return to England, with security from his creditors, in 1840. Disease of lungs and heart was now so far advanced that the fatal issue was only a question of time, but he continued to struggle on bravely and cheerfully for five years longer. In 1841 he was offered by Colburn the editorship of the New Monthly Magazine at a salary of £300 a year, a post which he filled for two years, when, a difference arising with the proprietor, he resigned the editorship, and in January 1844 started a new periodical of his own, Hood's Monthly Magazine, destined to be his last literary venture. Meantime in the Christmas number of Punch (1843) had appeared 'The Song of the Shirt ;' and in Hood's Magazine, during its brief career, there followed 'The Haunted House,' 'The Lay of the Labourer,' and 'The Bridge of Sighs,' proving that, as the darkness of his own prospects deepened, the sympathies with his kind deepened also, and quickened his finest genius. Only a few months after the starting of the magazine a notice to the subscribers had to tell that the health of the editor was rapidly failing. Towards the end of the year his friends used their interest with the Government, and in November Sir Robert Peel wrote announcing a pension to Mrs Hood on the Civil List of £100 a year. In the number of the magazine for February 1845 appeared Hood's last contribution, the touching lines, prophetic of his approaching end, beginning:

Farewell life-my senses swim,
And the world is growing dim,

and ending:

O'er the earth there comes a bloom,
Sunny light for sullen gloom,
Warm perfume for vapours cold-

I smell the rose above the mould!

After three more months of increasing pain and distress, Thomas Hood died at Devonshire Lodge, Finchley Road, on the 3rd of May 1845, and was buried in Kensal Green Cemetery. His devoted wife, broken in health with the long attendance on her husband, survived him only eighteen months.

His

Hood produced in twenty-four years an amount of prose and verse one-half of which at least the world might willingly let die. Of the other half, all the serious poetry is remarkable, and a small portion of first-rate excellence. Lyrics such as the 'Song of the Shirt,' the 'Bridge of Sighs, ' Eugene Aram,' the song beginning 'I remember, I remember, the house where I was born,' and the 'Ode to Melancholy' are of an assured immortality. humorous verse-and in the best of it, as in 'Miss Kilmansegg,' are often blended poetry, pathos, and even real tragic power-is of a kind that Hood absolutely created. Not only was he the most prolific and successful punster that ever used that form of wit, but he turned it to purposes of which no one had ever supposed it capable. It became in his hands the most natural and obvious vehicle for all his better gifts. The truth is, he brought

to it the transfiguring power of real imagination,
and, instead of its degrading whatever object it
touched, in his hands it ministered to the noblest
ends. Even in the 'Song of the Shirt,' when his
deepest sympathies were involved, he uses the
pun with almost magical effect, as where the poor
needlewoman, confined to her squalid garret when
all nature is beckoning her forth, exclaims :
While underneath the eaves

The brooding swallows cling,
As if to show me their sunny backs,
And twit me with the spring!

It was Hood's misfortune that the necessity of writing for bread compelled him to write constantly below his better genius. But he has left sufficient to found a durable fame as a writer of rare individuality, who, using a discredited method, made it delightful by the imagination of a true poet and the humanity of a genuine lover of his kind.

The Bridge of Sighs. One more Unfortunate, Weary of breath,

Rashly importunate,
Gone to her death!

Take her up tenderly,
Lift her with care;
Fashion'd so slenderly,
Young, and so fair!

Look at her garments
Clinging like cerements;
Whilst the wave constantly

Drips from her clothing;
Take her up instantly,
Loving, not loathing.-

Touch her not scornfully;
Think of her mournfully,
Gentle and humanly;
Not of the stains of her,
All that remains of her
Now is pure womanly.

Make no deep scrutiny
Into her mutiny
Rash and undutiful;
Past all dishonour,
Death has left on her
Only the beautiful.

Still, for all slips of hers,
One of Eve's family—
Wipe those poor lips of hers
Oozing so clammily.

Loop up her tresses
Escaped from the comb,
Her fair auburn tresses;
Whilst wonderment guesses
Where was her home?

Who was her father?
Who was her mother?
Had she a sister?
Had she a brother?

Or was there a dearer one

Still, and a nearer one
Yet, than all other?

Alas! for the rarity
Of Christian charity
Under the sun!
Oh! it was pitiful!
Near a whole city full,

Home she had none.

Sisterly, brotherly,
Fatherly, motherly
Feelings had changed:
Love, by harsh evidence,
Thrown from its eminence;
Even God's providence
Seeming estranged.

