66 66 1829-35. my gravest cares, and my playfullest fancy was with kindly wishes. Ah, surely of all cruelties the worst "is to extinguish our kindness. Mine is gone: I love "the people and the land no longer. My lord, ask me "not about them; I may speak injuriously." Essex still cannot guess the grief which no council, no queen, no Essex can repair; but he sees that it is grave, and respects it. "Nay, kiss not my hand: he whom God "smiteth hath God with him. In His presence what 66 am I?" 66 66 That Spenser's grief is for the death of some one dear to him, Essex knows now, yet still talks to him cheerily of endurance and hopefulness, for that every day, every hour of the year, there are hundreds mourning what he mourns. "O, no, no, no!" cries the other. "Calamities there are around us; calami"ties there are all over the earth; calamities there are " in all seasons; but none in any season, none in any "place like mine." "So," rejoins Essex, "say all fa"thers, so say all husbands. Look at any old mansion"house, and let the sun shine as gloriously as it may on the golden vanes, or the arms recently quartered over the gateway, or the embayed window, and on "the happy pair that haply is toying at it; neverthe"less thou mayest say that of a certainty the same fa"bric hath seen much sorrow within its chambers, and "heard many wailings and each time this was the "heaviest stroke of all. Funerals have passed along "through the stout-hearted knights upon the wainscot, "and amid the laughing nymphs upon the arras. "servants have shaken their heads, as if somebody had "deceived them, when they found that beauty and no"bility could perish. Edmund, the things that are too "true pass by us as if they were not true at all; and "when they have singled us out, then only do they Old "strike us." Supremely beautiful, surely; yet the passion that bursts forth when all the truth is told very far transcends it. But this must be read in the Conference itself. 66 Landor justly valued it, and was in great alarm on hearing from England that the friends who had charge of the printing could not understand why the same volume should contain both it and the Examination. Expressly for this, he wrote to Lady Blessington (11th Oct. 1834), "I have written an Introduction which quite satisfied me; which hardly anything does upon "the whole, though everything in part. Pray relieve me, then, from this teazing anxiety, for the Exami"nation and the Conference if disjoined would break 66 my heart." He had his wish; yet well-nigh broke his heart notwithstanding, on seeing the printed book. "I hope," he wrote to Southey, "my publisher sent you the Examination of Shakespeare-alas that I should say it the very worst-printed book that ever fell "into my hands. Volubly discreet'! 'slipped into' for 66 66 66 66 66 'stripped unto'! many others! Sit mute' for 'stand,' with many And then there are words I never "use: such as 'utmost;' I always write uttermost.' "In fact the misprints amount to 40 of the grosser 66 kind, and I know not how many of the smaller!" He added that if a friendly report of the thing (my notice of it) had not put him in good humour before it reached him, he would have flung it into the fire then and there, and dismissed it from his thoughts for ever. The friendly report had outstripped the volume in Florence by some days, and when the single copy afterwards arrived he had to lend it round to all his circle. He carefully kept the little notes from successive applicants for the loan, among them Milnes, Brown, Leckie, 1829-35. Kirkup, and the novelist Mr. James, also for the time his neighbour; and the flutter of pleasure and praise among them had been not without pleasure for himself, and a flutter of encouragement too. "I did not believe "such kind things would be said of me for at least a "century to come." The effect survived even the less hopeful side of the picture; and when Crabb Robinson wrote from London (10th Feb. 1835) that the Shakespeare book would have fallen dead-born but for one review, that, though this had proclaimed its beauties, others had found it unintelligible, and that a paper of high character had thrust it aside as "a mere silly imi"tation of obsolete law proceedings and phrases," Landor only replied to this part of the letter, that he was busy with something else which he hoped might have better fortune. The "something else" was Pericles and Aspasia, also written for the most part in this last year of residence in Italy which it helps to make memorable. VIII. PERICLES AND ASPASIA. LANDOR TO SOUTHEY. (Early in 1835.) "Since we met, since indeed we wrote, many things have occurred in your family on which I wish it were my good fortune to offer you only my congratulations. But grief