used, ignorant and indifferent who and what you | richest men on the Continent: he is supposed to were? Just so do all the rest, whether to princes spend about a tenth of his income: and the sale or private men, and expect to be rewarded in the same manner and proportion. Mr. Landor is prejudiced against the Tuscans in general, the Florentines in particular. Landor. I hope and believe I am not. I have found at the distance of twenty miles from Florence some of the best people I have ever yet conversed with. The country folks are frank, hospitable, courteous, laborious, disinterested, and eager to assist one another. I have sat among them by the hour, almost the only company in the nation I could ever endure half so long; and, at the first time of seeing me, the whole family has told me its most intimate concerns. The mother has enlarged on the virtues and excused the faults of her husband; and the daughter has asked me whether I was married; and whether I liked it; as she intended to take a husband in the beginning of the carnival. Stefano.. I must know him. . and had bought the bed and hemmed the sheets and folded and packed up the corredo; telling me that there is nothing in the world so pleasant as the beginning of the carnival . . such fun! "Matta!" cries the mother, and smiles at me. Florentine Visiter. O gentlemen, there are girls in Florence that will say a great deal more than that to you in half the time: and I promise you we have as worthy men among us (if you do not want to eat with 'em or ask a favour of 'em) as any upon earth. Selfishness and insincerity are thrown out against us: the worse indeed, in public or in private, are sure to laugh at his simplicity from whom they receive a benefit; but the better (I hope) are disposed to excuse it. English Visiter. You seem rather shy about the main question, and let the old fact stand. Ferdinand was parsimonious, was he not? Landor. Parsimony is the vice of the country. The Italians were always, far exceeding all other nations, parsimonious and avaricious; the Tuscans beyond all other Italians; the Florentines beyond all other Tuscans. So scandalous an example of it as occurred a few months ago, is, I hope and believe, unparalleled. Prince Corsini married a woman of immense fortune, by whom he has a family of eight children. He took a mistress: the wife languished and died. He gave orders that all her clothes should be sold by auction in his palace; old gowns, old petticoats, old shifts, old shoes, old gloves; even articles at the value of one penny, such as excited the derision of some, the blushes of others, the horror of not a few. There had been no quarrel between the wife and husband. She was beautiful, engaging, sweettempered, compliant, domestic. She sank from the world which her virtues had adorned, and had been seven days in her grave, when prostitutes paraded the street before her palace, wearing those dresses in which the most exemplary of mothers had given the last lessons of morality to her daughters. The prince is one of the produced fourteen pounds. This example is not necessary for the defence of Ferdinand. He had experienced the vicissitudes of fortune; he had twice been forced from his throne; he had a family to provide for; yet the taxes were equable and moderate; and property and its comforts, in no portion of the globe, are so well distributed and so general as in Tuscany. He did not throw away his money among idlers and sycophants in court or college. English Visiter. No, no! Quiet and as much in the shade as he could be, he was not to be tickled or intoxicated by a sonnet or a sermon. When he observed them on the surface, he swam down the stream (I hear) and let them founder. Landor. Generosity does not rest upon the purse; nor is the sovran most worthy of esteem for liberality who gives most among those about him. Believe me, my friends, novel and strange and uncomfortable as it may appear to you, the generosity of a prince is parsimony. Ferdinand had more pleasure at being praised by villagers in their carts, pressing down their figs and turning their peaches, than by professors in the chair or canonics in the pulpit. He never went out of his way to meet it: it met him everywhere. English Visiter. That must be an admirable prince whom none of your poets thinks it a good speculation either to praise or libel. Florentine Visiter. Such in his latter days was the felicity of Ferdinand; and those who now extol him, turn their eyes another way, and watch the countenance of the son. Landor. May he prove his good sense and rectitude, by paying none for praises! As for tears, if they are due, let them flow on. Werel in his place, I would not wipe them away, nor give a pinch of snuff to increase them. English Visiter. While you are in this humour, and are possessed by the right feeling in all its warmth and fulness, I wish you would compose an elegy on the occasion; as our critics are of opinion that you are sadly deficient in the true pathetic. Landor. It would ill become me to hold an argument against men of such genius and judg. ment as our critics; and it would fare badly with me if I could prove them to be mistaken. I might attempt an elegy, were it possible that persons in the same station as Ferdinand's could be improved or moved by it. But to affect an immoderate grief, as poets do, on the death of princes, is the worst of hypocrisy: it being certain that there can be little or no sympathy between them, whatever respect may be borne by those who are swayed by imagination toward the regal