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THE LIFE OF LANDOR.

BOOK FIRST.

1775-1797. ÆT. 1-22.

WARWICK, RUGBY, OXFORD, AND SWANSEA.

1. Introductory. II. The Landors and the Savages. III. Birth and Childish Days. Iv. At Rugby School. V. At Ashbourne. VI. At Trinity College, Oxford. VII. First published Book. VIII. A fair Intercessor. IX. A Moral Epistle. x. Retreat to Wales.

I. INTRODUCTORY.

I AM not insensible to what is generally taken to be expressed, in literature as in many other things, by great popularity. The writer whom crowds of readers wait upon has deserved his following, for good or for ill; and the desire to read without the trouble of thinking, which railways have largely encouraged and to which many modern reputations are due, has not prevented the growth of other reputations that will outlive the contemporaries who conferred them.

But with this popular literature which in some form always exists, changing its form with the age, there has existed at all times a literature less immediately attractive, but safer from caprice or vicissitude; and finding its audiences, fit however few, the same through many ages. England has been very fortunate in it. Its principal masters have been the men who from time to time have purified, enlarged, and refixed the language; who

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have gathered to it new possessions, extending its power and variety; but whose relation for the most part to contemporary readers, far from that of the petted or popular favourite, has been rather that of the thoughtful to the little thinking, or the learned to the little knowing. They have been too wise for the foolish, and too difficult for the idle. They have left unsatisfied the eager wish for the merely pleasurable on whose gratification popularity so much depends; and they have never had for their audiences those multitudes of readers who cannot wait to consider and enjoy. Taking rank with this rare class is the writer, WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR, of whom I am about to give some account.

It is not my intention to speak otherwise than frankly of his character and of his books. Though I place him in the first rank as a writer of English prose, though he was also a genuine poet, and there is hardly exaggeration in the saying of one of his American admirers, that, excepting Shakespeare, no other writer has furnished us with so many or so delicate aphorisms of human nature, his faults lie more upon the surface than is usual with writers of this high order. It was unfortunate for him in his early years that self-control was not necessarily forced upon a temperament which had peculiar need of it; and its absence in later time affected both his books and his life disastrously. He was not subject to even the ordinary influences and restraints of a professional writer. To him literature was neither the spiritual calling for which it was prized by Wordsworth, nor the lucrative employment for which it was valued by Scott. Landor wrote without any other aim than to please himself, or satisfy the impulse as it rose. Writing was in that sense an indulgence to which no limits were put, and wherein no laws of government were admitted. If merely a thing pleased him, it was preeminent and excellent above all things; what for the moment most gratified his will or pleasure he was eager to avouch wisest and best, as in the thing that satisfied neither he could find suddenly all opposite qualities; and though a certain counterpoise to this was in his own nature, his opinions generally being wise and true, and his sympathies almost always generous and

* Professor Lowell.

noble, it led him frequently into contradictions and extravagance that have deprived him of a portion of his fame.

II. THE LANDORS AND THE Savages.

Landor's father was a physician. 'It was, I believe, not unusual,' his brother Robert writes to me, speaking of ninety or a hundred years ago, 'for even the eldest sons of private gentlemen to engage in some profession during their father's lifetime, ' if their fathers were not old. The regular army could afford 'but little room for them. Perhaps the greatest number were ' educated in your profession, as best qualifying them to manage 'the business of after-life. But some preferred medicine. Our 'father took his degree at Worcester-college, Oxford, and suc'ceeded Sir Charles Shuckborough, an old Warwickshire baronet. 'A still older baronet many years after, who lived in the adjoining parish to Ipsley-court, was first Doctor and then Sir Charles 'Throckmorton. The different branches of the medical profes'sion were kept much more distinct a hundred years ago than

at present. After the death of his father and his own succes'sion to the two Warwickshire estates, our father resigned his 'practice, and lived part of the year at Ipsley-court and part at 'Warwick.'

At Warwick was born Doctor Walter Landor's most famous son, the first issue of his second marriage. Of the six children born to his first marriage, with the daughter and heiress of Mr. Wright of Warwick, all but one died in childhood; and this daughter, on whom had been settled the bulk of her mother's fortune, married a Staffordshire cousin, Humphrey Arden of Longcroft. Doctor Landor's second wife was Elizabeth Savage, eldest daughter and co-heiress with her three sisters of Charles Savage, the head of an old Warwickshire family, the bulk of whose property, however, had been transferred to a younger branch who bore the name of Norris. The paternal fortune, not very large even before it was divided, the eldest daughter shared with her three sisters; but after her marriage to Doctor Landor, two estates in Warwickshire, Ipsley-court and Tachbrooke (clearbrook), were bequeathed to her by the representatives of the Norris branch

of her family, two great-uncles, very wealthy London merchants; and so much of the original land of the Savages of Tachbrooke was thus restored to them. A condition of strict entail to the eldest son accompanied the bequest, as if the object were to revive so far the consideration and condition of the old family; and, Doctor Landor's paternal estates in Staffordshire being in like manner entailed, there remained for the younger children that might be born to his second marriage, apart from any possible bequests from other relatives or prudent savings by their mother, only the succession to a smaller estate in Buckinghamshire left equally to her and her three sisters by the same Mr. Norris, after expiry of the life-interest in it of another descendant from the same family, the Countess of Conyngham. This estate was called Hughenden-manor, and is now the property of Mr. Disraeli.

Yet well-born as Walter Savage Landor thus was, on the side of both parents, no title can be established for such claim to high consideration or remote antiquity, on the part of either, as from time to time has been put forth in biographical notices of him, and even in his own writings. For here the reflection has to be made, strange in its application to such a man,-that, possessing few equals in those intellectual qualities which he was also not indisposed to estimate highly enough, he was not less eager to claim a position where many thousands of his contemporaries equalled, and many hundreds surpassed him. I had on one occasion the greatest difficulty in restraining him from sending a challenge to Lord John Russell for some fancied slight to the memory of Sir Arnold Savage, speaker of Henry the Seventh's first House of Commons; yet any connection beyond the name could not with safety have been assumed. When he says in one of his Imaginary Conversations that his estates were sufficient for the legal qualification of three Roman knights, he is probably not far from the truth; but it is much more doubtful whether any one of his forefathers of either family possessed in land an income equal to his own before it was squandered by him. Between the two classes of the untitled gentry of England, his family by both father and mother held a place of which any man might have been proud; but it was not exactly all he claimed for it. To the rank of those powerful commoners of a