of October, he wrote and told Southey what had happened. He was ignorant then that his wife's elder sister had already written to acquaint him with his wife's extreme grief and very serious illness; but this is the subject of his next letter to his friend, written at the opening of 1815, in which he says that it had at once banished from his mind all traces of resentment, and that he had written instantly to comfort and console her. As soon as her health and the weather admitted of her joining him, he added, he was to meet her in England, where he should stay only two days; and his closing assurance that Southey would receive his Latin poems in a fortnight, has amusing confirmation in what one of his brothers soon afterwards wrote to his mother about this unhappy domestic dispute: When we supposed him 'to be so miserable at Tours after parting with his wife, he was busy about a long Latin poem on the Death of Ulysses!' To the letter at the opening of 1815 Southey replied on the 5th of February, loud in pleasure at the reconciliation, and encouraging his friend not to doubt but that he would be able to keep his promise, and be the happier for keeping it. He bids. him also not forget that Tours holds the grave of Ronsard, who would have been a great poet if he had not been a Frenchman. 'But poetry of the higher order is as impossible in that curst 'language as it is in Chinese.' The letter closes with the hope that they may meet somewhere on the Continent before another autumn is gone: but not many weeks had passed before the hope began to look desperate, and Napoleon was again in the Tuileries when Landor replied. Nevertheless this had found him prepared. War or no war, he would not return to the country that had cast him out, by refusing to his property the protection of its laws. He thought Bonaparte's government not unlikely now to last, and he had obtained leave from it to continue resident in France. That it was not his intention to return to England, and that he had every disposition to prefer the empire to the government it had so suddenly displaced, he told his friend in this letter. Two more months however again unsettled everything, and greatly weakened in Landor the desire to continue a French citizen. BOOK FOURTH. 1815-1821. ÆT. 40-46. FIRST SIX YEARS IN ITALY: AT COMO, PISA, AND PISTOIA. 1. From Tours to Milan. II. At Como, Pisa, and Pistoia. III. On the way to Florence. IV. Retrospect and Prospect: a new Literary Undertaking. I. FROM TOURS TO MILAN. THE intention of remaining in France survived Waterloo but a little while, and with the second Bourbon restoration Landor resolved upon quitting Tours. But any return to England being for the present impossible, he now thought of Italy for his home. What had been his homes in Llanthony and Bath were now no longer his. His personal property had been sold in both places, and the management of his real estate had been taken out of his hands. It was a sad time. The Llanthony vision was over. No more possibility now of what once had been his dream, to rebuild the abbey as a princely mansion; no more chance of seeing in its plantations the two or three million trees which with a desperate fidelity his fancy and his hopes had made almost real; and though his new roads were to survive him, as they do even yet, too surely had the doom already been pronounced against whatever else he would have associated with his name at Llanthony. Before his house had well been inhabited his new trustees had ordered it to be taken down; but a few months earlier a flood had carried away the bridge he built; and whatever besides he valued had since been swept away as ruthlessly by a public sale. 'I have here in my rectory,' writes Mr. Robert Landor, ८ ‹ a Titian valued at twelve hundred guineas which my brother Henry purchased at the auction for ten pounds.' It needs not to dwell farther on these things. As to his real estate he was happily more fortunate. By the annuity reserved under the act of parliament to his mother, she became the first of his creditors; and being enabled to demand the management of Llanthony, she set apart from it for his use five hundred a year on condition that the money so advanced should be repaid to her younger children whenever by her death the estate at Ipsley should fall into his hands. Her life was prolonged for fourteen years, during which she had thus paid to him seven thousand pounds; and what was held to be a sufficient provision having accrued in the same interval to the younger children, partly by her economy and partly by the bequests of other relatives, the above-named condition, shortly before her death, with the entire concurrence of those other children, was abandoned and Llanthony released from that encumbrance. To this it will be only necessary to add that irrespective of all these arrangements there were simple contract debts unsettled which rendered for the present unadvisable not only any return to England, but even a continued residence at Tours; and Mr. Robert Landor, having at the time a project to visit Italy, at his brother's earnest request joined him at Tours that they might make the journey together. Landor's stay in the hospitable old French town, then less overrun with English than in later days, had been not without many enjoyments; for the ease with which at will he put off from his thoughts whatever troubled or harassed him, the old characteristic well known to