character. I do not assert that my grief remains for days, or even hours, together, violent or unremitted, although it has done so once or twice: but seldom have I thought of a lost friend or unfortunate companion, be it at the distance of thirty or of forty years, that the thought is not as intense and painful, and of as long a visitation, as it was at first. Even those with whom I have not lived, and whom indeed I have never seen, affect me by sympathy, as though I had known them intimately, and I hold with them in my walks many imaginary conversations. Since the time of Chaucer there have been only two poets who at all resemble him; and these two are widely dissimilar one from the other, Burns and Keats. The accuracy and truth with which Chaucer has described the manners of common life, with the fore-ground and back-ground, are also to be found in Burns, who delights in broader strokes of external nature, but equally appropriate. He has parts of genius which Chaucer has not in the same degree; the animated and pathetic. Keats, in his Enulymion, is richer in imagery than either : and there are passages in which no poet has arrived at the same excellence on the same ground. Time alone was wanting to complete a poet, who already far surpassed all his contemporaries in this country, in the poet's most noble attributes. If anything could engage me to visit Rome, to endure the sight of her scarred and awful ruins, telling their stories on the ground in the midst of bell-ringers and pantomimes; if I could let charnel-houses and operahouses, consuls and popes, tribunes and cardinals, senatorial orators and preaching friars, clash in my mind; it would be that I might afterward spend an hour in solitude, where the pyramid of Cestius stands against the wall, and points to the humbler tombs of Keats and Shelley. Nothing so attracts my heart as ruins in deserts, or so repels it as ruins in the circle of fashion. What is so shocking as the hard verity of Death swept by the rustling masquerade of Life! And does not Mortality of herself teach us how little we are, without placing us amid the trivialities of patchwork pomp, where Virgil led the Gods to found an empire, where Cicero saved and Cæsar shook the world! Florentine Visiter. I wish, sir, you would favour us with a Latin inscription for the tombs of the gentlemen whose names you mentioned, since the pathetic is not requisite in that species of composition. Landor. Although I have written at various times a great number of such inscriptions, as parts of literature, yet I think nothing is so absurd if you only inscribe them on a tomb. Why should extremely few persons, the least capable perhaps of sympathy, be invited to sympathise, while thousands are excluded from it by the iron grate of a dead language? Those who read a Latin inscription are the most likely to know already the character of the defunct, and no new feelings are to be excited in them: but the language of the country tells the ignorant who he was that lies under the turf before them; and, if he was a stranger, it naturalises him among them; it gives him friends and relations; it brings to him and detains about him some who may imitate, many who will lament him. We have no right to deprive anyone of a tender sentiment, by talking in an unknown tongue to him, when his heart would listen and answer to his own: we have no right to turn a chapel into a library, locking it with a key which the lawful proprietors can not turn. Italian Visiter. It is rarely we find an epitaph in which the thought, if novel, is not superficial. Where there is only one, it should be striking or affecting. Landor. But it is an error to imagine that every thought must be either. Truth, in these documents and appeals, should oftener be remarkable for simplicity than force. It sinks deeplier into the mind by insinuating than by striking, and is more acceptable for grace than for novelty. English Visiter. Yet you yourself in these compositions, as in the rest, are more valued for originality. Landor. My valuers in general know not exactly what it is they value me for, and often take for originality what they have heard, and perhaps have said, with some slight difference. I have written things which others have written before, not indeed in the same words precisely, and therefore not affecting the reader in the same manner; and these things I should certainly have conceived, whether they had or had not. It is quite impossible that any two men, of intellect and imagination, should reason long on the same subject, and never encounter any similar thought, any similar image. In one the thought will be more complete, the image more compact, more proportionate, more animated. The contrary would be as incredible as that two birds, close to each other in the same field, and striking their beaks and claws into the same turf for nutriment, should not hit upon the same grains and animalcules. English Visiter. Your enemies, who often call you strange and perverse, never call you superficial. Landor. They know not and heed not what they say. Never have I done anything designedly to attract the public notice, which is ordinarily attracted not by the slow operation of silent power, but by a rapid and incessant display of peculiarities and freaks in the most public paths of literature. But my groundwork, in common with that which brings the crowd about it, must of necessity be superficial. In the matter laid on the superficies, and in the manner of laying it, is all the difference. It is as intolerable to keep reading