the most odious. South himself, highly as I estimate him, ' and even you, whose language is still better, will never push me across the road to shake hands with this uncouth ruffian.' At Wastwater the friends separated, and within a couple of days Southey wrote to say that Landor's recent apparition had been to them as a dream, but as the pleasantest of dreams, and one that was never to be indistinctly remembered. Landor answered this from Warwick, which, he tells his friend, after what appeared to him almost an age of wandering, he had reached the preceding week; and which, formerly of all places in the world the most quiet and idle, was now joining its own noises to those of Leamington. 'I remember the time, not forty years 'ago, when Leamington had only two tenements that joined each other, and in the whole village only six or seven of any sort, 'besides the squire's, one Prew, who was the uncle of my grandmother. If her brother had lived, he would have had this ' vast property, at that time a small one. I cannot help smiling ' at the narrow escape I have had of three such encumbrances.'

From Julius Hare he heard in the same week that his visit had left with Wordsworth also the pleasantest impression. Julius had seen much of the great poet in that and the preceding year, having passed some time with him at Rydal; 'and rarely indeed in the course of life,' he wrote to Landor, 'is one allowed to take such a survey of all that is lofty and all that is profound ' in our nature, as one obtains from living with him in his home. He has frequently desired me to give you his kindest remem'brances and the assurances of his highest regard. Your poli'tics did not alarm him. He was in excellent health and spirits, · and talked with all the alacrity of youth of the day you passed 'with him.' To this I will add the comment afforded by some sentences from a letter sent by Hare to Landor in the midsummer of the previous year (1831), which future biographers of the poet may thank me for preserving. 'When Wordsworth was 'last with us at the end of April, I was very much grieved to 'find how much the state of the country and the ministerial re'form-bill had preyed upon his health. Everybody said he 'seemed to have grown ten years older in the last three months. If the bill does all the good which its most infatuated advo'cates anticipate, it will hardly make amends for this evil.' The

anticipation of both evil and good is almost always in excess; and brief as were the months that had brought the poet back to his alacrity of youth, they had doubtless satisfied him also that the country was getting on its legs again.

We hear of Landor next in Richmond and in London, from which he wrote to his sisters on the 24th of September to say that his English visit was coming to a close. His wife's family, with whom he had been staying at Richmond, had been most kind to him, but he was very impatient to be again among his own creatures. Cholera had been with him on every side as he travelled, but he had tried to be a match for it, and it would be very spiteful of it to do for him' anywhere but at his own villa, where he had a place prepared, and where his two labourers were to have a crown each for planting him. Their brother Robert would tell them of the fortunate meeting 'before the inn at Evesham, where his carriage and my coach had stopped ;' and they would have heard of his visit to Charles at Colton. On the following Saturday he meant to leave England, and they would probably receive meanwhile some pictures he had intrusted to Mr. Ablett for them.

Julius Hare and one of his Cambridge friends (since master of Downing) accompanied Landor on his return. They travelled through Belgium, up the Rhine to Frankfort, and through Munich and the Tyrol into Italy, reaching Florence on the last day of November. After he quitted Hofer's country, and while staying with his friends in Venice, a city that he held always to be incomparable among cities as Shakespeare among men, he had put into his own language what he heard from the Tyrolese peasants about Hofer's death, and sent it over to England for publication. At the same time he sent also to Kenyon an ode to Southey and an ode to Wordsworth, written while yet he had lingered amid the passes of the Tyrol. Much excellent verse was in the latter, on the company of immortals with whom he ranked his friend; and very pleasantly it closed by wishing them

'Every joy above

That highly-blessèd spirits prove,

Save one: and that too shall be theirs,

But after many rolling years,

When 'mid their light Thy light appears.'

Nor will the reader object that I should add the closing verse of the yet nobler ode to Southey, in which, referring to the old dedication of the Curse of Kehama, there is the grand exaggeration of thanks and praise which, from Raleigh and Spenser downward, poets have exercised the right to give to brother poets, without exception or challenge:

Wherein my name, engraven by thy hand,
Above the royal gleam of blazonry shall stand;
Not, were all Syracuse

Pour'd forth before my Muse,

With Hiero's cars and steeds, and Pindar's lyre
Brightening the path with more than solar fire,
Could I as would beseem requite the praise

Shower'd upon my low head from thy most lofty lays.'

As soon as I read your ode to Southey,' wrote Kenyon to Landor (16th January 1833), 'I resolved to print it. I sounded 'S. on the subject, and then sent it to the Athenæum, the Editor ' of which deferred it for a week, that it might give éclat to the 'first paper of the year. Southey said something about omitting the last stanza, as beyond the occasion; but this I did not attend to.' Crabb Robinson wrote to him a few months later that Wordsworth was extremely grateful, though he thought Southey's ode the best, and wished that, in his own, Dryden had been praised less and Spenser more.

