper, that I began to un-
derstand what was told me by those around him in his illness,
that this last attack, bringing him as it did to the very verge
of the grave, had yet seemed in its retreat to have left his mind
less clouded than at any time during the two years preceding.
I could hardly expect that he would come; but his refusal,
and the kindly bit of doggerel verse sent with it, very pleasantly
told me that old simple scenes and enjoyments had been again
in his thoughts. The letter is dated in the middle of June
1858.
'I never more shall have the luck
To feed again the lonely duck
Upon the lake of Wimbledon.
Forster, as jovial and as kind
As Kenyon, finds me less inclin'd,
Now he and health alike are gone.
Here you see all I can do. Yesterday I drove out for the first time, and
was less fatigued than I expected. My object was my burial-ground.
It has been fixt on, near the church-tower at Widcombe. Napier's father
LL
514
Book VII.
TWENTY-ONE YEARS AT BATH.
lies buried there, he told me. Sixty years ago, in this season, I promised
a person I dearly loved it should be there. We were sitting under some
old elders, now supplanted by a wall of the churchyard.'
At the end of the same month I had farther proof of how
strongly his thoughts were bent in this direction. He sent me
an epitaph he had written for himself:
Ut sine censurâ, sine laude inscripta, sepulcro
Sint patris ac matris nomina sola meo:
At puro invidiæ, sua gloria rara, poetæ
Incumbente rosâ laurus obumbret humum.
Nor do I care
But then, you see, the verses are not fitted for a stone.
a straw whether a rose and laurel cover my bones. Sandford will see
them run to earth.'
He had no consciousness as yet that others were already in hot
pursuit of him, with quite other than roses or laurels in their
hands; and that the chase would end only when his bones had
been run to earth in an Italian burial-ground.
•
The blow fell at last so suddenly that I only heard of what
had been determined after the resolution was taken. Told by
his law-advisers that the matter complained of was such that an
adverse verdict inust be expected, and that the damages would
necessarily be heavier because of the breach of an undertaking
which they had themselves given in his name upon my interfer-
ence in the previous year,—a plan of that former time, only
then at my suggestion abandoned, was at the same interview put
before Landor, and eagerly assented to. This was, that he should
place his property beyond seizure for damages, break-up his
house in Bath, sell his pictures, and return to Italy. There was
no time to lose if such a scheme were to be carried out success-
fully; and it was with supreme astonishment I received an inti-
mation, telegraphed at midday from Bath on the 12th of July
1858, that Landor would be at my house in London that night,
accompanied by one of his nieces. Some friends were dining
with me, among them Sir Alexander Cockburn and Mr. Dickens,
who, on the arrival of the old man too fatigued by his journey
to be able to join the dinner-table, left the room to see him ;
and from another friend, the Rev. Mr. Elwin, who was also one
of the party, I received very lately a letter reminding me of
what occurred. 'I have no recollection so vivid as of that
1836-1857.
515
LAST DAYS IN BATH.
i
' dinner in Montagu-square, when the servant announced, as it
were in Cockburn's very teeth, that Landor, who was flying
'from justice, had come to take refuge in your house for the
night, and Dickens went out to console him. I thought that
'Landor would talk over with him the unpleasant crisis; and
I shall never forget my amazement when Dickens came back
into the room laughing, and said that he found him very jovial,
and that his whole conversation was upon the characters of
Catullus, Tibullus, and other Latin poets.' Writing to his
daughter a few weeks later, when, upon the scandal of the
published trial, there had arisen a burst of virtuous indignation
which might just as virtuously and with greater justice have
been spared, Mr. Dickens thus mentioned the impression left
on him by the interview to which Mr. Elwin alludes: 'You
' must not let any new idea of poor dear Landor efface the for-
mer image of the fine and brave old man. I would not blot
'him out, in his tender gallantry, as he sat upon his bed at
'Forster's that night I lately told you of, for a million of wild
'mistakes at eighty-four years of age.' Landor crossed to France
four days later, on the morning of the 15th of July; and I
never saw him again.
6
BOOK EIGHTH.
1858-1864. ET. 83-89.
LAST SIX YEARS IN ITALY.
1. In his old home. II. At Siena. III. In Florence.
Scenes, being the last Imaginary Conversations.
I. IN HIS OLD HOME.
IV. Five unpublished
V. The Close.
LANDOR went first to Genoa, and there it was his intention to
have stayed; but considerations urged by members of his family
prevailed, and he decided to move on to his old home in Fie-
sole.
Before he left Genoa the advice on which he quitted Eng-
land had been embodied in legal forms, and he had assigned
over to others the property reserved to his use under the trust-
deeds of Llanthony. It was his own wish that the assignment
should have been made to one of his nieces; but this was over-
ruled, and everything over which any control had been retained
to him passed to the ownership of Arnold Landor, his eldest
son.
There are matters as to which I have thus far imposed silence
on myself, and intend as much as possible to continue to do so;
but it is quite necessary, at this point of my narrative, that I
should briefly state the position in which this deed of transfer
left what had been Landor's worldly estate. When he separated
from his family in 1835, Llanthony and Ipsley may be said, at
a rough calculation, to have been yielding very certainly more
than three thousand a-year rental, the deductions for mortgages
and insurances at that time being a little over fourteen hundred
a-year, and, of the balance, not more than from six to seven
hundred a-year being taken by Landor, who left the rest to
accumulate for casual expenses, repairs, and the discharge of
1858-1864.
517
IN HIS OLD HOME.
debts. Of this six hundred, upon quitting Italy he left two-
thirds to Mrs. Landor, at the same time transferring abso-
lutely to his eldest son the villa and farms where the family
lived, and of which the farm-produce went far towards their
expenses of living; while he took, for his own maintenance in
London, only the remaining third. This proved however to be
too little, and after a year or two it was raised, out of the
surplus at Llanthony, to four hundred a-year; trenching by
so much on the reserved fund. But his younger children
had meanwhile profited by legacies from other members of the
family; and upon Arnold's visit to England in 1842, sufficient.
had been raised to pay the debt to Ablett for Fiesole, an insur-
ance of equal amount indemnifying Arnold. The result was
that when Landor, now on the eve of his return to his old
home, executed a farther deed of transfer to his son, whereby
the latter became entitled to everything arising from Llanthony,
the property which had been entirely Landor's (not a shilling of
it having been derived from other sources than those which his
mother had so vigilantly protected and improved for his use)
was wholly and exclusively at the disposal of others. His son.
Arnold, standing next in the entails of Llanthony and of Ipsley,
which he was sure very soon to inherit free from all incum-
brance, was meanwhile invested, by the just-executed deed of
transfer, with the rights over them up to this time possessed
by his father. He had also, by his father's free gift, the abso-
lute ownership of the villa and farms at Fiesole; and he had
received a legacy of three hundred pounds from his aunt Eliza-
beth.** By similar legacies his sister had a hundred a-year to
her exclusive use, and each of his two younger brothers eighty
pounds a-year; while his mother, whose four hundred a-year,
secured in 1835, had been raised to five hundred upon the re-
settlement in 1842, had this larger annuity secured to her for
life on her husband's death by charge on the Llanthony estate.
Landor himself was now travelling to Florence with a few pic-
* Arnold enjoyed his possessions for little more than six years after
his father's death. He died on the 2d of April 1871, within a few days
of the completion of his 53d year; and has been succeeded by the next
heir, Walter Landor.
518
Book VIII.
LAST SIX YEARS IN ITALY.
|
tures, a few books, a small quantity of silver plate, and some-
thing short of a hundred and fifty pounds, as the sum of his
earthly possessions. This had been the amount realised in Man-
chester by the sale of the pictures that did not accompany him.
Before he reached Fiesole, a thousand pounds damages had
been awarded against him, and proceedings begun to compel the
payment. The deed of transfer, as I well knew, was little likely
to stand against resolute and determined efforts to overthrow it.
The court of chancery, on application, granted an injunction.
against receiving the rents until the case should be argued;
practically the deed of transfer was defeated; and before Lan-
dor died the entire amount of damages and costs had been paid
under order of the court. Of course this affected only the sum
reserved to Landor's use, and everything else remained as I have
stated.
6
C
On his way to Italy, and after his arrival, he wrote to me
continually; but one subject mainly occupied his letters, and I
could give to it but one reply. As to other matters, it became
very soon obvious that the only result that was reasonably to
have been expected was not far distant, and that his old home
could be a home to him no more. Red mullets compensated
'Milo for Rome. We have them daily, with ortolans of late,
' and beccaficos. But these do not indemnify me for Bath, the
only city I could ever live in comfortably. I have been in
'Florence twice only since I came here eleven weeks ago.' This,
in October 1858, was the most favourable aspect of things. But
before the end of that month he announced to me that his
health was such as to admit of no chance of his surviving, and
that, by means of the small remnant of the pittance he had
taken with him, he had so arranged that he should sleep his
last sleep in the graveyard of the little church near Bath where
already he had chosen his place of rest.
'WIDCOMBE! few seek with thee their resting-place;
But I, when I have run my weary race,
Will throw my bones upon thy churchyard turf;
Altho' malignant waves on foreign shore
Have stranded me, and I shall lift no more
My hoary head above the hissing surf.'
I was nevertheless not unprepared for what followed in little
1858-1864.
519
IN HIS OLD HOME.
more than a fortnight, when, in the middle of December, he
wrote to me from Florence that he had left Fiesole; that he
was somewhat less unhappy; that twice in five weeks, for
nearly a quarter of an hour, he had walked out in the sun; and
that his principal misery, which indeed he now dwelt upon as
the very worst that ever had befallen him, was the continued
and inexplicable delay in the publication of his enlarged Hel-
lenics. But while in consultation with his relatives in England
as to what step for providing him a new home it might be ad-
visable to take, we heard that he was again at Fiesole.
It will not be supposed, after all which has been said in this
book of the defects of Landor's character, that my object now
is to throw exclusively on others the blame of what occurred
during the first ten months after his return to Italy. It is only
fair to say that his letters continued to confirm the impression
as to his mental state made upon me by the incidents described
in the last section. That he was irritable, difficult to manage,
intemperate of tongue, subject to all kinds of suspicions, fancies,
mistakes; that, even when treated most considerately, he was
often unjust, but, when met by any kind of violence, was apt
to be driven wild with rage; that, in a word, choleric as he had
always been, he was now become very old,—is not, I fear, to be
doubted. Knowing all this only too well, I abstain from a
mention of even the character of the complaints in his letters ;
but there is nothing that should withhold me from a distinct
expression of the opinion I was led very reluctantly to form,
that the members of his family with whom he was now striving
to live completely failed to discharge the duty they were under
every natural and human obligation to render, and from which
they could not be released by any amount of mad irritability
on his part, or any number of irrational demands upon their
patience. I knew from the first that the attempt to live at the
villa could not succeed. In itself to the last degree unpromis-
ing, the time and the accompaniments of the unhappy trial
made it hopeless and impossible. Not however by him, but by
those who should have seen that there was at least nothing in-
sane in his desire to have such other provision made as they
might easily have arranged for him, was the miserable torture
།
520
Book VIII.
LAST SIX YEARS IN ITALY.
prolonged. Thrice during those ten months he left Fiesole to
seek a lodging in Florence; thrice he was brought back; and it
was on the fourth occasion, when, in the first week of July 1859,
he had taken refuge in the hotel on the Arno with eighteen-
pence in his pocket,' that the gravity of the situation, and the
absolute necessity at last of doing what should have been done
at first, were put before me by my old friend Mr. Browning, at
that time living in Florence.
Was it possible, he asked, that 'from Mr. Landor's relatives
' in England the means of existence could be afforded for him
in a lodging at Florence? To which I had to reply, that,
several times during the progress of these dreary months, the
same question had been put from England to Mr. Landor's
nearer relatives at Fiesole, on whom he had, quite apart from
any natural duty, such claims for help by way of money as I
have just described; and that the same answer had invariably
come. The trouble had been got rid of by Landor's return to
the villa. Now however he would not return; the question had
resolved itself into his living upon means to be furnished from
England, or the alternative of his not living at all; and what
the old man's fate might have been, during even the brief inter-
val required to determine this, it would be difficult to say, if the
zealous aid of the good Mr. Kirkup had failed him, or if he had
not found a friend so wise and kind as Mr. Browning.
(
'You will have heard,' he wrote to me on the 6th of August, that I
am now in a cottage near Siena, which I owe to Browning, the kind friend
who found it for me, whom I had seen only three or four times in
my life,
yet who made me the voluntary offer of what money I wanted, and who
insists on managing my affairs here, and paying for my lodgings and sus-
tenance. Never was such generosity and such solicitude as this incom-
parable man has shown in my behalf.'
Two days after the date of that letter Mr. Browning had
heard from myself the result of the application to Landor's bro-
thers. They asked only to know what sum was wanted, and
they engaged at once to supply it as long as their brother might
live. From this time up to the day of his death, I handed over
on their behalf to Mr. Browning two hundred pounds every year
by quarterly payments, to which an additional sum of fifty pounds.
was held always in reserve for special wants arising; and the
1858-1864.
521
AT SIENA.
10
money continued to be applieu Landor's use under Mr. Brown-
ing's immediate direction even after the event of Mrs. Brown-
ing's death, which plunged so many besides himself into mourn-
ing, and occasioned his departure from Italy in 1861. With a
few extracts from the letter to myself (from Siena on the 13th
of August 1859) which will explain these arrangements, and will
describe the way in which, to the very last, they were strictly
and successfully carried out, I quit this distasteful subject for
ever.
เ
·
• • •
I agree absolutely with you in your appreciation of the character
of Landor and its necessities now and for the future in this untoward
position, so absolutely that I shall not go into minute justification of
any opinion I may give you about what is to be done, but take for almost
granted that you will understand it: subject to questioning from you,
should that not be the case. Your plan is the only proper one for obtain-
ing the end we aim at. Mr. Landor is wholly unfit to be anything but
the recipient of the necessary money's worth, rather than the money
itself. Fortunately he professes to have the same conviction, and pre-
fers such an arrangement to any other. He requires a perpetual guar-
dian in the shape of a servant; one to be ever at hand to explain away
the irritations and hallucinations as they arise. They come and go, and
leave no trace, treated so; otherwise the effect is disastrous.
I pro-
pose to take an apartment as near my own residence in Florence as can
be found, and establish him there as comfortably and as economically as
possible. I will endeavour to induce my wife's old servant Wilson, who
married Ferdinando (Romagnoli) still in our service, to devote herself to
the care of our friend. I may say, after our fourteen years' experience
of her probity, truthfulness, gentleness, and assiduity, that he can be
placed in no better hands; and were he bestowed on a person one whit
less trustworthy, I should expect some melancholy result the next day.
I can depend on Wilson's acting for me in all respects, and not simply
complying with his fancies or profiting by his mistaken generosities. I
will receive the two hundred pounds in quarterly payments, as you pro-
pose; and will transmit to you, at the end of every quarter, a detailed
account of Landor's expenses duly examined and certified by Kirkup.'
This last condition was the only one to which I refused assent;
and Landor's nieces, to whom it was then proposed to transmit
such account, also as strongly objected. I believe that Mr.
Browning did nevertheless, against renewed protest, continue to
render it to the close.
II. AT SIENA.
While the arrangements for his future life in Florence were
in progress, Landor remained quietly at Siena, occupying a plea-
522
Book VIII.
LAST SIX YEARS IN ITALY.
sant little cottage in a vineyard inhabited only by the contadino,
or farming-gardener, and his wife. Subsequently he became the
guest of an accomplished American then staying at Siena, Mr.
W. W. Story, who for years has made Italy his home, and has
connected his name with Italian art by works not unworthy of
its happiest time.