Where the lamps quiver
So far in the river,

With many a light

From window and casement,
From garret to basement,
She stood, with amazement,
Houseless by night.

The bleak wind of March
Made her tremble and shiver;
But not the dark arch,
Or the black flowing river:
Mad from life's history,
Glad to death's mystery
Swift to be hurl'd-
Any where, any where
Out of the world!

In she plunged boldly,
No matter how coldly
The rough river ran,—
Over the brink of it,
Picture it-think of it,
Dissolute Man!
Lave in it, drink of it,
Then, if you can!

Take her up tenderly,
Lift her with care;
Fashion'd so slenderly,
Young, and so fair!
Ere her limbs frigidly
Stiffen too rigidly,
Decently, kindly,—

Smooth, and compose them,
And her eyes, close them
Staring so blindly!

Dreadfully staring
Thro' muddy impurity,
As when with the daring

Last look of despairing
Fix'd on futurity.

Perishing gloomily,
Spurr'd by contumely,
Cold inhumanity,
Burning insanity,
Into her rest.—

Cross her hands humbly,
As if praying dumbly,
Over her breast!

Owning her weakness,

Her evil behaviour,

And leaving, with meekness, Her sins to her Saviour!

The Song of the Shirt.
With fingers weary and worn,
With eyelids heavy and red,

A woman sat, in unwomanly rags,
Plying her needle and thread—
Stitch stitch! stitch!

In poverty, hunger, and dirt,

And still with a voice of dolorous pitch She sang the 'Song of the Shirt.'

'Work! work! work!

While the cock is crowing aloof!
And work-work-work,

Till the stars shine through the roof!
It's Oh! to be a slave

Along with the barbarous Turk, Where woman has never a soul to save, If this is Christian work!

'Work-work-work

Till the brain begins to swim;
Work-work-work

Till the eyes are heavy and dim!
Seam, and gusset, and band,

Band, and gusset, and seam, Till over the buttons I fall asleep, And sew them on in a dream!

'Oh, Men, with Sisters dear!

Oh, men, with Mothers and Wives!
It is not linen you 're wearing out,
But human creatures' lives!
Stitch-stitch-stitch,

In poverty, hunger, and dirt,
Sewing at once, with a double thread,
A Shroud as well as a Shirt.
'But why do I talk of Death?
That Phantom of grisly bone,

I hardly fear its terrible shape,
It seems so like my own-
It seems so like my own,

Because of the fasts I keep ;

Oh, God! that bread should be so dear, And flesh and blood so cheap!

'Work-work-work!

My labour never flags;

And what are its wages? A bed of straw,
A crust of bread-and rags.

That shatter'd roof-and this naked floor-
A table-a broken chair-

And a wall so blank, my shadow I thank
For sometimes falling there!

'Work-work-work!
From weary chime to chime,
Work-work-work-

As prisoners work for crime !
Band, and gusset, and seam,
Seam, and gusset, and band,

Till the heart is sick, and the brain benumb'd,

As well as the weary hand.

'Work-work-work,

In the dull December light,

And work-work-work,

When the weather is warm and bright-
While underneath the eaves

The brooding swallows cling,
As if to show me their sunny backs,
And twit me with the spring.

'Oh! but to breathe the breath
Of the cowslip and primrose sweet-
With the sky above my head,
And the grass beneath my feet;
For only one short hour

To feel as I used to feel,
Before I knew the woes of want

Round her eyes her tresses fell,
Which were blackest none could tell,
But long lashes veil'd a light,
That had else been all too bright.

And her hat, with shady brim,
Made her tressy forehead dim ;—
Thus she stood amid the stooks,
Praising God with sweetest looks :-

Sure, I said, Heav'n did not mean,
Where I reap thou shouldst but glean,
Lay thy sheaf adown and come,
Share my harvest and my home.

I Remember, I Remember.

I remember, I remember,
The house where I was born,
The little window where the sun
Came peeping in at morn;
He never came a wink too soon,
Nor brought too long a day,
But now, I often wish the night
Had borne my breath away!

I remember, I remember,

The roses, red and white,
The violets, and the lily-cups,
Those flowers made of light!
The lilacs where the robin built,
And where my brother set

The laburnum on his birthday,—
The tree is living yet!

I remember, I remember,

Where I was used to swing,

And thought the air must rush as fresh To swallows on the wing;

My spirit flew in feathers then,

That is so heavy now,

And summer pools could hardly cool

The fever on my brow!