over perpetual sharpnesses as it is to keep walking over them. What is ample and capacious has room enough for elevation, not what is circumscribed and contracted. What we admire in a park is inadmissible in a cabbagegarden. Taylor the Platonist had resolved on sacrificing a bull to Jupiter: foolish enough : more foolish to select for the place of sacrifice a little back-parlour-floor. The bull whisked his tail in the worshipper's face, inculcating the im mediate necessity of a fresh ablution, and burst incurable ignominy it inflicted by its recoil on away through the window. the executioner. In composition no height is attainable without English Visiter. Such people as Gifford are to many preliminary steps along much lower ground. | be acquitted: for how could they feel his poetry That which appears, and really is, plain, humble, or estimate his virtues? Gifford is the Harriet and (if you please) superficial, in my writings, Wilson of our literary world; the witherer of may induce other men to think deeply. Whether young names. With the exception of Matthias they are read in the present age or in the next, he is the dullest, as Byron is the sharpest, of our occupies no more my speculation than whether it satirists. be this morning or this afternoon. Landor. I have no recollection of anything English Visiter. Are you certain that in their written by the couple you mentioned with Byron ; inferences they are all quite sound? Landor. Indeed I do not know perfectly that they are but they will give such exercise in discussing them as always tends to make other men's healthier: for questions of religion, on the points that now stick uppermost, are avoided by me, because they produce the contrary effect, in the fostering of scorn and malice. English Visiter. We are in the full enjoyment of single blessedness when we espouse no party and no church. Among few reasoners, living and deceased, you set us the example of abstaining from controversies; the example of giving truth for nothing, and of valuing it above all price. Shelley and Keats were neither less ingenuous nor less averse to disputation. Landor. It was not my fortune (shall I call it good or bad now they are dead?) to know those young men who, within so short a space of time, have added two more immortal names to the cemeteries of Rome. Upon one of them I have written what by no means satisfies me. English Visiter. Pray let me hear it, if you retain it in your memory. Landor. I rarely do retain anything of my own and probably you will never find a man who has heard me repeat a line. But here it is: you may read it yourself. English Visiter. Fair and free soul of poesy, O Keats! O how my temples throb, my heart-blood beats, Thy bosom, pierced by Envy, drops to rest, With Spenser's quiet, Chaucer's livelier ghost, Shall say, without thee half our loves were lost. Here indeed is little of the pathetic. You must rather have been thinking on the depravity of those who exerted their popularity to depress him, heedless that it precipitated him to the tomb. Landor. If I bore malice toward any man I should wish him to write against me: but poor Keats, sinking under the blow, perceived not the but of him and of his sharpness we think alike. He has not exerted all his force, or he has not experienced all his felicity, on me. Rather than the world should have been a loser in this part of his poetry, I would have corrected and enlarged for him what he composed about me, and I would have furnished him with fresh materials. I only wish I could have diverted his pen from Southey. [ While he wrote or spoke against me alone, I said nothing of him in print or conversation: but the taciturnity of pride gave way immediately to my zeal in defence of my friend. What I write is not written on slate: and no finger, not of Time himself, who dips it in the clouds of years, can efface it. To condemn what is evil and to commend what is good is consistent. To soften an asperity, to speak all the good we can after worse than we wish, is that, and more. If I must understand the meaning of consistency as many do, I wish I may be inconsistent with all my enemies. There are many hearts which have risen higher and sunk lower at his tales, and yet have been shocked and sorrowed at his untimely death a great deal less than mine has been. Honour and glory to him for the extensive good he did! peace and forgiveness for the partial evil! English Visiter. Good resolutions, like good wine, are the better the longer they are kept. Byron was irritable and selfish, restless and insincere but what shall we say of his old enemies across the Border, descending on Keats as he entered the field, and bringing down the loyal militia and supplementary sharp-shooters of the Edinburgh press, until he had surrendered his pen and breathed his last? Landor. Let us say that they have done, and hope that they will yet do, better things. They | might, like the beneficent deity of old mythology, have fixed a new Delos, a Delos among the Cyclades of poetry. Fame often rests at first upon something accidental; and often too is swept away, or for a time removed: but neither genius nor glory is conferred at once; nor do they glimmer and fall, like drops in a grotto, at a shout. Their foundations in the beginning may be scooped away by the slow machinery of malicious labour; but after a season they increase with every surge that comes against them, and harden at every tempest to which they are exposed. English Visiter. But certainly there are blemishes in Keats, which strike the most