to say everything, but the care to reject as much as possible, which impresses the reader throughout; and there is always the absence of exaggeration. When Jove looks, there is no need that he should frown.

Wide-seeing Zeus lookt down; as mortals knew

By the woods bending under his dark eye,

And huge towers shuddering on the mountain tops,
And stillness in the valley, in the wold,

And over the deep waters all round earth.

Certainly this little book, which appeared at the close of 1847, gave convincing proof that up to this date Landor's powers, even of fancy, had not ebbed a hand's-breadth on the sands of time, seventy-three years wide.

IX. SUMMER HOLIDAYS AND GUESTS AT HOME.

When I first visited Landor in Bath the city was only accessible by coach, and no coach left after eight o'clock in the morning. But these difficulties in the way of intercourse soon disappeared, and the travelling that had occupied two entire days took up little more than double the same number of hours. The first time Mr. Dickens went with me the railroad was open, and it had become possible to leave in the afternoon, dine and pass the evening with Landor, and breakfast the next morning in London. Still vividly remembered by us both are such evenings, when a night's sleep purchased for us cheaply the pleasure of being present with him on his birthday; and it was at a celebration of this kind in the first of his Bath lodgings, 35 St. James's-square, that the fancy which took the form of Little Nell in the Curiosity Shop first dawned on the genius of its creator. No character in prose fiction was a greater favourite with Landor. So interesting and pathetic did she seem to him, that he thought upon her, for a moment, Juliet might have. turned away her eyes from Romeo, and Desdemona found her hair-breadth escapes almost witching as Othello's; so that when, a little later, the occasion and place of her birth were recalled to him, he broke into one of those whimsical bursts of comical extravagance out of which arose the fancy of Boythorn. With tremendous emphasis he confirmed the fact I have named, and added

G G

that he had never in his life regretted anything so much as his having failed to carry out an intention he had formed respecting it; for he meant to have purchased that house, 35 St. James'ssquare, and then and there to have burnt it to the ground, to the end that no meaner association should ever desecrate the birthplace of Nell. Then he would pause a little, become conscious of our sense of his absurdity, and break into a thundering peal of laughter.

Another of these evenings, when Mr. Dickens and myself had travelled to him expressly to celebrate his birthday, returning the same night to London, is worth recalling because of our talk having led to his writing the fine quatrain adopted afterwards as the motto to his Last Fruit. It was his own version of the moral of his life in its aims and enjoyments; and, to all who could so accept it, a very terse and conclusive summing-up of Epicurean philosophy. But, on another subject, Landor also talked that night in a way that hardly befitted a true disciple of Epicurus, enlarging on the many tears that David Copperfield had caused him to shed; to which the author of that delightful book himself replied by a question, which, from so powerful and so gentle a master of both laughter and tears, startled us then, and may make the matter worth allusion still. 'But is it not yet more wonderful that one of the most popular 'books on earth has absolutely nothing in it to cause anyone ' either to laugh or cry?' Such, he proceeded to say, was to be affirmed with confidence of De Foe's masterpiece; he instanced the death of Friday, in that marvellous novel, as one of the least tender, and, in the true sense, least sentimental things ever written; and he accounted for the prodigious effect which the book has had upon an unexampled number and variety of readers, though without tears in it, or laughter, or even any mention of love, by its mere homely force and intensity of truth. Not every schoolboy alone was interested by it, but every man who had ever been one. I may add, though- connected with the night referred to solely by the subject thus introduced, that six years later, when a project was on foot to make provision for a then living and destitute descendant of the author of Robinson Crusoe, Landor sent a letter to the Times which

brought us all the help we sought. A line or two only can I give from its eloquent and touching appeal.

'De Foe has left one descendant-a Crusoe without a Friday-in an island to him a desert. There are men who may be warmed by the reflected glory of their ancestors; but, however elevated and unclouded, it falls feebly on the deathbed of the forsaken. Daniel De Foe wants

no statue, and is far beyond any other want; but, alas, there is one behind who is not so. Let all contribute one penny for one year: poor James De Foe has lived seventy-seven, and his dim eyes can not look far into another.. It was in the power of Johnson to relieve the granddaughter of Milton; Mr. Editor, it is in yours to prop up the last scion of De Foe. If Milton wrote the grandest poem and the most energetic and eloquent prose of any writer in any country; if he stood erect before Tyranny, and covered with his buckler not England only, but nascent nations; if our great prophet raised in vision the ladder that rose from earth to heaven, with angels upon every step of it; lower indeed, but not less useful, were the energies of De Foe. He stimulated to enterprise those colonies of England which extend over every sea, and which carry with them, from him, the spirit and the language that will predominate throughout the world. Achilles and Homer will be forgotten before Crusoe and De Foe.'

The poor old man soon after died; but the money obtained comforted his last days, and has since contributed to his daughter's wants. The pennies did not come in very freely, but some larger gifts were generously made. The late Lord Lansdowne sent me fifty pounds, and Lord Palmerston gave a hundred out of the Queen's bounty.

The visit to Landor last described was made in 1849, five years after he had crossed the bridge of seventy; and the post of the day following our return brought me the quatrain I have mentioned, which it may interest the reader to see, on the pages following, in fac-simile as it came. My thanks were not spoken 'to you and Dickens for your journey of two hundred miles upon my birthday. Here they are-not visible on the surface 'of the paper, nor on any surface whatever, but in the heart that is dictating this letter. On the night you left me I wrote 'the following DYING SPEECH OF AN OLD PHILOSOPHER :

'I strove with none, for none was worth my strife;
Nature I loved, and, next to Nature, Art;

I warm'd both hands before the fire of Life;
It sinks, and I am ready to depart.'

In a previous section Landor's summer visits to his sister Elizabeth have been named. To her at Warwick he gave always, in each year, the largest part of all the time he passed