I remember, I remember,

The fir-trees dark and high;

I used to think their slender tops

Were close against the sky:

It was a childish ignorance,

But now 'tis little joy

To know I'm farther off from Heav'n

Than when I was a boy.

The best account of Hood's early life is to be found in his Literary Reminiscences, published in the first series of Hood's Own. The Memoir by his son and daughter (2 vols. 1860) is the chief source of information about his later life, but is a poor and unsatisfactory book. In 1885 Mr Alexander Elliot, in Hood in Scotland, collected some very interesting details of Hood's early residence in Dundee, and of a second visit of a few weeks to Dundee not long before his death. A complete edition of Hood's works, both prose and poetry, was issued by Hood's son and daughter, in seven volumes, in 1862. The only portion of his writings not included was that contained in the Comic Annuals, afterwards reissued as Hood's Own-First and Second Series. Later, in 1869, these latter portions, including the original illustrations, were included in an edition in ten volumes. An edition of Hood's serious poems, and a selection from his humorous, with a prefatory Memoir by the present writer, was published by Messrs Macmillan in their 'Eversley' series in 1897. The present article is revised from that originally written for Chambers's Encyclopædia in 1890.

ALFRED AINGER.

Walter Savage Landor was born at Warwick, 30th January 1775, the eldest son of an ex-physician, of a good old Staffordshire family. He was brought up at Warwick, at Ipsley Court, and at Tachbrook. At ten he was sent to Rugby, but at sixteen was removed over a Latin quantity; and from Trinity College, Oxford, which he entered in 1793, the 'mad Jacobin' was rusticated next year. He then broke 'for ever' with his father, but, becoming reconciled, retired to South Wales on an allowance of £150 a year, having previously published Poems (1795). At Swansea he met the Hon. Rose Aylmer (1779-1800), and she it was who lent him Clara Reeve's Progress of Romance, from one of whose stories he took the framework of Gebir. This epic, published in 1798, and greatly improved in 1803, shows the influence of Milton and Pindar. Its success was small, but Landor through it won the lifelong friendship of Southey, the one friend he never quarrelled with. Of the two or three small volumes of verse which he produced about this time the most noticeable is Simonidea (1806), which was long believed to have been utterly lost until a copy was discovered in 1893. On the death of his father in 1805 he set up at Bath, and lived beyond even his now large income. In 1808, with a couple of Irishmen, he sailed for Spain to assist in freeing it from Bonaparte. Next year he purchased Llanthony Abbey, Monmouthshire, but quarrelled soon with neighbours and tenants alike, and sank upwards of £70,000 in five years. In 1811 he married the penniless daughter of a Banbury banker, Julia Thuillier. It was an illassorted match, entered into mainly because of her 'woonderfully beautiful goolden hair;' in 1814 he left her in Jersey, and crossed to France. Rejoined by her next year at Tours, he went on to Italy, where he remained at Como, Pisa, Florence, and Fiesole till 1835, with the exception of one short visit to England. His great tragedy, Count Julian, had appeared in 1812; and to this period belongs his best-known work, the Imaginary Conversations (5 vols. 1824-29), which Longmans and others rejected. A second quarrel with his wife in 1835 led to his leaving her and his four much-loved children; again he settled at Bath till 1858. During these years he wrote the Examination of Shakespeare (1834), Pericles and Aspasia (1836), Pentameron (1837), Hellenics (1847), and a collection of Latin poems, Poemata et Inscriptiones (1847). In 1858 an unhappy scandal (see his Dry Sticks Fagoted) involved him in an action for libel, and again drove him to Italy; at Florence he lived till his death, 17th September 1864. In the spring of that year he had received a visit from Mr Swinburne, and to the last he went on busily composing in verse and prose. His last volume, Heroic Idylls, had been published in 1863. His lion-like aspect, his imperious will, and his massive intelligence made Landor one of the most original figures. Dickens drew one side of him as 'Mr Boythorn' in Bleak House.

