tles, and mounted astride upon what is here termed 'the high ass'—all is so totally dissimilar to any thing one has seen elsewhere, that one could almost fancy one's self carried back to the days of the great Saladin or Tagloon.

So.

"The present ruler of Egypt is a fine, healthy old man, likely to live a dozen years longer, and, for the sake of the country, it is to be hoped he may do He is now much occupied with the marriage of his youngest daughter with Kiamil Pasha, which is to take place next month, when there will be extraordinary rejoicings in Cairo. He has given her £280,000 worth of diamonds, and also the Defterdar's Palace (the house where Kleber was assassinated), newly furnished, in the most sumptuous manner, partly in the Oriental, partly in the European style. I never saw mirrors of such magnitude and beauty as those in the princess's salaamlik. As the waters of the Nile have not yet subsided sufficiently to admit of a visit to the great pyramids of Ghizeh with any comfort, I have postponed going there until our return from the upper country, when, in descending the river, we shall take all the pyramids in detail, ending by the finest of them all, that of Cheops. And now, dear Lady Blessington, will you not exclaim at the egotism of this letter? I blush for myself when I perceive that I have filled three pages without telling you of the deep concern with which we read in the papers at Malta of the painful accident Count D'Orsay had met with. I trust in Heaven that the injury has only been temporary, and I assure you that it would afford the greatest satisfaction both to Mr. Band to myself to hear that the wounded hand is restored to its healthy state.

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Pray let me have the happiness of hearing that you are all as well as I wish you to be, and if you will write to me on the receipt of this, and direct your letter to J. B, Esq., care of Messrs. Briggs, Alexandria, Egypt, it will be forwarded to me here, and I shall have the pleasure of receiving news from Gore House on my return from the head-quarters of hieroglyphics. I dined yesterday at our consul general's, Colonel Barnett, where we met the French consul general, Monsieur Barrot (brother of Odillon Barrot), and his pretty English wife. There had been, on the previous day, a presentation to the Pasha of the Grand Cross of the Legion of Honor, which Louis Philippe sent out to him, in acknowledgment of the bon accueil which the Duc de Montpensier received in this country. Queen Victoria has also been sending her picture, set in diamonds, to Mohammed Ali; and, after the formal presentation of it, his highness gave a dinner to all the Englishmen in Cairo. This day he has done the same thing by the French sojourning here.

"Adieu, my dear Lady Blessington. Mr. B unites with me in a thousand kind regards to you and to your charming nieces, not forgetting l'artist par excellence, Count D'Orsay, and I remain, ever and affectionately yours, "I. F. ROMER

CHAPTER V.

W. S. LANDOR, ESQ.

In a letter of Mr. Landor to Lady Blessington in 1837, the following brief notice of his career was given by him:

"Walter Landor, of Ipsley Court, in the county of Warwick, married first, Maria, only daughter and heiress of J. Wright, Esq., by whom he had an only daughter, married to her cousin, Humphrey Arden, Esq., of Longcroft, in Staffordshire; secondly, Elizabeth, eldest daughter and co-heiress of Charles Savage, of Tachebrooke, who brought about eighty thousand pounds into the family. The eldest child of this marriage, Walter Savage Landor, was born January 30th, 1775. He was educated at Rugby his private tutor was Dr. Heath, of St. Paul's. When he had reached the head of the school, he was too young for college, and was placed under the private tuition of Mr. Langley, of Ashbourne. After a year, he was entered at Trinity College, Oxford, where the learned Benwell was his private tutor.* At the peace of Amiens he went to France, but returned at the end of the year."

6

"In 1808, on the first insurrection in Spain, in June, he joined the Viceroy of Gallicia, Blake. The Madrid Gazette' of August mentions a gift from him of twenty thousand reals. On the extinction of the Constitution, he returned to Don P. Caval

It has been stated that Landor was rusticated at college for the boyish freak of firing a gun in the quadrangle of his college, and that, after this occurrence, he never returned to take a degree.' He repaired to London on leaving college, and remained there for some time, under the care of General Powell, his godfather, who pressed him to enter the army. Having declined that proposition, his father, desiring to make him a lawyer, offered him £400 a year if he would reside in the Temple and study the law, but only a small pittance, of about £150 a year, in the event of a refusal. He proceeded to South Wales, and resided in great seclusion for some time at Swansea.-R. R. M.

1 Men of the Time, p. 273, London, 1853.

los the tokens of royal approbation in no very measured terms.* In 1811 he married Julia, daughter of J. Thuillier de Malaperte, descendant and representative of J. Thuillier de Malaperte, Baron de Nieuveville, first gentleman of the bed-chamber to Charles the Eighth. He was residing at Tours, when, after the battle of Waterloo, many other Englishmen, to the number of four thousand, went away. He wrote to Carnot that he had no confidence in the moderation or honor of the emperor, but resolved to stay, because he considered the danger to be greater in the midst of a broken army. A week afterward, when this wretch occupied Tours, his house was the only one without a billet. In the autumn of that year he retired to Italy. For seven or eight years he occupied the Palazzo Medici in Florence, and then bought the celebrated villa of Count Gherardesea, at Fiesole, with its gardens, and two farms, immediately under the ancient villa of Lorenzo de Medici. His visits to England have been few and short.'