Landor has to-day completed a three-weeks' stay with the Storys.
They declare most emphatically that a more considerate, gentle, easily-
satisfied guest never entered their house. They declare his visit has
been an unalloyed delight to them; and this, quite as much from his
gentlemanliness and simple habits, and evident readiness to be pleased
with the least attention, as from his conversation, which would be attrac-
tive under any circumstances. An intelligent friend also, on a visit to
them, bears witness to the same effect. They perceive indeed, though
not affecting themselves, inequalities of temper in him; but they all agree
that he may be managed with the greatest ease by "civility" alone.'
Such always was Landor, when he would consent to submit
himself to friendly influences. That was at the close of August,
and again Mr. Browning wrote to me from Siena on the 5th of
September.
'At present Landor's conduct is faultless. His wants are so moderate,
his evenness of temper so remarkable, his gentleness and readiness to be
advised so exemplary, that it all seems too good; as if some rock must
lurk under such smooth water. His thankfulness for the least attention,
and anxiety to return it, are almost affecting under all circumstances. He
leads a life of the utmost simplicity.'
From Florence also, to anticipate a very little the days imme-
diately after their return, Mr. Browning wrote to me in the
middle of October, being then himself on the eve of going to
winter in Rome, that he should be grieved indeed to lose sight
for a while of the wonderful old man, whose gentleness and
benignity had never been at fault for a moment in their three-
months' intercourse. They had walked together for more than
an hour and a half only two days before. His health had been
perfect, his mind apparently at ease. 'He writes Latin verses;
' few English, but a few; and just before we left Siena an ima-
'ginary conversation suggested by something one of us had said
' about the possible reappearance of the body after death. He
'looks better than ever by the amplitude of a capital beard,
'most becoming we all judge it.' 'If,' Mrs. Browning at the
}
1858-1864.
523
AT SIENA.
same time wrote to me, 'if you could only see how well he looks
in his curly white beard!'
From his own letters to myself during the stay at Siena I
should hardly have dared to judge so favourably, though there
were some allowances to be made. His great immediate trouble
being removed, he had now again unhappily set his heart on
obtaining, through me, some means of making public reply to
what had been publicly said of him in England in connection
with the trial at Bath; and I had no alternative but to tell him
plainly that the thing was quite impossible. He did not take
this so well as the condition of mind above described might have
led me to anticipate; but the case as affecting him involved, in
many particulars, so much real hardship, it was so impossible
to speak of what had been to him the original provocation, and
all that followed had given to his punishment a proportion so
exceeding his offence judged even at its very worst, that any
wrong arising arising out of it incident to myself seemed but a
part of a wretched complication not avoidable by either of us.
Landor was very shortly to apply to his friend what the reader
has seen shrewdly applied by Mr. Bennet in Pride and Preju-
dice to a friend in similar circumstances; and I was not to have
the benefit of the same magnanimity. It is however the more
incumbent on me to say, on the eve of our only estrangement in
a quarter of a century of friendship, that the impression left with
me altogether was exactly what Mr. Browning and Mr. Story
depict in the foregoing letters, for that reason here introduced.
The drawbacks have been described already. There were always
those occasional outbreaks, very unwarrantable because generally
unjust to others, which in so many instances I have shown to
be as little rational as reducible to reason. Indeed I should say,
on the whole, that in Landor's affections at their best, just as
more rarely in even the finest parts of his books, there was a
certain incoherency. But, in several leading qualities, his cha-
racter was also quite as fine as his books, and the letters quoted
do only justice to it. He had a disposition largely generous;
an anger easily placable; and an eagerness to return, in quite
chivalrous excess, whatever courtesy or attention he received,
which was at all times delightful to witness.
524
Book VIII.
LAST SIX YEARS IN ITALY.
The conversation above referred to was not the only one
written at Siena. I received another from him at the same date,
with earnest appeal that I should endeavour by means of it to
get some help for Garibaldi's wounded; and with this he sent
me several pieces of writing having the same common drift, to
recommend such a settlement of Italian affairs as might leave
Venice and Florence independent republics, and King Victor
Emanuel protector and president of the Italian States in union.
I need hardly add that in this 1859 year the promise had gone
suddenly forth, backed by French legions, of a free Italy from
the Alps to the Adriatic; and the conclusion to which Landor
at once had rushed he expressed in that form.
There appears to have been some difficulty in getting him
back to Florence, increased by the effect produced upon him by
some new step in the chancery proceedings consequent on the
injunction against him recently obtained. He wrote to tell me
that the object of all that was going on could be no other than
to drive him mad; that the publication of his defence alone
could save him; and that until this could be accomplished he
must retire into utter solitude. His friends were about to leave
Siena, and he should himself go into some cottage or hut at
Viarreggio. Alas, what could I reply? I could only wait until
a few days' later post brought me word that to the arguments
employed to induce his return to Florence he had thought it
right to yield. 'Nothing,' he added in this letter to me, 'can
'exceed Mr. Browning's continued kindness. Life would be
' almost worth keeping for that recollection alone.'
III. IN FLOrence.
The lodgings found for Landor in Florence, and where he
remained until his death, were in a little house under the wall
of the city directly back of the Carmine, in a bye street called
the Via Nunziatina, not far from that in which the Casa Guidi
stands a quarter always liked by the Florentines for its anti-
quity and picturesqueness, and having higher associations since
both for them and for English visitors; to whom a marble slab
upon the wall in its last-mentioned street, placed by order of
1858-1864.
525
IN FLORENCE.
the municipality of Florence, now indicates the house in which
a great English poetess, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, made Italy
the subject of her latest song.
'He is in a small comfortable apartment, newly papered and furnished;
a sitting-room, dining-room, bed-room, and book-room communicating
with each other, on the first floor. Below are rooms for Mrs. Wilson and
a maid-servant. There is a small garden attached. He professes him-
self quite satisfied with all our attempts to make him comfortable, and
seems to like Mrs. Wilson much: but there is some inexplicable fault in
his temper, whether natural or acquired, which seems to render him very
difficult to manage.
He forgets, misconceives, and makes no endeavour
to be just, or indeed rational; and this in matters so infinitely petty that
there is no providing against them.'
That letter was written to me by Mr. Browning from Rome on
the 9th of December 1859, and only told what, knowing the
condition of mind in which Landor still continued, I expected
to hear, as soon as the personal influences and restraints should
be withdrawn under which he had been living lately. In the
same month I also heard from himself (December 21), that for
the first time since his return to Italy it had been snowing all
night, and that this alone was like England to him.
'Bath has no resemblance on earth, and I never have been happy in
any other place long together. If ever I see it again, however, it must
be from underground or above. I am quite ready and willing to go, and
would fain lie in Widcombe churchyard, as I promised one who is no more.
It may cost forty pounds altogether. I cannot long survive the disgrace
of my incapacity to prove the character of those who persecute me, and
this you only can relieve me from. When I think of it, I feel the approach
of madness; and so adieu.'
There was much else in this letter which I do not quote, but
to which I found it absolutely necessary so to reply as to put
clearly before him, without any kind of doubt, that what he de-
sired could not be done. This led to the suspension of our cor-
respondence. I continued to write to him for some time, my
letters remaining unanswered; he did not write to me again
until a year before his death; but in June 1860 Mr. Browning
had returned to Florence, and from him, in a letter dated the
15th, I had once more personal report of my old friend.
I find him very well, satisfied on the whole, busy with verse-making
and particularly delighted at the acquisition of three execrable daubs by
Domenichino and Gaspar Poussin, most benevolently battered by time.
526
Book VIII.
LAST SIX YEARS IN ITALY.
He has a beautiful beard, foam-white and soft. He reads the Odyssey
in the original with extraordinary ease. When he alludes to that other
matter, it is clear that he is, from whatever peculiarity, quite impervious
to reasoning or common sense. He cannot in the least understand that
he is at all wrong, or injudicious, or unwary, or unfortunate in anything,
but in the being prevented by you from doubling and quadrupling the
offence. He spent the evening here the night before last. Whatever he
may profess, the thing he really loves is a pretty girl to talk nonsense
with; and he finds comfort in American visitors, who hold him in proper
respect.'
To even such a visitor, a young lady who saw him frequently
in this and the following year, we are indebted for one or two
additional glimpses of him in his last Florence home.* Describ-
ing the little two-story casa, No. 2671, as halfway down the
street, with its bed-room, dining-room, and sitting-room opening
into each other, she says that in the latter he was always to be
found, in a large armchair, surrounded by paintings which he
declared he could not live without (all of them very bad for the
most part, excepting one genuine small Salvator), his hair snowy
white and his beard of patriarchal proportions, his gray eyes
still keen and clear, his grand head not unlike Michael Angelo's
Moses, and at his feet a pretty little Pomeranian dog called
Gaillo, the gift of Mr. William Story. Another likeness the old
man's look reminded her of, which she was emboldened one day
to name to him. 'Mr. Landor, you do look like a lion.' To
which the reply came, 'You are not the first who has said so.
'One day when Napier was dining with me, he threw himself
'back in his chair with a hearty laugh to tell me he had just
'discovered that I looked like an old lion.' 'And a great com-
'pliment you must have thought it,' says the young lady, 'for
'the lion is king of beasts.' 'Yes,' he rejoined, but only a
'beast after all.'
Of this young lady's recollections generally it must be said
that, though the kindliest feeling and very delicate perceptions
characterise them throughout, there are not many facts in them
that were worth recording. They are too truly what they profess
to be; 'the old man of Florence in 1859, 1860, and 1861; just
' before the intellectual light began to flicker and go out.' His
Papers in the Atlantic Monthly, entitled 'Last Days of Walter
Savage Landor.'
1858-1864.
527
IN FLORENCE.
}
courtly manners, his memory for things of the past, and his hu-
morous quickness in putting odd little sayings into verse, seem
most to have impressed her. Reference having been made one
morning to Monk Lewis's poem of Alonzo the Brave, he recited
it in cadences from beginning to end without the slightest hesi-
tation or the tripping of a word, remarking that he had not even
thought of the thing for thirty years. He undertook to teach
Latin to his young friend; gave her a great many lessons with
much zeal; and entered the room on each appointed day with a
bouquet of camelias or roses, the products of his little garden.
Some fruit, too, the old tree had yet to shed. Calling upon
him one morning, she found him at work on some dramatic
scenes dealing with a time of Greece before history was; intro-
ducing, by a somewhat daring stretch of chronology, Homer him-
self upon a visit to the father of Ulysses; and closing with the
poet's death on a topmost peak above the palace overlooking all
the kingdom of Ithaca. With an exception hitherto unpub-
lished that I shall presently lay before the reader, these scenes
were the last in which Landor's genius showed itself undimmed
by age. He had carried out to perfection in them that old Greek
simplicity of which I have formerly spoken, and of which, in
modern writing, I really do not know another instance so entirely
true. It is the simplicity, not of baldness, but of the youth of
the world. The king bids his guest to supper while yet the
dainties that are to compose it are still themselves enjoying life.
At hand is honey in the honeycomb,
And melon, and those blushing pouting buds
That fain would hide them under crisped leaves.
Soon the blue dove and particolour'd hen
Shall quit the stable-rafter caught at roost,
And goat shall miss her suckling in the morn ;
Supper will want them ere the day decline.
He orders afterward a bath to be prepared for their guest, and,
as he does so, the thought of his lost Ulysses arises to him.
Now leave us, child,
And bid our good Melampos to prepare
That brazen bath wherein my rampant boy
Each morning lay full-length, struggling at first,
Then laughing as he splasht the water up
Against his mother's face bent over him.
528
Book VIII.
LAST SIX YEARS IN ITALY.
Is this the Odysseus first at quoit and bar?
Is this the Odysseus call'd to counsel kings,
He whose name sounds beyond our narrow sea?
I may not quote more, but here is enough to throw light on
what the writer said to his young-lady visitor.
'It will be thought audacious, and most so by those who know the least
of Homer, to represent him as talking familiarly. He must often have done
it, as Milton and Shakespeare did. There is homely talk in the Odyssey.
Fashion turns round like Fortune. Twenty years hence perhaps, this con-
versation of Homer and Laertes, in which for the first time Greek domestic
manners have been represented by any modern poet, may be recognised and
approved. Our sculptors and painters frequently take their subjects from
antiquity; are our poets never to pass beyond the medieval? At our own
doors we listen to the affecting song of the shirt; but some few of us, at
the end of it, turn back to catch the song of the sirens.'
6
Landor's American friends quitted Florence in the autumn.
of 1861, but during that spring and summer they had taken fre-
quent drives in its neighbourhood, and not forgetful in the
least things, the old man, in spite of his years, would always
'insist upon taking the front seat, and was more active than
many a younger man in assisting us in and out of the carriage.'
During one of their excursions, as they passed on a summer's
day along the north side of the Arno, Landor gazed long and
sadly at a terrace overlooking the water and forming part of
the casa Pelosi, occupied of old by the Blessingtons. The de-
scription of another of these drives carries with it a painful in-
terest.
'Once we drove up to aerial Fiesole; and never can I forget Landor's
manner while in the neighbourhood of his former home.
It had been pro-
posed that we should turn back when only half way up the hill. Ah, go a
little farther, Landor said nervously; I should like to see my villa. Of
course his wish was our pleasure, and so the drive was continued. Landor
sat immovable, with head turned in the direction of the villa Gherardesca.
At first sight of it he gave a sudden start, and genuine tears filled his eyes
and coursed down his cheeks. There is where I lived, he said, breaking a
long silence and pointing to his old estate. Still we mounted the hill, and
when, at a turn in the road, the villa stood out before us clearly and dis-
tinctly, Landor said, Let us give the horses a rest here! We stopped, and
for several minutes Landor's face was fixed npon the villa.
There now,
we can return to Florence, if you like, he murmured finally with a deep
sigh. I have seen it probably for the last time. Hardly a word was
spoken during the drive home. Landor seemed to be absent-minded.'
A tragedy lies underneath those few sentences of which every
!
529
1858-1864.
IN FLORENCE.
scene had been bitterly acted out, though not a line of it can be
written here.
After 1861, the year when Mr. Browning left Italy and in
which Landor also lost his American friends, he more rarely
quitted the house. But he busied himself with writing of vari-
ous kinds. He printed an imaginary dialogue in Italian between
Savonarola and the Prior of Florence, devoting its equally ima-
ginary profits to the help of Garibaldi's wounded; he wrote
many occasional verses of no great worth; and, to the same
English journal which had published three new Imaginary Con-
versations by him during the year just passed, the Athenæum,
he sent over a fourth which appeared in the autumn of 1862.
During this time he also brought together some old and new
Latin verses which he was very anxious that I should publish.
They came to me in the following year with a prefatory note in
which his old feeling as to France, more embittered by recent
events, received characteristic expression. 'Several of the Latin
'
verses here collected were written fourscore years ago, when the
'youths of England were set a-fire by the French Revolution.
'France is now safely locked up, with her hands tied behind
her, and whipped when she hoots too loud for the ears of her
'keeper.'
The speakers in the first conversation printed in the Athe-
næum (in 1861) were Virgil and Horace, on the road to Brun-
dusium; and of the character of both poets, in their generous
praise of each other, a pleasant impression is left. The second
had for its speakers Macchiavelli and Guicciardini, their subject
being Italy. Her unity under a prince of Savoy is predicted, as
well as the quarter from which the worst obstruction to it will
come. Often had Landor made his young American friend laugh
at his comments on the preti; as plentiful as fleas, he would
say, and an even greater curse because they were 'fleas demor-
'alised;' and in this dialogue there are capital hits much to
the same purpose. Nothing can be hoped for,' says Macchia-
velli, 'where priests and monks swarm in all seasons. Other
grubs and insects die down, these never do. Even locusts,
' after they have consumed the grain and herbage, take flight or
are swept away, and leave no living progeny on the ground
M M
530
Book VIII.