Landor is one of the acknowledged masters of English prose. His style, if lacking in easy grace and flexibility, is a model of dignity and chastened splendour, and in the works of few English writers could one find such an abundance of lofty and stately passages as in the trilogy of the Imaginary Conversations, the Pericles and Aspasia, and the Pentameron. These three works, it is noteworthy, are all written in dialogue, epistolary or conversational; and indeed Landor put nearly all his rememberable prose into this form. The Imaginary Conversations, a monumental achievement, comprises almost a hundred and fifty dialogues put into the mouths mostly of Greek and Roman heroes, modern European statesmen and men of letters, from Achilles and Esop down to

Napoleon, Southey, Alfieri, and Landor himself. Their dramatic quality is respectable, and sometimes even broadly effective, especially where the author, as in the dialogues between Bossuet and the Duchess de Fontanges and Peter the Great and his son, becomes rather savagely satiric. But what gives them their lasting value and attraction is the wealth of high thought and keen criticism which they enshrine in a singularly noble style. Landor, as his little volume of Poemata attests, was a most accomplished classical scholar; and although it was as a Latinist that he excelled, his appreciation of the Hellenic art and spirit justifies Mr Swinburne's poetic sentence on him :

And through the trumpet of a child of Rome
Rang the pure music of the flutes of Greece.

The classic quality is conspicuous in all his verse, from the rather ponderous Gebir to the statuesque perfection of the Hellenics, and one recognises it

in the simplicity and intensity of many of his unforgettable brief lyrics and epigrams, like the lines on Rose Aylmer and the quatrain beginning, 'I strove with none, for none was worth my strife.' Yet Mr Sidney Colvin's definition of Landor as 'a classic writing in a romantic age' is not to be accepted without qualification. The classic calm of his pose does not avail to hide in him the rebellious individualism which is a main and essential characteristic of the romantic movement and spirit. He is really as much an insurgent in temper as Shelley or Byron; the mutinous pugnacity of his life is mirrored in the audacious and extravagant paradox too often displayed in his works. The writer who belittled Plato and Napoleon and extolled Alfieri as the greatest man of his time had certainly not the true classic serenity which sees life steadily and sees it whole. He glorified Milton (It may be doubted if the Creator ever created one altogether so great'), found Spenser tedious, and by no means fully sympathised with Wordsworth or his romantic contemporaries. He was no sustained or systematic thinker; his thoughts are essentially opinions and prejudices, and hence it comes that the reader often wearies of him ere he ceases to admire. Admiration, indeed, will never be wanting to Landor so long as nobility of style and of nature keeps its power to charm. Browning said he owed more to him than to any contemporary.

Many of Landor's detached fragments, both in prose and verse, are current: 'Ambition is but avarice on stilts and masked;' 'Religion is the elder sister of philosophy;' 'It is a kindness to lead the sober, a duty to lead the drunk;' 'Nicknames and whippings, when they are once laid on, no one has discovered how to take off;' 'Study is the bane of boyhood, the aliment of youth, the indulgence of manhood, and the restorative of old age.' But no saying of his is perhaps oftener quoted than the picturesque and rather mixedly metaphorical remark about his own standing as an author: 'I shall dine late, but the dining-room will be well lighted, the guests few and select; I neither am nor ever shall be popular.'

Rose Aylmer.

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.

Years After.

'Do you remember me? or are you proud?' Lightly advancing thro' her star-trimm'd crowd, Ianthe said, and look'd into my eyes. 'A yes, a yes to both: for memory Where you but once have been must ever be,

And at your voice Pride from his throne must rise.'

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;

I, that the myrtle and the bay
Shoot fresh on ruin'd walls.

I wonder not that youth remains

With you, wherever else she flies:
Where could she find such fair domains,

Where bask beneath such sunny eyes?

Your pleasures spring like daisies in the grass,
Cut down and up again as blithe as ever;
From you, Ianthe, little troubles pass

Like little ripples in a sunny river.
Years, many parti-colour'd years,
Some have crept on, and some have flown,
Since first before me fell those tears
I never could see fall alone.
Years, not so many, are to come,

Years not so varied, when from you
One more will fall: when, carried home,
I see it not, nor hear Adieu.
Well I remember how you smiled

To see me write your name upon
The soft sea-sand,—'O! what a child!
You think you're writing upon stone!'
I have since written what no tide
Shall ever wash away, what men
Unborn shall read o'er ocean wide
And find Ianthe's name again.
To Southey.
Indweller of a peaceful vale,
Ravaged erewhile by white-hair'd Dane;
Rare architect of many a wondrous tale,
Which, till Helvellyn's head lie prostrate, shall remain !
From Arno's side I hear thy Derwent flow,
And see methinks the lake below
Reflect thy graceful progeny, more fair
And radiant than the purest waters are,
Even when gurgling in their joy among
The bright and blessed throng,
Whom on her arm recline

The beauteous Proserpine
With tenderest regretful gaze,

Thinking of Enna's yellow field, surveys.

Alas! that snows are shed

Upon thy laurel'd head,

Hurtled by many cares and many wrongs!
Malignity lets none

Approach the Delphic throne;