incurious and inobservant beholder. Quò me Bacche rapis? Landor. If so, why expose them? why triumph I do not know whether I should have cried out over them? In Keats, I acknowledge, there are very anxiously many wild thoughts, and there are expressions which even outstrip them in extravagance: but in none of our poets, with the sole exception of Shakspeare, do we find so many phrases so happy in their boldness. English Visiter. There is a more vivid spirit, more genuine poetry, in him than in any of his contemporaries; in whom it has rarely its full swing; but the chords (excepting in Burns and Moore) are flattened, as it were, by leaves or feathers on them. The Connection' has given you also some elbowings and shovings. Landor. And how much more reasonably than they were given to such gentle creatures as Keats! He, like many other authors, young and aged, traversed in criticism both marsh and crag, to fill his bosom with every bitter and every thorny plant, that might pierce, blister, or inquiet it. I never look for them nor see them. The whole world might write against me, and leave me ignorant of it to the day of my death. A friend who announces to me such things, has performed the last act of his friendship. It is no more pardonable, than to lift up the gnat-net over my bed, on pretext of showing me there are gnats in the room. If I owed a man a grudge, I would get him to write against me: but if anybody owed me one, he would come and tell me of it. English Visiter. You appear more interested about this youth than about Burns, whom I have known you extol to the skies. Landor. I do not recollect what I wrote on Burns, for I seldom keep a copy of anything, but I know that I wrote it many years after his decease, which was hardly less deplorable than Keats's. One would imagine that those who, for the honour of our country, ought to have guarded and watched over this prodigy of genius, had considered only how they could soonest despatch him from the earth. They gave him a disreputable and sordid place, exactly of the kind in which he would indulge his only bad propensity. English Visiter. And I now remember that you allude to this propensity, not without an acknowledgment that you yourself would have joined him in its excess. Landor. How so? If you can recollect it, the critics will thank you for it. English Visiter. These, I think, are the verses. Had we two met, blithe-hearted Burns, Inquisitive low whispering cares Had found no room in either pate, Landor. My Bacchus is, I protest, as innocent as Cowley's mistress: but, with a man like Burns, English Visiter. The Scotch, never delicate or dexterous in ridicule, bantered in their coarse manner the poetry of Keats. It is their practice, and a practice not confined to them, to hinder popularity in its first ascent; and, when they can not hinder it, to attend upon it obsequiously and overload it with incense. From their stiffness and awkwardness they do not appear at first sight an inconstant people; yet none is less ashamed of committing the most open and scandalous inconstancy. A celebrated author, whose name will survive many centuries, wrote in favour of the Princess of Wales while the old king was living, against her when she had lost her protector. He flattered her husband, who had all the vices of all the Neros, without one virtue or semblance of virtue; who abandoned two contemporary wives, every mistress, every relative, every friend, and every supporter. Landor. Can it be? Excuse my question: you know my utter ignorance of parties in the literary circles, and how little I am disposed to believe what they assert one of another. English Visiter. The truth of this is notorious. The same writer composed and sang a triumphal song on the death of a minister whom in his lifetime he had flattered, and who was just in his coffin when the Minstrel sang "The fox is run to earth;" not among a few friends, but in the presence of many who neither loved nor esteemed, neither applauded nor countenanced him. Constable of Edinburgh heard him, and related the fact to Curran, who expressed his incredulity with great vehemence, and his abhorrence with greater than his incredulity. Landor. I believe there has rarely been a less energetic or less consistent statesman than Mr. Fox but he was friendly and affectionate; he was When I heard of his a gentleman and a scholar. decease, and how he had been abandoned at Chiswick by his colleagues in the ministry, one of whom he had raised to notice and distinction, I grieved that such indignity should have befallen him, even in the midst of the recollection that honester men had experienced as unworthy and as ungrateful friends. I detested his abandonment of right principles in a coalition with a minister he had just before denounced; and I deplored his habit of gaming; a vice which brings after it more misery than any other, and perhaps than all united; and which misery falls on wives, mothers, and children, who never shared in the indulgence of that selfish passion. In a parliamentary leader it is the most pernicious; because it alienates from him the most respectable and the most efficient supporters, and deprives a good cause of good men. For this reason, and indeed on this ground alone, I wrote a Latin epitaph, not in honour to him, but certainly not to gratify any z 2 resentment, which was very far from me; nor with | And yet life, which he would throw forward so unany desire to be countenanced by the wealthier of guardedly, is somewhat more with him than with the aristocracy, which was equally