Browning, certainly a competent authority, in dedicating a drama to him, calls him a great dramatic poet, and if we deduct from the dramatic faculty that part of it which has reference to a material stage, we can readily concede him the title. His mind has not the succinctness necessary to a writer for the theatre. It has too decided a tendency to elaboration, and is more competent to present to the mind a particular quality of character in every light of which it is susceptible, than to construct a unitary character out of a combination of qualities. Perhaps we should be more strictly accurate if we should say that his power lies in showing how certain situations, passions, or qualities would affect the thought and speech rather than the action of a character. Of all his dramas except one, he has himself said that they are more imaginary conversations than dramas. Of his "Imaginary Conversations" we may generally say that they would be better defined as dialogues between the imaginations of the persons introduced, than between the persons themselves. There is a something in all men and women which deserve the much-abused title of individuals, which we call their character, something finer than the man or woman, and yet which is the man or woman nevertheless. We feel it in whatever they say or do, but it is bet ter than their speech or deed, and can be conceived of apart from these. It is his own conceptions of the characters of different personages that Landor brings in as interlocutors. Between Shakspeare's historical and ideal personages we per ceive no difference in point of reality. They are alike historical to us. We allow him to substitute his Richard for the Richard of history, and we suspect that those are few who doubt whether Caliban ever existed. Whatever Hamlet and Cæsar say we feel to be theirs, though we know it to be Shakspeare's. Whatever Landor puts into the mouth of Pericles and Michael Angelo and Tell, we know to be his, though we can conceive that it might have been theirs. Don Quixote would never have attacked any puppets of his. The hand which jerked the wires and the mouth which uttered the speeches would have been too clearly visible.

We cannot so properly call Landor a great thinker, as a man who has great thoughts. His mind has not much continuity, as, indeed, we might infer from what he himself somewhere says that his memory is a poor one. He is strong in details and concentrates himself upon points. criticisms on authors, though always valuable as

Hence his far as they

go, are commonly fragmentary. He makes profound remarks upon certain passages of a poem, but does not seem to aim at a comprehension of the entire poet. He perceives rather than conceives. He is fond of verbal criticism, and takes up an author often in the spirit of a proofreader. He has a microscopic eye, and sees with wonderful distinctness what is immediately before him. When he turns it on a poet it sometimes gives us the same sort of feeling as when Gulliver reports his discoveries in regard to the complexions of the Brobdignag maids of honor. Yet, of course, it gives him equal power for perceiving every minutest shade of beauty.

In the historical personages whom his conversations introduce to us, or, to speak more strictly, who introduce his conversations to us, we are sensible of two kinds of truth. They are true to the external circumstances and to the history of the times in which they lived, and they are true to Landor. We always feel that it is he who is speaking, and that he has merely chosen a character whom he considered suitable to express a particular phase of his own mind. He never, for a moment, loses himself in his characters. He is never raised or depressed by them, but raises and depresses them at will. If he choose, he will make Pericles talk of Blackwood's Magazine, or Aspasia comment on the last number of the Quarterly Review. Yet all the while every slightest propriety of the household economy and the external life of the Greeks will be observed with rigid accuracy. The anachronism does not seem to be that Pericles and Anaxagoras should discuss the state of England, but that Walter Savage Landor should be talking modern politics in ancient Greek,so thoroughly are the man's works impregnated with himself. But to understand this fully we must read all his writings. We only mention it as affecting the historical veracity of his characters, and not because it subtracts anything from the peculiar merits which belong to him as a writer. If a character be in rapport with his own, he throws into it the whole energy of his powerful magnetism. He translates every thing into Landor, just as Chapman is said to have favored Ajax, in his version of the Iliad. After we are once put upon our guard, we find a particular enjoyment in this intense individuality. We understand that he is only borrowing the pulpits of other people to preach his own notions from, and we feel the refreshment which every one experiences in being brought within the more immediate sphere of an original temperament and a

robust organization. We discover, at last, that we have encountered an author who from behind a variety of masks can be as personally communicative as Montaigne.

