1836-57. and he sprang out of bed repeating the 331st verse of the first Georgic, "ille flagranti, Aut Atho, aut Rhodopen, aut alta Ceraunia telo," &c. which he then and there set down in the letter that announced to me the close of his trial. He might as well have waited until daybreak, for he gained nothing by so sacrificing rest; but it was his old impetuous way. He was always inflicting a needless trouble on himself and on me, and pleading still that each should be the last. "Extremum hunc, Forstere, mihi concede "laborem." A week later, a strophe was added to one of the poems in the middle of the night, of which I had next day the quite illegible pencil-scrawl; and I may remark, of one of the best of his Latin poems subsequent to this volume, written Ad Heroinam amid the Italian excitements of 1849, and as much admired by Whewell of Trinity as by Aubrey de Vere, that this also was written with the like impetuosity, scrawled with pencil in the dark in the middle of the night, and in that condition sent to me. We got through our printer's trials at last, so successfully that he believed the quickest eyes would not discover eight faults in the whole eight thousand lines; and then he was all eagerness for the publication, alleging two special reasons. Leipsic fair was coming on, the very market for such a book; and before it could be taken notice of in England it must be got into France and Germany, if we would not have it prohibited in both! Alas, he might have spared himself these anxieties. I never heard that anybody asked for it at Leipsic fair; and sharp as were its epigrams against foreign as well as native rulers and statesmen, it may be doubted whether anyone noticed them save a few ripe scholars. High opinions from Whewell, Macleane, and others, to the effect that there had been no better Latin poetry since the Virgilian age, were sent him by Julius Hare; who added, for himself, that in spite of Landor's praise of Robert Smith, he suspected that the greatest Latin poet since Lucretius and Catullus was not Bobus, but a countryman of his." * The special result of the publication was rather for English than Latin readers. It led to the Hellenics. Its reception had justified my warning to him that the day was passed in which imagination or fancy could count for anything in a Latin composition, and that if he desired a judgment on his poetry rather than his Latinity he must go before another bench. "You were right," he now suddenly announced to me. "My resolution is "taken to send you a translation of all the Latin idyls, "including my Gebirus, out of the Poemata et Inscrip❝tiones. You shall have one a week; and a project "starts up before my mind. "hereafter, together with the Hellenics already included in the Works), " in one "small volume. It is better, if we can, to breathe life "into such figures as Pygmalion's than into such as "decorate our London tea-gardens." He kept his word, and the result was one of the most delightful of his books. The Latin became English idyls, retaining no trace of the coldness of translation, but all glowing and warm with original life. The Cupid and Pan, the Altar of Modesty, the Espousals of Polyxena, Dryope, Corythus, Pan and Pitys, Coresus and Callirhoë, Catillus This is, to print them English" (he means the *For various preceding allusions to Landor's Latin compositions, on which he himself set such store, see ante, i. pp. 85, 106, 188, 303 (these refer to the Gebirus; what follow chiefly to the Idyllia Heroica), 253, 256, 394, 395, 412, 415, 429, 437, 439, 446, 454, 456, 469, 477, 482, 483. See also, of the present volume, pp. 8, 121. 1836-57. and Salia, the Children of Venus, and the Last of Ulysses, were among those that thus took their place as English poems; and a collection so rich and various of classical scenes and images, limiting the word as we do in sculpture and painting, and associating it with Greece and Rome, does not exist in any other single book in our literature. Let the Corythus be studied, to understand the full value of its contents. Beside its beauty and wealth of imagery, there is also much beauty of form. Each idyl is for the most part exactly what the word implies, a short poem of the heroic cast, a small image of something great, epic in character, and in treatment too. There is a splendid touch in the Ulysses, where you see that by depriving Circe of her youth and restoring her's to Penelope it is meant to show how Vice loses her charm and perishes, and how impotent is Time against Virtue; but such meanings are never by way of sentiment obtruded. They are everywhere, but you must find them. It is not the eagerness to say everything, but the care to reject as much as possible, which impresses the reader throughout; and there is always the absence of exaggeration. When Jove looks, there is no need that he should frown. Wide-seeing Zeus lookt down; as mortals knew By the woods bending under his dark eye, And over the deep waters all round earth. Certainly this little book, which appeared at the close of 1847, gave convincing proof that up to this date Landor's powers even of fancy had not ebbed a hand's breadth on the sands of time, seventy-three years wide. X. SUMMER HOLIDAYS AND GUESTS AT HOME. When I first visited Landor in Bath the city was only accessible by coach, and no coach left after eight o'clock in the morning. But these difficulties in the way of intercourse soon disappeared, and the travelling that had occupied two entire days took up little more than double the same number of hours. The first time Mr. Dickens went with me the railroad was open, and it had become possible to leave in the afternoon, dine and pass the evening with Landor, and breakfast the next morning in London. Still vividly remembered by us both are such evenings, when a night's sleep purchased for us cheaply the pleasure of being present with him on his birthday; and I think it was at the first celebration of the kind in the first of his Bath lodgings, 35 St. James's-square, that the fancy which took the form of Little Nell in the Curiosity Shop first dawned on the genius of its creator. No character in prose fiction was a greater favourite with Landor. He thought that, upon her, Juliet might for a moment have turned her eyes from Romeo, and that Desdemona might have taken her hair-breadth escapes to heart, so interesting and pathetic did she seem to him; and when, some years later, the circumstance I have named was recalled to him, he broke into one of those whimsical bursts of comical extravagance out of which arose the fancy of Boythorn. With tremendous emphasis he confirmed. the fact, and added that he had never in his life regretted anything so much as his having failed to carry out an intention he had formed respecting it; for he meant to have purchased that house, 35 St. James'ssquare, and then and there to have burnt it to the ground, to the end that no meaner association should 1836-57. Then he would ever desecrate the birthplace of Nell. pause a little, become conscious of our sense of his absurdity, and break into a thundering peal of laughter. Another of these evenings, when Mr. Dickens and myself had travelled to him expressly to celebrate his birthday, returning the same night to London, is worth recalling because of our talk having led to his writing the quatrain adopted afterwards as the motto to his Last Fruit. It was his own version of the moral of his own life in its aims and enjoyments; and, to all who could so accept it, a very terse and conclusive summing-up of Epicurean philosophy. But, on another subject, Landor also talked that night in a way that hardly befitted a true disciple of Epicurus, enlarging on the many tears that David Copperfield had caused him to shed; to which the author of that delightful book himself replied by a question, which, from so powerful and so gentle a master of both laughter and tears, startled us then, and may make the matter worth allusion still. "But is it not yet more wonderful that "one of the most popular books on earth has absolutely "nothing in it to cause anyone either to laugh or cry?" Such, he proceeded to say, was to be affirmed with confidence of De Foe's masterpiece; he instanced the death of Friday, in that marvellous novel, as one of the least tender, and, in the true sense, least sentimental things ever written; and he accounted for the prodigious effect which the book has had upon an unexampled number and variety of readers, though without tears in it, or laughter, or even any mention of love, by its mere homely force and intensity of truth. Not every schoolboy alone was interested by it, but every man who had ever been one. I may add, though connected with the night referred to solely by the subject thus introduced, |