Seneca, and Lucullus and Cæsar: the three first named taking high rank in the class which I have set apart as prose-poems. In the first the conqueror of Syracuse lies with his death-wound before Hannibal, whose way it has cleared to Rome; in the second the tribune Metellus and the centurion Caius Marius meet at the siege of Numantia; and the third is that meeting of Tiberius and Vipsania after their divorce, which can hardly fail to affect the most careless reader with something of the emotion its writer underwent in composing it. The eternal protest of every age, against the sacrifice of human hearts to stateconvenience or policy, seems to rise with the cry of anguish of the unhappy prince, as he thinks of the contentment and quiet that might have been his though the palace of Cæsars cracked ' and split with emperors, while I, sitting in idleness on a cliff ' of Rhodes, eyed the Sun as he swang his golden censer athwart 'the heavens, or his image as it overstrode the sea.' The Epictetus and Seneca is one of the shorter dialogues, but very striking for its contrasts as well in the character as in the philosophy of the high-bred man of learning and the low-born slave, and enforcing admirable rules of simplicity and naturalness in writing. The most generally interesting of all these Latin dialogues, however, and most deservedly Southey's favourite, was the Lucullus and Cæsar. Everything that may be supposed to form part of the daily life of the most luxurious of Romans in the last years of the republic is here reproduced with a vivid reality. Even the farm, the cows, the lake, the fish-ponds, the Adriatic itself visible from that height of the Apennines, all of them as much adjuncts to the local truth of the scene as the tapestries and pictures in the hall, or the marble statues in the library, or the frescoes in the banquet-chamber that reproduce Cæsar's victories, take their places in the little drama presented to us in this delightful conversation. What a library is here!' exclaims Cæsar. 'Ah, Marcus Tullius! I salute thy image. Why 'frownest thou upon me? collecting the consular robe and uplifting the right arm, as when Rome stood firm again and Cati'line fled before thee.'

Such was the new series of Imaginary Conversations, of which it only remains that I should indicate the dates and

forms of publication. Twenty of the dialogues were issued as a third volume of the original series, one of them (partly in verse) on Inez de Castro being subsequently withdrawn to form portion of a dramatic poem with that title; and this third volume, with a dedication to Bolivar dated 1825 and a postscript supplied in 1827, was published by Mr. Colburn in 1828. Fifteen more formed the first volume of a new series, which a second volume of twelve more completed; one of the latter that had Peleus and Thetis for its speakers, thus violating the rule to exclude imaginary people, being afterwards transformed into a scene which is acted in the Epicurus and Leontion; and this 'second series,' its first volume dedicated in May 1826 to Sir Robert Wilson, and its second in August 1826 to Lord Guildford, was published by Mr. Duncan in 1829, the year to which my narrative has arrived. Anticipating a little, I will add that what Julius Hare had done for the first and second it devolved on me to do for the third series of the Imaginary Conversations; and as, out of these, eighteen had been completed, and eight more were partially written, before Landor left Italy, it will conclude the story of this remarkable work if I now mention what the subjects of them were.

Five were classical. In two, forming a bright little prosepoem, shaded with touches of character of the utmost delicacy and pathos, Æsop and Rhodope are the speakers. In a third, spoken over the fall of Carthage, and rising to even a grander theme in the immeasurable services of Greece to Rome, the speakers are Scipio and his Greek friends Panatius and Polybius. In the fourth, Pisistratus receives from Solon counsel and commiseration. In the fifth, where Lucius and Timotheus converse, and nearly every sentence is radiant with wisdom or wit, the great Greek satirist warns one of the leaders of the new Christian sect against the errors under which the old Gods had perished. This is a very masterly production.

Fourteen had for their speakers people famous in foreign lands. The East supplied one in Rhadamistus and Zenobia, a brief dialogue of intense passion: to which character belonged also a subject from Spain, Philip the Second and Donna Juana Coelho; one from France, Joan of Orleans and Agnes Sorel; and

three from Italy, Tancredi and Constantia, Tasso and Cornelia, Dante with his wife Gemma Donati, and Dante with his angel Beatrice. Galileo visited in his prison by Milton is the subject of a seventh; the eighth, filled also with pleasant memories of Florence and Fiesole, was a dialogue between the painter Fra Filippo Lippi and Pope Eugenius the Fourth; and La Rochefoucault talking to La Fontaine supplied the ninth, both speakers talking so well that one would hardly suspect the writer to have hated the first of these Frenchmen almost as much as he loved the second. The German subjects were three: Melancthon in colloquy with Calvin; and Sandt conversing with Kotzebue on the eve of the commission of his crime, and with Blucher afterwards in prison while waiting his punishment. The thirteenth and fourteenth, Cardinal Legate Albani and the Picturedealers, and the Emperor of China and his minister, formed portions respectively of two sets of papers, on High and Low Life in Italy, and on the Adventures of a Chinese statesman dispatched to Europe for a batch of first-rate professors of Christianity, with whose help his master, profiting by experience of the Jesuits, hopes to sow, among his enemies the Tartars, divisions and animosities that will destroy them.