LAST SIX YEARS IN ITALY.
'
(
'behind them. The vermin between skin and flesh are ineradic-
able.' 'But what,' says the other, 'can we do with the reli-
'gious?' to which, from Macchiavelli, there is a terse reply with
a wide application: Teach them religion.' The third and fourth
of these Conversations, the latter printed in August 1862, had
in both the same interlocutors, his old favourites Milton and
Marvel. The theme of the first was chiefly poetry, and that of
the second matters connected with English history or social life:
but neither of them added anything to what on both subjects he
had before said better. The same remark is indeed to be made
of nearly everything he now wrote up to the time of his death.
It was all very wonderful for a man verging on his ninetieth
year; and though it could hardly be expected to have other
value, I shall even yet have to make exception for one or two
pieces to be published in these final pages for the first time,
where, at the very close and on the eve of total darkness, the
light about to be extinguished flashes brightly forth once more.
The contents of the volume of Heroic Idyls published in
1863 had been brought to London during the same year by Mr.
Twisleton, who had carried out to Landor an introduction from
Browning, and whose visits to the old man that summer were
perhaps nearly his last intellectual pleasure. He found me,'
said Landor, in one of his last letters to me, 'I will not say on
my last legs, but really and truly on no legs at all. These last
'three days I have been extremely ill, totally deaf and almost
'insensible during two of them, half-deaf and just alive the
'third. But Mr. Twisleton has tolerated my half-deafness, and
'has nearly cured the other half. How refreshing it is to find.
a well-bred man anywhere! And what rare good sense Mr.
Twisleton adds to good humour and fine scholarship! The
new book was dedicated to this new friend.
At the same date, and in the midst of these infirmities, it is
pleasant to be able to add that Landor was receiving also other
personal attentions; as well from his fast ally Mr. Kirkup, as
from his younger sons Walter and Charles, the latter of whom
especially had become frequent in attendance on him. But it
was at this time Colonel Stopford's death occurred, and I can
understand him to have been greatly shaken by it; as well for
1858-1864.
531
FIVE UNPUBLISHED SCENES.
the regard his friend had himself inspired, as for Mrs. Stopford's
sake. She was his wife's younger sister, and never, in any part
of his life, had her unwearied affection failed him.* Her letters
had been a solace when everything around him was unpropiti-
ous; and the last of them, written from under the roof of the
mother of the empress of France, who had always been her
friend, with whom she had been living during much of the past
few years, and who gave her a home after she lost her husband,
was among the papers sent to me by Landor shortly before his
own death.
Besides the very interesting scenes of Homer and Laertes,
the best parts of the volume dedicated to Mr. Twisleton were six
other classic dialogues in blank verse, entitled Hippomenes and
Atalanta; Sappho, Alcæus, Anacreon, and Phaon; Theseus and
Hippolyta; the Trial of Æschylus; Aurelius and Lucan; and
Damocles and Hiera. It contained also a brief scene, more mas-
terly than any of these except the Laertes and Homer, in which
the murder of the fine old Scottish king, the second James, in
the Dominican convent of Perth, is represented not only with
force and distinctness, but with a quiet power of silent pathos
which is deeply tragical.
Anticipating my narrative by but a few months, I have now
to add, of the last writings of this wonderful old man, five scenes
or dialogues brought to me by Mr. Twisleton from Landor,
written at even a later date than any of the above, and printed
below exactly as I received them, in accordance with his urgent
desire. Their date is between his 88th and 89th year.
I.
IV. FIVE UNPUBLISHED SCENES, BEING THE LAST Imaginary
CONVERSATIONS.
PYTHAGORAS AND A PRIEST OF ISIS.
Pythagoras. Thou hast inquired of me, and thou hast heard
All I could tell thee of our Deities;
With patience bear me yet awhile, nor deem me
Irreverent, if I ask to know of yours
* He enjoyed also through life the friendliest regard of another of his
wife's relatives, the youngest of her nephews, his godson, called Landor
after him, who became a most distinguished engineer officer, and holds
still, I believe, one of the highest military employments in India.
532
LAST SIX YEARS IN ITALY.
Book VIII.
?
1
Which are around me on these sacred walls.
Willingly granted; hesitate no more;
Priest.
Speak.
Pythagoras.
Priest.
Pythagoras.
Priest.
Yonder is an ape, and there a dog,
And there a cat.
Think not we worship these,
But, what is holier even than worshipping,
Gratitude, mindful thro' obscuring years,
Urgeth us to look up to them.
O guest!
Now tell me what indweller of a town
But shares his substance, nor unwillingly,
With his protectress from invader mouse;
What child but fondles her and is carest;
What aged dame but sees her likeness there
More strikingly than in her dearest child?
Now to another of these images.
None are such friends as dogs; they never leave
The side of those who only stroke the head
Or speak a kindly word to them.
'Tis true.
But may I ask of thee without offence,
What good do apes to any, young or old,
What service render they, what fondness show?
Thou smilest; I rejoice to see that smile.
I wish all teachers could bear questioning
So quietly. Religious men bear least.
Pythagoras, they rightly call thee wise,
Yet, like thy countrymen, thou knowest not
Thy origin and theirs, and all on earth.
Some of you think, nor quite absurdly so,
That when the deluge drown'd all creatures else,
One only woman was there left alive,
And she took up two stones and cast behind
Her back those two, whence men and women sprang.
Scraps of the stones seem clinging to the heart
Of that primordial pair.
We priests of Isis
Acknowledge duly our progenitor,
Whose moral features still remain unchanged
In many, thro' all times.
Did ever ape,
As kindred nations have been doing since,
Tear limb from limb the brother, grin to see
His native bush and his blue babes enwrapt
In flames about the crib for winding-sheet?
There live in other lands, from ours remote,
The intolerant and ferocious who insist
That all shall worship what themselves indite;
We never urge this stiff conformity.
1858-1864.
533
FIVE UNPUBLISHED SCENES.
II.
Selene.
Forms ever present are our monitors,
Nor need they flesh and blood, nor spill they any.
We leave each man his choice, the pictured plank
Or hammer'd block, nor quarrel over ours.
ENDYMION AND SELENE.
(An old discontented love-affair.)
Endymion sleepest thou, with heels upright
And listless arms athwart a vacant breast?
Endymion! thou art drowsier than thy sheep,
And heedest me as now thou heedest them.
I come to visit thee, and leave a home
Where all is cheerful, and I find a face
If not averted, yet almost as bad.
Rise; none are here to steal away thy reeds.
Endymion. Thou art immortal; mortal is Endymion,
Nor sleeping but thro' weariness and pain.
What pains thee?
Selene.
Endymion.
Selene.
Endymion.
Selene.
III.
Love, the bitterest of pains.
Hast thou not mine? ungrateful!
Thine I have,
O how less warm than what a shepherdess
Gives to a shepherd!
Cease thy plaint, rash boy;
I give no warmer to the Blest above,
Yet even the brightest every day pursues
My path, and often listens to my praise,
And takes up his own harp and aids the song.
Few are the youths whose finger never trill'd
An early oat or later lyre for me.
Haply thou too, Endymion, shalt be sung
Afar from Latmos if thou meritest,
Nor thy name sever'd, as 'tis here, from mine.
Silence is sweeter at the present hour
Than voice or pipe, or sleep; so pay my due
Ere Morn come on, for Morn is apt to blush
When she sees kisses; let her not see ours.
THE MARRIAGE OF HELENA AND MENElaos.
Mounted upon a tall Thessalian steed
Between two purely white rode Menelaos,
The sons of Leda were his company.
On drove they swiftly to where stood, above
Eurotas, a large mansion, large but low;
There they dismounted, two of them well known,
The third was never seen that way before.
Under the shelter of the house's roof
Sate with an idle spindle in the hand
534
Book VIII.
LAST SIX YEARS IN ITALY.
Two seeming equal-aged, and yet was one
A mother, one her daughter; both sprang up.
'O Polydeukes!' the fond mother cried
(He had embraced her first), 'O Kastor! come
Both of you to my bosom; long, how long
Have ye been absent!
Helena! no word
From the neck
Of welcome to your brethren ?'
Of Kastor, whereto she had clung, she turn'd
Her eyes a moment on the stranger's face,
Whispering in Kastor's ear, 'Whom bring ye back?
Mild as he looks he makes me half-afraid.'
But Kastor, without answering, ran where stood
His mother and their guest; to her he said,
'Here, my sweet mother, we have brought to thee
The son of Atreas, brother of that king
Who rules the widest and the richest realm
In all this land. Our guest is Menelaos.'
Extending her right arm and open hand,
'Enter,' said she, a humble domicile,
Which Gods have enter'd and vouchsafed to bless.'
Whereto with due obeisance he replied,
'O Leda, where thou art the Gods indeed
May well have enter'd, and have left behind
Their blessing, and to such I bend my brow;
Thy sons announced the welcome thou hast given.'
And not one word to me! said Helena,
With a low sigh, which Kastor caught and broke,
Thus chiding her: Come thou too, unabasht,
Bid my friend welcome; speak it.'
'I must not
Until our mother tells me,' said the maid.
'Then I do tell thee,' Leda said; whereon
Helena rais'd her head, but timidly,
And bade him welcome: gazing on his face
More confidently now by small degrees
She question'd him about the world abroad,
And whether there were rivers bright and cool
As her Eurotas, on whose streams were swans,
'Until rude children mockt their hoarser tones,
And pelted them with egg-shells if they hissed.
My gentle mother could but ill endure
To see them angry, stretching out their necks
Ruffled, as they are never till provok'd;
For she loved swans, the tamest one the most,
So tame that he would let her hold his beak
Between her lips and stroke his plumage down:
This fondler was her favourite long before
I saw the light, when she was of my age.
་
1858-1864.
535
FIVE UNPUBLISHED SCENES.
!
Ah! we have no such now; I wish we had.
There still are birds of red and azure wing,
Beautiful to behold; and here are heard
Among the willows some who sing all night,
Unsociable and shy, and shun the feast
Of other birds upon the sunny field.
Are any such elsewhere? these you shall hear
When sleep hath carried off the weariness
Which that proud prancing creature must have caused.'
Night came, but slumber came not quite so soon
To four faint eyes: the lark was up in air
When Helena arose; the mother first
Had left her chamber, and the board was spread
With fruits and viands ready for the guest.
Presently he and his two friends sate down;
But Helena was paddling listlessly
In the fresh river, with unbraided hair
And vesture cast aside; some irksomeness
She felt which water could not all remove.
The cool and spacious hall she entered soon,
Where Menelaos and her brethren sate;
The guest was seated at her mother's right,
And she was bidden to the left, close by.
Often did she look forward, to drive off
The flies that buzz'd about the stranger's head...
Flies never were so troublesome before.
Complacently saw Leda the device,
But Menelaos saw the care alone
Of a young maiden hospitably kind.
The brothers were impatient of delay
Until they both could urge their parent on
To give their sister to a man so brave:
Such too was Leda's wish when she had learnt
How throughout Argos honour'd and beloved
Was Menelaos: she warn'd Helena
More earnestly than ever, more profuse
Of sage advice and proverbs from the depth
Of ancient lore, how youth runs fast away,
And beauty faster; sixteen years had flown
Unwaringly, and had she never thought
To wed?
"
O mother! I am but a child,'
Cried she; do any marry at sixteen?'
The mother shook her head and thus pursued:
Remember how few moons have risen since
A wild Cecropian carried thee from home,
And well bethink thee that another time.
Thy brothers may be absent, in the chase
Or far in foreign lands, as now of late.'
Helena made excuses, and the more
536
Book VIII.
LAST SIX YEARS IN ITALY.
She made the more she wished them overcome;
But if her mother and her father Zeus
So will'd it, 'tis her duty she must yield.
She ran across the court wherein three steeds
Were standing loose; there Polydeukes trimm'd
His courser's mane, there Kastor drew his palm
Down the pink nostril of his dapple-gray,
And just beyond them the Thessalian steed
Stampt at neglect, for Menelaos lay
Sleepless past sunrise, which was not his wont.
Incontinent the brothers rais'd their heads
And shouted,
'Here, thou sluggard! here before
Our busy sister come to pat the necks
Or throw arm round them.'
Scarcely were these words
Spoken ere Menelaos was at hand.
Helena, who had watcht him thus advance,
Drew back as one surprised, and seem'd intent
To turn away, but Polydeukes sprang
And caught her arm and drew her, struggling ill,
To where his brother with their comrade stood.
At first she would have turn'd her face aside,
But could not: Menelaos gently toucht
Her shrinking arm; little it shrank, nor long.
Then he entreated her to hear the words
Of true and ardent love, for such was his
He swore; she shook her head, with brow abased.
What ardent love can mean I never heard;
My brothers, if they knew it, never told me,'
Said she, and lookt amazed into his face.
'Simplicity and innocence!' exclaim'd
The wondering Argive. 'What a prudent wife
Will she be, when I win her, as I hope,
Diffident as she is nor prone to trust;
Yet hope I, daughter though she be of Zeus,
And I but younger brother of a king.'
Day after day he grew in confidence,
And gave her all he gain'd in it, and more.
Hymen was soon invok'd, nor was averse;
Eros had long been ready, the light-wing'd,
And laught at his slow step who marcht behind.
Chaunted were hymns to either Deity
By boys and maidens, tho' they understood
No word they sang: serious was Hymen's face
When Eros laught up into it and twitcht
The saffron robe, and heeded no reproof.
'Tis said they sometimes since have disagreed
More seriously: but let not me report
The dissidence and discord of the Gods.
1858-1864.
537
FIVE UNPUBLISHED SCENES.
IV.
V.
AN OLD MAN AND A CHILD.
A child pickt up a pebble, of the least
Among a myriad on a flat sea-shore;
And tost it back again.
Said mildly an old man.
'What hast thou done?'
C
Nothing at all,'
Replied the child; it only was a pebble,
And not worth carrying home, or looking at,
Or wetting, tho' I did it, with my tongue :
Tho' it was smooth, it was not large enough
To copy on when I begin to write,
Nor proper in the winter to strike fire from,
Or puss to pat and roll along the floor.'
Then said the elder:
Thoughtful child art thou,
And mightest have learnt from it some years hence
What prouder wise ones never have attain'd.
The wisest know not yet how many suns
Have bleacht that stone, how many waves have roll'd
Above it when upon its mountain's breast;
How once it was no stone nor hard, but lapt
Amid the tender herbage of the field.'
The child stared up, frightened; then ran away.
Before she had run far she turn'd her face
To look at that strange man.
'He seem'd so calm,
He may not be quite mad nor mischievous.
I shall not mind him much another time;
But O what random stories old men tell!'
ANDREW MARVEL AND HENRY MARTEN.
Marvel. Glad to see thee once more, my good Harry, how art thou?
Marten. You see how I am by seeing where I am. Prisons are but
indifferent conservatories of health. Cold air penetrates the closest of
them, and friendship is the only matter it shuts out. But here you are,
Andrew, to disprove my saying. God knows how grateful I feel for this
visit.
Marvel. The breezes from the Welsh mountains, and from the estuary
under the castle, have kept the colour fresh on thy cheek.
Marten. When I mount upon the table I can catch them as they pass,
yet I would willingly barter the best of them against the smoke of Lon-
don and the fogs of the Thames. Oliver's pen across my muzzle would
not mightily discompose me on a like occasion.
Marvel. Never sigh, my man!
Marten. Pleasure hath her sighs, though shorter than those of sorrow,
and you bring them out with you.
Marvel. Even here there may be occasionally a glimpse of happiness.
