from Bath, until he quitted it for ever, with one exception. He went once more to Llanthony. Alas, my dear friend,' he wrote in January 1856, 'I would rather undertake a voyage to Baby'lon than to London. One sorrowful task is imposed on meto take two ladies to my Abbey. Sad scene! sad remem'brances! Forty-three years have passed since I saw the place, ' and never had I wished to see it again.' A few days later brought me nevertheless my usual summons on his birthday:

Even our meetings on that day were now to close, as he too surely predicted in a touching letter after our last celebration of it. 'It appears to me that neither of us will have anything

6

more to say on that subject. However, I have enjoyed better 'health this winter, such as it has been, than in almost any ' other since I left my paradise in Italy. Strength alone fails me in the corporeal, and memory in the mental. I remember 'what I would forget, and I forget what I would remember. I 'have nothing to do now but to look into the fire, and see it 'burn down, as I myself have done. Solitude was always dear to me; and at present more than ever; once a playful friend, and now a quiet nurse. Scarcely a soul of my old acquaintance is left in Bath. All have departed; the most part to that country where there neither are nor ever will be railroads. I 'must perforce remain where I am. I have only one more 'journey to make, and I hope it may be by an express train. I

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was very near taking my ticket a little while ago, and now

stop only in the waiting-room.' Within the last few years, death had indeed been busy around him; and it remains that I should give brief mention of his losses in this way, and the penalties he was paying for extreme old age.

X. DEATHS OF OLD FRIENDS.

The first loss by which Landor suffered keenly was that of Joseph Ablett, to whose generous kindness he first owed his Fiesolan villa. We were under promise together to visit Llanbedr in the spring of 1848; when, early in the January of that year, our loss was announced to us. 'Poor dear Ablett ! Landor wrote: at whose house we were to meet in the spring, died on 'the 9th, and I can remember few things that have caused tears 'to burst forth from me as this did. Never was there so kind'hearted a man. His manner (though never to us) often seemed 'cold: but even then there was a hot spring gushing from a vast depth through a giacier. I heard almost at the same time ' of the death of a companion of my early childhood, on whose marriage I think I wrote my first verses; but her loss has grieved me incomparably less than that of my later friend. 'Good, generous Ablett! one more tear for thee!' He never would admit that age, which remembered its sorrows longer than youth, had even the poor advantage of feeling them less acutely.

The following year carried off the brother next to himself in years. 'My brother Charles,' he wrote to me on the 8th of July 1849, the liveliest, wittiest, most energetic and independ'ent of men, is lying on his death-bed. This very instant a ' letter tells me he is dead.' The handsomest of the family in person, Charles Landor had singularly genial and agreeable manners, and, though too passionately fond of field-sports and outdoor occupations to have time for cultivation of the pursuits that attracted his brothers, had many of the accomplishments in which they excelled, with a much keener observation in the affairs of life. Exactly a month before this death of his brother there had come the news of Lady Blessington's, and the way in which this affected her old friend has been seen. 'Yet why,' he wrote to me, 'call it sad? It was the very mode of departure she anticipated and desired: as I do too.' Before the year closed he had also himself a warning. Death had taken aim at him and missed him, he said; but let the next be more successful, if so he might be spared the sorrowing over friends.

HH

'Let him take another as soon as he pleases, but pass by those 'I love.' A vain wish, as he knew well.

Ah! he strikes all things, all alike,

But bargains: those he will not strike.

After not many months he lost another friend for whose summons to a promised visit at Aylesbury in the autumn of 1850 we were both waiting when the sad intelligence came. During the two preceding years Landor had seen much of Lord Nugent, and his allusions to him in casual verses were frequent. The Hungarian war had roused the warmest zeal of both, and they took unwearying delight in rendering service to such of the leaders of that gallant people as were in England after the struggle. I was witness to Landor's grief when he heard that our friend was taken from us, and I strongly sympathised with an opinion he expressed publicly at the time that Nugent had deserved better treatment than his party gave him. Some public men are unlucky, and he has been longer remembered by a joke of Canning's than for qualities of his own deserving the highest respect. He was a courageous and consistent politician, and few men had been so at the cost of greater worldly sacrifices. To Landor he was farther endeared by social characteristics of the pleasantest kind; and perhaps by some resemblances in temperament, which made them both, as the survivor confessed, apt to be ardent after impracticable things.

