'dent, idle indeed. You will accept these opinions of mine as 'worth hardly a moment's consideration, unless they are con'firmed by your own; for I am now, and ever have been, as ill qualified to estimate Walter as he was to estimate Plato. Parr once described him to me as a most excellent Latin scholar with

some creditable knowledge of Greek; and I believe that not much more could be said fifty years later. Nor did he pretend

' to more.'

Of any taste as yet developed in him for particular branches. of English reading or study, there is no trace; but one of his letters to Southey in 1811 tells us of his first literary purchase: 'The two first books I ever bought were at the stall of an old woman at Rugby. They happened to be Baker's Chronicle ' and Drayton's Polyolbion. I was very fond of both because they were bought by me. They were my own; and if I did 'not read them attentively, my money would have been thrown 'away, and I must have thought and confessed myself injudi'cious. I have read neither since, and I never shall possess ‘either again. It is melancholy to think with how much more fondness and pride the writers of those days contemplated 'whatever was belonging to Old England. People now in praising any scene or event snarl all the while, and attack their neighbours for not praising. They feel a consciousness that 'the foundations of our greatness are impaired, and have occa'sioned a thousand little cracks and crevices to let in the cold air upon our comforts. Ah, Nassau and Oliver!-Quis vobis ' tertius hæres?' Certainly neither Sidmouth nor Castlereagh, Southey himself would have answered; and the mere tone of the question is some proof that to have read attentively,' at this time of life, two such hearty old lovers of their country as Baker and Drayton, had left a wholesome impression on this Rugby boy.

6

On the same form with him and Butler, all four having entered at about the same time, were Henry Cary and Walter Birch, both of them Landor's contemporaries at Oxford also. Writing from Florence to Mr. Robert Lytton at nearly the close of his eighty-fifth year, he says: 'Do not despise Cary's Dante. 'It is wonderful how he could have turned the rhymes of Dante

into unrhymed verse with any harmony: he has done it. Poor Cary! I remember him at Rugby and Oxford. He was the friend ' of my friend Walter Birch whom I fought at Rugby, and who thrashed me well. He was a year older, and a better boxer: we were intimate ever afterwards, till his death.' 'Birch and I thought ourselves men when we were only boys,' is the remark of another of his letters; but it made us the more manly when 'we grew up.' Many proofs remain of this intimacy, which, a few years after Landor's brief residence at Oxford, his brother Robert closely shared on coming into residence at Worcestercollege: Birch having by that time obtained a fellowship at Magdalen, and deservedly high repute among the most distinguished men in the other colleges. Birch's elder brother was second master at Rugby; and Landor often generously spoke of Walter himself as having been the best Rugby scholar, as well as the boy with whom he had formed his closest and indeed his only real friendship. 'I see this morning,' he wrote to me in 1854, that Routh, the president of Magdalen, is dead. He was ' made president just before I entered the university. The first · scholar admitted to his college after the election was my friend 'Walter Birch, the best scholar at Rugby, not excepting Butler. 'We used to walk together in Addison's walk along the Cher'well. From Rugby we had often gone to Bilton, one mile off, a small estate bought by Addison, where his only daughter, an 'old fat woman of weak intellect, was then living, and lived a good while after,-three or four years. Surely I must have 'assisted in another life!'

6

Beyond such glimpses as these there is little more to relate of his Rugby days. Though he had not many intimacies in the school, he was generally popular and respected, and used his influence often to save the younger boys from undue harshness or violence. This is mentioned in some recent recollections by one who was with him at Rugby; and an illustration may be added from a letter of his brother Henry's, when both had passed their seventieth year: 'Do you think I ever forgot your kindness to me at Rugby, in threatening another boy who ill-used * me if he again persisted in similar conduct? Or your gift of money to me at that time, when I verily believe you had not

A like inter

' another shilling left for your own indulgences? ference on behalf of another school-fellow of his own standing, with whom otherwise he had little in common, led to an intimacy that should be mentioned here; not for anything it adds to our knowledge of his school-days, but because it brought pleasant associations to his later life. Between him and Fleetwood Parkhurst, son of an old Worcestershire squire descended from the Fleetwoods and Dormers, there was a discordance of taste and temper in most things: yet their connection survived the Rugby time; they met frequently after their school-days; they visited each other's families; Parkhurst was the only Rugby boy who went with him to the same college at Oxford; and on occasions they travelled together until quite thrown asunder by a quarrel, which nevertheless in no respect abated the affection already conceived for his son's friend by the elder Mr. Parkhurst, and continued through the old squire's life. At Ripple-court on the banks of the Severn, the family house, there was for years no happier guest; and when nearly half a century had passed, and Fleetwood's youngest sister had wedded a public man of distinction to be named later in this narrative, Landor reminded her of days still gratefully remembered.