When we enjoy it we wish for more, never quite contented. If we kiss a
fair maiden on one cheek, we press for the other. We change our mantles
538
Book VIII.
LAST SIX YEARS IN ITALY.
when they have lost their gloss. Even in the solitude of this royal en-
closure thou enjoyest a privilege granted to few outside.
Marten. What may it be?
Marvel. Memory, justly proud. Hast thou not sat convivially with
Oliver Cromwell? Hast thou not conversed familiarly with the only man
greater than he, John Milton? One was ambitious of perishable power,
the other of imperishable glory; both have attained their aim. Believe
me, it is somewhat to have lived in fellowship with the truly great, and to
have eschewed the falsely.
Marten. A prodigiously great one, in a black apron and white lawn
sleeves, pnffy and fresh and fragrant from his milliner, came some time
ago to instruct me in my duty and to convert me into righteousness. He
was announced by the governor as my Lord. I recollected one only whom
I ever called so. I bowed however, and sat down, after he had done the
like.
Marvel. These gentry usually set their day-labourers at the work of
edification. My Lord himself, I hope, got nothing out of you worth carry-
ing to court.
Marten. He looked on the table and saw there a book I had received
the day before, and was reading; it was Hudibras. That is all he saw,
and all he got out of me.
Marvel. I perceive, by thy smile, that humour is not yet parched-up
in thee, my pleasant Hal!
Marten. There are strokes of the wand that can open fresh springs in
the barren rock. I can enjoy fun in a poet, although I am none myself,
and the better perhaps for that reason. Are there any of our other poets
yet living?
Marvel. Plenty, plenty; but they ride without girths to their nags,
and often roll off the saddle. Waller, the smoothest and most graceful of
them, is growing old at Beaconsfield. Even the courtiers jeer at his versa-
tility. Dryden is living. He bears no hatred to Milton, though he would
have rhymed Paradise Lost. Butler was less mischievous. Cowley has
written one unaffected piece, an Anacreontic on his imaginary mistresses.
Good fellow; he died suddenly; drunk after dinner with bishop Sprat of
Rochester, he was found dead in a wet ditch.
Marten. Poor Abraham! He was my chokepear. They called him
metaphysical: does metaphysical mean fantastical? What people feel,
they surely can speak out, and not run into dark corners to be looked for.
Marvel. Ostriches hide their heads under their wings in the sands of
the desert, and are followed for their plumage. But you are right, Harry.
A poet loses nothing by being clear and bright, provided his readers are
not dull or cloudy. There is a prodigious quantity of thought in Butler,
and its brightness makes the inconsiderate doubt its depth.
Marten. Butler, I hear, is a great favourite with the king, who has
paid four groats for the poem, but never one to the poet; poor as Job, they
tell me, or as Milton. Yet Milton, at least, is free.
Marvel. He is free from all sores but an inconstant and incurable
wife. Solitary in his city garden, if there be any flower he stoops for it
in vain; he has no eyes to find it. I visit him now and then; but they
who most want comfort most avoid society.
1858-1864.
539
THE CLOSE.
V. THE CLOSE.
Implored so long in vain, at last is come
The hour that leads me to a peaceful home.
These lines, with others that spoke of the burden of life, and its
heaviness at last even when we have only years to carry, were
in a letter from Landor brought to me by Mr. Twisleton at the
close of 1863. During the decline of that year he is described
by those living in Italy to have become but the wreck of him-
self; and visitors whose very names recalled to him the happiest
associations of bygone years, had to report that 'his mind was
clouding;'* yet the pieces which have just been given were its
product. Exceptional indeed, and very wonderful, such a lot,
-to be carrying the weight of ninety years with so little loss.
of intellectual power, after so much self-achieved greatness and
self-inflicted misery. A friend in writing to him at this date
very aptly compared him to one of the 'Jötuns' of his early
poem of Gunlaug, in a note to which it is said that in the North
at all times had existed men of enormous stature; that we our-
selves had seen them, our fathers had seen them, and our chil-
dren (perhaps) might see them; but that ordinary people were
apt to fear these higher sort of men, would lie in ambush for
them, and would persecute them; until at last mothers came
again to produce children only or nearly of the common size;
and yet, for all that, one of the old stock would occasionally re-
appear. 'Well I hope you take the due comfort out of your
' wonderful amount of achievement, and keep up the old heroic
heart usque ad finem, post finem! And so, all happiness to
'you from God, and all honour from men.'
&
*
Without comment, and requesting only that the reader will
'As we passed through Florence, in the spring of 1864, we paid a
' last visit to Landor, then in extreme old age, looking most patriarchal in
his white hair and beard. His mind was clouding, and he scarcely re-
'collected us at first, but he remembered the family, and repeated over
' and over again the familiar names, "Francis, Julius, Augustus, I miei
"tre Imperatori! I have never known any family I loved so much as
yours. I loved Francis most, then Julius, then Augustus, but I loved
"them all. Francis was the dearest friend I ever had." A few weeks
after, his great spirit passed away.' Memorials of a Quiet Life, by
Augustus J. C. Hare, ii. 423 (1872).
540
Book VIII.
LAST SIX YEARS IN ITALY.
considerately forgive some expressions retained in them favour-
able to myself which I could not wholly erase, I now print, ex-
actly as they came, Landor's last letters. They carry my nar-
rative very nearly to its close, relating what it would be difficult
otherwise to express, yet hardly desirable to omit altogether;
and here, at the end of life, as invariably at its beginning, they
were signed simply 'Walter' Landor.
14TH DECEMBER 1863.
'Well do I know the friendship you had for me, and have grieved over
its interruption. I would not now write but for the promise you once held
out to me that you might consent to be my biographer. Last week I re-
ceived a most insolent letter from a Mr. containing a note from a
person connected with him informing me that he was writing my life. He
gave me a specimen, full of abuse and falsehood. This I communicated
to my excellent friend Mr. Twisleton. If you still retain a thought of
becoming my biographer, I hope you will protect me from this injustice.
How often have I known you vindicate from unmerited aspersions honest
literary men! Unhappily no friend has been found hitherto who takes
any such interest in
WALTER LANDOR.'
4TH JANUARY 1864 (with order for copies of the Heroic Idyls).
'MY DEAR FORSTER, I write instantly on receiving your generous and
manly letter. Severe sciatica has deprived me both of locomotion and
of sleep, but not of gratitude. I have been able to write what I am now
writing with great difficulty. Were it possible, I would answer at the
same time Browning's ever-kind letter. Will you send this to him, which
says all I could say. Excessive pain at every movement withholds me
from it. May both of you enjoy as many happy new-years as I have
endured of unhappy ones! and may you ever believe that no man is more
affectionately yours than
WALTER LANDOR.'
2D FEBRUARY 1864.
'MY DEAR FORSTER, Your kind letter has almost made me well again.
It will be with renewed pleasure that I receive your book. Browning will
give you the address of his correspondent in Florence, through whom I
may receive it. Many are the kind letters on my last birthday, for last
it must be-but yours the kindest. So, good-bye, with every blessing from
WALTER LANDOR.'
your grateful
18TH FEBRUARY 1864.
'MY DEAR FORSTER, It is to you I write the last letter that perhaps I
may ever write to any one. Several days I have been confined to my bed
by a sciatica, and could neither write not read. I hope I may live long
enough to read your Life of Eliot. Our friend Browning has my address.
He lives where you know in London. My head and eyes are confused so
that I cannot find his letter, which I laid by. He has a banker here whose
1858-1864.
541
THE CLOSE.
[he means Mrs. Wilson]
'to tell me, which
name I sent for Mrs.
she did one moment agone, and I have now forgotten.
shall, your unwearied kindness to
But not, nor ever
W. LANDOR.'
22D FEBRUARY 1864.
Your book-
'DEAR FORSTER, Tear off the opposite page, and send it to Dickens.
I am anxious to read the book you so kindly promised me.
seller will have a correspondent here by whom it can come.
tionately yours,
21ST MARCH 1864.
Ever affec-
W. LANDOR.'
'MY DEAR FORSTER, Your book reached me yesterday and kept me
awake. To-day comes your kind letter. While I have any of my senses
about my head I will attempt to write of both.
* There has long
been a sickly season in all countries for the growth of men to greatness.
How few have been bred in England that could compare with Eliot and
Pym! Alas, I cannot write more. Adieu then, and believe me ever your
'affectionate
W. LANDOR.'
4TH MAY 1864.
DEAR FORSTER, My kind friend Mr. Twisleton will convey to you
some papers and a small bundle of letters, the last I receive. They show
that I have yet friends, and am grateful ever as your old friend,
'W. LANDOR.'
9TH MAY 1864.
'MY DEAR FORSTER, This is the last letter I shall ever write to any-
body. My kind friend Mr. Twisleton will carry it, with my others last
received, to England with him. My love to noble Dickens, with, to your-
self, your ever affectionate
W. LANDOR's.
'I have been utterly deaf and almost dumb these last five weeks. I
am grateful for your promise that you will give to the world the last
things the old man has done.'
9TH SEPTEMBER 1864.
'MY DEAR FORSTER, Nothing could give me greater pleasure than the
letter I receive from you to-day. I lost my senses for five days and
nights in consequence of a verdict obliging me to pay so vast a sum for
exposing. I must leave off. My head is splitting. You will print
what I sent you.
Ever affectionately yours,
•
'W. LANDOR.'
Shortly before the letters were written immediately preced-
ing this last, which brings the end very near to us, an incident
is said to have occurred, which, upon the relation of a friend in
Florence, the American lady describes in her recollections. On
the night before the 1st of May, Landor became very restless,
542
Book VIII.
LAST SIX YEARS IN ITALY.
as during the year had happened frequently, and at about 2
o'clock in the morning he rang for Mrs. Wilson, and insisted
on having his room lighted and its windows thrown open. He
then asked for pen, ink, and paper, and the date of the day.
Being told that it was the dawn of the 1st of May, he wrote a
few lines of verse, and, leaning back, said, 'I shall never write
again. Put out the lights and draw the curtains.' The
The paper
on which he had written was not afterwards found, and his
housekeeper supposed it was destroyed by him. She described
him, during what remained of life, as gradually more and more
indifferent to outward things; for the most part reading, or at
all events with a book in his hand; physically not more deaf,
but so much more heedless of external impressions that she had
to write down every question she asked him; and with hardly
any one crossing his threshold except his two younger sons.
'I did not give up visiting him,' Mr. Kirkup says in a letter to me:
'but, as he had complained of the fatigue of talking to me, who am deaf,
I went just enough to show that I did not take offence, and I made my
visits short ones. Another cause of my keeping away was that he had
reconciled himself to two of his sons, who were always there, and he felt
uneasy at my seeing them after all that had formerly passed with me
and Mr. Browning. The last time I saw him was in a chair drawn by
Carlino, who stopped to speak to me; but his father hardly noticed me.
Since that I have kept away, but was glad to hear that the young men
continued to live with him and to sleep at his house. Carlino ha told
me that he went every evening to put him to bed, and afterwards that
they both slept there because their father was afraid of their returning at
night to the villa on account of brigands.' Landor himself confirmed this
account in one of his last letters to another friend. Kirkup comes often
to visit me. I can hardly wish it. We are both as deaf as posts, and it
brings me the bronchitis to speak audibly.'
One more incident remains to be mentioned, which in writ-
ing to me some time later Mr. Kirkup referred to. Young Al-
gernon Swinburne, whose mother I knew thirty years ago, came
' out from England for no other purpose than to see Landor,
'without knowing him, a few weeks before his death. He
'afterwards dedicated to him, in Greek, his beautiful tragedy
‘of Atalanta in Calydon. Landor was much gratified by his
' enthusiasm, and brought him to me.' The visit happily was
made not quite so late, or it could hardly have yielded the grati-
fication it gave.
The young poet's announcement of his arrival
1858-1864.
543
THE CLOSE.
in Florence was among the letters sent me by Landor in May.
He had indeed, he wrote to him, travelled as far as Italy with the
sole object and desire of seeing him. He carried to him a letter
from an old friend, now Lord Houghton; from many others of
his countrymen, who might never hope to see him, he was the
bearer of infinite homage and thankfulness; and for himself he
had the eager wish to lay at his feet, what he could never hope
to put into adequate words, profound gratitude and life-long re-
verence. It was but natural that all this should give pleasure
to the old man, in the sense of fame it brought so closely home
to him; and with it may also have come some foretaste of a
higher pleasure and happier fame awaiting him in the future.
In the present there was little more left to him. His last
note to me was dated on the 8th of September, and on the 17th
he had ceased to live. He had so weakened himself by abstain-
ing from food during three preceding days, that a fit of cough-
ing killed him. There was no other suffering. It was a buona
morte, said the Italian who was present; as brief, as it was un-
expected and sudden. He was laid in the English burying-
ground, and a stone placed over the grave. On this had been
cut correctly his name, and the dates of his birth and death ;
but the Florentine stonecutter's English was imperfect, and the
word 'wife,' which should have appeared in the 'last sad tribute'
of the rest of the inscription, had taken the quite unintelligible
form of 'coife.' But as there was no conscious irony in this, so
neither was there much inappropriateness; and Landor was not
to pass away without a worthier written epitaph. It came from
the young poet who visited him so lately, and needs only to be
prefaced by the remark that the convention by which Florence
became the capital of Italy had been signed two days before
Landor died.
IN MEMORY OF WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR.
Back to the flower-town, side by side,
The bright months bring
New-born the bridegroom and the bride,
Freedom and spring.
The sweet land laughs from sea to sea,
Filled full of sun;
All things come back to her, being free;
All things but one.
In many a tender wheaten plot
Flowers that were dead
Live, and old suns revive; but not
That holier head.
544
Book VIII.
LAST SIX YEARS IN ITALY.
By this white wandering waste of sea,
Far north, I hear
One face shall never turn to me
As once this year:
Shall never smile and turn and rest
On mine as there,
Nor one most sacred hand be prest
Upon my hair.
I came as one whose thoughts half linger,
Half run before;
The youngest to the oldest singer
That England bore.
I found him whom I shall not find
Till all grief end,
In holiest age our mightiest mind,
Father and friend.
But thou, if anything endure,
If hope there be,
O spirit that man's life left pure,
Man's death set free,
Not with disdain of days that were
Look earthward now;
Let dreams revive the reverend hair,
The imperial brow;
Come back in sleep, for in the life
Where thou art not
We find none like thee. Time and strife
And the world's lot
Move thee no more; but love at least
And reverent heart
May move thee, royal and released
Soul, as thou art.
And thou, his Florence, to thy trust
Receive and keep,
Keep safe his dedicated dust,
His sacred sleep.
So shall thy lovers, come from far,
Mix with thy name
As morning-star with evening-star
His faultless fame.
The only perfect poet is he who makes no man perfect. Lan-
dor's fame very surely awaits him, but it will not in any sense
be faultless. To the end we see him as it were unconquerable.
He keeps an unquailing aspect to the very close, has yielded no-
thing in the duel he has been fighting so long single-handed
with the world, and dies at last with harness on his back. But
he is only unvanquished; he is not the victor. Victorious he
cannot at any time be said to have shown himself; either over
the circumstances from which he suffered, or the genius by
which he achieved, so much. Greatness there was always; a
something of the heroic element which lifted him, in nearly all
that he said and very much that he did, considerably above or-
dinary stature; but never to be admitted or described without
important drawbacks. What was wanting most, in his books
and his life alike, was the submission to some kind of law. To
this effect a remark was made at the opening of this biography,
which has had confirmation in almost every page of it written
since. But, though he would not accept those rules of obedi-
ence without which no man can wisely govern either himself or
others; and though he lived far beyond the allotted term of
life without discovering what was true in the profound old say-
I
1858-1864.