We schemed such projects as we might
In younger days with better right.
Athens was ours; and who but we

Shouted along Thermopyla!'

More of his Irish than of his English stock was indeed to be observed in Nugent. He did not inherit from his mother his title only. Her father was Lord Clare, to whom the Haunch of Venison was written; and his grandson had not a little of the genial nature, the cordial tastes, the respectable talents for literature, even the reported portliness of person, which distinguished Goldsmith's friend, who had himself written that ode to Pulteney containing the masterly verse quoted by Gibbon in his character of Brutus.

The next of Landor's friends who passed away had been the

heroine of much of his minor poetry. To her were addressed, amid many others as tender and graceful, the lovely lines in which he describes himself, when first she separated from him and crossed the sea, as having no power to rest

But on the very thought that swells with pain.

O bid me hope again!

O give me back what earth, what (without you)
Not heaven itself can do,

One of the golden days that we have past;
And let it be my last!

Or else the gift would be, however sweet,
Fragile and incomplete.

'I have lost my beloved friend of half a century, Jane the Countess de Molandè,' he wrote to me on the 3d of August 1851. She died at Versailles on the last of July after sixteen hours' illness. This most afflicting intelligence was sent me by her son William, who was with her at the last hour. She will be brought over to the family vault, in county Meath, of her first husband, Swifte, great-great-grandson of the uncle of the Dean of St. Patrick. I hoped she might have seen my grave. Hers I shall never see, but my thoughts will visit it often. Though other friends have died in other days (why cannot I help this running into verse?) One grave there is where memory sinks and stays.'

It was to see Landor at his very best to see him in the presence of this lady. In language, manner, look, voice, even in the minutest points of gesture and bearing, it was all that one could possibly imagine of the perfection of chivalrous respect. Even when I first saw her, a bright good-humoured Irish face was all her beauty, but youth still lingered in her eyes and hair; and a little scene between her and Landor at the interview was perfectly expressed in a few lines of dialogue written by him next day.

M. Why, who now in the world is this?

It cannot be the same.. I miss
The gift he always brought . . a kiss.
Yet still I know my eyes are bright,

And not a single hair turn'd white.

L. O idol of my youth! upon

That joyous head gray hair there's none,

Nor may there ever be! gray hair

Is the unthrifty growth of Care,

Which she has planted-you see where.

Two years later brought the same fatal summons for one who during many years had been held in high esteem by all the

Landor family. Mr. Rosenhagen died in the middle of the December of 1853; and when my old friend wrote to me as usual on Christmas-day, the event was painfully affecting him.

'Merry Christmases (that is the right word, and no other will do) are mostly over with childhood, though they sometimes boisterously burst into the circle when they ought to be a-bed. I am in perfectly good health, but my upper teeth are as useless as the fleets in the Euxine; and of all infidelities the worst is their secession. I have been very sad too since the loss of my friend Rosenhagen. In writing the name my hand trembles. Never was there a better man or more perfect gentleman. With his father and himself and Thomas Grenville have passed away any remaining chances of discovering the writer of Junius. However, it matters little, -Johnson's letter to Chesterfield is worth them all, admirable as they are.'

But the year then beginning, his eightieth, was to be the saddest of all to him. It opened with the death of the last survivor of those who had known him at Bath at the beginning of the century. My earliest Bath friend,' he wrote to me on the 6th of February 1854, Miss Caldwell, sister to good dear Lady * Belmore, of whose death I so lately wrote to you, died a few days ago. I had known them since the beginning of the century. Alas! I feel that I am gone very far down the vale of years a vale in which there is no fine prospect on either side, and the few flowers are scarcely worth the gathering.' Nor had the month thus mournfully opened come to its close before a much sadder loss had fallen on him. The companion of his childhood, his eldest and only surviving sister Elizabeth, died in the family house at Warwick. Her illness had not been serious at first, and to the end there seemed to be hope: but on the 2d of March he wrote to me that he had lost his earliest, dearest, and nearly his last friend; and that grief had taken away his sleep, appetite, digestion, everything. It was indeed a hard and heavy blow, though there was much to soften it in the many memorials she left of a tender regard that had survived and been true to him through all his life's vicissitudes.

His letters for some time bore the trace of grief in even the tone with which they spoke of ordinary things; and one of them, written little more than a month after this last great loss, in which he described himself watching the lights of a Bath sunset disappear, and thinking of the friends who like them had gone out as suddenly, I felt to be very touching.