many, England &c, is the middle one." Then he tells Southey that a copy of his second edition has gone to him, that the third volume will soon be on its way, and that he has finished two more volumes, a fourth and a fifth. "Whether they will ever be printed I "know not, and never will inquire. This is left with "Julius Hare."

There was precisely the same uncertainty a year and a half later, but it had not meanwhile restrained his ardour of composition; and the result was told to Southey in November 1828. Francis Hare had urged him, he said, letter after letter, to make up the hundred of his conversations. He had thrown away many halfwritten ones, but at last he had completed the number, and perhaps he had done amiss in admitting any that contained living characters. When Southey should have read the third volume, which at last was issued, and a copy of the sheets of the fourth which would be sent along with it, he was to say whether their contents were, as Julius Hare fancied, better than the two first. He feared himself they might not be. But about the two last being better (what he had sent for one volume having expanded into two) he had no doubt; and very anxious and restless he had been that each duad should excel the preceding. "I have had no letter from Julius "Hare since the month of March, but I have received "the third volume, and the fourth also, though with"out the dedication. What progress is made in the “fifth and sixth I am quite ignorant."

In that March letter Hare* had only announced to him the expansion of his fifth volume into two, and

At the end of it he announced his brother Francis's approaching marriage, and spoke of the pleasure they all felt "at the prospect "of his ceasing to lead the life of a vagrant."

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1822-28.

had given him little hope of its going to press as yet. But the fourth and fifth were in hand; Mr. Ainsworth was to be the publisher; and infinite had been Hare's troubles in connection with them. The printer had not recently been making much progress, but had promised to resume his former diligence; and the publisher was still objecting strongly to the bulk of the volumes. "One of between 500 and 550 pages makes 66 a very good octavo: if it be larger the expense becomes very heavy, and it is impossible to make a "proportionate augmentation in the price. Now the "last calculation, certainly not over-rated, gives us 1500 66 pages for the fourth and fifth volumes, and I think "therefore you must determine on having a sixth." Still there came fresh disputes as time went on; a full year had interposed before Hare wrote again; he had in the interval been obliged to withdraw the two printed volumes from the publisher who had undertaken them; and it took a good deal of time (Hare wrote at the end of July 1829) to find a substitute. "The Conversations 66 are too classical and substantial for the morbid and "frivolous taste of the English public, and few pub

lishers, except my friend Taylor, look beyond the "saleableness of a work. Duncan has at length agreed "on the terms of sharing the profits, if there are any. "The sixth volume is not yet gone to a printer, and,

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as I am going abroad for a couple of months, must "wait till October. I would that it were in my power "to extend my journey as far as Florence, that our

epistolary might be succeeded by a personal acquaint66 ance; but I fear my time will not allow of that, as "I must spend some days at Bonn to learn report of "Niebuhr's second volume." He and Thirlwall were now engaged in translating that remarkable book; and,

two years before, he and his brother Augustus had published anonymously their Guesses at Truth.

The weeks were passed at Bonn, but the journey was not extended to Florence, and until Landor's visit to England in 1832 the friends did not see each other. With the publication by Mr. Duncan in 1829 of the volumes above named, Hare's connection with the Imaginary Conversations may be said to have ceased. For the sixth volume he failed to find a publisher at his return, and that task somewhat later devolved upon me.

Meanwhile, in a letter of April 1829, Southey told Landor that the first volume of his unpublished series (the first of the volumes afterwards issued by Mr. Duncan) had been sent to him. Some things in it he wished away, but as to very very many more Landor would know how truly they must have delighted his old friend; and in especial, he said, Lucullus and Cæsar had thoroughly pleased him as through every line of it one of the most delightful of all. Southey added, in reference to certain passages on Keats and Shelley, in whose marvellous genius and untimely fate Landor had of late become deeply interested by intercourse as well with their writings as with personal friends of both, that he had been deceived concerning Shelley; not as to his genius, which was of a very high order indeed, but as to his character. He had himself believed as long as it was possible that Shelley's errors were only errors of opinion, and that he would ripen into a right-minded man. But now he knew how bitter was the mistake he had made.

It remains only that, as with the first series of the Conversations, I should give account of what the second series contained; but, the general character of the work and its mode of treatment having been sufficiently placed before the reader, the task that now awaits me

1822-28.

is easier, and may, with a few prominent exceptions, be briefly dismissed.

X. CONTENTS OF THE NEW SERIES.

The three volumes contained only nine more dialogues than were in the first series, but some were of greater length. Eleven of the subjects were taken from modern politics; three were of a personal turn and character; sixteen were illustrations of biography, eight of them relating to English worthies, and the other eight to Italian, French, or German; five might be classed as historical, the speakers being rulers or princes of past times; and there were five Greek and five Roman conversations. I will take them generally in this order.

It was Landor's settled opinion, frequently expressed during his residence in Italy, that the sovereigns of the continent then reigning were responsible for all the revolutionary tendencies that agitated Europe at the time; and the violent reaction witnessed by him even before his return to England was but the fulfilment of what he had confidently foretold. Prominent among the princes that seemed to him despicable, and for characterising whom as the most ignorant and gross barbarians that had appeared since the revival of letters he is indeed not harshly to be judged, were the French and Spanish Bourbons, the kings of Spain and Portugal, the rulers of Austria and France, and the Pope (Leo XII) with his confederates in Italy. In one of the political dialogues the speakers are Don Victor Saez and El Rey Netto; in a second the latter prince reappears with his brother sovereign of Portugal, its title being Don Ferdinand and Don John-Mary Luis; in a third, Miguel

and his mother are introduced; and in a fourth we have Leo XII. and his valet Gigi. Throughout them the principal object is to show the inseparable connection of tyranny and superstition with cruelty; of cowardice with religious persecution; and of all with unspeakable silliness. Landor's apology for sometimes putting better talk into his dialogues than his assumed talkers were capable of, will here only apply in a Rabelaisian sense. Not a redeeming grace is given them here, unless in that relish for their own baseness which in the expression of it has a gusto of enjoyment so intense as to amount to genius. Few are the passages extractable from these dialogues that might not shock a reader unprepared for the lengths of infernal malignity and ferocious cruelty which fanaticism of any kind will not scruple to defend under the pretences of religion; and only three or four times does Landor plainly confess to the hidden meanings of satire underlying these repulsive utterances. One is where Victor Saez tells his master that a legitimate king can never have a surer ally than what is called a constitutional minister, because it is the experience of all those gentry that the people are a football to be fed with air, and that the party always sure to be the winner is the one that kicks it farthest. Another is in the information communicated by Miguel to his mother, on the remark of somebody that the wit of "Don Jorge da Cannin❞ would immortalise him, that it was no good nowadays people trying to make themselves immortal, for that immortality, his confessor told him, had become so creaky and that he would not be tempted by an annuity upon crazy it at three years' purchase: in short, that true immortality in this world can come only from the Pope, two centuries or so after burial, and when all but his Holi