545
THE CLOSE.
ing, that all the world is wiser than any man in the world; his
genius, which the possession of such additional knowledge would
have rendered more complete, was yet in itself so commanding
and consummate as to bring into play the nobler part of his cha-
racter only and by this his influence will remain over others,
while for all that was less noble he will himself have paid the
penalty. I am not going now to preach any homily over my
old friend. Whatever there was to say has been said already
with as much completeness as I found to be open to me. At-
tempt has been honestly made in this book to estimate with fair-
ness and candour Landor's several writings, as each of them suc-
cessively appeared; and judgment has been passed, with an
equal desire to be strictly just, on all the qualities of his tempera-
ment which affected necessarily not his own life only. But,
now that the story is told, no one will have difficulty in striking
the balance between its good and ill; and what was really im-
perishable in Landor's genius will not be treasured less, or less
understood, for the more perfect knowledge of his character.
What indeed was highest in him receives vivid illustration
from that which limited and controlled it. If he had measured
everything less by his own unaided impressions, if he had con-
sented at times to judge himself by others instead of always
judging others by himself, the originality that distinguishes all
his books might have been less intensely marked. It is a great
power, as solitude itself is, if a man chooses to risk the danger
attending it. To refuse the recognition also of any strength but
one's own, to exalt continually one's individual prowess, and to
rest all claim to magnanimity and honour on self-assertion rather
than self-denial, cannot but be a grave fault in the conduct of·
life in modern time; but shift it back into classic ages, and the
heroes of Greece and Rome take visible shape once more. Yet
was this only a part of Landor's happiest achievement, which
was not so circumscribed within Paganism as the general cha-
racter of his genius and method has led many to suppose. The
source from which he drew his inspiration had not so confined
him in applying it. Though his mind was cast in the antique
mould, it had opened itself to every kind of impression through
a long and varied life; he has written with equal excellence in
NN
546
Book VIII.
LAST SIX YEARS IN ITALY.
both poetry and prose, which can hardly be said of any of his
contemporaries; and perhaps the single epithet by which his
books would be best described is that reserved exclusively for
books not characterised only by genius, but also by special in-
dividuality. They are unique. Having possessed them, we
should miss them. Their place would be supplied by no others.
They have that about them, moreover, which renders it almost
certain that they will frequently be resorted to in future time.
There are none in the language more quotable. Even where
impulsiveness and want of patience have left them most frag-
mentary, this rich compensation is offered to the reader. There
is hardly a conceivable subject, in life or literature, which they
do not illustrate by striking aphorisms, by concise and profound
observations, by wisdom ever applicable to the needs of men,
and by wit as available for their enjoyment. Nor, above all,
will there anywhere be found a more pervading passion for
liberty, a fiercer hatred of the base, a wider sympathy with the
wronged and the oppressed, or help more ready at all times for
those who fight at odds and disadvantage against the powerful
and the fortunate, than in the writings of WALTER SAVAGE
LANDOR.
T
GENERAL INDEX.
ABLETT, Mr., of Llanbedr-hall, 286;
Landor's bust for, ib.; Landor's
visit to England with, 336-8; Lan-
dor's ode to, 343-4; death of, 465.
Absence of mind, 319-20.
Adair, Robert, takes Landor to the
House of Commons, 68; introduc-
tions to the press, ib. ; his corre-
spondence with Landor, 84-5; on
the Fox administration, 107.
Addington administration, 81.
Addison, on a famous couplet of, 72;
and see 494.
Addison and Steele (Imag. Con.), 316.
Eschines and Phocion (Imag. Con.),
243.
Eschylus, 337, 337, 500, 531.
Alexander, emperor, and Capo d'Is-
trias (Imag. Con.), 247-8.
Alexander and the priest of Hammon
(Imag. Con.), 309.
Alfieri and Metastasio (Imag. Con.),
255; Carlyle on, 256.
Alfieri, on the French, 34; Landor's
liking for, 257; Salomon the Floren-
tine Jew and (Imag. Con.), 257.
American war of 1812, view of, 165;
as to Americans, 166-7, 168-9.
Anacreon and Polycrates (Imag. Con.),
310.
Andrea of Hungary, &c., Landor's,
387-99.
Anecdotes of Landor at Rugby, 9-20,
101; and see Preface.
Angelo, Michael, and Vittoria Col-
onna (Imag. Con.), 421.
Anne of Swansea, 50.
Annual Review 92.
Anti-Jacobin, the, and its successor,
69; attacks on Landor, ib.
Antoir, M., Landor's dispute with,
335.
Antonelli and Gemeau (Imag. Con.),
419; and Pio Nono (Imag. Con.), 420.
Antony and Octavius, scenes for a
study, 482-9.
Architecture, as to, 495.
Aristoteles and Calisthenes (Imag.
Con.), 258.
Arnold of Rugby, 324, 333, 459.
Ascham, Roger, and Lady Jane Grey
(Imag. Con.), 249-50.
Athenæum, appearance of Landor's
ode to Southey in, 341; publication
of Conversations in, 329.
Atlantic Monthly, young lady's recol-
lections in, 89 note, 526-8.
Aurora Leigh, Landor's opinion of,
55 note.
Autobiographical, 70-72.
Aylmer, Rose, 50, 217; her death, 106;
Lamb's fondness for the lines on,
337.
Bacon, Lord, and Richard Hooker
(Imag. Con.), 250.
Baños, Lopez, and Romero Alpuente
(Imag. Con.), 257.
Barry Cornwall (B. W. Procter),
427.
Bath, 103-7; and see 385; a sunset,
469; a miserable squabble and its
close, 506-14; and see 518.
Beaufort, Duke of, lines by Landor
on, 160.
Beauties of England and Wales, er-
ror as to Llanthony corrected, 145.
Beddoes, his Death's Jest-Book, 475.
Belmore, Lady, 468.
Beniowski and Aphanasia (Imag.
Con.), 309.
Benwell, Landor's tutor at Oxford,
21.
B., Landor's tenant at Llanthony, 154,
173-4; Lamb's recollections of the
B. family, 175; their system of an-
noyance, 178-9.
Birch, Walter, Landor's friend at
Rugby, 16; at Oxford, 26; Robert
Landor's recollections of, 95-6, 99;
on the Latin Gebirus, 96-7; corre-
spondence with Landor, 90-101; on
548
INDEX.
Landor's marriage, 151; notices of
later life, 198 and note.
Birthdays, 385, 432.
Blackwood's Magazine and Landor,
372.
Blake, Wm., Landor attracted by
writings of, 375.
Blake and his brother Humphrey
(Imag. Con.), 420.
Blessington, Lord and Lady, 228,
284-5, 324; the Shakespeare MS.
forwarded to the latter, 354; way
of life at Gore-house, 376-7; letter
from Landor to, 439; death of, 465;
and see 411, 455, 528.
Boccaccio and Petrarch (Imag. Con.),
309.
Boileau, 247.
Bolivar, a revised opinion, 443.
Bonaparte, the one Frenchman Lan-
dor cared to see, 86; his reception
at Paris described by Landor, ib.,
88; note on, to a passage in Gebir,
89-90; in Spain, 116-17; Landor's
later opinion of him and his work,
163; Southey on the last move of,
163, 169; Landor's difference, 169;
see also 185, and 187-8; the Presi
dent of the Senate and (Imag. Con.),
247.
Bonaparte, Louis Napoleon, visit to
Landor, 455; Orsini attempt, 457;
M. de Molé and (Imag. Con.), 419.
Bonaparte, King Louis, 247.
Book of the Church, Southey's, 269,
415.
Books, the first two bought by Lan-
dor, 14; sent from Italy to Southey
and Wordsworth, 199, 274-6.
Bossuet and the Duchess de Font-
anges (Imag. Con.), 309.
Boulter, Archbishop, and Philip Sav-
age (Imag. Con.), 308.
Bowles, Caroline, second wife of Sou-
they, 413, 414-16.
Boxall, Sir Wm., 498.
Brothers, Landor's, 6, 478; see Charles
and Henry Landor.
Brown, Mr. Armitage, the friend of
Keats, 320, 404-5; letter in justifi-
cation of Landor's departure from
Fiesole, 364-5; dedicates his book
to Landor, 404-5; his death, ib..
Browning, E. Barrett, 55 note, 362,
381,425 (on her 'two-word rhyme'),
489, 525.
Browning, Robert, 388, 427-8, 445,
520-5, 529.
Bugeaud, Marshal, and
chieftain (Imag. Con.), 419.
Arab
Bunsen, Arnold, and Julius Hare, 459.
Burgess, Bishop, correspondence with
Landor on Llanthony abbey-church,
147.
Burnet, Bishop, and Humphrey
Hardcastle (Imag. Con.), 246.
Butler, Bishop, at Rugby, 15.
Byron, Lord, Landor on, 270 and
note; remark of Landor's mother
on, 278; for Landor's portrait of,
see 246; and see 199, 427.
Caldwell, Miss, 468.
Calvus, Landor's signature in the
Courier, 171.
Campbell, Thomas, 98.
Canning, 69, 166, 272, 301.
Carlo-Alberto, King, and the Duchess
Belgioiso (Imag. Con.), 419.
Carlyle, on Landor's denunciation of
pluck, 255; on the Alfieri dialogues,
256, 421; concerning his French
Revolution, 419; on the Petrarca
Essay, 438; visits Landor, 454; on
the Old Roman in Landor, 489; and
see 351.
Carmen Triumphale, Southey's, 171.
Caroline, Princess and Queen, 191,
194, 199, 200-1, 202.
Cary, Henry, at Rugby, 15, 96; trans-
lation of Dante, 96, 99; and see 26,
363.
Catherine and Daschkoff (Imag. Con.),
309.
Catullus, 84, 425, 435-6, 438, 448,
496, 501, 505-6.
Chapman, Dr. of Trinity, Oxford,
33.
Charitable Dowager, Landor's com-
edy, 175-6.
Chatham, admiration of, 378.
Chaucer, Boccaccio, and Petrarch
(Imag. Con.), 309.
Chesterfield, Lord, and Lord Chat-
ham (Imag. Con.), 257.
Children, pleasure derived from,
273, 282, 284-5, 333; Landor's
refusal to part with Arnold, 278-9.
Cicero, Marcus Tullius, and Quinctus
(Imag. Con.), 236.
Clarke, Oxford fellow, 35-6.
Cleopatra, question of her age, 483
and note.
Clerke, Captain Shadwell, 259-60.
Cockburn, Sir Alexander, 514-5.
Coleraine, Lord, Rev. Mr. Blooms-
bury, and Rev. Mr. Swan (Imag.
Con.), 303-4.
Coleridge, S. T., on Gebir, 56; Sou-
they's letters to on the same, 59;
INDEX.
549
connection with the press, 67;
excitement at Spanish war, 118;
the Friend, 124-5; letter to Cottle
from, 162 note; writing in Courier,
171; Landor's visit to him at High-
gate, 336; death, 344.
Collected works, Landor's, opinions
of, 443-5; printers' troubles, 447-9.
Colloquies, Southey's, 199, 224, 275-
6, 296.
Commentary, the, Landor's, 164-7.
Commonwealth, English, heroes of,
372.
Competition, Landor's dislike to, 13,
26, 69.
Conspiracy of Gowrie, Rough's, 75.
Convention of Cintra, 120.
Copley, Lord Lyndhurst,
a noto-
rious radical,' 75; and see 77.
Cornwall, Barry (Proctor), author's
visit with to Charles Lamb, 337.
Corythus, 177.
Cottle, Southey's letter to, on Gebir,
58; and see 373.
Count Julian, Landor's, 130-41; cor-
respondence with Southey concern-
ing it, 135-40; on its chances of
representation, 137-8; difficulties
of publication, 139; and see Sou-
they.
Cowper, William, Landor's liking for,
496, 500.
Critical Review on Gebir, 58.
Criticism, one-eyed, 384.
Croker (J. W.), 166, 171.
Cromwell and Noble (Imag. Con.),
243; and Sir Oliver Cromwell
(Imag. Con.), 420.
Curse of Kehama, Southey's, 110-27.
Cymodameia, Landor's, 440, 448.
Czartoryski, Prince and Princess,
Landor's interview with, 411.
Dalling, Lord (Henry Lytton Bulwer),
228.
Dan Stewart, 67.
Dante, Landor's opinion of Cary's
translation of, 15, 99; Words-
worth to Landor on, 240; and see
378-84, 500.
Darley, George, 398-9.
Dashwood, Mrs., 286; and Landor's
domestic affairs, 367-8 note.
Davies, Mr., of Court-y- Gollen,
156.
Davis, Thomas, and Landor, 434.
Death, strange choice of a, 289.
De Foe, Dickens on, 450; Landor to
the Times on, 451.
De Quincey and Gebir, 57; on Dr.
Parr, 65-6; his remarks on Count
Julian, 131, 134; and see 498-9.
De Vere, Aubrey, 496.
Delille, Abbé, Adair's plea for, 85;
Landor and (Imag. Con.), 247.
Demosthenes discussed (Imag. Con.),
243; Eubulides and (Imag. Con.),
247, 310-11.
Dickens, Charles, on Landor's villa
at Fiesole, 329; first message to,
409; his Boythorn in Bleak House
suggested by Landor, ib., 412, 449;
visits to Landor, 449, 450; his Lit-
tle Nell, 449; on De Foe, 450; last
message of Landor to, 541; and see
285, 366, 499, 514-5.
Dillon, Lord, 321.
Diogenes and Plato (Imag. Con.),
312.
Disraeli, Mr., his estate of Hughen-
den, 4.
Disraeli, Isaac, 73; the author on his
writings, ib. note; letter to Landor
on the Pentameron, 387.
D'Orsay, Count, 285.
Dry Sticks, Landor's, 472, 510, 511;
see also Last Fruit, &c.
Dudley, Lord, and the Cicero Con-
versation, 260; see also 443.
Earl of Brecon, tragedy by Robert
Landor, 399.
Edinburgh Register, the, 123, 125,
and 161 note.
Eldon and Elcombe (Imag. Con.),
420.
Eldon, Lord Chancellor, Landor's let-
ter to, 158.9.
Election address, Landor's in 1812,
170.
Elizabeth and Burleigh (Imag. Con.),
244.
Elwin, Rev. W., 514-5.
Emerson on Landor and the Imag.
Con., 261-2, 304; visit of, to Lan-
dor, 346-8; published account of
his meeting with Landor, 349-52;
Landor's reply to, ib.
Emigration, Landor on,
268.
Empress (ex-) of France, her mother
and Landor's sister-in-law, 531.
Endymion and Selene, Landor's, 533.
English visiter, Florentine visiter,
and Landor (Imag. Con.), 304-5.
Epictetus and Seneca (Imag. Con.),
313-14.
Epicurus and Metrodorus (Imag.
Con.), 421.
Epicurus, Leontion, and Ternissa
(Imag. Con.), 313; and see 507-9.
550
INDEX.
Essex and Spenser (Imag. Con.), 358.
Euripides, Landor on, 125, 377.
Examination of William Shakespeare
before Sir Thomas Lucy touching
Deer stealing, Landor's, 354.9; and
see Preface.
Examiner, the, defence of Southey
against the Quarterly, 473-4.
Fame, Landor's sure, 544.
Family epitaphs, 325.
Fawn of Sertorius, Robert Landor's,
481.
Ferdinand, Don, and Don John-Mary
Luis (Imag. Con.), 300.
Ferranti and Giulio, Landor's tragic
poem, some extracts from, 221.3.
Fielding, on Warburton, 21.
Field sports, Landor on, 433.
Fiesole, Landor's villa at, 257, 329,
331, 528.
Fisher's portrait of Landor, 413-4.
