less nor more than true. It puts Wordsworth, in regard to the special influences he has exercised, in what I believe to be his just place. No effect comparable in its kind to that which his writings have bequeathed, no such fruits of spiritual insight applicable as well to his own time as to coming times and changes with which he would himself have had small sympathy, have attended those of any poet within living memory. The influence of his genius on his immediate contemporaries has been surpassed by its authority over their successors, whose ways of thought have been mainly fashioned by his, and not in poetry alone.

Other views of Landor's as to books and men, which find expression in letters written at this date to me, may properly be represented by one or two sentences here. Wordsworth and other kindred subjects reappear; and in them, or in similar detached sayings that may be given hereafter, the reader will not judge hardly such small contradictions or inconsistencies as are incident to the freedom of friendly correspondence. The animating spirit is always the same, and there is no mistaking Landor's voice in any.

A JUDGMENT OF THREE ORATORS.

'I have often heard them, Grattan as well as Pitt and Fox; and, though I might otherwise be angry with him, I preferred always the plain-spokenness of Fox, even when hammering repetition upon repetition, to the sounding inanities of Pitt and the gaudy barbarism of Grattan.'

EDUCATION.

'Education does not control or greatly modify the character. It brings out what lies within : vim promovet insitam: and that is nearly all it does.'

HAZLITT.

'Hazlitt's books are delightful to read, pleasant always, often eloquent and affecting in the extreme. But I don't get much valuable criticism out of them. Coleridge was worth fifty of him in that respect. A point may be very sharp, and yet not go very deep; and the deficiency of penetrating may be the result of its fineness.'

CHARACTERISTIC.

'Faults very often drop from us by thinking about them. I was remarking to a friend one day the common negligence of writing "I never should have thought to have seen you here," when he smiled and showed me that I myself had done it in the Examiner. I thought I should have dropt at the shock !'

A LOST THOUGHT (8th Nov. 1843).

'It is hardly possible to recover a lost thought without breaking its wings in catching it. I got up in the middle of last night to fix one on paper, and fixed a rheumatism instead. Night is not the time for pinning a butterfly on a blank leaf.'

NOT TO BE READ AT ONCE.

'There are admirable poems which demand relays. You cannot lay down Chaucer or Shakespeare. Spenser falls out of your hands in the midst of his enchantments. The longest of Wordsworth's poems I can get through without a relay is Michael; and there is not much in the old poets that we call the classic (sincę Ovid) which is worth this.'

FAULTLESS WRITERS.

'La Fontaine, Catullus, and Sophocles, are perhaps the writers who have fewest faults. Strange companions! But there are pages in Shakespeare and Milton worth all the works of all three.'

Two-WORD RHYMES.

'How is it possible that so serious a writer as Miss Barrett should not perceive that the two-word rhyme is only fit for ludicrous subjects:

These rhymes appear to me but very so-so, .

And fit but for our Lady del Toboso.

But we are so much in the habit of seeing the common law of the land in poetry infringed and violated, that nothing shocks us.'

INVITATION TO BATH (1843).

'I have an antique ring, long prized in our family, which I want to put upon your finger. For this express purpose it has been newly set over the ancient gold, and here are the lines I have written for it. It is a mask: Forster! though you never wore

Any kind of mask before,

Yet, by holy friendship! take

This, and wear it for my sake.'

PROSE RUNNING INTO VERSE.

*

'While writing the Tancredi dialogue, I had the greatest difficulty to prevent my prose running away with me. Sundry verses indeed I could not keep down, nor could I afterwards break them into prose. Here is a specimen, not in the Conversation as it stands at present, which was written while I fancied I was writing prose:

* Several such instances have been given, and I could multiply them from his correspondence, light as well as grave, if it were worth the while. Here is one of the lighter sort from an invitation to me to visit him in Bath in the April of his 81st year. 'What weather! Some demon seems to shuffle months together! March came for April, April comes for March. 'Here are two verses for you, with a rhyme to boot: no thanks to me, for I never intended it. And now, when will you come ?'

Can certain words pronounced by certain men
Perform an incantation which shall hold

Two hearts together to the end of time?

If these were wanting, yet instead of these,

There was my father's word, and there was God's.'

PROPERTY OF AUTHORS IN THEIR WRITINGS.

'It seems to me that no property is so entirely and purely and religiously a man's own as what comes to him immediately from God, without intervention or participation. It is the eternal gift of an eternal being. No legislature has a right to confine its advantages, or to give them away to any person whatsoever, to the detriment of an author's heirs. To the rights of another

"His ego nec metas rerum nec tempora pono.'

THE CHURCHYARD ELEGY.

'Gray's Elegy will be read as long as any work of Shakespeare, despite of its moping owl and the tin-kettle of an epitaph tied to its tail. It is the first poem that ever touched my heart, and it strikes it now just in the same place. Homer, Shakespeare, Milton, Dante, the four giants who lived before our last Deluge of poetry, have left the ivy growing on the churchyard wall.'

SOUTHEY'S SMALLER PIECES.

'How delightful is the humour that runs through his smaller pieces! I am quite astonished at the Gridiron. It is the only modern piece that reminds me heartily of Aristophanes-that admirable poet whose choruses have levity at one end with gravity at the other, like Apollo's arrow and indeed every arrow that can hit the mark. Are any poems of our time more animated or fanciful than the smaller pieces of Southey?'

POETRY IN GENERAL (1843).

