to leave Italy for having threatened to chastise the poet Monti, but he moved only to Pisa, which continued to be his home until 1821. For the eight years from 1821 to 1829 Florence was the home of Landor, originally in the city itself, then in the Villa Castiglione. In 1824 appeared the first and in 1829 the fifth volumes of the Imaginary Conversations. He now, in advancing years, became for the first time generally distinguished, although even yet he was little known to the larger public. In 1829, through the kindness of a Welsh friend, Mr. Ablett, Landor was able to buy an exquisite estate at Fiesole, the Villa Gherardesca, which now became his home, and here he was happy and at peace for several years. In 1834 he published the Citation and Examination of Shakespeare, in 1836 Pericles and Aspasia, and in 1837 The Pentameron and Pentalogia. But before the latter date he had broken up his home in Fiesole, had left his wife in anger, and had returned to England. He settled finally and alone in Bath, where he remained for more than twenty years. The most important of his later publications were The Last Fruit off an Old Tree (1853); Antony and Octavius (1856); and Dry Sticks (1858). In the latter year, in consequence of an unlucky dispute, and rather than face an action for libel, the fierce old man fled to Florence. Here he found his children, whom he had enriched at his own expense, and it is to Walter Savage Landor After the Portrait by Boxall their shame that they appear to have received him in his ruin with the coldest ingratitude. But for the generous kindness of Robert Browning, Landor must have starved. His last book, Heroic Idyls, appeared in 1863. His arrogance was with him to the end. He lived on to reach his 90th year, and died at Florence on the 17th of September 1864. Mr. Swinburne celebrated his obsequies magnificently in Greek and English. Crabb Robinson has described Landor in his prime as "a m n of florid complexion, with large full eyes, altogether a leonine man, with a fierceness of to e well suited to his name." FROM "IMAGINARY CONVERSATIONS." Southey. Occasionally I have been dissatisfied with Milton, because in my opinion. that is ill said in prose which can be said more plainly. Not so in poetry; if it were, much of Pindar and Eschylus, and no little of Dante, would be censurable. Landor. Acknowledge that he whose poetry I am holding in my hand is free from every false ornament in his prose, unless a few bosses of latinity may be called so, and I am ready to admit the full claims of your favourite, South. Acknowledge that, heading all the forces of our language, he was the great antagonist of every great monster which infested our country; and he disdained to trim his lion-skin with lace. No other English writer has equalled Raleigh, Hooker, and Milton, in the loftier parts of their works. Southey. But Hooker and Milton, you allow, are sometimes pedantic. In Hooker there is nothing so elevated as there is in Raleigh. Landor. Neither he, however, nor any modern, nor any ancient, has attained to that Landor's Villa at Fiesole summit on which the sacred ark of Milton strikes and rests. Reflections, such as we indulged in on the borders of the Larius, come over me here again. Perhaps from the very sod where you are sitting, the poet in his youth sat looking at the Sabrina he was soon to celebrate. There is pleasure in the sight of a glebe which never has been broken; but it delights me particularly in those places where great men have been before. I do not mean warriors-for extremely few among the most remarkable of them will a considerate man call great-but poets and philosophers and philanthropists, the ornaments of society, the charmers of solitude, the warders of civilisation, the watchmen at the gate which Tyranny would batter down, and the healers of those wounds, which she left festering in the field. And now, to reduce this demon into its proper toad-shape again, and to lose sight of it, open your Paradise Lost. Southey. Shall we begin with it immediately? or shall we listen a little while to the woodlark? He seems to know what we are about; for there is a sweetness, a variety, and a gravity in his cadences, befitting the place and theme. Another time we might afford the whole hour to him. Landor. The woodlark, the nightingale, and the ringdove have made me idle for many, even when I had gone into the fields on purpose to gather fresh materials for composition. A little thing turns me from one idleness to another. More than once, when I have taken out my pencil to fix an idea on paper, the smell of the cedar, held by me unconsciously across the nostrils, has so absorbed the senses that what I was about to write down has vanished altogether and irrecoverably. FROM "PERICLES AND ASPASIA." We are losing, day by day, one friend or other. Artemidora of Ephesus was betrothed to Elpenor, and their nuptials, it was believed, were at hand. How gladly would Artemidora have survived Elpenor. I pitied her almost as much as if she had. I must ever love true lovers on the eve of separation. These indeed were little known to me until a short time before. We became friends when our fates had made us relatives. On these Eldon and Excombe To cook so gra "[(don) · Encombe! why do you to confess the with, Sib so silent? (Encombe) I played last evening, and played! Dr you your questo and you of you зай сат call it it playing to plander over-reach your friends? be unhappy happy. of 2 call it playing, cannot bi one a 2. The fingers of a game. nach farther than a murderers, and do Against the robber robbers more mischief. Murderer at once: is open, that contaminate or stab it. (Combe) Certainly I have it will teach you My dear father, if you could but the money (Elon, Jour next quarter, the beginning of cepit, is righ at hand. However, a spun against flank. (Mon) Tell me the courts of the doit (Encombe) two thrusan pounds. (Elton) Ins & what! though... pounds • Pands did you? pounds. 2 candible (Cacombe, too bear! shaling. Page of the MS. of Landor's "Imaginary Conversations" occasions there are always many verses, but not always so true in feeling and in fact as those which I shall now transcribe for you. "Artemidora! Gods invisible, While thou art lying faint along the couch, Have tied the sandal to thy veinèd feet, Faithful and fond her bosom heav'd once more, Her head fell back: one sob, one loud deep sob Swell'd through the darken'd chamber; 'twas not hers: Unwearied, undiverted in its course, Had plash'd the water up the farther strand. Historian The second romantic generation was marked by the rise of a school The of historians inferior only to the great classic group of Hume, Robertson, and Gibbon. In the full tide of monarchical reaction, William Mitford completed his History of Greece, a book eloquent and meritorious in its way, but to be superseded by the labours of Grote. Sharon Turner, a careful imitator of Gibbon, illustrated the Anglo-Saxon period of our chronicles, and the Scottish metaphysician, Sir James Mackintosh, towards the close of his life, occupied himself with the constitutional history of England. Of more importance was the broad and competent English history of Lingard, a Catholic priest at Ushaw, whose work, though bitterly attacked from the partisan point of view, has been proved to be in the main loyal and accurate. These excellent volumes deserve the praise which should be given in rhetorical times to histories of modest learning and research. It was the ambition of Southey, who was an admirable biographer, to excel in history also. In Brazil and in the Peninsular war he found excellent subjects, but his treatment was not brilliant enough to save his books from becoming obsolete. The second of these was, indeed, almost immediately superseded by Sir W. Napier's History of the War in the Peninsula, a masterpiece of military erudition. William Mitford (1744-1827), who belonged to an old Northumbrian family, was born in London on the 10th of February 1744. He was educated at Cheam School, and at Queen's College, Oxford. In 1761 he succeeded to a valuable estate in Hampshire, and on coming of age determined to devote himself entirely to history. He became, eventually, Verdurer of the New Forest, and was a |