For several years past Mr. Landor has resided in Bath; he has been married, and has three children; his lady is still living, though not in the vicinity of Bath. Possessing a good fortune, Mr. Landor has retained a small portion of it, just sufficient to live on, for his own wants. The remainder has been allotted

to his family.

The property inherited by Landor was very considerable, but so early as 1806 he had sold a very large portion of it in Staffordshire and Warwickshire, which his ancestors had possessed for nearly seven hundred years. He then bought two estates in Monmouthshire, on which he expended several thousand pounds; on the building of a house alone, £8000. Some tenants of his, named Betham, having abandoned their farms and fled to the Crimea, being in his debt to the amount of £3000, he ceased to feel any interest in the place he had intended to

* He not only received the thanks of the Supreme Junta, but, soon after his return to England, the rank of colonel. He sent back the documents with his commission to Don Pedro Cavallos on the subversion of the Constitution by Ferdinand. He was "willing," he said, "to aid a people in the assertion of its liberties against the antagonist of Europe, but could have nothing to do with a perjurer and traitor."-See "Men of the Time."

have permanently settled in, and, on the authority I have already referred to," he ordered his house to be demolished."

When a large portion of the prose literature of our times that has acquired celebrity shall have lost its renown, or be remembered merely on account of an ephemeral celebrity, the "Imaginary Conversations" of Walter Savage Landor will live in honor, and flourish far and wide. There are intellectual gifts and graces of no ordinary kind exhibited in his prose productions: wonderful acquirements, scholarship of a genuine kind-massiveness of mind-keenness and subtilty of perception-earnestness and enthusiasm-geniality of disposition-tenderness of heart, and a noble love of every thing in nature good and beautiful. The poetry of Mr. Landor, in all probability, is not destined to the same immortality, and possibly few critics will imagine that any considerable portion of it is deserving even of passing commendation at the hands of his contemporaries.

In Landor's disposition there is a singular combination of opposite qualities, and in his mental powers and abilities a mixture no less strange of force and energy, with a childish simplicity, deep erudition, an intimate acquaintance with ancient and modern history and literature, with strong prejudices, partialities, and dislikes, by which his opinions are considerably affected, often even on the gravest subjects; great tenderness of heart is found allied with heat and excitability of temper, while critical acumen of no ordinary kind is found associated with credulity, and a disposition to believe things that to many appear marvelous, and to hesitate to give credence to those things which others think it important to receive with implicit trust.

The marked feature in the principal prose writings of Landor is that of originality of mind and a daring recklessness of all consequence in the expression of opinions he believes to be just and true. Take up any one of the "Imaginary Conversations," and you feel yourself in communion with the mind of an author of powerful intellect-in the presence of a great original thinker-a fervent lover of truth and goodness-a fierce hater of every thing mean and base-of all shams, and of all kinds of scoundrelism, however grandly disguised or dignified with great

names- —a man of vast and varied erudition, endowed with that peculiar power of high dramatic genius which can transport the imagination to distant climes and ages, create an ideal presence of celebrities of antiquity, whom he brings before his readers in a life-like manner, looking, speaking, acting, and playing their great parts in life's drama over again, as they looked, and spoke. and acted, or pretended to be, a thousand or two thousand years ago.

Lady Blessington thus speaks in one of her letters of her first meeting with Walter Savage Landor in May, 1825, at Florence:

"I had learned from his works to form a high opinion of the man as well as the author. But I was not prepared to find in him the courtly, polished gentleman of high breeding, of manners, deportment, and demeanor that one might expect to meet with in one who had passed the greater portion of his life in courts. There is no affectation of politeness, no finikin affability in his urbanity, no far-fetched complimentary hyperbolical strain of eulogy in the agrèmens of his conversation with women, and the pleasing things he says to them whom he cares to please."

Of all the literary men with whom Lady Blessington came in contact and they certainly were not few or undistinguishedat home and abroad, the person whom she looked on with most respect, honor, and affectionate regard, was Walter Savage Landor.

LETTERS FROM LADY BLESSINGTON TO W. S. LANDOR, ESQ. "74 Rue Bourbon, Quartier St. Germain, Paris, February, 1829. "MY DEAR MR. LANDOR,-I can no longer allow you to think that I am ungrateful for your letter of last month, which my silence might imply; but when I tell you that for the last two months I have only twice attempted to use my pen, and both times was compelled to abandon it, you will acquit me of neglect or negligence, neither of which, toward those whom I esteem and value as highly as do you, are among the catalogue of my faults. The change of climate, operating on a constitution none of the strongest, and an unusually severe winter to me, who for some years have only seen Italian ones, has brought on a severe attack of rheumatism in the head, that has not only precluded the possibility of writing, but nearly of reading also, so that my winter has been indeed cheerless. Among the partial gleams of sunshine