The epithet robust seems to us particularly applicable to Landor. And his is the robustness of a naturally vigorous constitution, maintained in a healthy equipoise by regular exercise. The open air breathes through his writings, and in reading him we often have a feeling (to use a local phrase) of all outdoors. In saying this we refer to the general freedom of spirit, to the natural independence confirmed by a life of immediate contact with outward nature, and only thrown back the more absolutely on its own resources by occasional and reserved commerce with mankind; tolerated rather than sought by a haughty, and at the same time exquisitely sensitive disposition. We should add, that his temperament is one more keenly alive to his own interior emotions than those suggested to him from without. Consequently, while a certain purity and refinement suggest an intimacy with woods and fields, the truest and tenderest touches of his pencil are those of human and not of external nature. His mountain scenery is that of the soul; his rural landscapes and his interiors are those of the heart. If there should seem to be a contradiction between the coarseness and the delicacy we have attributed to him, the inconsistency is in himself. We may find the source of both in the solitary habit of his mind. The one is the natural independence of a somewhat rugged organization, whose rough edges have never been smoothed by attrition with the world, and which, unaccustomed to the pliability and mutual accommodation necessary in a crowd, resents every obstacle as intentional, every brush of the elbow as a personal affront. The other has been fostered by that habitual tendency of the isolated to brood over and analyze their own sentiments and emotions. Or shall we say that the rough exterior is assumed as a shield for the tenderness, as certain insects house themselves under a movable roof of lichen? This is sometimes the case, but we suspect that in Landor both qualities are idiosyncratic. That frailest creation of the human imagination, the hamadryad, is the tenant and spirit of the gnarled oak, which grasps the storm in its arms. To borrow a comparison from the Greeks, to whom Landor so constantly refers us, we must remember that Polyphemus, while he was sharpening the spit for Ulysses, was pining for Galatea, and that his unrequited tenderness sought solace in crushing his rival with half a mountain.

There are two kinds of egoism: one which is constantly measuring itself by others, and one which as constantly meas ures others by itself. This last we call originality. It secludes a man from external influences, and, leaving him nothing to lean upon but his own judgments and impressions, teaches him their value and enables him to inspire other men with the same estimate of them. In this sense Landor is original. This gives all that he writes a decided charm, and makes the better part of it exceedingly precious. He is constructed altogether on a large scale. His littlenesses are great, his weaknesses decided; and as long as the larger part of men are so careful to give us any thing rather than themselves, let us learn to be duly thankful for even a littleness that is sincere, and a weakness that is genuine. So entirely has he been himself, that, while we cannot help being conscious of his deficiencies, we also feel compelled to grant a certain kind of completeness in him. Whatever else he might have been, we are sure that he could not have been more of a Landor. In spite of the seeming contradictions of his character, it would not be easy to find a life and mind more thoroughly consistent than his. A strenuous persistency marks every thing about him. A few friendships and a good many animosities have lasted him all his days. He may add to both, but he never lessens the number of either. In speaking of a man constituted as he is, it would perhaps be better to say oppugnancies than animosities. For an animosity properly implies contemporaneousness, and a personal feeling toward its object; but so entirely does Landor refer every thing to his absolute self, that he will pursue as vindictively a dead error, or a dead man, as a living one. It is as they affect him that they are good or bad. It is not the year 48 or 1848 that is past or present, but simply Walter Savage Landor. With him it is amicus Plato, amica veritas, magis amicus Landor. His sense of his own worth is too large and too dignified to admit of personal piques and jealousies. He resents an assault upon himself as a wrong done to sound literature, and accepts commendation merely as a tribute to truth.

We know of no writer whose pages, if opened at random, are more sure to repay us than those of Landor. Nowhere shall we find admirable thoughts more admirably expressed, nowhere sublimer metaphors or more delicate ones, nowhere a mind maintained at a high level more equably, or for longer intervals. There is no author who surpasses, and few who

equal him in purity and elevation of style, or in sustained dignity and weight of thought. We should hesitate to name any writings but Shakspeare's which would afford so large and so various a selection of detached passages complete and precious in themselves. The rarest and tenderest emotions of love and friendship have never found a more adequate historian. His pathos is most delicately subdued. He approaches sorrow with so quiet a footfall and so hushing a gesture, that we are fain to suspend our breath and the falling of our tears, lest they should break that tender silence. It is not to look upon a picture of grief, but into the solemn presence of grief herself, that he leads us.

Landor has as little humor as Massinger, who in some respects resembles him, though at an infinite distance below. All that he has is of a somewhat gigantic and clumsy sort. He snatches up some little personage who has offended him, sets him on a high shelf, and makes him chatter and stamp for his diversion. He has so long conversed in imagination with the most illustrious spirits of all ages, that there is a plentiful measure of contempt in his treatment of those he esteems unworthy. His lip begins to curl at sight of a king, partly because he seems to consider men of that employment fools, and partly because he thinks them no gentlemen. For Bourbons he has a particular and vehement contempt, because to the folly of kingship they add the vileness of being Frenchmen. He is a theoretic republican of the strain of Milton, Sydney, and Harrington, and would have all the citizens of his republic far-descended gentlemen and scholars.

It is not wonderful that Landor has never been a popular writer. His is a mind to be quietly appreciated rather than to excite an enthusiastic partisanship. That part of his works which applies immediately to the present is the least valuable. The better and larger portion is so purely imaginative, so truly ideal, that it will be as fresh and true a hundred or a thousand years hence as now. His writings have seldom drawn any notice from the Reviews, which is singular only when we consider that he has chosen to converse almost exclusively with the past, and is, therefore, in some sense, a contemporary of those post-secular periodicals. The appearance of a collected edition of his works seems more like the publication of a new edition of Plato than of an author who has lived through the most stirring period of modern history. Not that he does not speak and speak strongly of living men and recent events,