and later years in Bath, I do not care to dwell, though I was chiefly responsible for giving them to the world. The Napier apology is worth much; but the evidence and the witness must be taken together, and the testimony is not without a flaw. Napier himself had much in common with his friend, not merely of chivalrous spirit, disinterested aims, and a character incapable of meanness, but also of arrogant temper, resentful impatience of differences of opinion, and a proneness to express with violence views somewhat recklessly formed. But having said this, there is nothing more to be said. A never-ceasing and quite unwearying hatred of oppression animated both; and whatever else was to be remarked of Landor's comments on passing events, the charge was not at any time to be made of siding with the strong against the weak, or of passing over the neglected and unregarded. Somebody at this time compared his weekly onslaughts on what he took to be scandals in church or state, to the growls of an ancient cynic worried by the sight of purple and fine linen, describing him as tame and civil before, nay as even fawning on, the tatters of adversity: and when that is nearly the worst that can be urged of an ungovernable temper, it is hardly an unpardonable sin. I will only add, before quitting this subject, that he wrote frequently on the condition of Ireland, and for the most part with a gravity and impartiality into which faults of temper entered rarely. He remonstrated with O'Connell, when at the height of his repeal agitation, for wasting upon a design both foolish and impracticable powers that might have forced upon attention the true and attainable remedies; and to Mr. Thomas Davis, the creator and leader of the party which subsequently broke down O'Connell's influence, he addressed truths not less unpalatable. Davis had, in my judgment, qualities that would have made him incomparably the ablest politician produced by Ireland in our day; and his premature death, before what was crude and immature in his opinions had time to ripen, was a great calamity. He had much admiration for Landor, and was especially grateful to him for the help he had given in various ways to Father Mathew's crusade against intemperance. Landor had indeed an excessive admiration for that worthy parish priest, to whose noble enterprise

he was never tired of sending money and other active help. I am not sure that he did not think the humble and reverend father to be the only true successor of the apostles living in our age.

IX. REVIEWS, COLLECTED WORKS, POEMATA ET INSCRIPTIONES, AND HELLENICS.

In August 1842 Robert Landor wrote to his brother that he had been reading with unusual satisfaction two reviews lately written by him, on Catullus and on Theocritus; and that besides the pleasure he had derived from the completeness and refinement of the criticism, they had given him a pleasure of another kind which he could hardly specify without implying something a little disrespectful.

They are as remarkable for their candour and moderation as for other qualities of which I felt more certain; and, in speaking of our own poets now living, there is the same freedom from prejudice as in your observations on those who have been dead these two thousand years. Nor can I believe that there is an idyl of Theocritus more tender or graceful, or even more classical, than that of the Hamadryad. The conclusion appears to me more like the sweetest parts of Gebir than anything you have written, and much more delicate in its pathos than any other person has written, since.'

These essays, as well as a later one on Petrarch, were written for a review at my request, and they well deserve what is thus said of them. For Pindar and Horace he also collected materials, and there is a passage in the Petrarch paper which makes it matter of special regret that they were not written. It was not his habit to be quite just to Horace, but here he says: 'One 'poet is not to be raised by casting another under him. Catul'lus is made no richer by an attempt to transfer to him what belongs to Horace, nor Horace by what belongs to Catullus. 'Catullus has greatly more than he; but he also has much, and let him keep it.' No injustice more grave is committed in criticism than when one writer is thus pitted against another. The genius of Catullus you may think supreme, but that Horace is more of a favourite with greater numbers of people is a fact as little to be doubted. A critic, if unable otherwise to account for the fact, should consider this power to engage and delight many minds as no small merit in itself; if nothing else, as at

least a proof that the master of it is in sympathy with the world. Some writers have a charm beyond the reach of criticism; sometimes perhaps opposed to its conclusions, and certainly often wanted by others of superior excellence. There are a hundred readers of Virgil and Horace to one of Catullus.

From letters written to me during the composition of the essays, some characteristic traits may be drawn. Catullus was the first subject chosen; and the necessary rendering of portions into English he found to be extremely difficult, glibly as the work has been since done by more hands than one.

'I have attempted in vain to translate the extracts from Catullus. My version of the Description of Morning, of which the original verses, as mere verses, are the finest to be found anywhere out of Milton, is infamously bad. Where the waves wakened by the zephyr are said to move, pray correct thus:

Slowly and placidly, with gentle plash

Against each other, and light laugh; but soon

The breezes freshening, rough and huge they swell,
Afar refulgent in the crimson east.

But no man has ever been able to translate this writer, and no man ever will be.'