'I have rather a dislike to all poetry except the very highest; nearly all of it appears to me impure and false: strong expressions on subjects that cannot support them; the macula on the smaller stars that were above the horizon in Shakespeare's time. There is so much too that is incongruous, and I require the unmixed. Salt and sugar ought to be kept separate. Coffee should not taste of cheese, nor tea of mustard. Wordsworth has none of this bad housewifery; nor has Southey, in whose mind there are at least more mansions than in father Wordsworth's. Tennyson has too many summer-houses and pavilions for the extent of his grounds; but everything in them is pleasing and suitable. And what fine poems are such as his Ulysses and his Godiva!

THE PRELUDE OF WORDSWORTH.

'You have indeed given me a noble passage from Wordsworth's Prelude: O si sic omnia scripsisset! Higher it would be difficult to go. Here the wagoner's frock shows the coat of mail under it. Here is heart and soul. Here is the εἰκὼν βασιλική of poetry.'

'Such creatures as

ASSAILANTS OF GENIUS.

may pelt young Keats as he climbs the tree :

but that Gray should be insensible to the fervour of Rousseau is quite astonishing, quite deplorable. I wonder how people dare to lie in the presence of such a train of detectives, reaching from their own doors to the very limits of space and time.'

A SHAKESPEARE CELEBRATION (1844).

'A herd of clownish Warwickshire squires of the purest breed, and in no county of England is the breed so pure, was resolved to celebrate Shakespeare's birthday at Stratford-upon-Avon. I was invited: I declined. I told them he was not only the greatest glory of their county but the greatest work of God's creation, but I should hardly testify my love and veneration by eating and drinking, and I had refused all such invitations when I might meet those who knew me, of whom in Warwickshire there is now scarcely one. I could not help doubting whether any of the party ever read a single page of his writings; but I entertain no doubt whatever that if he were living and had come into the party, they would have butted him out. As the rocks that bound the sea are formed by the smallest and most inert insects, so celebrity seems to rise up from accretions equally vile and worthless. This idea has occurred to me many times before, and may perhaps be found in my writings; but never did it come forward with so luminous a stare as on the present occasion.'

BYRON AND WORDSWORTH (Bath, 1845).

A lady here, a friend of yours, has been lecturing me on my hostility to Wordsworth. In the course of our conversation I said what I turned into verse half an hour ago, on reaching home. No writer, I will again interpose before transcribing them, has praised Wordsworth more copiously or more warmly than I have done; and I said not a syllable against him until he disparaged his friend and greatest champion, Southey. You should be the last to blame me for holding the heads of my friends to be inviolable. Whoever touches a hair of them I devote diis inferis, sed rite. Here are the lines:

Byron's sharp bark and Wordsworth's long-drawn wheese
Issue alike from breasts that pant for ease.

One caught the fever of the flowery marsh,

The other's voice intemperate scorn made harsh.

But each hath better parts: to One belong

Staffs for the old and guide-posts for the young:

The Other's store-room downcast eyes approve,

Hung with bright feathers dropt from moulting Love.'

BARRY CORNWALL (1840).

'Give the admirable Procter one [a copy of his Andrea and Giovanna]. What delightful poetry he writes! How fresh and sweet and pleasant the old-world flavour which he gives to modern life! Nobody writes with more purity. As to my own, jam satis terris nivis. I think it cold languid stuff for the most part beside his. I have read XXI. and XLIV. of Procter's Songs six or seven times; and how beautiful XIII. v. LXXXII. CVIII.-in fact all of them I'

ROBERT BROWNING.

'You were right as to Browning. He has sent me some admirable

things. I only wish he would atticise a little. Few of the Athenians had such a quarry on their property, but they constructed better roads for the conveyance of the material.'

AGAIN: SOMEWHAT LATER (1845).

'I have written to Browning; a great poet, a very great poet indeed, as the world will have to agree with us in thinking. I am now deep in the Soul's Tragedy. The sudden close of Luria is very grand; but preceding it, I fear there is rather too much of argumentation and reflection. It is continued too long after the Moor has taken the poison. I may be wrong; but if it is so, you will see it and tell him. God grant he may live to be much greater than he is, high as he stands above most of the living: latis humeris et toto vertice. But now to the Soul's Tragedy, and so adieu till we meet at this very table.'

Luria had been dedicated to Landor, who in later years, as will be seen hereafter, was to receive from its writer a graver service; and though the fame is now Mr. Browning's by rightful inheritance which but a few claimed for him when this letter was written, a tribute may be still matter of just pride to him which connects, with a man so remarkable as Landor, a wish so earnestly uttered, and a prediction so well fulfilled.

VIII. A FRIEND NOT LITERARY, AND OTHER FRIENDS.

Every autumn, as long as the last of Landor's sisters lived, took him upon a visit to her in Warwick, at the house in which he was born; and the only drawback from his pleasure, on these as on all occasions when he quitted Bath, was his inability to take with him a favourite companion claiming honourable mention in this history. 'Daily,' he wrote to me from Warwick in 1844, 'do I think of Bath and Pomero. I fancy him lying on 'the narrow window-sill, and watching the good people go to 'church. He has not yet made up his mind between the An'glican and Roman-catholic; but I hope he will continue in ' the faith of his forefathers, if it will make him happier.' This was a small white Pomeranian dog that had been sent to him from his Fiesolan villa the previous autumn; visiting by the way myself, to whom he had been consigned for safer delivery; and at first sight dazzling me, as I well remember, by the eager brightness of his eye and the feathery whiteness of his coat, as he pushed his nose through the wicker-basket in which he had