'What delightful weather! Last evening' (8th April 1854) 'I walked in the park, and saw the sun gradually illuminate the whole of Marlborough-buildings, window after window, six or seven at the time. Many of my old friends lived there, and went away in like manner, one after another. This evening I took my usual walk a little earlier, and, sitting afterwards without candles for about an hour as I always do, I have had the same feeling as I watched the twilight darken on my walls, and my pictures vanish from before me. I make no change in these lines, but write them as they have risen to my mind: My pictures blacken in their frames And youthful maids and wrinkled dames Death of the Day! a sterner Death The fairest form and balmiest breath As the same year wore on, he saw too surely another grief preparing for him. He wrote to me in July of the illness of Julius Hare; and soon after, on his friend's expressed wish to see him, he went to Hurstmonceaux, from which I received soon after some verses written by him on his friend's having placed in his hands a small unpublished poem of Wordsworth's. They closed thus: Hail, ye departed! hail, thou later friend, It was, alas! rather fear than hope that had suggested this ear- It spoke of matters they had talked about together, and especially of an old mulberry-tree in the garden at Warwick celebrated in Landor's verse. The ancient gods and heroes, said Julius, had each his favourite plant; and there were other reasons, which he had tried himself to express in unaccustomed verse, why Landor should have the mulberry. Of yore in Babylon the mulberry It keeps the records of glad friendships here: 'Twas SHAKESPEARE'S, MILTON's, now 'tis LANDOR's tree; Julius's letter, which also made pathetic reference to the effect on Sir William Napier of the death of his brother Charles in the previous year, ended with words very memorable, and worthy to have closed the intercourse of two such friends. 'The great men of England seem to be passing away, those at least of that great generation whose youth was kindled and stirred by the first French Revolution. But one of them remains, my friend Walter Landor, and may he still remain as long as his spirit is not too impatient to escape from the decay of the body! It is perhaps well that the influence which first moved you to the resentment of injustice should be with you to the end.' (Landor had sent him a new Conversation having for its subject the politics of the day). There are still so many painful things in the actual state of the world, so much wrong and so much folly, that it may probably be the duty of those who see these evils clearly, and feel the mischief of them strongly, to do all they can to expose and redress them. But it is the very pressure of such evils that makes me desire more earnestly to be borne away from them by some of those visions of beauty and tenderness which you in former times raised up for me, or by more of that intercourse with sages and heroes which led me not to the treasures of antiquity alone, but to those that lie in our own native speech. The Greek and Roman dialogues you have printed separately; but I have always had a strong wish to see a selection made of the more purely poetical and dramatic dialogues, including almost all in which there are female speakers. It would be one of the most beautiful books in the language, or, what is the same thing, in the world.' Hare survived only until the middle of January 1855. He had been again a prisoner from illness for a month, but nothing immediately dangerous was apprehended; when suddenly he grew rapidly worse, and died on the morning of Tuesday the 23d in his sixtieth year. From one of the mourners at his deathbed Landor heard the sad intelligence, in a letter written two days later. 'How often your friend spoke of you. Dear Lan'dor! he used to say; I hope we shall meet once more. Yes, but not on earth.' It was to this Landor referred in lines sent to me on the 27th. 'I sit up in bed to write what pressed upon me this morning. Poor Julius was hardly sixty. In three days I shall enter on my eighty-first year. Superfluous lags the veteran on the stage. I am outliving all my friends, and it is time for me to go and join those who are gone before me. Already memory and strength are gone, and surely my days are numbered. Julius! how many hours have we Spent with the sage and bard of old! In truth's bright armour none more bold. By friends around thy bed in death My name from those pure lips was heard. O Fame! how feebler all thy breath Than Virtue's one expiring word!' Towards the close of the same year, too, he lost a friend for whom he had a thoroughly genuine admiration and regard, and of whom, on the 25th of October 1855, he thus wrote to me: 'I am grieving, and shall grieve long, for Sir William Molesworth. When, on that desert heath the house of commons, will three such men for honest and useful work, as himself and Hume and Peel, ever meet again? Poor Sir William ! The last time we met was at Pencarrow. We started a stote near the pool, and both ran after it, might and main. I ran faster than stote or baronet; but the creature must have been bred on whig land, for he doubled, and fairly escaped us.' The following year brought a much graver loss, and the name with which my melancholy list must close is that of one very dear to us both. The good, joyous, generous Kenyon died in December 1856, thinking of his friends to the last; and finding it his happiness in death, as it had been through life, to provide for the welfare and enjoyment of all who had ever been associated with enjoyments of his own. 