Florence, archbishop of, and Fran-
cesco Madiai (Imag. Con.), 420.
Florentine art, a doubtful phase of,
348.
Flowers, Landor's love for, 8-9.
Fonblanque, Albany, referred to, 473.
Fox, Charles, Landor and Napier on,
461; and see 107, 108, 111, 162, &c.
France and the French, Landor's view
of, 85, 89 90; and see 116, 529.
French Revolution, influence upon
Landor, 85, 89; Alfieri on, 34, 257.
Frere, on Southey's defence of, 123;
design for Greek ballads, 195.
Friend, the, Coleridge's, 124.
Friends, Landor's poems to his, 22,
340-1, 414, 440-1, 464, 466-7, 513 ;
Landor's visits to, 374, 451-2, 457-
60, 463.
Garibaldi and Mazzini (Imag. Con.),
420.
Gebir, germ of, where, 50; Quarterly
Review on, 52; intention of the
poem indicated, ib.; effect of, on
his fame, 53; critical notice of,
53-56; lines specially liked by
Shelley, Davy, Scott, and Lamb,
54; loss and recovery of the manu-
script of, 55; manner of publica-
tion, 57; extract from preface to,
57; De Quincey on, ib.; Southey's
admiration of, 58-59; Shelley's
fondness for, 62; Landor's letter
to Parr about, 67; critique in the
Monthly Review, 70; the suppressed
postscript to, 70-73; Rough's imita-
tion of, 75; note to passage on Bo-
naparte in, 89; Landor to Southey
on the reception of, 90, 127; pro-
duction of a carefully edited edi-
tion, 93-4; alterations in new edi-
tion, 278. For its Latin form of
Gebirus, see 93-97.
Genius, men of, the highest men of
business, 307.
Gibson's bust of Landor, 286, 287.
Gifford and his Juvenal, 127; dislike
of Southey, 161; and see 496.
Giovanna of Naples, 390.
Gladstone, Mr., allusions to, 22. 473.
Gleichem, Count and Countess (Imag.
Con.), 421.
Godiva, Lady, boyish poem on, 20;
and see 307.
Goethe, 196, 494.
Gray's Elegy, 426.
Greenough, the American sculptor,
and Landor, on Florentine art, 348.
Guizot and Louis Philippe (Imag.
Con.), 419.
Gunlang and Helga, 94, 96; and see
539.
Hallam, 403.
Hamadryad, poem of the, 437-8.
Hare, Augustus, 227; and see 342;
Landor's affection for Francis, Ju-
lius, Augustus, 539.
Hare, Francis, character and friend-
ship with Landor, 228-9; his mar-
riage, 287; letter to Landor urging
him to keep the peace at Florence,
327; new edition of Landor's poems
dedicated to, 336; his interest in
Landor's domestic affairs, 366-7
note; a Conversation suggested by,
368; last visit to, 410.
Hare, Julius, 229; on the Imaginary
Conversations, 227-264; Laudor to
Southey on, 229; finds a publisher
for the Imaginary Conversations,
237; his connection with the pub-
lication, 334-9; article in London
Magazine, 265 note; letter to Lan-
dor on the same, 266; to the same
on Byron and Hazlitt, 270; to the
same, on the sale of the first series
(Imag. Con.), 288; letter from Lan-
dor on the Imaginary Conversa-
tions, 292-3; on Landor's quarrel
with his publisher, 292-6; on Lan-
dor's visit to Wordsworth, 339; on
the effect of the reform agitation
upon Wordsworth, ib.; returns to
Italy with Landor, 340; opinion of
the Pentameron, 381; opinion of
the Trilogy, 398; on Landor's col-
INDEX.
551
lected works, 444-5; visits to, 459;
lines to Landor, 469; last letter and
death, 469, 470; on Landor's pic-
tures, 342; dubbed archbishop, 505;
and Walter Landor (Imag. Con.),
423.
Hazlitt on the Imaginary Conversa-
tions, 221, 245, 247, 250, 259; on
the same, in the Edinburgh Review,
265, 267; with Leigh Hunt in
Florence, 292; visit to Landor,
319-322; Landor on his works, 424.
Hellenics, Landor's (see Last Fruit,
&c.), 448, 489, 500; austere sim-
plicity in writing, ib.; and see 490,
527.
Henry VIII. and Anne Boleyn (Imag.
Con.), 259.
Henry IV. and Sir Arnold Savage
(Imag. Con), 242.
Herbert, William, 96.
High and low Life in Italy, Landor's,
151.
Hill, uncle of Southey, 276.
Hillard, Mr., of Boston, 361.
History, qualifications for, in Landor
and Southey, 270-72.
Hofer, Andrew, and Count Metter-
nich (Imag. Con.), 256; see also 340.
Hogarth, 98, 458.
Hogg, Jefferson, author of Shelley's
Life, on Shelley's liking for Gebir,
62; with Lambe and Hare, 281.
Homer, 14, 377, 512, 527-8.
Horace, 384, 435, 529.
Horne Tooke and Johnson, Imagón-
ary Conversations, 251.
Houghton, Lord (R. M. Milnes), 345,
405; see Milnes.
Hughenden manor, 4.
Hume, David, and John Home (Imag.
C'on.), 256.
Hunt, Leigh, 168; on Landor and
his friends, 216; his residence in.
Italy, 292, 328; sketch of Landor
in Italy, 322-3; letter on the Pen-
tameron, 381 note.
Icelandic poetry, 96.
Imaginary Conversations, Landor's,
some characteristics of, 221, 224-5;
dialogue a form of writing suited
to Landor, 225; the plan confided
to Southey, 225-6; the first portion,
237; a publisher found, 237-9;
Southey and Porson on Words-
worth, first published in London
Magazine, 239-40; summary of the
two vols., 241-63; their reception,
262-7: Landor's mother on, 278;
Dr. Parr and, 279; 3d, 4th, and
5th vols. in progress, 286; sum
realised to author by the first two
vols., 286-7; the second series,
289-99; a volume of, in Ms. de-
stroyed by Landor, 290, 293; se-
cond edition published in 1826,
296; contents of second series,
300-16; the shortest one, 411; con-
tents of the last series, 419-24; five
unpublished scenes, 531-8; and see
529.31.
Impious Feast, the, Robert Landor's
poem, 287.
Inez de Castro, Landor's, 315.
Ion, Talfourd's, first night of, 370.
Ipsley-court and estate, 3, 187, 334,
516.
Ireland, Southey and Landor on griev-
ances and remedies, 268-9.
Irish church establishment, Landor
on, 249 (Imag. Con.), 420; Blanco
White on, 493.
Italy, a free, Landor's plan for, 524.
Italians, 353.
Jacobinism at Oxford, 28-9.
James, G. P. R., 367, 408; on Lan-
dor's trilogy, 398.
James I. and Isaac Casaubon (Imag.
Con.), 244.
James, Doctor, master of Rugby
school, 9; Landor's dispute with,
20, 101; and see Preface.
Jeffrey, Francis, Lord, 162, 417-8.
Jephthah, Buchanan's, Landor's trans-
lation of, 22.
Jervis, Chief Justice, 181.
John of Gaunt and Joanna of Kent
(Imag. Con.), 307-8.
Johnson, Dr., his interview with Dr.
Parr, 63; and Horne Tooke (Imag.
Con.), 251, 253.
Jones, Nancy, 103.
Julian, Count. See Count Julian.
Keats, John, 287, 304-5; and sce
426-7, 496.
Kemble, John, suggested for Count
Julian, 137-8.
Kenyon, John, 227, 229 231; receives
Landor's odes to Southey and
Wordsworth, 340-1; on the Penta-
meron, 380-1; character of, 405-6;
shortest of Conversations, 411; to
Landor describing excursion with
Southey, 412; as to second Mrs.
Southey, 412-13; his death, 471,
508; see also 332, 371, 476; a legacy
from, and its fate, 508-9.
552
INDEX.
King of the Sandwich Islands, Mr.
Peel, Mr. Croker, and Interpreter
(Imag. Con.), 302.
King of Ava and Rao-Gong-Fao (Imag.
Con.), 302.
Kirkup, Mr. Seymour, 229, 318, 319,
320-21, 335, 526, 542; and see as to
Dante, 379.
Kleber, General, and some French
officers (Imag. Con.), 245.
Kosciusko and Poniatowski (Imag.
Con.), 248, 443.
La Fontaine, Landor's liking for and
likeness to, 281; and see 197.
Lamartine, Landor meets him at Lord
Dillon's, 321.
Lamb, Charles, 67; his recollections
of the B. family, 175; letter to Lan-
dor, 217; Landor's visit to him
at Enfield, 336; letter to Lan-
dor, with copy of Elia, 337; lines
by Landor on the death of, 345;
opinion of Landor's Examination
of Shakespeare, 354.
Lambe, Dr., of Warwick, 76, 281,
284; Landor's grief at death of
Mrs. Lambe, 105.
Landor, social position of the family
of, 4-5; use of the word by Rabe-
lais, 5; derivation of the name, 5
note; Doctor Walter, 3, 30-1; the
Doctor's family, 5; Henry, 48;
Landor's mother, ib.; death of his
father, 100; Edward Wilson, 318;
longevity of the family, 478 note.
See also under 'Mother," Brothers,'
and 'Sisters.'
Landor, Doctor, Landor's father, 3,
6, 17-18, 30, 34, 45, 48, 63; death of,
100. For Mrs. Landor, see Mother,
Landor's.
Landor, Charles and Henry, 6, 7, 8,
10, 16, 17, 46, 48, 186, 432, 465,
478, 507-8.
Landor, Elizabeth and Ellen, 8, 48,
104-6, 327, 330-5, 428-33, 451, 468;
see also 276-88, and 332-43.
Landor, Rev. Robert Eyres, 3; simi-
larity of his genius to his brother's,
399-402; his death and character,
478-81; see also note 479-80; and
see 160, 340. Subjoined are the
subjects of his letters to the author
contained in this work: Dr. Lan-
dor, 3, 30; the Landor family, 5-6;
Walter at school, &c., 14; Walter's
temperance, 18; Walter at Ash-
bourne, 21; Walter at Trinity, 29
Walter's first book, 35; General
Powell, 45-6; Walter's allowance,
48; Gebir, 56-7; Walter's impa-
tience of controversy, 61, 211 note;
Dr. Parr, 211; Serjeant Rough,
65-7, 75-8; Walter and his critics,
94; Walter Birch, 99-100; Walter's
extravagance of talk, 106-7; Wal-
ter's young wife, 151, 189; the sale
at Llanthony, 186; on his brother's
tragedies and his own Count Arezzi,
400-2; on Mr. and Mrs. Rosen-
hagen, 406-7. Other letters, not
to the author, are: to his mother,
descriptive of their journey to Italy,
188-91; to his brother Walter, on
his Andrea, &c., 398, 399; to the
same, on
on some essays by him,
435.
Landor, Walter Savage.
FIRST BOOK.
Character and writings, 2, 208-226,
261-262, 443-449, 544; his claim
to old descent, 4, 5; born 30th
January 1775, 6; early want of
restraining influences, 6-7 ; re-
miniscences of his childhood, 7-9 ;
sent first to school at Knowle, 8;
his love for flowers, 8-9; at Rug-
by school, 9-10; his appearance
when first seen by the author, 11;
his excellence in Latin verse, 12,
18; antique character of his mind,
13; his knowledge of Greek, 14;
Baker's Chronicle and Drayton's
Polyolbion his first two books, 15;
popular at school, 16, 20; removal
from Rugby, 20; his own account
of this, 101; his progress at Ash-
bourne, 21; Medea at Corinth, 23-
4; his early poems, ib.; his excel-
lence in translation, 25; entered
Trinity-college Oxford 1793, ib. ;
not much moved by the French
Revolution, ib.; Jacobin notions,
25-6, 28-9; life at Oxford, 26; his
satire on public affairs in 1794,
27; close of Oxford career, 29-33;
not consciously deceptive, 31'; his
first vol. of Poems published 1795,
32, 35-7; his relations with his
father, 30-31, 34, 45, 48; A Moral
Epistle to Earl Stanhope, 42 44;
was never offered a commission in
the army, 46; offensive manner of
stating his opinions, 47; at Tenby
and Swansea, 49; Gebir, 49-50.
Letters of Landor, to members of his
family, 8, 17; to Southey, 8, 15; to
Doctor Davy, 26; to Robert Lyt-
INDEX.
553
Landor, Walter Savage:
ton, 15-6; to his biographer, 16, 21,
21-2 note, 34, 49.
SECOND BOOK.
Descriptive survey of Gebir, 52-6;
his own estimate of the poem, 57;
lack of courtesy to his father's
friends, 60; his impatience of ar-
gument, 61: friendship with Dr.
Parr, ibid.; his remark to Hogg
about Gebir, 62; letters to the
Courier, 68; correspondence with
Robert Adair, 68, 84-5, 107; urged
to contribute to the Morning
Chronicle, 68; unpublished post-
script to Gebir, 70-73; friendship
with Serjeant Rough, 75-80; his
imitations of Oriental literature,
80; correspondence with Parr, 82-4;
visits Paris 1802, 86; his estimate
of Bonaparte and the French people,
87, also 116; note to a passage in
Gebir written on his return from
France, 89-90; the Phocæans, 90;
some characteristics of his style,
91-2; arranges with his brother a
new and fuller edition of Gebir, 93 ;
Gunlaug and Helga, 94, 96; cor-
respondence with Birch, 96, 100;
on pastoral poetry. 97; succeeds to
the estate 1805, 100-2.
Letters of Landor, to members of his
family, 86-7, 88, 89; to Southey,
60, 61, 90; to Parr, 69, 84; to Wal-
ter Birch, 97; to Robert Lytton,
96; to his biographer, 55, 57-8.
THIRD BOOK.
Life at Bath, 100-5; Parr's affec-
tion for him, 107-8; features of
his character sketched by Parr,
108; his introduction to Southey,
109; friendship with Southey be-
gun, 110; their correspondence, ib.;
characters of the two men com-
pared, 111-14; letters to Southey
quoted: on Kehama, 114; on France
and the French, and his sudden
departure for Spain, 115-16; in
Spain, 116-20; his share in the revo-
lution, 118-120; resigns his Spanish
commission on the restoration of
the Jesuits, 120; on the Stuart
affair, 119; on the convention
of Cintra, 120-21; on some personal
hopes and regrets, 122; on Sir
John Moore and the attack by
Frere, 123; on Spanish affairs, 124;
on Coleridge and taxation, 124-5;
Landor, Walter Savage :
on Euripides, 125; on themes for
epic poets, 126; acknowledg-
ment of Kehama and its dedication,
127; on the reception of Gebir, ib.;
Count Julian, 128; Roderick, and
the method of the ancients, 128;
the nature and limits of his dra-
matic faculty,129-30; Count Julian,
story of the tragedy followed and
illustrated, 130-5; the work com-
pleted, 135; its chances of represen-
tation, 137-8; difficulties of publica-
tion, 139; the Llanthony estate and
abbey, 8, 141-9; letter to the au-
thor on the same, 143; letters to
Bishop Burgess on restoration of
the abbey-chapel, 147; his estimate
of the Welsh, 147, 148; his Letters
of a Conservative, 147-8; letters to
Southey on affairs at Llanthony,
148-150, 152, 154; his marriage,
149.52; receives Mr. and Mrs. Sou-
they at Llanthony, 153; eccentric
conduct as grand-juryman, 155-6;
is desired to become a magistrate,
156; offers himself to the lord-
lieutenant, 157; correspondence
incident to this, 157-60; influ-
ence of the affair upon him, 160;
Robert Landor dissuades him from
leaving England, ib.; on Jeffrey,
Pitt, and Fox, 162; state of the
government, 163-4; and of the
people, 164; his Observations on
Trotter's Life of Fox, 164-5; bis
Commentary and Parallel, 165-7; on
America and its relations (1812),
165-7; on liberty and other matters,
167-8; on Bonaparte, 169; on en-
closure bills, 170; on Southey's
appointment to the laureateship,
171; a troublesome tenant at Llan-
thony, 173-5; the Charitable Dow-
ager, 175-6; Corythus, 177; Idyllia
Heroum atque Heroidum, 177;
annoyances at Llanthony, 178;
letter to Mr. Jervis on the Betham
action, 181; the law's delay, ib. ;
resolves to leave England, 182-3,
186; quarrels with and leaves his
wife at Jersey, 184-5; reconciled,
185; return of Napoleon, 185; at
Tours, ib.
