he had a grudge. They had met at his friend Sir Charles Elton's; he had come off second-best in an argument, as most people did with Hallam; and he had laughingly repeated to me, with halfhumorous application to himself, what Lord Dudley told Francis Hare, of his having dined with Hallam and his son in Italy, when it did my heart good to sit by, and hear how the son 'snubbed the father, remembering how often the father had 'unmercifully snubbed me.'

V. VISITS AND VISITORS.

Charles Armitage Brown, his friend of the old Florence days, was now a settler in England, and as long as he remained Landor visited him from time to time at his house near Plymouth. Here, in 1837, he was lecturing his neighbourhood on Keats and his treatment by the Reviews; was enlightening them on Shakespeare and his Sonnets, and the probability of the poet's having visited Italy; and was otherwise busying himself in writing for newspapers. With his lectures he does not seem to have made much impression, until, with the view of proving that Shakespeare must have had ample means for visiting Italy, he undertook to show that at the age of forty-three the great poet was worth nearly seven thousand pounds: when a burst of glad applause, sudden as a pistol-shot, shook the lecture-hall. Brown mentioned this to Landor as quite a good anecdote in the history of human nature, showing the delight of those west-country folk at the rewards bestowed, even in his lifetime, on the author of Othello; but Landor declared with his hearty laugh that it only showed they comprehended seven thousand pounds much better than a wilderness of Othellos. The friends agreed however in most things: and Brown said to Landor, after one of his visits, that all his womankind had fallen in love with him; that the daughters of his friend Colonel Hamilton Smith declared their craze openly; that it would have to be said of him, as of the other great Warwickshire poet, that no woman could safely go nigh him; and that for his own part he had not been happier when twenty years younger, and with Keats for his companion in that same western county, than Landor had made

him in those late 'white days' in their walks by the Laira and the Tamar. In the same letter (27th April 1838) he said he was coming to London shortly, like parson Adams with his sermons, to try and find a publisher for a volume about Shakespeare; and before that year the volume also was out, with dedication to Landor as the best lover of the poet and the best living writer of the English language. Two years later, family hopes took Brown to New Zealand; and not long after his arrival, one of the sudden fits to which he had become subject after leaving Italy, closed, in the streets of New Plymouth, the life of this kindly original man, whose name cannot be forgotten as long as a reader remains for the most sorrowful story in our language, the brief life and pitiable death of the author of Endymion.*

All who remember Landor at this time will understand, if they have not shared, the delight his visits gave. Brown has only expressed what everyone felt. His fine presence, manly voice, and cordial smile, the amusing exaggerations of his speech, the irresistible contagion of his laugh, and the subtle charm of his genius diffused over all, made him quite irresistible. Nor was it possible to have him more at his best than under the hospitable roof of Kenyon, whether at Torquay, where he frequently went at this time, or in London, or in later years at Wimbledon or Cowes. Of this excellent man Southey wrote in 1827 that everybody liked him at first sight, and liked him better the longer he was known; that he had himself then known him three and twenty years; that he was of all his friends one of the very best and pleasantest; and that he reckoned as one of his whitest days the day he first fell in with him. Not without strong opinions himself, Kenyon had that about him which repelled no opinion whatever; and to this rare quality Southey hardly did justice on another occasion, when, rallying him on his regret at having no occupation, he told him he was happier so, than if sitting on the bench all berobed and bewigged, or

* See Milnes's admirable Life and Letters of Keats: a book that one reads with the same miserable anguish of foolish impatience at the decrees of providence, with which such tragedies as Romeo and Othello are read.

flitting like the bat in the fable between the two contending parties in the house of commons, not knowing to which he properly belonged. It was the fact of Kenyon's knowing well to which he belonged that gave peculiar charm to the catholicity of his tastes and tolerance; nor could his love of pleasure, or his frank confession of the pursuit of it, have other effect than to raise him in the respect of all who knew how much of it consisted in doing good and giving pleasure to others. It is material to add besides, that Kenyon had accomplishments of no ordinary kind, and could give and take with the best who assembled at his table. He wrote manly English verse, was a fair scholar, a good critic of books and art, an observer on whom unusual opportunities of seeing much of the world had not been thrown away; and, in a familiar friendship with him of a quarter of a century, I never saw him use for mere personal display any one advantage he thus possessed. He was always thinking of others, always planning to get his own pleasure out of theirs; and Landor in this respect was an untiring satisfaction to him. He displayed his enjoyment so thoroughly. The laugh was encouraged till the room shook again; and, while Landor would defend to the death some indefensible position, assail with prodigious vigour an imaginary enemy, or blow himself and his adversary together into the air with the explosion of a joke, the radiant glee of Kenyon was a thing not to be forgotten. I have seen it shared at the same moment, in an equal degree, by Archdeacon Hare and Sir Robert Harry Inglis. Of another friend to whom regular visits were made at this time, who had married, during his absence in Italy, an old school-and-college companion's sister, whom we have seen that Landor remembered as long ago as her childhood during happy days at her father's house, I will leave Mr. Robert Landor to speak.