V. AGAIN IN ITALY: OLD PICTURES AND NEW FRIENDS.

Landor had by this time become known, not wisely but too well, among the Italian picture-dealers, who passed through his hands as many rare old masters as would have set up the fortunes of half the galleries in Europe. In this as in too many other things he had no judgment but his will; and a cheerful self-imposture enabled him in perfect good faith to carry on the imposture honestly with all, even with the rascals who made it their commodity. He would so prepare you by a letter for his Rubens or his Raffaelle, or in its presence would do it homage with such perfect good faith, that your own eyes were as ready as

his to be made fools to the other senses. Your picture found its way to Alton,' wrote Augustus Hare to him in the summer of 1833, and we thought it almost worthy of the letter which announced its coming. More perfect than that letter it could not 'have been, if Raffaelle had painted the whole of it.' Often have enjoyments in this way been mine which the presence of the real masters could not have made addition to; and never had I reason to question his own belief that the canvas did actually contain the glories that were but reflected on it from imagination and desire. It was incident to such treasures of course that they should rapidly accumulate; here and there even a real master crept in; and what with the splendour of the frames, the show upon his walls became magnificent. But the principle of the collection admitted hardly of a limit, and the treasures overflowed. He had taken several with him to England. Ablett had a Carlo Dolce; his sisters some Claudes and Canalettis; and his brother Henry, with special injunction that he should place them at Tachbrooke, which in part he had lately repurchased, some masters as old as Perugino. He now tells his sisters (8th January 1834) that he has a great many more pictures going to them, only delayed by the rogues in the custom-house wanting more money. As to his brother's or their offering to pay for them, that was quite out of the question. He had more than he has room for, as his windows are low, not reaching to the middle height of the apartments and they were to tell Henry that his batch would follow. They would be very old ones, Cimabues and Giottos, and were getting ready from suppressed convents and monasteries at Prato and Pistoia. In later years I partook myself of this munificence; and I well remember, when I then met Julius Hare with Landor at Kenyon's dinner-table, with what a grave smile, lighting up the deepmarked lines of his thoughtful face, Julius spoke of his drawingroom at Hurstmonceaux as perhaps the only one in England that had seven virgins in it each of them almost three hundred years old.

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The notices that follow are from Landor's letters to his sisters in 1834, the last that were to be written to them from his home in Italy.

AUGUST 27, 1834.

'We have heard that Coleridge is dead. He had recovered his health when I saw him, and told me that he had not been better for many years. Poor man! He put on a bran-new suit of black to come down and see me, and made me as many fine speeches as he ever could have done to a pretty girl. My heart aches at the thought that almost the greatest genius in the world, and one so friendly to me, is gone from it. Southey too is likely to suffer the most severe affliction, not merely in the death of his old friend, but his wife (he says) has been long declining in health, and he fears to lose her. She too, when I saw her, was florid and strong, and had not begun to bear the appearance of age in any respect whatever. I hear wonderful things of a new poem by Mr. Taylor, Philip Van Artevelde.'

SAME DATE: A NEW BOOK.

'Before a month is over, you or Harry (it comes to the same thing) will receive a very curious book, "The Examination of William Shakespeare before Sir Thomas Lucy touching Deer-Stealing." Of course it will interest Henry more than you, being law. It is not impossible that I may be very soon in England, for I have told Lord Mulgrave that I would accept the Archbishopric .of Canterbury, if he would obtain a commendam from the king for me to hold the Popedom at the same time. But perhaps the popular outcry against pluralities may raise some difficulty. I begin to sicken of Italy; for five entire months we have not had rain enough to wash a pocket-handkerchief, and no dew. Even the big leaves are falling off; my pear-trees and peaches are withered. I shall lose nearly sixty. The apricots stand it for the present.'

In the same letter he sends word of another consignment of pictures on the way to his sisters and to Henry. The previous one had been most successful. Thanks were profuse; and his sister Elizabeth had described amusingly Henry's enthusiasm, as he knelt before virgins and children, no less a picture than they. This last batch, his sister Elizabeth told him in acknow- . ledgment, had become quite the rage' at Warwick, all sorts of people flocking to see them; but sisters and brother had not yet divided the spoil. Her previous letter (22d October), urgently pressing him to pay them another visit in the ensuing year, had given him melancholy news about Southey's wife; and to this he replied very sadly, telling her that he could not bring himself then to move from Florence, and enclosing her some verses sent as his reply to a similar invitation. The verses' were that fine ode to Joseph Ablett to be found in the collected works, which will preserve his friend's name as long as his own survives. I give a part of it here as written in this letter, because of the changes made in it as printed, where the couplet

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