lies buried there, he told me. Sixty years ago, in this season, I promised a person I dearly loved it should be there. We were sitting under some old elders, now supplanted by a wall of the churchyard.'

At the end of the same month I had farther proof of how strongly his thoughts were bent in this direction. He sent me an epitaph he had written for himself:

Ut sine censurâ, sine laude inscripta, sepulcro
Sint patris ac matris nomina sola meo:

At puro invidiæ, sua gloria rara, poetæ

Incumbente rosâ laurus obumbret humum.

Nor do I care

But then, you see, the verses are not fitted for a stone. a straw whether a rose and laurel cover my bones. Sandford will see them run to earth.'

He had no consciousness as yet that others were already in hot pursuit of him, with quite other than roses or laurels in their hands; and that the chase would end only when his bones had been run to earth in an Italian burial-ground.

The blow fell at last so suddenly that I only heard of what had been determined after the resolution was taken. Told by his law-advisers that the matter complained of was such that an adverse verdict inust be expected, and that the damages would necessarily be heavier because of the breach of an undertaking which they had themselves given in his name upon my interference in the previous year,—a plan of that former time, only then at my suggestion abandoned, was at the same interview put before Landor, and eagerly assented to. This was, that he should place his property beyond seizure for damages, break-up his house in Bath, sell his pictures, and return to Italy. There was no time to lose if such a scheme were to be carried out successfully; and it was with supreme astonishment I received an intimation, telegraphed at midday from Bath on the 12th of July 1858, that Landor would be at my house in London that night, accompanied by one of his nieces. Some friends were dining with me, among them Sir Alexander Cockburn and Mr. Dickens, who, on the arrival of the old man too fatigued by his journey to be able to join the dinner-table, left the room to see him ; and from another friend, the Rev. Mr. Elwin, who was also one of the party, I received very lately a letter reminding me of what occurred. 'I have no recollection so vivid as of that

' dinner in Montagu-square, when the servant announced, as it
were in Cockburn's very teeth, that Landor, who was flying
'from justice, had come to take refuge in your house for the
night, and Dickens went out to console him. I thought that
'Landor would talk over with him the unpleasant crisis; and
I shall never forget my amazement when Dickens came back
into the room laughing, and said that he found him very jovial,
and that his whole conversation was upon the characters of
Catullus, Tibullus, and other Latin poets.' Writing to his
daughter a few weeks later, when, upon the scandal of the
published trial, there had arisen a burst of virtuous indignation
which might just as virtuously and with greater justice have
been spared, Mr. Dickens thus mentioned the impression left
on him by the interview to which Mr. Elwin alludes: 'You
' must not let any new idea of poor dear Landor efface the for-
mer image of the fine and brave old man. I would not blot
'him out, in his tender gallantry, as he sat upon his bed at
'Forster's that night I lately told you of, for a million of wild
'mistakes at eighty-four years of age.' Landor crossed to France
four days later, on the morning of the 15th of July; and I
never saw him again.

BOOK EIGHTH.

1858-1864. ET. 83-89.

LAST SIX YEARS IN ITALY.

1. In his old home. II. At Siena. III. In Florence. Scenes, being the last Imaginary Conversations.

I. IN HIS OLD HOME.

IV. Five unpublished
V. The Close.

LANDOR went first to Genoa, and there it was his intention to have stayed; but considerations urged by members of his family prevailed, and he decided to move on to his old home in Fiesole.

Before he left Genoa the advice on which he quitted England had been embodied in legal forms, and he had assigned over to others the property reserved to his use under the trustdeeds of Llanthony. It was his own wish that the assignment should have been made to one of his nieces; but this was overruled, and everything over which any control had been retained to him passed to the ownership of Arnold Landor, his eldest

son.