his family, surprised even his brother when they met so soon after the tragedy of Llanthony. I have heard the latter, in relating their first visit together to the quaint old market-place with its splendid fountain where Walter had been in the habit of doing his own marketing daily during his exile, describe the joyous greeting that broke forth from all the market-women successively as he came in view, and his laughing word of jest or compliment for each that had given him universal popularity. The prefet of the town, next to the marketwomen, he seems to have regarded with most favour; it was the same who (I believe erroneously) was reported to have given brief refuge to Napoleon in his then recent flight to the English coast ; and it was always Landor's belief that he had seen the fugitive emperor dismount in the court-yard of the prefet's house in one of the suburbs, to which he had himself gone, finding the door unexpectedly closed to him, upon the very day when Napoleon was supposed to have passed through Tours. In September the brothers started for Italy, and by means of a letter addressed in the following month to their mother by the younger of them I learn some of the incidents of their journey. Here are its opening sentences: Walter wished very much to ' leave Tours on many accounts; amongst others, on account of ' its unhealthiness, the probability of fresh revolutions, and some 'personal apprehensions about his English creditors. I wished 'to see Italy; and as he pressed it most earnestly, and indeed ' could not travel without me, I agreed to accompany him. After 'contests with his landlady of a most tremendous description, ( we set off. Walter had kept his own carriage in all his distresses, and as posting was the cheapest thing in France, we posted Walter and myself on the dicky, his wife and her maid 'within. Our road lay on the eastern side of the river Loire for more than two hundred miles. This side was occupied by the 'German troops, and the other by the French. Thus we passed, 'between Tours and Lyons, a distance of four hundred miles, 'through 200,000 men,-Austrians, Prussians, Bavarians, Wirtembergers, Hessians. At Moulins the Prince of Hesse with all 'his staff was at the same hotel; and amused himself, whilst we were at supper, by standing with another officer at the door of our room and looking at Walter's wife. I ordered the door to 'be shut in his face. As this was done by an Englishman, he only laughed. If it had been done by a Frenchman or a German, there would have been no laughing on either side.' : The acres of vineyards seen by them on the banks of the Loire, Landor himself would often refer to with enthusiasm as not numbering less than hundreds of thousands; and as they passed, he told me, he could not but remember Goldsmith and his flute: though the scene otherwise was unlike the poet's pastoral picture, for along the rocky parts of the shore they observed, miles together, the people making their homes in the rock. The towns on the route were dirty and ill-built as Lyons itself; but for the last half of the distance, the two hundred miles nearest that second city of France, they found the scenery liker their own than anywhere else, and saw enclosures of quick with timber in the fences, rich well-cultivated land, and young wheat much forwarder than in England. 'It was from the bridge of Lyons 'we first saw the Alps, extending immediately in our front to a great distance. They were covered with snow half-way from 'the summits. It was about twenty miles from Lyons that one ' of our wheels broke for the third time, and we were detained more than a day. At last however we proceeded towards Chambery, the capital of Savoy, and passed through a most enchanting and romantic country,-rocks, woods, vineyards, and the 'finest passes.' : The letter proceeded to relate with much reality and vividness their first impressions of Italy, destined to be the home of one of them for more than twenty years and after another thirty years his final resting-place. All this however may not be dwelt on beyond the fact that though Landor meant at first to have fixed his quarters at Chambery, he made wiser ultimate choice of the Lake of Como. Of small and great discomforts also, and their trials of temper, incident to such a twenty days' journey over the seven hundred miles separating Milan from Tours, the son's letter naturally told much that the mother might be glad to hear; but even the few touches of character I shall quote must be read with allowances. If Mr. Robert Landor did not spare himself, of his brother he was quite as unsparing; and, with a very humane and proper chivalry which need not now be construed with excessive strictness, all his sympathy and all · his pity were reserved for the pretty little wife. To an observer so generous as well as just, her advantages of sex as well as of youth and beauty were indeed very great; but though prepared for Walter's ten thousand' fits of temper, it is a little startling, after the incident at Jersey, to find Walter's wife never giving way to even one. 'He is seldom out of a passion or a sulky fit 'excepting at dinner, when he is more boisterous and good'humoured than ever. Then his wife is a darling, a beauty, an 'angel, and a bird. But for just as little reason the next morn'ing she is a fool. She is certainly gentle, patient, and submissive. She takes all the trouble, is indeed too officious, and |