from the critics, but in quarters from which praise was more grateful. What an undaunted soul before his eighty years,' Mrs. Browning wrote to me (March 1856) after infinite praise of the Scenes, and how good for all other souls to contemplate! 'It is better than any treatise on immortality!' 'What a won'derful Landor he is,' was written by another hand in the same letter. 'The eye is not dim, nor the natural force abated. That 'is to live one's eighty years indeed. I wish, if you have a way, you would express our veneration for what he is, has 'been, and we trust long will be.' Not that any undue confidence in this undimmed intellect ever blinded Landor to the sense of how near he stood to the inevitable presence; in these Scenes very frequently, and scattered over all his last fruit, is the lesson, not unwisely at any time enforced, of the tranquillity with which the rest of death may be waited for; he was ever ready to contemplate calmly in his own case what arises to the thought of Antony,

I have been sitting longer at life's feast
Than does me good; I will arise and go:

and for that especially Mr. Carlyle at this time thanked him. 'You look into the eyes of Death withal, as the brave all do 'habitually from an early period of their course; and certainly 'one's heart answers to you. Yea, valiant brother, yea, even so! There is a tone as of the old Roman in these things which 'does me good, and is very sad to me, and very noble.'

Little more remains to be said of Landor's last literary labours in England. The old tree was to go on shedding fruit as long as there was life in trunk or bough, and the last was never to mean anything more than the latest. Of those under immediate notice the latest was the enlargement of his Hellenics ; several new ones being added, and several of the old ones rewritten; but enough will have been said of it if I add that it had been especially his study, with advancing years, to give more and more of a severe and simple character to all his writing after the antique, and that this was exclusively the object, here, of the most part of his changes or additions. For this reason they deserve close attention. It was an old sagacious warning to a young writer, that if he should happen to observe

in his writing at any time what appeared to him to be particularly fine, he would do well to strike it out; and, in revising those pieces on classical subjects, Landor was following the advice as implicitly after he had passed his eightieth year as if he had not reached his eighteenth. I remember a close he had put to the exquisite Paris and Enone which I thought extremely striking. But no, he said; it ended the poem too much in a flash, which we below were fond of, but which those on the heights of antiquity, both in poetry and prose, avoided. And of course he was right.

The incidents that led to his final departure from, England are now briefly to be named. But as in these latter years, when he had ceased to visit much, he had been deriving no inconsiderable enjoyment as well from the reading as from the writing of books, some notices of that kind of use of his leisure may have also some interest for the reader, and will here be properly interposed.

XII. SILENT COMPANIONS.

All the recent years, as they passed, had found my old friend content with his few associates in Bath, and more and more indisposed to other society. He made exception only for that of his books, and here it became my privilege still to have part. There was rarely a week in which he did not write to me of some book as of a friend he had been talking with; and often so characteristically, that any account of this portion of his life would be incomplete which did not borrow illustration from at least one or two of these letters. Dialogues not imaginary I may call them, with but one listener until now; and my only regret in presenting them is that space can be found for so few.

To the first I shall name he had been attracted, by remembering that when Southey visited him at Como, in 1816, he mentioned Blanco White with much affection as the most interesting character he had left behind him in England. But he never mentioned him as the best dialectician and the most dis'passionate reasoner. He rated less highly than I now perceive. to be his due both his abilities and the beauty of his language.

'I had always thought Whately his superior; but I am converted to the side of Blanco, who unites the graces of poetry and the refinements of criticism, and superadds to both a passionate. 'love of truth. He is indeed the very opposite of a character on which he discourses in one of the volumes; a man so fond ' of lying that he lies to himself, as men sing to themselves who are fond of singing.' The volumes were the Life and Letters of Blanco White, of which the more he read the higher his opinion became. They opened a California to him, he said, ' all gold below, and all salubrity above.' This admiration did not surprise me. The book has always seemed to me to hold a high place among the few in our language of a biographical kind that have a purely and keenly intellectual interest; and Blanco himself was so uncommon a man, though the name is unfamiliar now, that the reader may thank me for prefacing what Landor has to say by a few words of my own.