There are matters as to which I have thus far imposed silence on myself, and intend as much as possible to continue to do so; but it is quite necessary, at this point of my narrative, that I should briefly state the position in which this deed of transfer left what had been Landor's worldly estate. When he separated from his family in 1835, Llanthony and Ipsley may be said, at a rough calculation, to have been yielding very certainly more than three thousand a-year rental, the deductions for mortgages and insurances at that time being a little over fourteen hundred a-year, and, of the balance, not more than from six to seven hundred a-year being taken by Landor, who left the rest to accumulate for casual expenses, repairs, and the discharge of

debts. Of this six hundred, upon quitting Italy he left twothirds to Mrs. Landor, at the same time transferring absolutely to his eldest son the villa and farms where the family lived, and of which the farm-produce went far towards their expenses of living; while he took, for his own maintenance in London, only the remaining third. This proved however to be too little, and after a year or two it was raised, out of the surplus at Llanthony, to four hundred a-year; trenching by so much on the reserved fund. But his younger children had meanwhile profited by legacies from other members of the family; and upon Arnold's visit to England in 1842, sufficient. had been raised to pay the debt to Ablett for Fiesole, an insurance of equal amount indemnifying Arnold. The result was that when Landor, now on the eve of his return to his old home, executed a farther deed of transfer to his son, whereby the latter became entitled to everything arising from Llanthony, the property which had been entirely Landor's (not a shilling of it having been derived from other sources than those which his mother had so vigilantly protected and improved for his use) was wholly and exclusively at the disposal of others. His son. Arnold, standing next in the entails of Llanthony and of Ipsley, which he was sure very soon to inherit free from all incumbrance, was meanwhile invested, by the just-executed deed of transfer, with the rights over them up to this time possessed by his father. He had also, by his father's free gift, the absolute ownership of the villa and farms at Fiesole; and he had received a legacy of three hundred pounds from his aunt Elizabeth.** By similar legacies his sister had a hundred a-year to her exclusive use, and each of his two younger brothers eighty pounds a-year; while his mother, whose four hundred a-year, secured in 1835, had been raised to five hundred upon the resettlement in 1842, had this larger annuity secured to her for life on her husband's death by charge on the Llanthony estate. Landor himself was now travelling to Florence with a few pic

* Arnold enjoyed his possessions for little more than six years after his father's death. He died on the 2d of April 1871, within a few days of the completion of his 53d year; and has been succeeded by the next heir, Walter Landor.

tures, a few books, a small quantity of silver plate, and something short of a hundred and fifty pounds, as the sum of his earthly possessions. This had been the amount realised in Manchester by the sale of the pictures that did not accompany him.

Before he reached Fiesole, a thousand pounds damages had been awarded against him, and proceedings begun to compel the payment. The deed of transfer, as I well knew, was little likely to stand against resolute and determined efforts to overthrow it. The court of chancery, on application, granted an injunction. against receiving the rents until the case should be argued; practically the deed of transfer was defeated; and before Landor died the entire amount of damages and costs had been paid under order of the court. Of course this affected only the sum reserved to Landor's use, and everything else remained as I have stated.

On his way to Italy, and after his arrival, he wrote to me continually; but one subject mainly occupied his letters, and I could give to it but one reply. As to other matters, it became very soon obvious that the only result that was reasonably to have been expected was not far distant, and that his old home could be a home to him no more. Red mullets compensated 'Milo for Rome. We have them daily, with ortolans of late, ' and beccaficos. But these do not indemnify me for Bath, the only city I could ever live in comfortably. I have been in 'Florence twice only since I came here eleven weeks ago.' This, in October 1858, was the most favourable aspect of things. But before the end of that month he announced to me that his health was such as to admit of no chance of his surviving, and that, by means of the small remnant of the pittance he had taken with him, he had so arranged that he should sleep his last sleep in the graveyard of the little church near Bath where already he had chosen his place of rest.

'WIDCOMBE! few seek with thee their resting-place;

But I, when I have run my weary race,

Will throw my bones upon thy churchyard turf;

Altho' malignant waves on foreign shore
Have stranded me, and I shall lift no more
My hoary head above the hissing surf.'

I was nevertheless not unprepared for what followed in little