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by A and B; the main object being to recommend particular systems or lines of thought, special opinions, or social changes. Far different was Landor's. His plan had taken a range as wide as life and history. All the leading shapes of the past, the most. familiar and the most august, were to be called up again. Modes of thinking the most various and events the most distant, all that had made the greatness or the littleness of mankind, were proposed for his theme. Beside the fires of the present, the ashes of the past were to be rekindled, and to shoot again into warmth and brightness. The scene was to be shifting as life, but continuous as time. Over it were to pass successions of statesmen, lawyers, and churchmen; wits and men of letters; party men, soldiers, and kings; the most tender, delicate, and noble women; figures fresh from the schools of Athens and the courts of Rome; philosophers philosophising, and politicians discussing questions of state; poets talking of poetry, men of the world of matters worldly, and English, Italians, or French of their respective literatures and manners. The very extent of such a design, if success were to be obtained at all, was a security for its fair execution. With a stage so spread before him, whether his immediate purpose were expression of opinion or representation of character, he could hardly help breaking through the circumscription and confine' of his own small round of likings and dislikings. His plan compelled it; and what else it exacted no other man living could have supplied so well. The requisites for it were such as no existing writer possessed in the same degree as he did. Nothing had ever been indifferent to him that affected humanity; poetry and history had delivered up to him their treasures; and the secrets of antiquity were his. The first beginnings of his enterprise had been mentioned to Southey in a letter from Florence of the date of the 9th of March 1822.

'It is long ago since you first told me that you were writing some dialogues. I began to do the same thing after you, having formerly written two or three about the time when the first income-tax was imposed. I have now written fifteen new ones, throwing into the fire one between Swift and Sir William Temple, and another between Addison and Lord Somers; the former because it was democratical, the latter because it was composed maliciously, and contained all the inelegancies and inac

curacies of style I could collect from Addison. The number would surpass belief. The two earlier ones, the first between Lord Grenville and Burke, the other between Henry the Fourth and Sir Arnold Savage, were written more than twenty years ago, which no person would believe of the former; but I gave the substance of it to Robert Adair to get inserted in the Morning Chronicle, and a part of it (now omitted) was thought too personal, and it was refused. I hope your dialogues are printed, that they may give some credit and fashion to this manner of composition.'

Thus employed, we leave him at the close of the first half of his life happier upon the whole than he has been since its outset in the Tenby and Swansea days, with a better outlet than has yet been open for his powers and faculties, and with even a little gleam of sunshine, from his mother's care and sacrifices, again lighting-up his personal fortune. In the letter to Southey just quoted he tells him of his hope to be able, some day soon, to fix himself permanently, not in Florence itself, but in a villa in its neighbourhood; and he says that he shall add a garden to it by converting a vineyard into one, which I cannot do unless I purchase it; and (a thing I never expected) this too is in my 'power.' Another thing as unlooked for he was soon also to find within his power. He never expected that, if any considerable number of people were found to praise or admire him, he should be able to entertain other than a mean opinion of himself; and of this excuse for every eccentricity, this foolish principle which has dominated over so much of his past life, he will very shortly be deprived. He will discover that when people praise him they do not necessarily lower him to their level; that they do not prove him to be, for that reason, only so much more like themselves; and that it is*not therefore essentially a base or unworthy thing to desire or deserve, nay even in some small degree to obtain, popularity. We may not be sanguine indeed that this wiser experience will be permanent, or that old errors and extravagances will not still be abundant; but the promise is fairer than it has been, and from the last half of Landor's life there is at least the prospect of better results than have attended the years that are gone.

[The First Volume of the original edition of this Biography closed with the Fourth Book.]

BOOK FIFTH.

1822-1828. ÆT. 47-53.

THE IMAGINARY CONVERSATIONS.

1. The Manuscript on its way. 11. A Publisher found. 111. What the Book contained. IV. How the Book was received. Correspondence with Southey. VI. Family Letters. VII. Additional Dialogues.

I. THE MANUSCRIPT ON ITS WAY.

'JULIUS HARE will have the kindness to put this letter into the post-office when he reaches London. I have long expected to

see Mr. Kenyon in hopes of reading your new poem, of which I have heard not indeed many but very high eulogies.' These are the opening lines of the first letter written to Southey by Landor, early in 1822, after Florence had become his settled abode; and in the whole of his later life there are not two pleasanter figures than the friends it names.

It was not however Julius, but Augustus Hare, to whom the letter was intrusted, a later passage in it correcting the mistake; for it was not till towards the close of the year that Julius was returning to his law-studies in the Temple, after that visit to his brothers Francis and Marcus at Milan in the preceding winter, when he first made acquaintance with the name and writings of Landor, to whom all the brothers Hare, as we shall see, became ultimately known, Augustus and Marcus as well as Francis and Julius; but the latter two most familiarly. Hare-brained, Southey called them all; and there was sufficient truth in the playful imputation to recommend them especially to this new friend, to whom the impetuosity and eagerness as well as various information of Francis, and the scholarly acquirements and speculative turn of Julius, might have seemed but the reflection of

a part of his own larger and more various nature. The Hares,' he wrote to his sisters in 1833, 'are beyond all comparison the 'most pleasant family of men I ever was acquainted with.'

His knowledge of them began with Francis. This was the boy-friend of Palmerston, with whom, two years before the opening of the century, both having then reached the mature age of thirteen or so, the future prime-minister of England had discussed marriage, Don Quixote in the original, and the Greek and Latin classics ;* and whom Cyril Jackson distinguished, on his afterwards entering Christchurch, as the only rolling stone. he had ever known that was always gathering moss. Landor met him first at Tours; and, soon after establishing himself in the palazzo Medici in Florence, they became so intimate that from Hare's society, he often said, he derived the animation and excitement that had helped him most in the composition of his Imaginary Conversations; nor did these friendly relations cease until the close of Hare's life at Palermo.t Not indeed without occasional interruption from that excess or over-vehemence of speech from which neither was free, and which their common friend, Lord Blessington, seems to attribute more especially to Hare, in writing of his marriage in 1827 that il Signor Francesco had been so much improved by it that he at last allowed other people to talk. There is even a hint of the failing in

Landor's tender allusion to the friend,

Who held mute the joyous and the wise

With wit and eloquence, whose tomb, afar

From all his friends and all his countrymen,
Saddens the light Palermo.'

And by nearly the last remaining of the English residents of

* See vol. i. pp. 5-9 of Lord Dalling and Bulwer's Life of Lord Palmerston; a work unhappily interrupted by the death of its author, who, distinguished as he was in literature and in the service of the state, has left his friends to regret a charm of manner, itself the reflection of one of the kindliest of natures, which gave singular fascination to him in private intercourse.

† I will quote, as honourable to both, one of Hare's last letters from Palermo: 'My dear Landor, It did not require this fresh proof of your 'friendship to convince me that you were one of the most disinterested, one of the most zealous and constant of friends. That I have long 'known. Qualis ab incepto.' Landor had been making some exertion for Hare's children.