Letters of Landor, to members of his
family, 104, 150; to Southey, 106,
114, 115-6, 121, 122, 123, 124, 125,
126, 127, 128, 129, 135, 136, 137,
138, 139, 142, 143, 145, 148, 149,
152, 154, 162, 163, 164, 165, 166,
554
INDEX.
Landor, Walter Savage:
167, 168, 169, 170, 171, 173, 174,
176, 177, 179, 180, 182, 183; to
Bishop Burgess, 147; to Mr. Baron
Thompson, 155, 156; to the Duke
of Beaufort, 157; to Lord-chancel-
lor Eldon, 158-9; to Mr. Jervis,
181; to his biographer, 143.
FOURTH BOOK.
His first journey to Italy, 187-
189; his wife, 189; on lake Como,
191; touching letter on Southey's
silence, 192-3; on Wordsworth,
&c., 194; birth of his first child, &c.,
194; last incidents at Como, 195;
going to Pisa, ib.; ode to Berna-
dotte, ib.; on Byron, himself, and
Goethe, &c., 196-7; birth of a
daughter, and various matters po-
litical and social, 202-3; at work
on a Latin dissertation, 197-8; his
Orations in Italian, 203; sympathy
with the reaction against the Holy
Alliance, ib.; letter about his family,
204; letters from his mother, 205-6,
276-81, 323-4; letter from Words-
worth, 206; in the palazzo Medici
in Florence, 207; advantages of the
form of dialogue, 208-9; his wish to
be remembered with Southey, 209;
likeness and difference, 213-16
illustrations of character, 210-17;
advantages from self-banishment,
214, 220; beauty of minor poems,
217-9; two scenes, 221-3; plan of
Conversations confided to Southey,
225-6; better prospects, ib.
Letters of Landor, to members of his
family, 195, 204; to Southey, 191,
192, 193, 194, 195, 196, 197, 199,
201, 202, 203, 204, 206, 225, 226.
FIFTH BOOK.
Influence of intercourse with Fran-
cis Hare, 228; first portion of
the Conversations, 233; letters to
Southey on the publication of same,
233, 235, 236; his Imag. Conver
sation on Wordsworth's poetry,
239-40; contents of the first series,
241-62; English spelling, reform
of, criticised, 251-6 and note; his
liking for Alfieri, 257; reception
of the Conversations, 262-7; writ-
ing to Southey: upon forms of
government, 268; on colonisation,
ib.; on Irish grievances and errors,
269; on Byron's attacks, 270; a
history-writing project, 270-1; on
Landor, Walter Savage:
Canning, 272; on domestic affairs,
&c., 272-5; further grievances,
public and private, 274; a parcel
of books from Italy, 274-5, 276; on
the death of Southey's uncle Hill,
ib.; on republishing his poems, 277;
family letters, 276-88; at Kome,
282; first letter from his son, and
reply, ib.; illness of his children,
284-5; his Neapolitan visit, 285-6 ;
collecting pictures, 286, 287; Gib-
son's bust of him, 287; passion for
his children, 322, 333; to Southey,
as to second series of Conversations,
289-99; to Julius Hare, 292-93;
contents of new series, 300-2; pas-
sage from cancelled preface, 302;
English visiter, Florentine visiter,
and himself (Imag. Con.), 304-5.
Letters of Landor, to members of his
family, 228, 281, 284, 285, 286, 287,
288; to Southey, 227, 229, 232, 233,
234, 235, 230, 263, 269, 271, 272,
273, 274, 275, 276, 289, 290, 291,
293, 296, 298; to Julius Hare, 266,
292, 293, 296.
SIXTH BOOK.
At Fiesole, 317-23; his absence of
mind, 319-20; closing years in pa-
lazzo Medici, 317-325; death of
his mother, 325; family epitaphs,
325 note; ordered to leave Tuscany,
326; on his manner of life, 330-33;
his dispute with M. Antoir, 335;
the publication of his collected
poems (1831), 336; revisits Eng-
land, ib.; interview with Coleridge
and Lamb, ib.; visits Julius Hare,
and Warwick, 337; at the Lakes
with Southey and Wordsworth,
338; his argument with Southey
about the word impugn, 338-9;
return to Italy, 340; his odes to Sou-
they and Wordsworth, 340-1; ode
to Joseph Ablett, 343-4; Emerson
at Fiesole, 346-7; reply to Emer-
son's account of his opinions, 350-1;
his Examination of Wm. Shake-
speare for Deer-stealing, 354-9;
Pericles and Aspasia, letters to
Southey about, 359-60; review of
its plan, &c., 360-1; another do-
mestic breach, and departure from
Fiesole, 364-7.
Letters of Lander, to members of his
family, 325, 330, 331, 332, 333, 334,
336, 340, 343, 344, 345, 368; to
Southey, 326, 327, 338, 339, 359,
INDEX.
555
Landor, Walter Savage:
360, 365, 366; to Lady Blessington,
354, 358; to Cary, 363; to his bio-
grapher, 319.
SEVENTH BOOK.
Satire on Satirists, 370-1; refunds to
the publisher the money paid for
Pericles, 372; letter to the author
from Clifton, 371-2; to Southey,
372-3; last days with Southey, 373-
4; visits to friends, 374; Lady Bless-
ington, 376-7; the Pentameron,
378-87; settled at Bath, 385; An-
drea of Hungary, &c., 387-99; error
as to Greek trilogies, 399; failures
of memory, 400-3 and note; glimp-
ses of his friends, 404-12; his re-
ception in Paris (1841), 410; last
letter to Southey, 415; his inscrip-
tion for monument to Southey, 416;
last series of Conversations, 419-
24; Southey and himself (Imag.
Con.), 423; passages from his let-
ters to the author (1843-5), 424-
8; his dog Pomero, 428 30, 433,
471;
letters from Bath to his sister
Elizabeth, 430-3; his essays on
Catullus, Theocritus, and Petrarca,
&c., 435-9; collection and revision
of his works, 439-44; his Poemala,
445-6; the Hellenics, 448; letter
to the Times on De Foe, 451; at
the author's. 454, &c.; at Hurst-
monceaux, 459; last visit to Lon-
don, 463; last visit to Llanthony,
464; grief for deaths of old friends,
465-71; verses on Wordsworth,
Southey, and Hare, 469; on Julius
Hare's death, 471; his Last Fruit,
&c., 472-90; on Beatrice Cenci,
474-5; short poems, 475-7; lines on
Wordsworth, 478; poem to his
brother Robert, 478-9; Scenes for a
Study, 481-9; passages from letters
to the author on the Life and Let-
ters of Blanco White, 490-5; Notes
on Books and Men, from letters to
the author: of Milton's poetry, 495;
of himself as he appears in Southey's
Letters, 495; of the great masters
of our language, 496; of Southey
and Cowper, ib.; of William Gif-
ford, ib.; of Tennyson's Maud, 497;
of Aubrey de Vere's Masque, ib. ;
of Scott and Keats, ib.; of his por-
trait by Boxall, 498; of Sydney and
Bobus Smith, ib.; De Quincey's
Essays and Recollections, 498-9; of
some novels, 499; of the Edinburgh
•
Landor, Walter Savage:
on his Hellenics, 500; of the Quar-
terly on Steele, ib.; of the drama-
tists of Elizabeth and James, 500-1;
of some recent poems (1856), 501;
of the Apple of Discord, ib.; of
Swift's Tale of a Tub, 502; of Sir
Robert Peel's posthumous memoir,
ib.; of Grote's history, 504; of cor-
ruptions of language, ib.; of his
own proposed amendments, 505 6;
the action for libel at Bath, 506-9,
512, 518; his Dry Sticks, 510; last
visit to the author, 514.
Letters of Landor, to members of bis
family, 430, 431, 432, 433, 507, 508;
to Southey, 372, 373, 382, 383, 415;
to John Kenyon. 411, 412; to Miss
Rose Paynter (Lady Sawle), 411,
441, 463; to Crabb Robinson, 375,
376; to Lady Blessington, 439; to
the editor of the Times (on Defoe),
451; to his biographer, 371, 372,
373, 375, 377, 378, 382, 386, 387,
388, 389, 390, 391, 392, 393, 397,
403, 409, 410, 414, 424, 425, 426,
427, 428, 429, 430, 436, 437, 438,
439, 440, 441, 442, 443, 144, 446,
448, 451, 454, 455, 457, 458, 462,
464, 465, 467, 468, 469, 470, 471,
472, 474, 475, 482, 493, 494, 495,
496. 497, 498, 499, 500, 501, 502,
504, 505, 506, 510, 512.
EIGHTH BOOK.
Return to Italy, 516; failing strength
of mind and body, 519; domestic mi-
series, 520; Mr. Browning's friend-
liness, 520-1; at Siena, 521-4; again
at Florence, 524; last Dramatic
Scenes, 527-8; last published Con-
versations, 529-30; Heroic Idyls,
530; five unpublished scenes and
Conversations, 531-8; last letters
to author, 540-1; his death, 543;
Swinburne's verses to his memory,
513-4; the end, 544-6.
Letters of Landor, to his biographer,
518, 520, 524, 529, 530, 540, 541.
Landor, Mrs. W. S., 149-52, 183,
184-5, 188 90, 318-9, 332, 364-8, 517;
and see 517-520.
Landor, Arnold, 195; his grandmo-
ther's wish to be intrusted with his
education, 278; first letter to his
father, and reply, 282; question
of his education, 333-4, 316; his
death, 517 note; and see 517-20.
Landseer, Sir Edwin, 458, 495.
556
INDEX.
Langley, Mr., vicar of Ashbourne,
Landor's tutor, 21.
Language, the English, and ortho-
graphy, a favourite study of Lan-
dor's, 251; contributions to reform
of, 251-6; and see 503-6.
Laodamia, Wordsworth's, 240, 267.
Larochejaquelin and Béranger (Imag.
Con.), 419-20.
Lascy, General, and Cura Merino
(Imag. Con.), 250.
Last Fruit from an Old Tree, Lan-
dor's, 472-90.
Latin verse, Landor's excellence in,
12, 18. For references in this work
to his Latin poetry, see 115, 126,
177, 195, 197, 202, 207; see also
445-8.
Laureateship, 171.
Layard, Austen H., 381-2.
Leamington, a village, 339.
Leighton, and Lough, 463.
Leo XII., pope, and his valet Gigi
(Imag. Con.), 301.
Leofric and Godiva (Imag. Con.),
307-8.
Leonora
and Father Panigarola
(Imag. Con.), 421.
Leopold, Peter, and Du Paty (Imag.
Con.), 246.
Le Sage, 493.
Letters of a Conservative, Landor's,
147-8.
Letters to Charles Butler, Landor on
Southey's, 269.
Lincoln, president, allusion to his
death, 215-16.
Lisle, Lady, and Elizabeth Gaunt
(Imag. Con.), 307-8.
Literary fame, Landor, Southey,
Quarterly Review (1850), and au-
thor on, 502-3.
Literary Fund, Southey on, 418.
Literature, how regarded by Landor,
2, 208-9, 502.
Llanthony estate, described by Lan-
dor in a letter to Southey, 8, 153;
proposal to plant a wood of cedar
of Lebanon on, 142; letter to the
author descriptive of, 143; author's
visit to, 144-5; letters to Bishop
Burgess about the abbey-chapel,
147; progress of repairs and plans,
148-9; life there, 152.61; his mo-
ther's management of the estate,
187; as to Ipsley, 204-5; last visit
to, 464; and see 507.
Lockhart, on a passage of one of Sou-
they's letters, 417; on Landor, ib.
London Journal, Leigh Hunt's, 345.
London Magazine, first Imaginary
Conversation published in, 239-40.
Lonsdale, Lord, in Devil's Walk, 457.
Lords, a house of, Landor on, 203;
Southey, 214-5.
Louis XIV. and Father la Chaise
(Imag. Con.), 250-1.
Louis XVIII. and Talleyrand (Imag.
Con.), 419.
Lowell, Professor, of Boston, opinion
of Landor, 2.
Lucullus and Cæsar (Imag. Con.),
314.
Lucys, the old and young, 335.
Lynn, Miss (Mrs. Linton), 475.
Lyttelton, Dorothea, 34-41.
Lytton, Bulwer (Lord), the Caxtons,
499.
Lytton, Robert, Landor on, 463; let-
ter to, 15.
Macaulay, T. B. (Lord), Landor meets
at the author's, 457.
Macchiavelli and Michael Angelo
(Imag. Con.), 420.
Mackintosh and Dr. Parr, 65.
Maclise, Daniel, 458, 495; and W.
Mulready, ib.
Macready, Mr., reform of theatre-
lobbies, 137; on Landor's trilogy,
398.
Mahomet and Sergius (Imag. Con.),
309.
Malesherbes and Rousseau (Imag.
Con.), 308.
Marcellus and Hannibal (Imag. Con.),
313-14.
Marriage of Helena and Menelaos,
Landor's, 553.6.
Marriage, seriousness of, 151 note.
Martin and Jack, Swift's progeny
(Imag. Con.), 420.
Marvel and Henry Marten, Landor's,
537-8.
Masque of Proserpine, Aubrey de
Vere's, 497.
Mavrocordato and Colocotroni (Imag.
Con.), 256-7.
Mediocrities, reign of, 164.
Memory, failures and tricks of, 319-
20, 402-3, 527.
Menander and Epicurus (Imag. Con.),
420.
Metellus and Marius (Imag. Con.),
313-14.
Methodism and Wesley, 472.
Middleton and Magliabechi (Imag.
Con.), 248.
Mignet, his courtesy to Landor in
Paris, 410.
INDEX.
557
Miguel and his mother (Imag. Con.),
300.
Milman, Dean, 457.
Milnes, R. Monckton, poems on Lan-
dor's children, 345; friendship with
Landor, 345, 359-6; his Life of
Keats, 405 note; see Houghton.
Milton, Landor's study of Paradise
Lost, 49; Landor charged with im-
itating, 51; Landor's veneration
for, 70; Wordsworth on the son-
nets of, 231; Landor on the poetry
of, 423, 495, 500; and Marvel
(Imag. Con.), 248-9, 530.
Mina, 443.
Mackenzie, Miss, of Seaforth, 366,
382.
Mocatta, Isaac and Jacob, 73-4.
Modern allusions in dialogues of an-
cients (Imag. Con.), 247, 258.
Molandé, Jane Countess de (Ianthe),
103, 327-8, 331, 336, 372, 429, 467.
Molesworth, Sir William, 454, 471.
Molly Perry' and her letter, 41 and
note.
Montaigne and Joseph Scaliger (Imag.
Con.), 309.
Monthly Review on Gebir, 70.
Moore, Sir John, 123.
Moore and Landor, 205, 408.
Moral Epistle to Earl Stanhope, 42-4.
Morning Chronicle, Landor solicited
for contributions to, 68.
Morning Post and Courier, early con-
tributors to, 67.
