literary potentate, was Carlyle's French Revolution. Never had he read a history, he declared, which interested him so much; and doubtless all the more because of the emotion which the tremendous course of events it describes had excited in him, when, in his own and Landor's youth, he read of them day by day. Not a few opinions, indeed, he found rising to the surface in that book to which he hardly knew what reception to give; but with wisdom and with feeling he found it to be full to overflowing, nor could he rest satisfied till he had seen and spoken with the author.

VII. LAST SERIES OF CONVERSATIONS, AND SOME LETTERS.

The entire number of new Conversations added to the old during the twenty-one years now under description, written before Landor's return to Italy, and excluding only the five which belong to the last six years of his life, were thirty-nine; and the additional subjects may here be named. Eighteen belonged to the domain of modern foreign politics, and of these I will give little more than the titles. They were, Bugeaud and an Arab chieftain on the eve of the marshal's massacre in Algeria; -Talleyrand at his last confession to the Archbishop of Paris ;

the Queen of Tahiti, the English consul Pritchard, Louis Philippe's envoy de Mitrailles, and the French officers and sailors who were present when the envoy struck the Queen in the face;-Louis XVIII and Talleyrand conversing on the genius of Wellington, as to whom it is finely said that his loftiest lines of Torres Vedras, which no enemy dared assail throughout their whole extent, were his firmness, his moderation, and his probity, which placed him more opposite to Napoleon than he stood in the field of Waterloo ;-Thiers talking to Lamartine of the foreign policy of the House of Orleans;-Louis Philippe expounding to Guizot the moral of the Spanish marriages;Antonelli and Gemeau conversing twice on the Occupation of Rome; President Louis Napoleon characterising to M. de Molé the policy of his uncle;-King Carlo-Alberto discussing with the Duchess Belgioiso the prospects of Italy, and local jealousies in the way of unity;-Larochejaquelin receiving Bé

ranger before the second Empire;-Garibaldi giving honour to Mazzini for the defence of Rome ;-three dialogues of Nicholas and Nesselrode on the policy of the Crimean War ;-the Archbishop of Florence sentencing for heresy the bible-reading family of Francesco Madiai;-and two final dialogues on the contentions of religion, contributed respectively by Antonelli and Pio Nono, and by brothers Martin and Jack of the family of the Dean of St. Patrick. 'Both parties,' says Martin, call themselves. catholic, which neither is; nor indeed, my dear Jack, is it desir' able that either should be. Every sect is a moral check on its neighbour. Competition is as wholesome in religion as in commerce. We must bid high for heaven; we must surrender 'much, we must strive much, we must suffer much; we must 'make way for others, in order that in our turn we may suc'ceed. There is but One Guide. We know him by the gentle'ness of his voice, by the serenity of his countenance, by the 'wounded in spirit who are clinging to his knees, by the chil'dren whom he hath called to him, and by the disciples in 'whose poverty he hath shared.'

Of subjects more strictly biographical there were four. The speakers were, Eldon and his grandson Encombe, played off against each other with exquisite fooling; Wellington and Inglis after the Somnauth proclamation of Lord Ellenborough, where it is shown how small was the fear of Juggernaut coming down St. James's-street; Romilly and Wilberforce talking of the Abolition of the Slave-trade; and Wyndham and Sheridan in discussion about the Irish Church, Sheridan maintaining that the only feasible reform of her was to abolish her bishops and endowments, sell the whole of her lands, and devote all the proceeds, in a just proportion between papal and protestant communicants, to the religious and moral education of the people. With these may be named the imaginary talk of two others of the most illustrious of Englishmen: Blake on his quarter-deck passing judgment on his delinquent brother Humphrey; and Oliver Cromwell with his Ironsides at his uncle Sir Oliver's in Hinchinbrook. On the old knight's noteworthy career perhaps a word is worth adding at Landor's suggestion. It did not close until Sir Oliver had reached his ninety-third year, and it

had by that time covered a space which included all the men of great genius, excepting Chaucer and Roger Bacon, whom England had then produced: not the Bacons and Shakespeares only, but the prodigious shoal that attended those leviathans through the intellectual deep. Raleigh, Spenser, Marlowe and the drama tists of Elizabeth and James; Cromwell, Eliot, Milton, Selden, Hampden, and Pym; Hooker, Taylor, Barrow, and Newton; Hobbes, Sidney, Locke, and Shaftesbury; all had lived in some part or other of that single life.

