of New England,-well, Mr. Willis thought that country really did deserve 'not ill of his respect': 'But it is an ungracious people, and best judged at a distance. They would offend your notions of what is due from one gentleman to another every hour if you lived among them, while in the great outline (all that is seen in the distance) they are a just and intelligent race, and good trustees of one's birthright of national pride. The perfection of good fortune, I think, is to be an American and live with Englishmen.' Landor will be thought perhaps not without excuse for the way in which he always afterwards spoke of Mr. N. P. Willis. Before quitting Italy he stayed some time at the Baths of Lucca, and he did not arrive in England until the autumn of 1835. He stayed three months at Llanbedr-hall with Mr. Ablett, passed the winter months at Clifton, and rejoined his friend at Llanbedr in the spring of 1836. BB BOOK SEVENTH. 1836-1857. ÆT. 61-82. TWENTY-ONE YEARS AT BATH. v. Death of 1. New and Old Friendships. II. The Pentameron of Boccaccio and Petrarca. III. Writing Plays. IV. Visits and Visitors. Southey. VI. Last Series of Conversations. VII. A Friend not Literary. VIII. Reviews, Collected Works, Poemata et Inscriptiones, and Hellenics. IX. Summer Holidays and Guests at Home. x. Deaths of Old Friends. XI. Fruit gathered from an Old Tree. x. Silent Companions. XIII. Last Days in Bath, and Final Departure from Eng land. I. NEW AND OLD FRIENDSHIPS. I HAVE described on a former page the impression made upon me by Landor when I met him first in the summer of 1836. He and Wordsworth had come to town expressly to witness Talfourd's Ion; with Crabb Robinson they occupied the same box on the first night of that beautiful tragedy; and well satisfied they seemed with themselves and with each other, as, to many who watched them during the performance, they half divided the interest with the play. We all of us met afterwards at Talfourd's house; but, of the talk that might have made such a night memorable, I regret that I recollect only one thing (impressed upon my memory by what followed a little later), that when the absence of Southey was deplored, in connection with the domestic griefs that sadly occupied him at the time, there was an expression of feeling from both Wordsworth and Landor of unrestrained and unaffected earnestness. When a very few weeks had passed after this, it was not a little startling to receive a Satire on Satirists very evidently by Landor, in which Wordsworth was handled sharply for alleged disrespect to Southey. It is hardly worth mention here. It made Crabb Robinson very angry, and, to propitiate him, Landor good-naturedly called back his own copy of the satire already on its way to Southey; but he stuck to his point that Wordsworth had been unjust to Southey's poetry, and had indeed small appreciation generally for the highest kinds of merit. To which Robinson made an excellent reply; going wider and deeper than he meant to go, or perhaps knew that he was going. What matters it that he 'is insensible to the astonishing powers of Voltaire or Goethe? He is, after all, Wordsworth. In all cases I care little what a man is not; I look to what he is. And Wordsworth has written a hundred poems the least excellent of which I would not 'sacrifice to give him that openness of heart you require. Pro'ductive power acts by means of concentration. With few exceptions those only love everything who, like me, can them'selves do nothing.' Nor was the satire itself all satire; for not a few passages from it might be cited that rise equally above the injustice committed and the anger provoked by it. Pericles and Aspasia had at this time been published, and to Southey thanks are given for having encouraged its writer to efforts of which the fruit was its Agamemnon scenes. Called up by genius in an after-age, That awful spectre shook the Athenian stage; I felt the looks they gave, the words they said, And reconducted each serener shade. . Ever shall those to me be well-spent days; Sweet fell the tears upon them, sweet the praise.' For some of the praise I was responsible; and very cordial acknowledgment of it reached me in a letter written from Heidelberg (1st September 1836), whither he had gone in the vain hope of being joined there by his elder children; when at the same time he sent me a fresh scene of Orestes at Delphi, and told me that those which had been most admired were written at our friend Kenyon's before breakfast, but chiefly in the 'bedtime morning, while the sheets of Pericles were passing through the press.' Not praise only fell, however, but here and there a less kindly word for which he had little tolerance. He wrote to me from Clifton, on the 29th of October : 'I returned from Germany a fortnight since, but found myself so fatigued and spiritless that I remained only a night in London, not even going to pay my respects at Gore-house. The splendid things you have written of me have aroused, it seems, the choler of Blackwood. I never have read until this moment (nor now) a single