The reviewer, calling him an unpractised author, and saying that his performance betrayed all the incorrectness and abruptness of inexperience, had added this: 'He has fallen into the common error of those who aspire to the composition of blank ' verse, by borrowing too many phrases and epithets from our incomparable Milton.' To which Landor retorted by asking what expressions he had borrowed. 'I challenge him to produce them. If indeed I had borrowed them, so little should I have realised by the dangerous and wild speculation, that I might have composed a better poem and not have been a better poet. But I 'feared to break open, for the supply of my games or for the 'maintenance of my veteran heroes, the sacred treasury of the 'great republican. . . . For the language of Paradise Lost ought 'not to be the language of Gebir. There should be the softened 'air of remote antiquity, not the severe air of unapproachable sanctity. I devoutly offer up my incense at the shrine of MilWoe betide the intruder that would steal its jewels! It requires no miracle to detect the sacrilege. The crime will be 'found its punishment. The venerable saints, and still more 'holy personages, of Raphael or Michael Angelo, might as con'sistently be placed among the Bacchanals and Satyrs, bestriding 'the goats and bearing the vases of Poussin, as the resemblance of that poem, or any of its component parts, could be introduced in mine.' Nothing could be better said than that. It marks exactly the distinction; and it is interesting to note that thus early had taken root in his mind that profound veneration for the most majestic of English poets which steadily attended him without abatement to the close of life, and which, as it rises or falls in England, may be taken as no indifferent or inexact measure-of-value as well in poetry as in the taste for it.

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• ton.

The offending reviewer was supposed to be a Mr. Pybus, who had dabbled in verses himself; and this explains an amusing passage which, showing the writer at the outset of life just as he was to its close, exactly prefigures the offer with which he startled the reviewing world twenty-five years later, when he promised. a hot penny-roll and a pint of stout for breakfast to any critic who could show himself capable of writing a dialogue equal to the worst of his Imaginary Conversations.

'Some will think me intoxicated, and most will misconstrue my goodnature, if I invite the reviewer, or any other friend that he will introduce -but himself the most earnestly, as I suspect from his manner that he poetises-to an amicable trial of skill. I will subject myself to any penalty either of writing or of ceasing to write, if the author, who criticises with the flightiness of a poet, will assume that character at once, and taking in series my twenty worst verses, write better an equal number in the period of twenty years. I shall be rejoiced if he will open to me any poems of my contemporaries, of my English contemporaries I mean, and point out three pages more spirited, I will venture to add more classical, than the three least happy and least accurate in Gebir.'

Shall we be angry at this? There is a remark of Dr. Johnson's on the most affecting of Shakespeare's plays,--where he says that the characters of this poet, however distressed, have always a conceit left them in their misery, 'a miserable conceit;' but if so, who would take it from them? It would be hard to grudge a conceit to misery, if that were everything left to it; or a trifle of self-praise to a poet, if there were no one else to praise him. Vanity, in the sense of abundance of worshippers and the fumes of perpetual incense, it undoubtedly is not; and with a rather touching sense of what it actually is, Landor proceeded to describe the circumstances and way in which Gebir was written, and referred to the earlier poems published by him on leaving Oxford. The passage has the interest of autobiography.

'If my rights had not been refused me, I should not have asserted my claims. Rambling by the side of the sea, or resting on the top of a mountain, and interlining with verses the letters of my friends, I sometimes thought how a Grecian would have written, but never what methods he would take to compass popularity. The nearer I approached him, though distant still, the more I was delighted. . So little was I anxious to publish my rhapsodies, that I never sat down in the house an hour at once for the purpose of composition. Instead of making or inviting courtship, I declared with how little I should rest contented. Far from soliciting the attention of those who are passing by, Gebir is confined, I believe, to the shop of one bookseller, and I never heard that he had even made his appearance at the window. I understand not the management of those matters, but I find that the writing of a book is the least that an author has to do. My experience has not been great; and the caution which it has taught me lies entirely on the other side of publication. Before I was twenty years of age I had imprudently sent into the world a volume of which I was soon ashamed. It everywhere met with as much commendation as was proper, and generally more. For, though the structure was feeble, the lines were fluent; the rhymes showed habitual ease, and the personifications fashionable taste. . . . So early in life I had not discovered the error into which we were drawn by the Wartons. I was then in rap

tures with what I now despise. I am far from the expectation or the hope that these deciduous shoots will be supported by the ivy of my maturer years.'

The manuscript closes with a comment on the reviewer's charge of borrowing,' valuable for its proof of Landor's literary reading thus early, and of his shrewd sense of the use that is made of charges of plagiarism; which may in fact imply the greatest merit, and which are seldom employed otherwise than falsely. You are punished, not because you steal, but because you are detected, through want of spirit and address in carrying off your booty. Plagiarism, imitation, and allusion, three shades 'that soften from blackness into beauty, are by the glaring eye ' of the malevolent blended into one.' Some of his illustrations are excellent, and were new to me. In connection with the passage from Montaigne, for example, which represents the goose. arguing after his fashion: All the parts of the universe I have an interest in: I have advantage by the winds, and convenience by the waters; the earth serves me to walk upon, the sun to light me, the sky to cover me; I am the darling of nature; and ' is it not man that treats, lodges, and serves me?"—he produces two couplets by Pope, taken from the first and the third epistle of the Essay on Man: the art of the plagiarism consisting in the different application made of the several parts of the original, and the workmanship justifying the art.