Mother, Landor's, 3, 46 note, 48,
150, 153, 182, 187, 188, 190, 202,
204-6, 226, 276-9, 280-1, 323-5; her
death, 325.
Multiformity, a test of genius, 443.
Napier, Gen. Sir Wm., 350, 385, 431,
433, 459-61; defence of Landor, 462;
Landor's last meeting with, 463;
see also 470, 506; a parallel, 434.
Napier, Gen. Sir Charles, 459-60, 470.
Napoleon, Prince Louis, visits Lan-
dor at Bath, 455.
Napoleon, President Louis, and M.
de Molé (Imag. Con.), 419.
Newton and Barrow (Imag. Con.),
306.
Nichol, Mr., of Edinburgh, and the
Dry Sticks, 511.
Nicholas and Michael (Imag. Con.),
303; and Nesselrode (Imag. Con.),
420.
Noble, Michael, Christian name
wrongly given by Landor (Imag.
Con.), 243.
Norris, Miss, letter to Landor from,
1790, 19.
Nugent, Lord, 454, 466.
Observations on Trotter's Life of Fox,
Landor's, 164-5.
O'Connell and Landor, 434.
Occasional verses, 159-60, 216-20.
Ode to General Washington, 28.
Odysseus, Tersitza, Acrive, and Tre-
lawney (Imag. Con.), 303.
Odyssey, the, read in the original
Greek by Landor at 85, 14.
Old man and a child. Landor's, 537.
One life, incidents embraced by, 21-2.
Oratory, not always safe guidance,
249.
Oriental literature, Landor's imita-
tions of, 80.
Orsini, 456-7.
Ovid, 323.
Oxford Review, the, 94.
Pallavicini, Marchese, and Landor,
245.
Parallel, the, Landor's, 164-5.
Parents of Luther, a scene, 384.
Parkhurst family, their friendship
for Landor. 17.
Parr, Dr., 62 5; his threefold claim
to the admiration of Landor, 63;
Johnson's story of him, ib. ; some
of his peculiarities, 64-5; in con-
troversy with Mackintosh, ib.; Mr.
Robert Landor on, 65-6; his taste
for poetry, 67; a note to Landor,
81; obscurity of his hand writing,
ib.; his charges' against Pitt,
82; selections from his correspond-
ence, 82-4; instance of his friend-
ship for Landor, 107-8; letter to
Landor on his marriage, 151-2;
Imaginary Conversations and, 279;
and see 77, 201.
Paynter, Miss Rose, afterwards Lady
Sawle, 12, 385, 411, 440-1, 446, 454.
Peel, 502; and Walpole, ib.; and
Castlereagh, ib.
Pelayo, Southey's. See Roderick.
Penn and Peterborough (Imag. Con.),
307.
Pentameron, Landor's, 378-82.
Pericles and Aspasia, Landor's letters
to Southey on, 359-60; account of,
&c., 360-3.
Pericles and Sophocles (Imag. Con.),
250.
Peter the Great and Alexis (Imag.
Con.), 310.
Phocæans, the, whence derived, 26;
558
INDEX.
some extracts from, 91; Southey's
article in the Annual Review on,
92-3.
Photo, Lavellas, and Kaido (Imag.
Con.), 303.
Pictures, old and new, and picture-
dealers. 341-2. 343-4.
Pitt and Canning (Imag. Con.), 302-3.
Pitt, William, 63-4; Dr. Parr's opi-
nion of him, 82; Landor and Southey
on, 107, 111; Pitt and Fox, 162-3;
measured by results, 163-4.
Plato, imperfect estimate of, by Lan-
dor, 14; explanation of, 312;
mighty influence of, 258; see also
302.
Pluck, Landor's horror of the word,
255 note.
Poetry, danger in modern criticism
of, to poets, 305.
Poets, what they think of poets, 422,
501; four magic ones, 495; hatred
of poets by poets, 501.
Pollio, Asinius, and Licinius Calnis
(Imag. Con), 421.
Pomare, queen of Tahiti, and others
(Imag. Con.). 419.
Pomero, Landor's dog, 428-30, 471.
Popery, British and Foreign, Lan-
dor's, 472.
Popular writers, 1.
Porson, Parr's remark about, 62
note.
Postscript (unpublished) to Gebir,
70-3.
Powell, General, 45-6.
Pride and Prejudice, Miss Austen's,
511, 523.
Puntomichino, Cavaliere, and Mr.
Devis Eusebius Salcranagh (Imag.
Con.), 256.
Pybus, Mr., 70.
Pythagoras, The Priest of Isis and,
531-3.
Quarterly Review, notice of Gebir,
52; Southey's connection with, 161;
Imaginary Conversations and, 243;
its intended notice anticipated by
Hare, 265-6; and see 502-3.
Rabelais' use of the word Landore, 5.
Rawson, Mr., of Wastwater, 338.
Republicanism, Landor's and Sou-
they's, 168-9; illustration of Lan-
dor's, 351-2.
Reviewers, challenge to, 70.
Richard Coeur de Lion and the abbot
of Boxley (Imag. Con.), 241.
Richelieu, Duc de, Sir Firebrace
Cotes, Lady Glengrin, and Mr.
Normanby (Imag. Con.), 304.
Rickman, clerk to parliament, 142.
Riguelme, General, 123.
Robinson, Mr. Crabb, 336, 366-7;
Landor's Satire on Satirists, 370;
opinion of the Pentameron, 381;
opinion of Andrea, &c., 398; ex-
cellent remark, 371.
Roderick, Southey's, 126; plan of the
poem explained to Landor, 127-8.
Roderigo, 131; the theme of Scott,
Southey, and Landor simulta-
neously, 138.
Rogers, Samuel, 457-8.
Romilly and Perceval (Imag. Con.),
308; and Wilberforce (Imag. Con.),
420.
Romilly, Sir Samuel, 30, 378, 420.
Rose, George, 165-6.
Rosenhagen, Mrs. and Mr., 406-8; his
death, 407.
Rough, Serjeant, 70-80; his imita-
tion of Gebir, 59; his visit to
Robert Landor, 76-7; end of the
friendship with Landor, 77-8, 79-
80; see also 286-7.
Saez, Don Victor, and El Rey Netto
(Imag. Con.), 300.
Sandford, William, 456, 514.
Satire on Satirists, Landor's, 370-1.
Savonarola and the prior of Florence,
Italian dialogue by Landor, 529..
Sawle, Lady, see Paynter, Miss Rose.
Scott, Walter, 54, 137, 497; and see
417 ;
and for how he fared in
Wordsworth's talk, 338.
Self-portraiture, touches of, 138 note,
338; self-accusings and exaltings,
122, 233-5, 274.
Seward, Miss Anna, of Staffordshire,
60; Landor's anger at her attack
upon him, ib.
Shaftesbury, Earl of, 418.
Shakespeare, 380, 423, 426; Examina-
tion of, before Sir Th. Lucy touching
Deer-stealing, Landor's, 354-9 (see
also remark in Preface); a Shake-
speare celebration, 401, 427; and
see 493; remarks of Landor on
his satellites, 496, 501; allusion to,
as 'perfect poet,' 544; and see 388,
423.
Shelley, his favourite passages in
Gebir, 54; his passion for that
work, related by Hogg, 62; Lan-
dor's opinions of, 304; Mrs. Shel-
ley to Landor on his Collected
Works, 445.
!
¡
INDEX.
Sidney, Sir Philip, nd Lord Brooke
(Imag. Con), 242.
Simonidea, Landor's, 106, 217, 231.
Sisters, Landor's, 6, 48, 325; see Lan-
dor, Elizabeth and Ellen.
Sleath, Dr., Landor's Latin tutor at
Rugby, 21.
Smith, Sydney, and Dr. Parr, 62, 64;
Bobus and, 498; on Demosthenes,
ib.
Smollett, 499
Soliman and Mufti (Imag. Con.), 310.
Sonnets, Wordsworth on his own,
231.
Sophocles, 44.
Southey, at Oxford, 29; on Landor,
54; his notice of Gebir in the Criti-
cal Review, 58; and to his private
friends, ib.; his connection with the
Morning Post, 67; his review of
Landor's Phocæans, 92; his Madoc,
108; letter to Grosvenor Bedford
on his introduction to Landor,
109; Curse of Kehama, 110-127;
beginning of his friendship with
Landor, 109-110; its progress and
importance, 110-15; his poetry,
112-113; on Spain, 121-25; on the
convention of Cintra, 121; misgiv-
ings about his own work. 125; pro-
poses Pelayo as a subject for his new
epic poem, 126; on the same, and a
Latin idyl of Laudor's, ib. ; on Rode-
rick and further plans, 127-8 and
note; on the stage requisites of
Roderick, 129-30; letters from Lan-
dor on Count Julian, 135-6; his
opinion of that work, 136-7; its
unfitness for the stage, 137;
lifficulties in the way of its pub-
lication, 139; letters from Lan-
dor concerning the Llanthony es-
tate, 142, 143, 145-6, 148-50, 152-5;
at work on the Quarterly, 161;
letters from Landor on public men
and affairs, 162-72; on Landor's
'Observations on Trotter's Life of
Fox,' 164-5; on America (U. S.)
and some questions of policy, 166-
71; receives the laureateship, 171;
to Landor on the position of affairs
(1814), 169; to the same on the
Charitable Dowager, 175-6; from
Landor on his troubles at Llan-
thony, 178-80; from the same, ex-
plaining his sudden departure from
England, 182; surreptitious pub-
lication of Wat Tyler, 192; visits
Landor at Como, 1817, 193; to Lan-
dor, on the " amusements of Co-
559
mo,' 194; to the same on the
Byron madness, 196; to the same
on Sir Charles Wolseley's letter,
200; to the same, on the advan-
tages of a house of Lords, 214-15;
to the same, on his own dialogues,
225-6; to the same, on Words-
worth's poetry, 230; letters from
Landor on the Imaginary Con-
versations, &c., 232, 233, 234, 234-
5, 236-7; to Landor on the revision
of the same, 238; on the theology
of the eighth Conversation, 244; on
the first series, 262; on political
affairs (1824), 268; on the state of
Ireland, ib.; from Landor on the
Letters to Charles Butler, 269; to
the same, on the history-writing
project, 271; letters to Landor on
the Imaginary Conversations, 293-
4, 300; letters from Landor on the
same, 289-90, 291, 293, 297, 298,
299; elected to parliament, 298;
dispute with Landor on the word
impugn, 338-9; letters from Lan-
dor on Pericles and Aspasia. &c.,
350-60; last visit to Bristol. 373-4;
letter to Miss Bowles, 373; last
letter to Landor, 414; marriage
with Caroline Bowles, 414; Lan-
dor's last letter to him, 415; Mrs.
Southey to Landor, 415-16; his
death, 416; Landor's inscription,
ib.; disposition of the materials for
his life, 417; Jeffrey's encomium,
418; Porson and Southey (Imag.
Con.), 239-40, 422-3; Landor and
(Imag. Con.), 423; Landor
his minor pieces, 426; efforts on
behalf of his family, 473-4; Laudor
on his Life and Letters, 495-6;
Landor on Cowper and, 496.
Southey and Porson (Imag. Con.),
242-3; and see also 422-3
Southey's son, a church living ob-
tained for, 473.
on
Spain, the invasion of, by the French,
116-17; excitement in England,
118; Landor at Corunna during,
118.
Spelling, proposed reformation of,
and author's views on, 251-6, 443,
503-6.
Spenser (Imag. Con.), 244; sketch of
a scene at his burial, 358.
St. Clair, Landor's, 50.
Stage, writing for, why Landor failed
in, 290; and see 129-30.
Stanfield, Clarkson, 458, 495.
Steele, Richard, 500.
560
INDEX.
Stewart, Dan, 67.
Stopfords, the, 273 note, 432, 591.
Story, William, Landor's visit to, 522.
Stuart, Charles, envoy at Corunna,
118; misunderstanding between
Landor and, 119; letter to Vaug
han about this, ib.
Swansea, Landor's liking for, 50, 283.
Swift, style of, 502.
Swinburne, A. C., visit to Landor,
542-3; verses in memory of Lan-
dor, 543-4.
Tachbrooke, the Savages of, 3; Lan-
dor's attachment to, 7.
Tale of Paraguay, Southey's, 275.
Taleyrand and Archbishop of Paris
(Imag. Con.), 419.
Talma, 247.
Taunton, Judge, 180-1.
Taxation, Landor on, 124.
Taylor, John, first publisher of the
Imaginary Conversations, 237-46;
Landor's charges against, 292-3;
Hare's vindication of, 294.5; his
own letter to Hare, 295.
Taylor, Wm., of Norwich, 58, 65; on
Gebir, 192.
Taylor, Henry, author of Philip Van
Artevelde, 343, 417.
Tennyson, Landor on his Death of
Arthur, 375; and see 426, 497, 501.
Terence and Plautus, 506.
Thackeray, W. M., his Esmond, 499.
Thiers and Lamartine (Imag. Con.),
419.
Thomson, some characteristics of his
poetry, 97.
Tiberius and Vipsania (Imag. Con.),
313-14; as to character of Tiberius,
see 245.
Titian and Cornaro (Imag. Con.), 420.
Tom Brown's Schooldays, author of,
to Landor, 459.
Trilogy, the Greek, a correction by
author, 399.
Twisleton, Mr., 530.
Tyrannicide, 122, 163, 215, 433, 462.
Vaughan, Charles Robert, and the
Spanish mission, 118-19.
Venice, 340, 352.
Venturada, Landor's gift to the in-
habitants of, 118.
Villa Gherardesca, last look at, 528.
Villèle and Corbière (Imag. Con.),
302.
Virgil, a translation from, by Landor,
24-5; Horace and (Imag. Con.), 529.
Vision of Judgment, Southey's, 269.
Vyner, Captain, 232, 234.
Walker, Colonel (Imag. Con.), 421.
Wallace, William, and Edward the
First (Imag. Con.), 310.
Walton, Cotton, and Oldways (Imag.
Con.), 308.
Warter, Rev. J. Wood, 417.
Washington and Franklin (Imag.
Con.), 249.
Watson, Bishop, and William Pitt,
499.
Wat Tyler, Southey's surreptitiously
published, 192.
Wellington, Lord, 165, 167, 169, 419;
and see 459.
Wellington and Inglis (Imag. Con.),
420.
Wesley and Methodism, 472.
White, Blanco, 490-4.
Widcombe churchyard, 513-4, 518,
525.
William the Deliverer, one of the
Landors a high-sheriff during his
reign, 6; Adair to Landor on, 85.
Willis, N. P., visit to Landor in Italy,
353-4; letter to Landor, 368-9.
Wolfgang and Henry of Melchtal
(Imag. Con.), 309.
Wolseley, Sir Charles, 200, 201.
Women, Landor a favourite with,
404.
Wordsworth, on French Revolution,
25; excitement at Spanish War,
118; remarks by Landor on, 194,
196, 198, 201; letters to Landor
from, 206-7, 274-5; Southey to
Landor on, 229-232; urges Lan-
dor to write in English, 207,
230; on the writing of sonnets,
231; proposed dedication to him of
the Imaginary Conversations, 232,
235, 229-30; Southey and Porson
(Imag. Con.) on, 422-3; letter to
Landor on the same, 240; letter on
completion of first series, 262;
letter of thanks for books, 274-5;
effect of reform agitation (1832)
upon him, 339; ode to, 340; dif-
ference with, 370.1, 422; Landor
on, 423; position as a poet, 423;
on his prelude, 426, 427; lines
upon, 478; and see 198, 500.
Wyndham and Sheridan (Imag. Con.),
420.
Zenophon and Cyrus the Younger
(Imag. Con.), 310.
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