number of that worthy, who, I understand, has the impudence to declare that I have stolen, God knows what, from him and others. I am not informed how long this Scotchman has been at work about me, but my publisher has advised me that he loses 150l. by my Pericles. So that it is probable the Edinburgh Areopagites have condemned me to a fine in my absence; for I never can allow any man to be a loser by me, and am trying to economise to the amount of this indemnity to Saunders and Otley. . I think it probable that I shall fix myself at Clifton for a year.' The Blackwood review was really not a bad one, and, with a laugh for the absurdity of its parallel passages, might have satisfied any man; he described it himself as a mere 'kick on ' the shin between two compliments;' yet what was here threatened was soon afterwards actually done, and the hundred pounds which Mr. James had obtained for the Ms. of Pericles was paid back by Landor to its publishers. It may be held perhaps hereafter among the curiosities of literature that an author should have done this. I am not acquainted with any other instance. In the same letter he sent me a copy of the original edition of Milton's Defensio, which had belonged to Swift's celebrated uncle Godwin, one of whose lineal descendants was first husband of his friend the Countess de Molandè: and here I may say, once for all, that a continual and inexhaustible source of sympathy between us was our common admiration of those chiefs of our Commonwealth to whom early studies had led me; and that even the glittering forms of antique gods and heroes never took more radiant shape, in Landor's imagination, than the homely iron helmets and buffalo cuirasses of our English Hampdens, Iretons, Blakes, and Cromwells. At Clifton the winter was passed; but before I mention his meeting with Southey, who joined him there, an extract from a letter addessed to that friend may be given. I have been in Germany three months, hoping that some of my family would meet me there. Here I am again at Clifton, and here I think I shall finish my days; the climate suits my health so perfectly. Again I hear the rumour, and this time I hope it is not a false one, that you are coming amongst us. God grant that the expectation may arise from some improvement in the health of Mrs. Southey... Nothing can exceed the civilities I met with in Germany among the learned. No sooner had I reached England than I was informed of an attack made on me, and a worse threatened, by some doctor or professor in Edinburgh. But his labour is vain in regard to me. I have only to send back the 100l. I got for my Pericles. Did you ever receive those two volumes? The short letter of Pericles on the death of his sons will please you, and perhaps some few others. I have been reading for the third time Charles Elton's elegy on the loss of his two sons. It is not an elegy (though the structure of the verse has nothing to do with the matter), but many parts strike me as much as anything I ever read of the elegaic. Tears were in my eyes the first time, the second time, and the third time, on reading "That night the little chamber where they lay, Fast by my own, was vacant and was still." I do not like the Rhine so much as many parts of Italy. Como, Sorrento, and Amalfi, to say nothing of Ischia and Capri, far surpass all without the Alps, I mean on this side of them. Let me hear anything which gives you satisfaction or hope.' There was little of either, alas, left for Southey in this world; but such lights and shadows of the pleasant past as were still to be reflected from its old associations and memories, he now for the last time enjoyed in company with his friend. Their sympathies were close and affectionate as ever, widely as their opinions had diverged; and even of some later Conversations, in which idols of his own were overthrown, Southey had written shortly before to another friend: 'What you have heard me say of his temper is the only explanation of his faults. 'Never did man represent himself in his writings so much less generous, less just, less compassionate, less noble in all respects 'than he really is. I certainly never knew any one of brighter 'genius or of kinder heart.** With this bright genius and kind heart he now, accompanied by his son, walked for the last time over the downs of Clifton, and revisited the places of his boyhood. The good old Cottle, who exactly forty years before had published his Joan of Arc and advanced him the money to buy his wedding-ring, entertained them in Bristol; they went to the house of Southey's grandmother at Bedminster, and to the * I will preserve here what he wrote to Caroline Bowles when the last Conversations were sent over from Italy. Differing as I do . . . in some 'serious opinions, Landor is yet of all men living the one with whom I 'feel the most entire and cordial sympathy of heart and mind. Were I a single man, I should think the pleasure of a week's abode with him cheaply purchased by a journey to Florence, though, pilgrim-like, the 'whole way were to be performed on foot.' |