• Where Malvern's verdant ridges gleam

Beneath the morning ray,

Look eastward: see Sabrina's stream
Roll rapidly away.

The lord of these domains was one
Who loved me like an only son.'

Remaining at Rugby till he was past his fifteenth year, he had meanwhile been joined there by his younger brothers Charles and Henry; and in a letter to the latter written in 1847 we get our first glimpse of their father Doctor Landor, at this early time. Naming some communication received from the head of the Lawley family, he says Lord Wenlock had reminded him that their families had been intimate for sixty years, but that his own memory carries him farther back. It is sixty-five years since 'Sir Robert Lawley stood godfather to our brother Robert. I was at Canwell (so was Charles) with my father when I was ' about eleven years old. We went coursing, for we rode our

ponies. One morning we went into the stable, and Sir Robert 'said to my father, stopping in a certain spot, "Landor, how many bottles of port have we drank together just about """ here?" “Better talk of dozens, Sir Robert," said my father. 'He and his father must have known my grandfather, for he quoted as a saying of his father's that my grandfather was an 'honest dog for a Jacobite, and screamed with laughter as he said • it.' It was but a year after this incident that young Walter had a visitor who might have seemed not wholly unconnected with those dozens of port, and to have brought him unsought and premature instalment of his entailed estates of inheritance. The alarm was a false one, this particular legacy going to his younger brothers; but the reader will appreciate the quiet humour with which one of them, who received from his father no better portion, tells the tale.

"Though followed,' writes Mr. Robert Landor,' by two younger brothers as soon as they could be received at Rugby, there re'mains nothing worth recording till he was twelve years old; when a violent fit of the gout-gout which might have quali'fied him for an alderman-restored him to his mother's care at 'Warwick. Never was there a more impatient sufferer; and his imprecations, divided equally between the gout and his nurses, were heard afar. It is also strange that there never was any ' return of this disorder. Our father suffered from it, and all 'three of the younger brothers; but though Walter's appetite 'much surpassed the best of ours (or the worst), he escaped it during more than seventy years. However active at dinner, he was always temperate after it; and I never saw the smallest 'sign of excess, though he greatly enjoyed three or four glasses ' of light wine. He remained at Rugby till fifteen or sixteen, ́and gained the character of more than common scholarship by 'his Latin verses especially. However violent his temper might ' have been, I think that he was liked as well as respected by 'his school-fellows; for some of them, whom I knew many years later, always remembered him with pleasure.'

But, before finally quitting Rugby, an event of importance in a poet's life is to be recorded. While still in the school, and not more than fourteen, he had written his first original verses; made

upon a cousin's marriage, at her own request; with a certain sobriety of tone, as well as absence of commonplace in the metre, not usual in so young a beginner, and otherwise not worse or better than such things commonly are. But more interesting than the verses themselves is the letter I find with them in his papers, indorsed by himself 'Miss Norris,' addressed to 'Mr. 'Landor, at Rugby,' and written from his father's house in Warwick. The writer, who was of the family from whom his mother derived the estates of Ipsley and Tachbrooke, had obtained some influence over him, and uses it to confirm what was best in his tastes and temper by the endeavour to correct what was worst in both. 'I cannot help,' she writes, 'admiring your way of employing your leisure. . . . I think you are much in the right 'to make the most learned your friends and companions; but permit me to say, that though I think a proper spirit commend' able and even necessary at times, yet, in my opinion, it is better to submit sometimes to those under whose authority we are, even when we think they are in fault, than to run the risk of 'being esteemed arrogant and self-sufficient.' She was writing on the 23d of September 1790, little more than a year after the fall of the Bastille; and the revolt against authority she rebukes with such wise tenderness, has relation to one of the many differences between the scholar and his master which had occurred at this time. Landor was afterwards so willing to forget these encounters, and to recall nothing of the old doctor not kindly and grateful, that the allusion to them now shall be brief.

He seems to have thought, when in the school, that Dr. James either would not or could not appreciate what he did in Latin verse, and that when he was driven to take special notice of it, he took the worst, and not the best, for the purpose. Thus, when told very graciously on one occasion to copy out fairly in the play-book verses by himself of which he thought indifferently, Landor, in making the copy, put private additions to it of several lines, with a coarse allusion beginning, 'Hæc sunt malorum pessima carminum quæ Landor unquam scripsit,' &c. This offence was forgiven; but it was followed by another of which the circumstances were such as to render it impossible that he should continue longer in the school. The right at first was on