The friendly report had outstripped the volume in Florence by some days, and when the single copy afterwards arrived he had to lend it round to all his circle. He carefully kept the little notes from successive applicants for the loan, among them Milnes, Brown, Leckie, Kirkup, and the novelist Mr. James, also for the time his neighbour; and the flutter of pleasure and praise among them had not been without pleasure for himself, and a flutter of encouragement too. I did not believe such kind things would ́ be said of me for at least a century to come.' The effect survived even the less hopeful side of the picture; and when Crabb Robinson wrote from London (10th of February 1835), that the Shakespeare book would have fallen dead-born but for one review, that, though this had proclaimed its beauties, others had found it unintelligible, and that a paper of high character had thrust it aside as a mere silly imitation of obsolete law proceed'ings and phrases,' Landor only replied to this part of the letter, that he was busy with something else which he hoped might have better fortune.

The 'something else' was Pericles and Aspasia, also written for the most part in this last year of residence in Italy, which it helps to make memorable.

VII. PERICLES AND ASPASIA.

LANDOR TO SOUTHEY (early in 1835).

My friend Mr. Robinson has not told me whether Charles Lamb has left any writings behind him. Nothing can be more delightful than the Essays of Elia; and his sister's style is perfect. I have read Mrs. Leicester's School four times, and each time with equal if not fresh delight. She is now far advanced in years, and no friend can be in the place of a brother to her. He was a most affectionate creature, pleasurable and even-tempered. Him too I saw but once, and yet I think of him as if I had known him forty years.

Once, and once only, have I seen thy face,
Elia! once only has thy tripping tongue
Run o'er my breast, yet never has been left
Impression on it stronger or more sweet.
Cordial old man! what youth was in thy years,
What wisdom in thy levity, what truth
In every utterance of that purest soul!

Few are the spirits of the glorified

I'd spring to earlier at the gate of Heaven,

Is there anything yet left upon the earth? or is there only a void space between you and me? . . . I began a conversation between Pericles and Aspasia, and thought I could do better by a series of letters between them, not uninterrupted; for the letters should begin with their first friendship, should give place to their conversations afterwards, and recommence on their supposed separation during the plague of Athens. Few materials are extant: Bayle, Menage, Thucydides, Plutarch, and hardly anything more. So much the better. The coast is clear: there are neither rocks nor weeds before me. But I am writing as if I had not torn to pieces all their love-letters and orations! Few were completed.'

So Landor wrote in the letter, the last addressed to his friend from Italy, which Mr. Milnes brought over as an introduction to the poet-laureate. But even while he wrote, the subject of Pericles had recast itself in his mind; in the few more months that remained to him at the villa Gherardescha it was brought nearly to completion; and though, having carried the manuscript to England in the December of 1835, it was published while he resided there, it is to Italy the book belongs. Here therefore brief account of it is given.

The first notion mentioned to Southey, of including conversations in his plan, was thrown over afterwards; and he restricted himself to a series of imaginary letters, opening at the arrival of Aspasia in Athens from her native Miletus, and closing at the death of Pericles in the third year of the Peloponnesian war. He interspersed occasional speeches; and relieved his theme, which he also adorns and illustrates, by a variety of fragments of verse the most thoroughly Greek that any Englishman has written. It was a daring choice to select a time which within the compass of a single life took in the lives of the foremost of the ancient poets, philosophers, historians, and men of action, by whom humanity and the human race have been exalted; and it was trebly daring to advance to such a task, trusting solely to the force of his genius and unassisted but by the treasures of his memory. In writing my Pericles and Aspasia,' he says, in a letter of the 27th April 1836, 'I had no books to 'consult. The characters, thoughts, and actions are all fictions. 'Pericles was somewhat less amiable, Aspasia somewhat less virtuous, Alcibiades somewhat less sensitive; but here I could represent him so, being young, and before his character was 'displayed.' Besides these, his only leading persons are Aspasia's

