to us all. Her poor husband is now with us, but returns in a day or two to his now lonely home.

"This is the first letter I have written, except to the bereaved mother, my poor sister, who is broken-hearted.

“You were often and kindly remembered by my dear departed niece, who said to me, I am sure Mr. Landor lamented the death of my poor Isabella.' "M. BLESSINGTON."

"Gore House, August 29th, 1843.

"I have had my dear littel grand-nephews and niece, with their poor father, staying with me. It was, in truth, a sad meeting, and their presence brought with bitterness to my mind the recollection of her who always accompanied them, and whom I shall see no more on earth. Time has not yet reconciled me to her loss, and I feel it as poignantly, that I forget how soon, according to the natural course of events, I shall follow her to the grave. She can not come to me, but I shall go to her'. I have a family party of twelve with me at present, consisting of Lord and Lady Canterbury and their family joined to M. BLESSINGTON."

mine.

"Gore House, November 26th, 1845.

"I felt sure of your sympathy in the heavy affliction with which it has pleased God to visit me. I have made more than one vain attempt to thank you for your letter, which I found here on my return from Clifton, but I could not accomplish the task. You will easily imagine my grief at losing the playmate of my childhood, the companion of my youth.* Alas! alas! of the two heads that once rested on the same pillow, one now is laid in a dark and dreary vault at Clifton, far, far away from all she loved, from all that loved her.

"It seems strange to me that I should still breathe and think, when she who was my other self, so near in blood, so dear in affection, should be no more. I have now no one to remind me of my youth, to speak to me of the careless, happy days of childhood. All seems lost with her, in whose breast I found an echo to my thoughts. The ties of blood may sometimes be severed, but how easily, how quickly are they reunited again when the affection of youthful days is recalled.

"All that affection has, as it were, sprung up afresh in my heart since my poor sister has known affliction. And now she is snatched from me when I hoped to soothe her; and all that now remains to me of her is memory, a tress of her hair, and the sad recollection of a dark, dreary vault at Clifton, which no sunbeam can illumine, no breath of summer's air ever enter! "Adieu, my dear friend. May Heaven long keep you from seeing any one dear to you die. Every affliction is less heavy than that.

"M. BLESSINGTON." * Lady Canterbury died in November, 1845.-R. R. M.

"Gore House, Tuesday, June 9th, 1846. "I can not allow another day to pass over without thanking you for the delight afforded me by the perusal of the two glorious volumes given to me the day before your departure. What a rich gift! Although well acquainted with the Imaginary Conversations,' a reperusal of them has revealed new beauties. Indeed, every page of both volumes contains thoughts as profound and beautiful as they are original. What a mine this great work will be henceforth for plagiarists to crib and steal from!

"How beautiful is the region of wisdom and tenderness revealed in it! I can not tell you the gratification I have enjoyed, and shall continue to enjoy, from these precious volumes. Continue to write. It is a duty you owe to your name-to posterity. There are no lees in the rich wine of your imagination, which will flow on pure, bright, and sparkling to the last, and not one drop of it should be lost.

"I believe I told you that this will be the last year of the 'Keepsake' or 'Book of Beauty' appearing. You will not, I am sure, desert me at the close, but let me have a contribution, however short, to wind up both volumes. How much I regret that you could not prolong your stay with us. Your visit appears like a pleasant dream, too brief, yet leaving a pleasant memory. "M. BLESSINGTON."

"Gore House, February 28th, 1848.

"I will not admit that the eruption of the Parisian volcano has brought out only cinders from your brain: au contraire, the lava is glowing and full of fire-your honest indignation has been ignited, and has sent forth a bright flame.

"It gave me pleasure to see your hand-writing again, for I had thought it long since I had heard from you. I saw it stated to-day, in the Daily News, that Count D'Orsay had set out for Paris with Prince Louis. This report is wholly untrue. Prince Louis has gone to Paris alone. Here no one pities Louis Philippe, nor has the report of his death mitigated the indignation excited against him. His family are to be pitied, for I believe they were not implicated in his crooked policy. Seldom has vengeance so rapidly overtaken guilt. M. BLESSINGTON."

"Gore House, February 10th, 1849.

"The muse who loved thee in thy youth,

With such a fervency and truth,

Forsakes thee not, but fond as fair,

Still joys thy solitude to share,

And blandly has seduced old time,

To let thee write, as in thy prime.
Though seventy-five years may have flown,
The calculation we'll not own,

It must be false, for ne'er did age
Indite so pure and sweet a page,
Inspired by beauty, as I see

Breathe in the verse that comes from thee.
Long may'st thou live, the world to show,
That time can't chill the brilliant glow
Of minds like thine, to whom 'tis given
To keep the flame till they reach Heaven.
"M. BLESSINGTON."

CHAPTER VI.

LETTERS FROM WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR TO LADY BLESSINGTON. "Florence, March 14th, 1833.

"MY DEAR LADY BLESSINGTON,-The children are delighted at your recollection of them. A German tutor is coming to manage A- within a few days; I can hardly bring him to construe a little Greek with me, and, what is worse, he is not always disposed to fence with me. I foresee he will be a worse dancer than I am, if possible; in vain I tell him what is very true, that I have suffered more from my bad dancing than from all the other misfortunes and miseries of my life put together. Not dancing well! I never danced at all, and how grievously has my heart ached when others were in the full enjoyment of that recreation, which I had no right even to partake of.

"Hare has lately bought a Raffael here for four hundred louis. It is a Raffael indeed, but a copy from Pietro Perugino.

"The original is extant, and much finer than the copy. Raffael was but a boy when he painted it; he and his master are the only two painters that ever had a perfect idea of feminine beauty.