'Mr. Rosenhagen was of a Danish family, and the son of a clergyman intimately connected, I cannot tell how, with statesmen high in office and influence about the time of Lord Chatham. Oue son died young, but he had gained the rank of post-captain in the navy. Our friend rose still more rapidly in the Treasury, of which he became first clerk; and was often mentioned in the house of commons, though he never sat there. From the Treasury he was transferred as private secretary to Mr. Perceval; and he was joined, after the battle of Waterloo, in the same commission with the Duke of Wellington and Lord Castlereagh to negotiate the peace at Paris.

His part was especially financial, and he seems to have acquired the Duke's esteem in no common degree. But his attention to business almost entirely destroyed a sight which was always weak, and on his return to England he retired on a pension of twelve hundred a year; having married, as his second wife, the daughter of an old Worcestershire family connected with the Fortescues and Dormers, Miss Parkhurst, whose eldest brother was Walter's schoolfellow at Rugby, and went up to the same college at Oxford. Though they were very discordant, they were much together some years later, visiting each other's friends and travelling together; but with old Mr. Parkhurst, Walter was much the greater favourite, and he had been always very happy at Ripple, on the banks of the Severn. Many years had passed away from that time, during which there was no intercourse between the schoolfellows. My brother Henry had been often at Ripple, but until the marriage of Miss Parkhurst none of us had seen Mr. Rosenhagen. She reunited the two families while Walter was still at Florence. She and Mr. Rosenhagen had established themselves at Cheltenham, shortly before my removal to Birlingham thirty-six years ago. Till then I had not seen either of them; but, living then at the distance of only fourteen miles, every possible kindness was shown to me. My sisters and nieces were often their guests; and on Walter's arrival from Florence, when you became acquainted with him, he visited both me and them. Mr. Rosenhagen was almost blind and very deaf, but a delightful companion nevertheless. There was no danger of any disagreement between the high tory and the black jacobin, between the high churchman and the disbeliever in all churches, for they eschewed controversy, and it would have been very difficult indeed to irritate a man so courteous, so forbearing, and of such easy politeness. Besides a fine person, he had much unassuming dignity, treating with an impressive kindness, even as more than friends and equals, such of his guests as he liked: and he liked Walter greatly. My brother spoke of him in his Last Fruit as the best and wisest man whom he had ever known. I think that it was I who suggested this character by saying that Walter may have known some few men of equal ability, some few of equal virtue, but I doubted whether he had seen one man who equalled our friend in both. Very highly and sincerely, on the other hand, did Mr. Rosenhagen value Walter's better qualities; and of the worse he would neither speak nor hear. When quite blind, he lost the best of wives, suddenly (1844). I was with him a few days after her death. "I have lost, "or am losing, all my senses," he said, "but all amounted to very little "indeed compared with this loss." It is now fifteen years since he died, leaving me some very valuable books. He always believed that the Letters of Junius were written by his father, but felt no wish to prove the fact.'

Few names for praise and liking were oftener in Landor's mouth than Rosenhagen's: and in the same year (1840) in which he wrote to me that the Fanny Parkhurst whom he remembered as an infant was become the providence of her husband, and that old Parkhurst and his son-in-law Rosenhagen were the men who united most of virtue and most of politeness that he had ever met with, I find a letter from her, acknow

ledging the gift of his Fra Rupert and alluding to some lines in one of its scenes, in which she tells Landor that he had made the 'blind but cheerful old man' very grateful for embalming a thought of his in verse so beautiful; that he had received no honour equal to this since the great Duke named him in his despatches; that he had directed her to place the three tragedies on the same shelf with Shakespeare and the Greek tragedians; and that he had long felt his adoption into the friendship of the Landor family as one of the happiest consequences of his marriage.

Mention also should be made, among those with whom Landor had frequent intercourse in the earlier years after his return, of Mr. James, who at this time dedicated one of his romances to him, and to whom in Hampshire and on the Dorsetshire coast he made some joyous visits. The kind-hearted and not too vigorous novelist compared himself, on such occasions, to a still calm lake brushed by the wing of the whirlwind; and boundless was his enjoyment of the unaccustomed pleasure. 'I stagnate when I do not see you,' is the cry of his letters, which promise Landor wild-flowers and wood-walks in Hampshire, with hills to ring back his joyous laugh, and, at Lyme Regis, cliffs that will remind him of Italy though of different colour. The joyous laugh attracted Thomas Moore too in these days, and he tells us in his Diary what a different sort of person Landor was from what he had expected to find him; that he had all the air and laugh of a hearty country gentleman, a gros réjoui; and that whereas his writings formerly had not given him a relish for the man, the man now had given him a relish for his writings. To another and finer artist, dear to both of us alike, my old friend had also at this time to sit for a picture which I shall be pardoned for transferring to these pages, since it has added even to Landor's chances of being remembered hereafter.

'We all conceived, before seeing him, a prepossession in his favour; for there was a sterling quality in his laugh, and in his vigorous healthy voice, and in the roundness and fulness with which he uttered every word he spoke, and in the very fury of his superlatives, which seemed to go off like blank cannons and hurt nothing. But we were hardly prepared to have it so confirmed by his appearance. .

He was not only a very hand