so; and least others: it is full of hopes and aspirations, it is of all to ingratiate myself with the most profligate teeming with warm feelings, it is rich and overrun prince that ever was tolerated by the English with its own native simple enjoyments. In him people; a wretch impure as Nero, and heartless everything that ever gave pleasure, gives it still, as Caligula. with the same freshness, the same exuberance, the same earnestness to communicate and share it." Tyrants and usurpers, or those who would become so, are the only persons whose death should be the subject of rejoicing over wine; and it is braver and more generous to compass it than to sing it. Fox too had sung over wine; perhaps in that very room where he was lying in his shroud; but never did he exult in the death of an adversary, or look through his brimming glass at another's tears. He was not always a patriotic or conscientious statesman, nor very strenuous at any time against corruptions and abuses but many were then lamenting him; all who had ever known him personally. For in private life he was so amiable, that his political vices seemed to them but weaknesses, and oftentimes even as deep-laid schemes for some beneficent system and he spoke with such warmth and confidence, that there appeared to be in his character, in despite of the importunity and pressure of numberless proofs against him, both energy and prudence. : English Visiter. To discover, or to recapitulate, or to report, what is disadvantageous to man or author, is little praiseworthy: but to find merit in others is itself a merit; unless it is found, as hares are found, only to be run down. To be assaulted by satire or undermined by criticism, is deplorable to those chiefly to whom authorship is a profession, and whose families must waste away with the poison thrown into the fountain-head of their subsistence. I wish you yourself had never cracked the whip over Byron, differently as he was situated. "By God! I can not understand it!" cried Byron. "A man to run upon a naked sword for another!" Landor. He had drawn largely from his imagination, penuriously from his heart. He distrusted it: what wonder then if he had little faith in another's! Had he lived among the best of the ancient Greeks, he would have satirised and reviled them but their characters caught his eye softened by time and distance; nothing in them of opposition, nothing of rivalry; where they are, there they must stand; they can not come down nearer. Of all great poets, for such I consider him, Byron has borrowed most from others, not excepting Ariosto, of whose description he reminds me: Salta a cavallo, e per diversa strada Va discorrendo, e molti pone a sacco. Not only in the dresses which he puts on expressly for the ladies, not only in the oriental train and puffy turban, but also in the tragic pall, his perfumery has somewhat too large a proportion of musk in it; which so hangs about those who are accustomed to spend many hours with him, that they seldom come forth again with satisfaction into what is fresher and purer. Yet Byron is, I think, the keenest and most imaginative of satirists. English Visiter. Those who spoke the most malignantly of him in his lifetime, have panegyrized him since his decease with so little truth, discretion, and precision, that we may suspect it Landor. I expressed the same wish the first to have been done designedly; and the rather, as moment it was right and lawful. the same insincerity hath been displayed toward others, both where there might be and where there could not be a jealousy of rivalship. After his hot and stimulating spicery, we now are running to those sager poets who give us lemonade and ices; just by the same direction as dogs recur to grass. We rush out of the sudatory of Byron to roll in the snow of Wordsworth. English Visiter. There was something in his mind not ungraceful nor inelegant, although from a deficiency of firmness, it wanted dignity. He issued forth against stronger and better men than himself, partly through wantonness and malignity, partly through ignorance of their powers and worth, and partly through impatience at their competition. He could comprehend nothing Landor. He suited the times. The rapid exheroic, nothing disinterested. Shelley, at the gates citement and easy reading of novels, the only of Pisa, threw himself between him and the literature (if such it may be called) which inte dragoon, whose sword in his indignation was rests the public, outrun the graver and measured lifted and about to strike. Byron told a common steps of poetry. We have no longer decennial friend, some time afterward, that he could not epics and labyrinthine tragedies. Our steepleconceive how any man living should act so. "Do chases are out of vogue: we canter up and down you know, he might have been killed! and there the narrow green lane with the ladies, and return was every appearance that he would be!" The with an appetite and small fatigue. Byron dealt answer was, "Between you and Shelley there is chiefly in felt and furbelow, wavy Damascus dagbut little similarity, and perhaps but little sympa-gers, and pocket pistols studded with paste. He thy: yet what Shelley did then, he would do again, threw out frequent and brilliant sparks; but his and always. There is not a human creature, not fire burnt to no purpose; it blazed furiously when even the most hostile, that he would hesitate to it caught muslin, and it hurried many a pretty protect from injury at the imminent hazard of life. | wearer into an untimely blanket. |