The Italian subjects were four: Macchiavelli and MichaelAngelo on the suitability of Federal Republics for the government of Italy; Titian and Cornaro on the glories of Venetian art; Leonora, in her last confession to Father Panigarola, avowing her love for Tasso; Alfieri's experiences of English literature and manners, in a conversation with Metastasio of delightful wit and eloquence, which has elicited on a former page the admiration and sympathy of Carlyle; and Michael-Angelo and Vittoria Colonna on the poets and artists of elder and later Italy. Besides these, there were two brief prose poems on the affecting double marriage of Count Gleichem, and on the unrewarded services to humanity of the noble English soldier by whom infanticide in India was abolished: there were four, to be named below, in which Landor takes personal part, with Southey, Porson, and Julius Hare: and four Greek and Roman conversations completed the extraordinary catalogue. The speakers in these last were Menander and Epicurus, in two dialogues composed after the writer's eightieth year, and not unworthy of the exquisite Epicurus and Leontion to which they are the sequel; Epicurus and Metrodorus on the writers and the gods of Greece; and Asinius Pollio and Licinius Calvus on the heroes and histories of Rome. If to this list I were to add the subjects also of the dialogues written in verse by Landor, some already named and more to be named hereafter, it would bring up the number of his compositions exclusively of this class to no less than one hundred and ninety; in their mere number wonderful, and in their variety as well as unity of treatment still more memorable.

Of the four to which Landor contributes notices of personal

opinion I am now to speak; and first of that in which Southey and Porson are interlocutors. Landor's faith in Wordsworth had again been rudely shaken by his unyielding attitude in the Southey family dispute, and he had probably never felt less kindly to the great poet than during the final illness of their common friend. Hence therefore, taking him for the subject of a second dialogue between Porson and Southey which was to comprise what he thought of the later English poets, he was led to dwell less on the merits than on the defects of the author of the Lyrical Ballads. Even from Southey is drawn the admission of his friend's weakness for reciting his own poetry, which yet his friend himself might have forgiven for the exquisite truth of the description of it. 'He delivers them with such a

summer murmur of fostering modulation as would perfectly delight you.' But he is not the more inclined to spare his critics. In this, as in the first Porson dialogue, the critics of poetry are sharply handled; and as true in its application now, as it was then, is what is said of their fashion of dandling their favourite for the time and never letting him off their knee, feeding him to bursting with their curds-and-whey, while any other they warn off the premises, and will give him neither a crust nor a crumb, until they hear he has succeeded to a large estate ' in popularity, with plenty of dependants.' Against all that is thus grudging and ungenerous, there is eloquent protest; from which as earnestly, but whether as truly may be doubted, Southey is made to put in a claim of exemption for genius itself which is at least in keeping with the speaker's character. The curse of quarrelsomeness, of hand against every man, was in'flicted on the children of the desert, not on those who pastured 'their flocks on the fertile banks of the Euphrates, or contemplated the heavens from the elevated ranges of Chaldæa.' Alas that experience should ever seem adverse to this! but it is only too certain that the large estate in popularity, long and wearily expected, does not therefore bring content to its inheritor; and that poets of the highest rank will not be found readier to do justice to others, because they have had to wait long for justice to themselves.

There is much besides very truly said in this dialogue as to

English poets of the second class. Delightful praise is given to
Cowper; Byron and Scott are well discriminated, the last with
a hearty cordiality; and, where the greater masters are inci-
dentally named, language not inferior to their own arises to do
them homage. A great poet represents a great portion of the
'human race. Nature delegated to Shakespeare the interests
' and direction of the whole. To Milton was given a smaller
part, but with plenary power over it; and such fervour and
majesty of eloquence was bestowed on him as on no other
'mortal in any age.' In the three others also wherein Landor,
Southey, and Julius Hare were interlocutors, Milton continued
to receive critical treatment of the most striking kind: all his
works, and eminently his Latin poems, being laid under con-
tribution for subjects and illustration, and readings being fre-
quently suggested that add unexpected beauties to even his
noblest verse. An instance has been cited for admiration by De
Quincey, at the line of the Agonistes which depicts Samson in
his fall:

'Ask for this great deliverer now, and find him
Eyeless, in Gaza, at the mill, with slaves ;'

where, by the comma which Landor would thrice repeat, Sam-
son's agony is presented to us with increased vividness, under
blindness, inability of farther triumph over enemies, toil for
bread, and association with slaves, in all the accumulated aggrav-
ation of its unendurable misery. A rib of Shakespeare would
' have made a Milton,' says Landor in conclusion; 'the same
'portion of Milton, all poets born ever since.'

The talk with Julius Hare reintroduces Wordsworth, from whom, often and often as Landor takes leave, he is but the more and more loath to depart; and happily only quits him at last with wise and reconciling words. He would have all respect, all reverence even, short of worship, paid to him; speaks with delight of the series of enchanting idyls into which the Excursion would subdivide, with help of a judicious enclosureact; places Virgil and Theocritus below him for everlasting freshness of description; and admits that no man has ever had such mastery over Nature in her profoundest relations to humanity. This includes more than Landor meant to concede, but is neither