'This indeed is a sad grief,' Landor wrote to me, after a quarter of a century's friendship. He was the kindest, the most genial of men ever known to me. I never saw a cloud upon his face. There was 'not a word he uttered, not a letter he wrote, that did not carry • on its surface some ray of light from the happiness he was spreading around him.' Yet why should I scruple to add another name? Landor had lost in this year also the little Pomeranian dog who had been for more than twelve years his constant and sprightly companion. 'Pomero, dear Pomero died this evening' (10th March 1856) 'at about four o'clock. I have been able to think of nothing else. Everybody in this house,' he wrote a few days later, 'grieves for Pomero. The cat lies day and night upon his grave; and I will not disturb the kind creature, though I want to plant some violets upon it, and to have his epitaph placed around his little urn. O urna! nunquam sis tuo eruta hortulo: XI. FRUITS GATHERED FROM AN OLD TREE. To a republication in 1853 of Conversations, Critical Essays, Poems, and Miscellaneous Prose Pieces, all of which had been written, with few exceptions, in the interval of seven years since the collection of his Works, Landor gave the title of Last Fruit off an Old Tree; and allusion has already been made to such of it as consisted of new Conversations, or of critical studies on Theocritus, Catullus, and Petrarch. It remains, however, generally to speak of its other contents, and to bring under the same pretty and pathetic title, to which it more strictly applies, the yield of still later fruit from the old tree; or, in other words, such additions to Landor's writings as were either published, or collected with a view to publication, under the titles respectively of Scenes for a Study, Dry Sticks, and Hellenics Enlarged, before he finally departed for Italy in 1858. The principal prose pieces of the Last Fruit, apart from its reviews, were nineteen chapters on 'Popery British and Foreign,' and ten letters of a true believer to Cardinal Wiseman, laughing at the public alarm in 1850 over papal aggression, and condemning more gravely the legislation that followed. 'As if fifty car'dinals in England,' he wrote to me (and the remark will sufficiently describe his view of the case), 'could do us damage to ' the amount of five farthings!' The high-church view in either communion, protestant or popish, had nevertheless small comfort or support from him. In the course of his chapters there is an eloquent passage on the services of Methodism in reclaiming, at a critical time, the most profligate of the people from turbulence and crime. On one side is the gentle and virtuous Wesley, bringing about him as great multitudes as ever surrounded the earlier apostles, and working as great marvels in their hearts; while on the other are the beneficed clergy everywhere setting their faces against him, and angry faces they are, 'partly from old prejudices, and partly from old port.' At nearly the time when these chapters were written, Landor had been corresponding about one of his Llanthony livings with the bishop of St. David's, Dr. Thirlwall, for whose character and learning he had high respect; and he has some excellent remarks on the inadequacy of the payment of curates, which were probably suggested by that correspondence. His conclusion upon the whole matter is to counsel moderation on all sides; and this he enforces in language not undeserving of respect, though little likely to have hearing as matters stand at present. 'It would grieve me to foresee a day when our cathedrals and our churches shall be demolished or desecrated; when the tones of the organ, when the symphonies of Handel, shall no longer swell and reverberate along the groined roof and painted windows. But let old superstitions crumble into dust; let faith, hope, and charity be simple in their attire ; let few and solemn words be spoken before Him to whom all hearts are open, all desires known.' A similar set of letters or chapters written two years afterwards in the assumed character of an American, and dedicated to Mr. Gladstone, had for their subject the outset of the Crimean war, which was sharply criticised. These were issued separately: but, collected in the same volume with those on Popery, were others calling attention to Southey's services in connection with the neglect of his family; and of these last the sequel may be worth relating. They had been published in a paper I had long been connected with, and at that time conducted; not better known for its liberal opinions, than for the incomparable wit and ability which the dear friend whom I followed as its editor, Albany Fonblanque, had associated with its name. Nor had only the letters been given. Comments had been made on the subject of them from time to time; and I had very strongly directed attention to the fact, that though a tory administration was in power when Southey died and until three years after his death, his son was still suffered to languish on less than a hundred a-year, in the church of whose interests his father had been so zealous a champion. This was a duty that should hardly have been left to a journal differing so strongly from many of Southey's views; but it was nothing to what occurred a little later, |