Charles that he was in the fifth class at Rugby, and that the new master there was said to have wonderful influence; that the boys worked very hard to gain his approbation; and that flogging and fagging were nearly abolished altogether. This was Arnold. However, the old lady adds, 'I hope the boys 'won't study more than is good for the health of them, and I 'did not like to hear that the play-ground is deserted.' That was her last letter to her son in Florence, though she lived until the October following. She had an illness somewhat suddenly in the spring, from which she never quite rallied; and through the intervening months it is discoverable that she was becoming gradually weaker, though no immediate danger was thought to exist.

Landor continued to write to her as usual. He complained to her in January how much people had beset him with introductions since his Conversations appeared, and why it was that the last series was still delayed. However, it would really be out at the end of March; and she would find that he had mentioned his kind old friend Dr. Parr with the regard and gratitude he owed him. He writes to her in June of the pleasantest weather he can remember in Italy, and asks her to tell his sister to send him various fruit-seeds. He tells her a few days later that she was not to be alarmed by anything she heard of his having been expelled from Florence, because he was back again; and the grand-duke had only laughed when he heard that the real offence had been what he had said in his book of Florentine patriots and Florentine justice, and of one of the Florentine grandees selling his wife's.old clothes before she had been dead a fortnight. At the end of July he informs her of his great misfortune in the death by apoplexy of his friend Lord Blessington at Paris; and this must have been the last letter his mother received from him. He sent her over his bust by Gibson at the end of August; but the letter accompanying it was to his sisters. In this he told them to explain to her that it was the gift of an incomparable friend, Mr. Ablett, through whom he had obtained at last a home of his own in Italy; and this was replied to by his sister Ellen, who said the bust had arrived without the slightest injury, that it was beautiful and much admired, and that Lord

Aston in particular was delighted with it. She added that they were in the midst of gaieties; that the Studley-castle people were staying with them; that they had had a succession of archery meetings; and that their mother had just returned from Ipsley, very feeble, but insisting on the gaieties going on.' This was on the 8th of September, and is the last glimpse of her, brave and self-denying to the close, which we are permitted to receive. She died in October, within one month of her 86th year;* and in writing of it to Southey he said that he fancied he should have been less affected by it, not having seen her for fifteen years. 'But it is only by the blow itself that early re'membrances are awakened to the uttermost.' On the 12th of November he had written to his sister Elizabeth :

'My mother's great kindness to me throughout the whole course of her life, made me perpetually think of her with the tenderest love. I thank God that she did not suffer either a painful or a long illness, and that she departed from life quite sensible of the affectionate care she had received from both her daughters. I am not sorry that she left me some token of her regard; but she gave me too many in her lifetime for me to think of taking any now. You and Ellen will retain, for my sake, the urn and the books. I wish to have her little silver seal, in exchange for an Oriental cornelian which you and my brothers gave me, belonging to my father. I have his arms, which is enough. The one I mean is pretty in its setting, and contains the word "Leitas" in Persian letters. My brother Henry was so kind as to purchase two Venetian paintings, once

'Par

From a marble monument in Tachbrooke church I take the subjoined, written mainly by Landor himself, but with additional touches by his brother Robert: Gualterus Landor, Roberto generoso, pio, integer'rimo Patre natus: duas uxores duxit; a prima filiam unicam, ab altera 'filios Iv. filias III. suscepit; lepidus, doctus, liberalis, probus, amicis ju'cundissimus; anno ætatis LXXIII. decessit.-Juxta, prout vivens moriensque voluit, composita est uxor ejus Elizabetha, filia Caroli Savagii, 'conjux, mater, fæmina pia, optima, vix annos LXXXV. menses XI.' 'don me,' wrote Landor in 1856, when he sent me a copy of the inscription as originally drawn up by him, 'pardon me, what I never can par'don in myself, the use of Latin in an Englishman's epitaph, which ought 'to be written for Englishmen to read. It was urged on me.' An English inscription on an adjoining tablet in the same church may also here be given, though it anticipates some events in this memoir. To the memory of Mary Anne Landor, second daughter of Walter and Elizabeth Landor, 'who died December 26, 1818, aged 40 years; and of her youngest sister, Ellen Landor, who died July 17, 1838, aged 55 years. Lastly, of Eliza'beth Savage Landor, their eldest sister, who died February 24, 1854, aged 77 years.'

mine, and to place them at Ipsley. I thanked him at the time, and thank him again; but I am resolved to accept nothing whatever from any of my relatives. If my mother's picture was purchased at Llanthony, I would buy it gladly. Pray let me hear about it. I remember it at my grandmother's fifty years ago. Adieu. I am ill-disposed for writing more.'