Pindar he meant next to have tried, but to his surprise he found the language, after some years' abstinence, so unfamiliar as to render his undertaking too much of a task. He would always say he was never more than a boy in Greek, though he grew up to adolescence in Latin, and bore a strong beard in English. But even while he was complaining that he must learn the language over again, it came gradually back to him; and I remember well, when we next met, his likening that resumption of the reading of Greek to the sensation of entering a cathedral, where at first you find it dark, until use leads you on, and at last you become once more conscious of all the grand magnificence to which your eye dilates. After one day's reading he discarded his lexicon, and though he did not go on with Pindar he took up with another Greek favourite. The result was the paper on Theocritus, as delightful a piece of writing as any that ever fell from him; and the day after the manuscript reached me I had this letter:

'At the account of the first idyl where the herd offers Thyrsis his most magnificent goat for a song, insert this:

"We often hear that such or such a thing is not worth an old song. Alas, how few things are! What precious recollections do some of them "awaken! what pleasurable tears do they excite! Not only do they purify "the stream of life, but they can delay it on its shelves and rapids, they can turn it back again to the soft moss amidst which its sources issue." I have been trying a version of the famous lines in that idyl, so weakly imitated by Virgil, so beautifully by Milton, which yet does not please me. Fine as are the verses of Theocritus, the Greek language itself cannot bear him above Milton in his Lycidas.

Where were ye, O ye nymphs, when Daphnis died?

For not on Pindus were ye, nor beside

Penëus in his softer glades, nor where

Acis might well expect you, once your care.
But neither Acis did your steps detain,
Nor strong Anapus rushing forth amain,

Nor high-brow'd Etna with her forest chain.

I shall also add what I think is somewhat of an idyl; but you will judge. I took the idea from a note in your Pindar. I had forgotten the story.'

The story was the Hamadryad; and at no period of his life had he written a short poem in feeling belonging more intensely to the antique world, in the spirit of it more youthful, or with a more enchanting grace and delicacy of expression, than this in his seventieth year. Its subject is a wood-nymph's love for a young forester who has forborne to fell the oak that is her home and what a poet who was less of a Greek would have turned into sentiment or allegory, is made to interest us here by its absolute simplicity and reality. The time of light, clear, definite sensation; when, to every man, the shapes of nature were but the reflection of his own; when marvels were not explained but believed, and the supernatural was not higher than the natural, or indeed other than a different development of the attributes and powers of nature; is reflected in every line. Not human, yet not above humanity, the fairy doubts if her lover will be constant; perplexed between her natural heart and her shadowy non-natural ways, the mortal has his doubts as well; and in making us thus become conscious alike of the pains and pleasures, the enjoyments and the misgivings, of such unequal intercourse, there is a wonderful fascination. A bee is always sent to him when she specially desires his presence in long summer days, and longer winter nights, still sent forth by her, To bring that light which never wintery blast

Blows out, nor rain nor snow extinguishes,

:

The light that shines from loving eyes upon

Eyes that love back till they can see no more:'

and he has engaged himself never to own that he has tired of her, if ever such a calamity should befall. He is only to drive the bee away. Then shall I know my fate, and, for thou must 'be wretched, weep at thine.' Nor does he really in any heartless fashion tire or cease to be fond of her. But he is a mortal, not a dryad; and, mortal habits resuming their control, it happens one day that, annoyed by a little insect, too importunately buzzing in his ear at an inconvenient time, he lifts his hand impatiently, and in the same moment breaks the wing of a bee and the heart of the hamadryad. Landor liked his idyl so much that it may be worth adding a characteristic correction of it sent me not long before his death, in which he removed a bit of sentiment, a reflection, from it.

'Whenever you revise my poems do not forget to strike out two verses from my Hamadryad, which ought to have been omitted by me. The verses I mean are in the dialogue where first she prays of Rhaicos to spare her oak, complains of him and his father slaying the innocent trees, and to his inquiry whether her flock is anywhere near, replies:

I have no flock; I kill

Nothing that breathes, that stirs, that feels the air,

The sun, the dew. Why should the beautiful

(And thou art beautiful) disturb the source

Whence springs all beauty? Hast thou never heard

Of hamadryads?

Now these are obscure; I had corrected them to

Whence springs all beauty.. Life. Hast thou not heard, &c.

But I afterwards thought that the hamadryad should have cut across this little piece of reflection, and should have said:

The third of these Critical Essays, all of them written with more care than he ordinarily bestowed on matters of the kind, had for its subject Petrarca; and precisely the remark made to him by his brother Robert of the Catullus was made to him of this by Carlyle. 'That piece on Petrarca,' he said, 'surprises me (I beg many pardons) by its impartiality to that wearisome creature ; and looks, in my mind, like a perfect steel engraving in the