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friend and countrywoman Cleone, and the philosopher Anaxagoras; the figures in his foreground being wisely few, but their grouping and accessories such as to surround with all the greatness of their age his hero and heroine, who vie with each other in appreciation of the genius that is present with them, and in their knowledge of the glories of the past. There are several exquisite episodes; and that of Xeniades of Miletus, the rejected lover of Aspasia, himself as vainly beloved by Cleone, invests the latter with a softness and grace hardly second to Aspasia's own. These two women fill the book to overflowing with sensibility and tenderness, insomuch that one of Landor's American admirers* has singled it out as in this respect preeminent over all his writings, a book that we are frequently forced to drop, and surrender ourselves to the visions and memories, 'soft or sad, which its words awaken, and cause to pass before 'the mind.' Yet a book also that perfectly sustains the interest which it vividly awakens. Not mean is the exploit when a writer can satisfy the most exacting scholarship while he revives the forms or imitates the language of antiquity. But here we have something more, resembling rather antiquity itself than the most scholarly and successful presentation of it. We are in the theatre when Prometheus is played; we are in the house of Aspasia when Socrates and Aristophanes are there; Thucydides is shown to us in the promise of his youth; we see the last of the triumphs of Sophocles; and in speeches and letters of Pericles upon the great affairs he is conducting, History acts herself again. The political antagonism of Cimon, and the war with its sad disasters, usher in the mournful close. Amid the horrors of the plague the farewell to Athens and Aspasia is written; and over a sun that is grandly setting the fiery star of Alcibiades is seen to rise. Altogether a magnificent subject. very nobly handled. Landor had chosen for trial the bow of Ulysses, and it obeyed his hand.

Something to show manner and treatment might be added, but it would not express the charm that overspreads the book as with a wide and sunny atmosphere of clear bright air. It is

My old friend Mr. Hillard of Boston, who published in that city nearly twenty years ago a volume of Selections from Landor.'

only to be understood from reading it how intensely Greek the mind of Landor was. Here his faults became beauties. What one inclines to object to very often in his writing, that his characters make too little allowance for human passions, that they leave too little room for what in mechanics is called friction, that, as during all his own life their inventor and maker was apt to do, they too much believe what they wish and too readily suppose to be practicable what appears to be desirable, is no objection here. What we forever associate with the Greeks, of buoyant grace, elaborate refinement, precision of form, and imagination more sensuous and fanciful than sentimental or spiritual, we shall always find in most perfect expression where the impulsive predominates over the reflective part of the intellect. The mind of Landor was not more Greek than his style was English, and here it was at its very best; perfect in form, solid in substance, in expression always concise and pure, and often piercing and radiant as light itself. It was said of the book by one who was herself a Greek scholar (Miss Barrett: 21st of August 1839), that if he had written only this, it would have shown him to be of all living writers the most unconventional in thought ' and word, the most classical, because the freest from mere clas'sicalism, the most Greek, because preeminently and purely "English.'

At its close are three scenes in which Aspasia completes the story of Agamemnon. The first, where the shade of Iphigenia, unconscious of her mother's double crime, meets on his descent from death the shade of her father, by whose hand she had herself perished, is for the originality of its conception unsurpassed; and the second and third, representing the fate of Clytemnestra and the madness of Orestes, are, in my judgment, for the intensity and vividness of their dramatic expression, unequalled in the dramatic writings of our time. Of the book containing them he wrote to me afterwards: 'There is only one thought of ' another man beside myself in the whole of it, and this I have given twice, wishing it to be the one that weighed most with Pericles, that he never caused an Athenian to put on mourn'ing. In the rest, prose and poetry, wherever I detected a simi'larity to another, I struck out the sentence, however loath, and

' however certain that it would have been mine. But, alas, the 'air we breathe is breathed by millions; so are the thoughts.' Though scrupulous not to commit the offence, he could not avoid the charge; and the reader will be amused to learn the effect hereafter produced by it. Suffice it now to say that Pericles and Aspasia was not published until the spring of 1836; and that in the interval Landor had left the villa Gherardescha, and taken up his residence in England.

VIII. SELF-BANISHMENT FROM FIESOLE.

'I leave thee, beauteous Italy! no more
From the high terraces, at eventide,
To look supine into thy depths of sky,
Thy golden moon between the cliff and me,
Or thy dark spires of fretted cypresses
Bordering the channel of the milky-way.
Fiesole and Valdarno must be dreams
Hereafter, and my own lost Affrico
Murmur to me but in the poet's song.
I did believe (what have I not believed?)
Weary with age, but unopprest by pain,
To close in thy soft clime my quiet day,
And rest my bones in the mimosa's shade.
Hope! Hope! few ever cherisht thee so little,
Few are the heads thou hast so rarely raised;
But thou didst promise this, and all was well:
For we are fond of thinking where to lie

When every pulse hath ceast, when the lone heart
Can lift no aspiration. Over all

The smiles of Nature shed a potent charm,
And light us to our chamber at the grave.'

W. S. L.

Among the unaccountable things in me, and many are so even to myself, is this, that I admired Pindar somewhat more ' in youth than in what ought to be a graver age. However, his wisdom, his high-mindedness, and his excellent selection of ‘topics, in which no writer of prose or verse ever equalled him, ' render him worthy to spend the evening with one who has passed the earlier part of the day with Dante.' His old schoolfellow Cary had visited Italy, and to him these words were addressed, thanking him for his translation of Pindar. What also the course of my narrative requires that I should now relate, the reader must be content to accept among the 'unaccountable