'

'Seas roll to waft me, suns to light me rise,
My footstool earth, my canopy the skies.'

'While man exclaims, "See all things for my use;"
See man for mine," replies a pampered goose.'

Beside the famous lines on Addison, too,

'Damn with faint praise, assent with civil leer,
And, without sneering, teach the rest to sneer,'

he places this capital passage out of a personification of Envy, from a poet seldom read, though of a vigorous mind and lively 'imagination,' as he justly characterises Phineas Fletcher:

• When needs he must, yet faintly then he praises,
Somewhat the deed, but more the means, he raises;

So marreth what he makes, and praising most dispraises.'

The passage is in the 12th chapter of the 2d book of the Essays, and will be found in Cotton, ii. 348.

I will take only another sentence from the close. After attacking Mr. Mathias and (with no very evident reason) Mr. D'Israeli, he speaks of the latter as claiming to be descended from an Italian family, and adds: 'He is one of the children

*

' of Israel nevertheless, as is also announced by the name. 'I mark this circumstance not by way of reproach, for in the 'number of my acquaintance there is none more valuable, there 'is not one more lively, more inquiring, more regular; there ' is not one more virtuous, more beneficent, more liberal, more 'tender in heart, or more true in friendship than my friend Mocatta; he also is a Jew.' This character is borne out by such letters of his friend as Landor had preserved. A few lines from one of them may be added, which show that already Landor was meditating a tragedy for the stage; and this wise counsellor had the sense to warn him that, even if he got so far as the theatredoor, the chamberlain would be sure to turn his key upon him. He dates from St. Thomas's-square, Hackney, on the 5th December 1800.

'Most undoubtedly a tragedy replete with sentiments such as you could not help to infuse would not be received by the manager or sanctioned by the lord chamberlain; so that I much wish you could hit on some other plan more lucid and better brought out than you have hitherto produced. For I honestly think your talents equal to the greatest undertaking; but I dread that impetuosity which disdains those minor niceties of language which are yet necessary to show where the narrative stands and what is going on.'

III. MR. SERJEANT ROUGH.

Unhappily Landor soon lost the advantage of so judicious a friend as Isaac Mocatta, who died in the year following the date

* The writings of Mr. D'Israeli seem to me always highly deserving of respect and honour. He valued, as well as did what he could to raise, the literary character. But some of his critical opinions had amazed Landor, who reprehends him also amusingly for his too great familiarity with learned men, as where he calls the great French printer Henry Stephens. Here let me inform this gentleman that though Scholars have sometimes taken this liberty, it is not allowed to other folks. He might as 'well call Cicero Fetch, and Fabius Maximus Broad Bean. Either Henri Etienne, which was his name, or Henricus Stephanus, as he wrote it ' in Latin, is the proper term. We cannot suppose that, coming over to England, he would have called himself Henry Stephens.'

of that letter; but an extract from an earlier one may be added, as it touches another subject of difference between them. I thank 'you,' Mocatta had written in July 1800, 'for sparing me the 'triumph of Bonaparte's laurels. . . . The Corsican boy has certainly proved himself a man. May he crown his victories by dictating a moderate peace! I assure you, if I feel for the disappointment of the country, I do not for that of Mr. Pitt. I was reading lately Plutarch's essay on the character of Alexander, and some of his reasoning I felt as a silent reproof of my own condemnation of Bonaparte.' The time was nevertheless approaching when the occasion for reproof was reversed, and it was Landor who condemned the ambition and execrated the successes of Napoleon.

His

In July 1801, Mr. Jacob Mocatta announced his brother's death to Landor, to whom had been bequeathed some books from his library (among them a rare Sophocles) and a Prometheus in ancient sculpture, which, with his usual vehement appreciation for a friend's gift, Landor declared to be by Phidias, and which became the property of his brother Henry. 'I never knew a bet'ter or wiser man, or one more friendly,' is his indorsement of the letter that told him of the death and the bequest. friend had just lived long enough to see the Peace which he had hoped might be a temperate one, and which proved to be that of which everybody was glad and nobody proud. Landor received the letter when lodging at Oxford, where his brother Robert was now in residence; and between Oxford and London, where the peace and the ministry furnished occupation for everybody, the rest of the year was passed. Only one other affair Landor had found time to take in hand, and there is allusion to it in a letter of the following year to his brother Henry. This time year, too, I was to have been married' (he is referring to the recent marriage of Rough). 'But, after committing a piece of foolery in which I 'was the puppet, the farce concluded. But what can it signify? 'I can only be sixty thousand pounds the poorer:' the peculiarity of such expressions in his case being, that they import nothing which in conduct he is careful to contradict, but may in general be taken not unfairly as the measure of what he did as well as said. No man whom I have ever known of intellect approaching

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