The six latest were on English themes, all of them dialogues. of character, interfused with intense passion in that where Mary of Scotland surrenders herself to Bothwell: and, in the rest, where the English Mary and her sister Elizabeth meet after their brother's death and the proclamation of Lady Jane; where the queen Elizabeth talks, after the massacre of Bartholomew, with Cecil and Anjou and the French Ambassador; where Bishop Shipley says adieu to Franklin after his mission of peace has failed; where Addison encounters Steele after the bailiffs have been with him; and where Andrew Marvell after a visit to Milton meets Bishop Parker in Bunhill-row, showing at their very best Landor's humour and eloquence, grasp of individual portraiture, and play of wit and fancy. The last has, perhaps more than any, the greatest qualities of his writing consistently sustained, at their highest level and with the fewest drawbacks.

BOOK SIXTH.

1829-1835. T. 54-60.

AT FIESOLE.

1. Closing Years in the Palazzo Medici. II. Mother's Death. III. The Villa Gherardescha. IV. England revisited. v. Again in Italy: old Pictures and new Friends. VI. Examination of Shakespeare for Deerstealing. VII. Pericles and Aspasia. VIII. Self-banishment from Fiesole.

I. CLOSING YEARS IN THE PALAZZO MEDICI.

From France to Italy my steps I bent,
And pitcht at Arno's side my household tent.
Six years the Medicaan palace held
My wandering Lares; then they went afield,
Where the hewn rocks of Fiesole impend
O'er Doccia's dell, and fig and olive blend.
There the twin streams in Affrico unite,
One dimly seen, the other out of sight,
But ever playing in his smoothen'd bed
Of polisht stone, and willing to be led
Where clustering vines protect him from the sun,
Never too grave to smile, too tired to run.
Here, by the lake, Boccacio's fair brigade
Beguiled the hours, and tale for tale repaid.

How happy! O, how happy had I been
With friends and children in this quiet scene!
Its quiet was not destined to be mine:
'Twas hard to keep, 'twas harder to resign.'

So wrote Landor, in a little poem on his homes; but the Medicæan palace had not held his Lares five years when he moved into the country two miles from the Tuscan capital, and interposed the villa Castiglione between his homes in Florence and Fiesole. Here he lived, with a short interval in the winter of '28 and '29 at the casa Giugni, until he found his Fiesolan

home. A characteristic incident had closed his intercourse with the living representative of the Medici. Mr. Kirkup writes to

me:

'I remember one day, when he lived in the Medici palace, he wrote to the Marquis, and accused him of having seduced away his coachman. The marquis, I should tell you, enjoyed no very good name, and this had exasperated Landor the more. Mrs. Landor was sitting in the drawingroom the day after, where I and some others were, when the marquis came strutting in without removing his hat. But he had scarcely advanced three steps from the door when Landor walked up to him quickly and knocked his hat off, then took him by the arm and turned him out. You should have heard Landor's shout of laughter at his own anger when it was all over, inextinguishable laughter which none of us could resist. Immediately after he sent the marquis warning by the hands of a policeman, which is reckoned an affront, and quitted his house at the end of the year.'

The same anecdote is related to me in the letter of a family connection who passed some time at the Italian villa,* and who, after remarking that Landor's frequent outbreaks of intensely sensitive pride astounded the Italians more than anything, says truly enough that the secret of it was not the vulgar sense of importance attached to his position as an English gentleman, but the vast ever-present conviction of the infinity of his mental superiority. 'The smallest unintentional appearance of slight from a superior in rank would at any moment rouse ' him into a fury of passion, never thoroughly allayed till its last 'force had spent itself in an epigram.' Such incidents, at the worst never fraught with much gravity, often took even a highly amusing turn, during his earlier years in Italy, from his imperfect acquaintance with the language; and here Mr. Wilson Landor's letter confirms what was said on a former page.

'Though at last he understood it thoroughly, and spoke it with the utmost grammatical correctness and elegance, he acquired it with less facility than might have been expected. Mrs. Landor, without any study, could converse in it with ease and volubility long before her husband. When Southey visited them in Italy, although well acquainted with French and Italian, he showed himself a self-taught linguist, and his hearers were not a little amused at his oddities of pronunciation and speech.'

* Mr. Edward Wilson Landor, a cousin of the Landors of Rugely, now a police-magistrate in Perth (Western Australia), from whom, in September 1867, when the first four books of this biography had been printed off for more than two months, I received the letter above referred to.