"Raffael, when he went to Rome, lost Paradise, and had only Eden;' his Fornarina and others are fine women, but not such women as the first that God made, or as the one that he chose to be the idol of half the world. Titian, less fortunate than Lawrence, was rarely employed to paint a beauty; those that he and Corregio chose for models had no grace or loveliness; Leonardo's are akin to ugliness.

** I remain, my dear Lady Blessington, ever yours sincerely,

"W. S. LANDOR."

"Florence, July 16th, 1853. "Politics seem to be serious and alarming to the serious and ambitious. I hate Tory principles and Whig principles; but I never gave any opinion, except on one occasion, which was when the Reform Bill was in agitation. I then wrote from this villa to Lord L, telling him what it was very plain his party did not know, that the king has just as good a right to give repre

sentation to a borough as he has to create a peer, or grant a fair or market to a town; and that it is not constitutional for Parliament to curtail the number of voters where no corruption has been proved. I made him an apology for addressing him, and told him that I did not expect or wish even a reply. It is the duty of the wise to set the unwise right. The mode I mentioned would have made the king popular, and would have saved the country from that collision between the two houses of Parliament which is likely to terminate in a civil war. I have done my duty.

"I find that Coleridge has lost the beneficent friend at whose house he lived. George IV., the vilest wretch in Europe, gave him £100 a year, enough, in London, to buy three turnips and half an egg a day. Those men, surely, were the most dexterous of courtiers, who resolved to show William that his brother was not the vilest by dashing the half egg and three turnips from the plate of Coleridge. No such action as this is recorded of any administration in the British annals, and I am convinced that there is not a state in Europe or Asia in which the paltriest minister of the puniest despot would recommend it. I am sorry that Lord who speaks like a gentleman, should be implicated in a charge so serious, though he and his colleagues are likely to undergo the popular vengeance for less grave offenses.

"Those affairs are the gravest that compromise the dignity of a nation. Strafford would have hanged up a dozen or two of stout rogues and haranguers at the hazard of his life; but if Strafford had had twenty heads, he would have laid them on twenty blocks rather than have done what these boobies have been doing. Besides, they have been sowing mushroom spawn, thinking it would shoot up for their own tables.

"No, no; it will make its appearance on some foul, dismal day, and smell of blood.

"An ugly word to end with, and hardly a pleasanter one, I suspect, to their imaginations than to mine. W. S. L."

"Florence, December 21st.

"Fortune is not often too kind to me-indeed, why should she be but when she is, it is reasonable enough I should be grateful. We have come at last to this agreement, that whenever she does any thing pleasant to you, I may take my part of the pleasure, and as large a part as any one, except yourself and Lord B. She then put something into the opposite scale, and said it was but just.

"I laughed to hear her talk of justice, but owned it. Now I will lay a wager that of the hundreds of letters you and my lord have received to congratulate you on the marriage of Mrs. Purves, not one has been so long in coming to the point. It is something like the preface to the Carbonari conspiracy. I must, however, waft my incense, though in an earthen pot.

“Mighty well, good Mr. Landor! but I can not be sitting here for your fumigations. At Paris we have learned a new thing. We throw cold water

on the asphixifier to cure the asphixified.' I have another scheme. I am about to put a spark of patriotism just under your nose.

"Mr. Godwin Swift, a descendant of that Godwin who educated dear Jonathan, and was his uncle, has claims upon the Viscountess of Carlingford, which he is bringing before the House of Lords.* I never saw him since he was a baby; but I hear he is a most amiable and gentlemanly person. If Lord B or any other of your friends can be of any use to him, let me hope it. I should be overjoyed to see the representative of the earliest patriot in Ireland protected by him whom I consider the most disinterested and the greatest. His grandmother was a Meade-I believe a first cousin of the late Lord Clanwilliam.

66

Has Count D'Orsay hung up his two pictures? If the King of France should make an offer of the family vase for one of them, I would persuade him to accept the offer with his usual good grace. But perhaps the delicacy of his most Christian majesty may withhold him from proposing an exchange, on recollection (if he should recollect such a thing) that it was a gift from the D'Orsays."

"Florence, February 15th, 1834.

"The book is indeed the Book of Beauty,' both inside and outside. Nevertheless, I must observe that neither here nor in any other engraving do I find a resemblance of you. I do not find the expression. Lawrence has not succeeded either, unless you have the gift of changing it almost totally. The last change in that case was for the better, but pray stay there.

"I have a little spite against the frontispiece, and am resolved to prefer Francesca. If I had seen such a person any time toward the close of the last century, I am afraid I should have been, what some rogue called me upon a very different occasion, much later, matto! ma matto! Age breaks down the prison in which beauty has enthralled us; but I suspect there are some of us, like the old fellow let loose from the Bastile, who would gladly get in it again, were it possible.

"You are too generous in praising me for my admiration of Wordsworth and Southey. This is only a proof that I was not born to be a poet. I am not a good hater; I only hate pain and trouble. I think I could have hated Bonaparte if he had been a gentleman. Castlereagh was almost as mischievous, and was popularly a gentleman; but, being an ignorant and weak creature, he escapes from hatred without a bruise.

means.

"The Whigs, I am afraid, are as little choice of men as the Tories are of It is among the few felicities of my life that I never was attached to a party or a party man. I have always excused myself from dinners, that I It does little honor to the Whig faction, that among may never meet one. the number of peers created by them they have omitted Collingwood. Never has England produced a fighting man more able in his profession or more illustrious in his character than the late Lord Collingwood. He sacrificed his * See Appendix.