It is nearly thirty years since Blanco White died, and for thirty years before that time there were few names better known than his in the society of London and Oxford. He was a Spaniard, born in the same year as Landor; his father of an Irish stock, settled in Seville, then the most bigoted town in Spain ; and his mother an Andalusian so ardent for her church, that she dragged her son from his father's counting-house to turn him into an ecclesiastic. The career unhappily proved to be so conflicting with the character of his mind, that by the time he obtained rank as a priest, its unfavourable influences affected him with such keenness as to render flight his only escape from infidelity. He came to England in 1810, then so imperfectly acquainted with English that he had to support himself in London by setting up a Spanish newspaper; which he did by the kindness of Lord Holland. He rendered in this way much public service, up to the expulsion of the French from Spain in 1814; became gradually meanwhile a master of our language; lived very familiarly in Holland-house for a part of the time; and settled ultimately at Oxford, where he was no mean figure among even the extraordinary group of men who then met in the common room of Oriel. He received from the university a mastership of arts, and was led to take English orders. These

were his not least happy years. He corresponded with Southey and Coleridge, explained the Roman-catholic breviary to Pusey and Hurrell Froude, and delighted equally in Newman and Whately. But, tempted into controversy with members of his former communion, he threw himself over-zealously into the strife, and shocked Lord Holland not a little by declaring in the Quarterly against catholic emancipation. Soon, however, the larger liberality of his nature re-asserted itself, and, upon the schism that made broad division in Oriel, he stood fast by Whately. He accompanied his friend to Dublin; was unhappily not strengthened in his new belief by what he saw of the Irish Establishment; and, shaken by his own doubts at the very time when he was hoping to settle the wavering faith of a unitarian, became unitarian himself. His sincerity no one could doubt. He proved it by the most painful sacrifices; nay, by what is entitled to be called even heroism, touching and noble. The real truth was that his ardent impulsive nature had never actually recovered the shock of its recoil from the jesuit discipline. What followed, in successive stages, was compromise; and compromises only last for a time. He did not remain in unitarianism. But to the very last he seems to me, in a certain construction of his mind, in its close union of the moral with the intellectual faculties, even in some of its weaknesses, but above all in its restless desire for truth, a nonconformist Doctor Arnold. Perhaps. however he will be remembered longest for the extraordinary intellectual achievement of having so mastered our language, some time after he had passed middle life, as to have made it thoroughly his own. He literally recast his mind in an English mould; after a few years never thought but in English; wrote an admirable English style, strong and simple; and is the author of an English sonnet called 'Night and Death,' of surpassing beauty of expression, and subtlety as well as grandeur of thought.

What first attracted Landor, apart from his spiritual insight or force of reasoning and conviction, was the discovery in every part of his mind of an extreme of sensitiveness and elegance. Landor had a special abhorrence for the loud, swaggering, roystering style of criticism, much in vogue in his time, which

revelled in nothing so much as making havoc of names that should have had nothing but honour; and Blanco's comparison of its heroes to a 'set of half-drunken noblemen and their para'sites at Oxford showing the world what freedoms they can use with it,' enchanted Landor. To the same character of refinement in his mind belonged even the occasional errors he committed in criticism; as where he objects to Gil Blas, and thinks that Falstaff should have been made comfortable for the rest of his life. Yes,' says Landor, if Shakespeare had been a novel'ist. But Shakespeare was resolved on showing that the levity ' and even the heartiness of princes is failing to their favourites ' in the hour of need.' And so of the objection to Le Sage's hero that he is a scoundrel. So he is; but the scoundrel we laugh at we should no more think of taking for imitation, than of taking into our service. 'Show me any style in any language so diversified, so easy, so graceful as Le Sage's. He wanted the painter's eye, the poet's invention, fire, and energy; but life had opened to him all its experiences, and he carries round about him a perpetual carnival, pelting incessantly at everybody, and hurting none.'

A large class of sayings in the book, arising out of, or reflecting, the doubts and misgivings that shook Blanco's mind in his later years, have expression in the next extract made from it:

'At p. 300 I find this: "I have heard a man of great talents, and con"scientious besides, speak of the immortality of the soul as if virtue were absolutely dependent upon it. But for the happy inconsistency which in such cases corrects the evil tendencies of mischievous abstract principles, I would not give a straw for that man's virtue. Men who check their appetites upon speculation; who lay out their abstinence or moder"ation (as they think) at a high interest, are most unsafe to deal with: for if, by some mistake or other, they were to believe that there was a centper-cent of happiness to be earned by a bold stroke, they would not hesi"tate a moment to sacrifice one half of mankind to their own private gain. "The name of virtue is desecrated by its being given to that truly gross, though perfectly disguised, selfishness." Was there ever anything, in even the sayings of Bacon, better or more wisely said than this?'

What follows on the Protestant church in Ireland has an interest surviving even its disestablishment.

At p. 247 of the second volume we have these remarks on the Church Establishment in Ireland, where Blanco had lived so long with his friend Archbishop Whately: "I have arrived at the conclusion that were it not