sania which can hardly fail to affect the most careless reader with something of the emotion its writer underwent in composing it.* The eternal protest of every age against the sacrifice of human hearts to state convenience or policy, seems to rise with the cry of anguish of the unhappy prince, as he thinks of the contentment and quiet that might have been his "though the palace "of Cæsars cracked and split with emperors, while I, 66 sitting in idleness on a cliff of Rhodes, eyed the Sun "as he swang his golden censer athwart the heavens, "or his image as it overstrode the sea." The Epictetus and Seneca is one of the shorter dialogues, but very striking in its contrasts as well of the character as of the philosophy of the high-bred man of learning and the low-born slave, and enforcing admirable rules of simplicity and naturalness in writing. The most generally interesting of all these Latin dialogues however, and most deservedly Southey's favourite, was the Lucullus and Cæsar. The period chosen is when estrangement has begun between Cæsar and Pompeius, the former indeed only veiling, under a visit to his friend for the professed object of seeing his new villa on the Apennines, a very eager purpose of reawakening the old dislike of Lucullus to Pompeius, in the hope of thereby obtaining sanction to his own designs. In this he is baffled. From the conqueror of Mithridates, and old adversary of the extreme republicans, he receives only counsel to be content with his victories and a warning to make no attempt on the republic; experience having taught himself the hollowness of ambition, and luxury extinguished its last vestige in him. Fain would he persuade Cæsar that enough for the immortality he craved was already achieved by him, and that * See ante, pp. 146-149. 1822-28. they who now refused him his place would have to yield it hereafter. "No one can measure a great man "but upon his bier." Cæsar silently retains his own resolve; moved greatly, but not diverted from it, when Lucullus turns to the infirmities and passions of his own career, and enforces not without self-reproach the lesson they have taught him. "There is enough in us to be divided into two portions: let us keep the 66 upper undisturbed and pure. A part of Olympus "itself lies in dreariness and in clouds, variable and "stormy; but it is not the highest: there the Gods "govern." In the rest of the conversation the friends are merely host and guest; Lucullus enjoying Cæsar's admiration of the completeness of the equipments of his villa, as he is led through its various offices and halls to where its frescoes reproduce his victories, and to the chamber where their banquet waits them. Everything that may be supposed to form part of the daily life of the most luxurious of Romans in the last years of the republic is reproduced with a vivid reality. Even the farm, the cows, the lake, the fishponds, the Adriatic itself visible from that height of the Apennines, all of them as much adjuncts to the local truth of the scene as the tapestries and pictures in the hall or the marble statues in the library, take their place in the little drama presented to us in this delightful conversation. "What a library is here!" exclaims Cæsar. "Ah, Marcus "Tullius! I salute thy image. Why frownest thou upon me? collecting the consular robe and uplifting the right arm, as when Rome stood firm again "and Catiline fled before thee.” 66 66 Such was the new series of Imaginary Conversations, of which it only remains that I should indicate the dates and forms of publication. Twenty of the dia logues were issued as a third volume of the original series, one of them (partly in verse) on Inez de Castro being subsequently withdrawn to form portion of a dramatic poem with that title; and this volume, with a dedication to Bolivar of the date of 1825 and a postscript supplied in 1827, was published by Mr. Colburn in 1828. Fifteen more formed the first volume of a new series, which a second volume of twelve more completed; one of the latter that had Peleus and Thetis for its speakers, in violation of the rule to exclude imaginary people, being afterwards transformed into a scene which is acted in the Epicurus and Leontion; and this "second series," its first volume dedicated in May 1826 to Sir Robert Wilson and its second in August 1826 to Lord Guildford, was published by Mr. Duncan in 1829, the year to which my narrative has arrived. I have stated on a former page that what Julius Hare had done for the first and second it devolved on me to do for the third series of the Imaginary Conversations; and as, out of these, eighteen had been completed, and eight more were partially written, before Landor left Italy, I will here mention what the subjects of them were. Five were classical. In two, forming a bright little prose poem, shaded with touches of character of the utmost delicacy and pathos, Æsop and Rhodope are the speakers. In a third, spoken over the fall of Carthage, and rising to even a grander theme in the immeasurable services of Greece to Rome, the speakers are Scipio and his Greek friends Panætius and Polybius. In the fourth, Pisistratus receives from Solon counsel and commiseration. In the fifth, where Lucian and Timotheus converse, and nearly every sentence is radiant with wisdom or wit, the great Greek satirist warns one of the leaders of the new Christian sect against the errors under which the old Gods had perished. Fourteen had for their speakers people famous in foreign lands. The East supplied one in Rhadamistus and Zenobia, a 1822-28. brief dialogue of intense passion to which character belonged also a subject from Spain, Philip the Second and Donna Juana Coelho; one from France, Joan of Orleans and Agnes Sorel ; and three from Italy, Tancredi and Constantia, Tasso and Cornelia, Dante with his wife Gemma Donati, and Dante with his angel Beatrice. Galileo visited in his prison by Milton is the subject of a seventh; the eighth, filled also with pleasant memories of Florence and Fiesole, was a dialogue between the painter Fra Filippo Lippi and Pope Eugenius the Fourth; and La Rochefoucault talking to La Fontaine supplied the ninth, both speakers talking so well that one would hardly suspect the writer to have hated the first of these Frenchmen almost as much as he loved the second. The German subjects were three: Melancthon in colloquy with Calvin; and Sandt conversing with Kotzebue on the eve of the commission of his crime, and with Blucher while afterwards in prison waiting his punishment. The thirteenth and fourteenth, Cardinal Legate Albani and the Picture-dealers, and the Emperor of China and his minister, formed portions respectively of two sets of papers, on High and Low life in Italy, and on the Adventures of a Chinese statesman despatched to Europe for a batch of first-rate professors of Christianity, with whose help his master, profiting by experience of the Jesuits, hopes to sow among his enemies the Tartars divisions and animosities that will destroy them. The last six were on English themes, all of them dialogues of character, interfused with intense passion in that where Mary of Scotland surrenders herself to Bothwell: and, in the rest, where the English Mary and her sister Elizabeth meet after their brother's death and the proclamation of Lady Jane; where the queen Elizabeth talks, after the massacre of Bartholomew, with Cecil and Anjou and the French Ambassador; where Bishop Shipley says adieu to Franklin after his mission of peace has failed; where Addison meets Steele after the bailiffs have been with him; and where Andrew Marvel after a visit to Milton meets Bishop Parker in Bunhill-row, showing at their very best Landor's humour and eloquence, his play of wit and fancy. The last has, perhaps more than any, the greatest qualities of his writing consistently sustained, at their highest level and with the fewest drawbacks. BOOK SIXTH. 1829-1835. T. 54–60. AT FIESOLE. 1. Closing Years in the Palazzo Medici. II. Mother's Death. III. Ordered to quit Tuscany. IV. The Villa Gherardescha. v. England revisited. VI. Again in Italy: Old Pictures and New Friends. VII. Examination of Shakespeare for Deer-stealing. VIII. Pericles and Aspasia. IX. Self-banishment from Fiesole. I. CLOSING YEARS IN THE PALAZZO MEDICI. "From France to Italy my steps I bent, And pitcht at Arno's side my household tent. 'Twas hard to keep, 'twas harder to resign." So wrote Landor, in a little poem on his homes; but the Medicæan palace had not held his Lares five years when he moved into the country two miles from the Tuscan capital, and interposed the villa Castiglione between his homes in Florence and Fiesole. Here he lived, with a short interval in the winter of '28 and '29 at the casa |