Upon that incident of his expulsion from Tuscany, which was one of his last announcements to her, a few words are all it will be necessary to add. It might have seemed a little startling if told of any one else, but in his case it made hardly a perceptible difference in his relations to the magistracy and police of Florence, with whom he had generally some quarrel on hand. Three years earlier he had written to Southey that the things said about the Tuscans in his Conversations, and principally those in power, being translated with bitter comments by some literary men in Florence whom he could not admit into his house, had greatly exasperated against him the ministers of the grand-duke, whom however he did not know by sight, nor they him; so that it was a matter of perfect indifference to him. The ground of indifference lasted exactly two more years, at the end of which he obtained perforce a personal acquaintance with some of the ministers, having been called before the courts and threatened to be sent out of Tuscany. And now, And now, another year having intervened, this threat was to be put in force.

A robbery of plate committed at his villa led to such an angry correspondence with the police respecting it, that their president, laying hold of some intemperate expressions in which Landor had ripped up older grievances, obtained from some of the ministers of the grand-duke an order for his expulsion from Florence. Paying no heed to this, he addressed to the grandduke himself a very spirited remonstrance; and this having been, though without his knowledge, strengthened by the intercession of Lord Normanby, Sir Robert Lawley, and others, the only farther notice of the matter was a public avowal by himself, silently received by the authorities, to the effect that, since they had thought fit to declare his continued residence among them to be distasteful, it was his fixed resolve to settle himself in Tuscany. He closed with similar avowal the account of the affair which he sent to Southey. 'Such being the case, I resolved to pitch 'my tent in the midst of them; and have now bought a villa,

'belonging to the Count Gherardescha, of the family of C. Ugo'lino, and upon the spot where Boccaccio led his women to bathe ' when they had left the first scene of their story-telling. Here 'I shall pass my life, long or short, no matter; but God grant ' without pain and sickness, and with only such friends and such 'enemies as I enjoy at present.' The latter, it must be added, he did not cease to cultivate. He kept up fruitful sources of dispute with 'rascally' magistrates, as well as with 'pious' thieves; but on the whole, excepting for a quarrel with a neighbour about a watercourse to be presently related and which engaged all his energies for a time, Landor lived at his new villa quietly enough for nearly six more years. He had been impressed, perhaps more than was usual with him, by Francis Hare's warning, sent when he heard of the recent banishment from Florence, that he would never find anywhere on the Continent so suitable a home. Writing in August from Trinity-college where he was staying with his brother Julius, after eager expression of his delight at hearing of Landor again in Florence, Hare gave him several reasons for declaring it to be the best and fittest abode for him in Europe; implored him, by all their pleasant memories of it, to contrive not to get into any fresh scrapes that might finally drive him out of it; and pronounced it to be, by all the strictest laws of social intercourse, enough for one gentleman to cane one scoundrel once in one life. Telling him, then, that his brother Augustus had just received from New-college the Wiltshire living of Alton Barnes where Crewe wrote his poem of Lewisdon Hill, he closes with an abrupt question, Why is I in Italics short? which Landor has answered by scratching across the page the line,

'Omnia namque Italus promittere grandia gaudet.'

The villa, into which he had moved just before his mother's death, remains to be described; but first may be mentioned a visit to him which already had also occurred before she passed away. There had appeared in Florence, he told his sister Ellen, the dearest of all the friends he ever had or ever should have, his Ianthe of former years, now a widow of title who had buried two husbands, who remained nevertheless so handsome that an

English earl and a French duke were offering their addresses to her, and in these the Frenchman was persisting in spite of all discouragement. Talk of time not going back, why, the sudden vision of this one face had rolled back from him in an instant more than twenty years! With which thought, put into verse, he closes his letter:

Say ye that years roll on, and ne'er return?
Say ye the sun, who leaves them all behind

(Their great creator), cannot bring one back

With all his force, though he draw worlds around?
Witness me, little streams that meet before

My happy dwelling, witness Affrico,

And Mensola! that ye have seen at once
Twenty roll back, twenty as swift and bright

As are your swiftest and your brightest waves,
When the tall cypress o'er the Doccia

Hurls from his inmost boughs the latent snow.'

The 'happy dwelling' was the Fiesolan villa, his present great enjoyment of which, how he came into possession of it, and his way of life there, will be best understood from what he wrote about it to the old home in Warwick.

III. THE VILLA GHERARDESCHA.

When Leigh Hunt, after many sad disappointments in Pisa and Genoa, found himself in Florence, his refuge from his troubles was to wander about Maiano, a village on the slope of one of the Fiesolan hills, two miles from the city, thinking of Boccaccio. On either side of Maiano were laid the two scenes of his Decameron the little streams that embrace it, the Affrico and Mensola, were the metamorphosed lovers in his Nimphale Fiesolano; within view was his villa Gherardi, before the village the hills of Fiesole, and at its feet the Valley of the Ladies. Every spot around was an illustrious memory. To the left, the house of Macchiavelli; still farther in that direction, nestling amid the blue hills, the white village of Settignano, where Michael Angelo was born; on the banks of the neighbouring Mugnone, the house of Dante; and in the background, Galileo's villa of Arcetri and the palaces and cathedrals of Florence. In the thick of this noble landscape, forming part of the village of San