is as pure an offering, and far more costly. I need not tell you that I have grieved, and not for an hour or two, at your afflictions. Nor did it satisfy my mind, nor can it yours, that you still have more reason for contentment, and higher sources both of consolation and delight, than any man upon earth. The human heart was never made for listening, and even this truth will find but tardy admittance into yours. I am so disgusted with politics and politicians that I never read a newspaper, but I hear that some respect has been shown to the services you have rendered the country by your writings. Poor Coleridge has not lived for the restoration of what was taken from him. I wish he had indulged less in metaphysics. Had I seen him a second time, I would have asked him whether the principal merit of the Germans does not consist in nomenclature and arrangement. Strongly do I imagine to myself that I have seen all their new truths, as they call them, in old authors. Of the moderns, as far as I can judge (for such reading tires me like walking knee-deep in saw-dust), Hobbes is the most acute, and Locke the most logical. My friend Mr. Robinson has not told me whether Charles Lamb has left any writings behind him. Nothing can be more delightful than the Essays of Elia; and his sister's style is perfect. I have read Mrs. Leicester's School four times, and each time with equal if not fresh delight. She is now far advanced in years, and no friend can be in the place of a brother to her. He was a most affectionate creature, pleasurable and even-tempered. Him too I saw but once, and yet I think of him as if I had known him forty years. Once, and once only, have I seen thy face, Impression on it stronger or more sweet. Cordial old man! what youth was in thy years, What wisdom in thy levity, what truth In every utterance of that purest soul! Few are the spirits of the glorified I'd spring to earlier at the gate of Heaven. Is there anything yet left upon the earth? or is there only a void space between you and me?... I hear you are writing a History of the Moors. Surely there must be valuable manuscripts in Fez and Morocco, perhaps too in Madrid. Have you ever heard that the library of the Greek Emperors is still preserved in the Seraglio? I do not trouble my head about Menander, poor Parr's regret; for, if he were only worth two Terences, he was only worth three farthings; but I would gladly see a volume of Simonides, and anything beyond the few words that Thucydides has given us of Pericles. I began a conversation between Pericles and Aspasia, and thought I could do better by a series of letters between them, not uninterrupted; for the letters should begin with their first friendship, should give place to their conversations afterwards, and recommence on their supposed separation during the plague of Athens. Few materials are extant: Bayle, Menage, Thucydides, Plutarch, and hardly anything more. So much the better. The coast is clear: there are 1829-35 neither rocks nor weeds before me. But I am writing as if I had not torn to pieces all their love-letters and orations! Few were completed." So Landor wrote in the letter, the last addressed to his friend from Italy, which Mr. Milnes brought over as an introduction to the poet-laureate. But even while he wrote, the subject of Pericles had recast itself in his mind; in the few more months that remained to him at the villa Gherardescha, it was brought nearly to completion; and though, having carried the manuscript to England in the December of 1835, it was published while he resided there, it is to Italy the book belongs. Here therefore, in the same manner and for the same reason as in his former books, I proceed to give account of it. The first notion mentioned to Southey, of including conversations in his plan, was thrown over afterwards; and he restricted himself to a series of imaginary letters, opening at the arrival of Aspasia in Athens from her native Miletus, and closing at the death of Pericles in the third year of the Peloponnesian war. He interspersed occasional speeches; and relieved his theme, which he also adorns and illustrates, by a variety of fragments of verse, the most thoroughly Greek that any Englishman has written. It was a daring choice to select a time which within the compass of a single life took in the lives of the foremost of the ancient poets, philosophers, historians, and men of action, by whom humanity and the human race have been exalted; and it was trebly daring to advance to such a task, trusting solely to the force of his genius and unassisted but by the treasures of his memory. "In writing my Pericles "and Aspasia," he says, in a letter of the 27th April 1836, "I had no books to consult. The characters, |