profession had any need to find a place in his thoughts. He stood first in the entail of the family estates; and if he could confine his desires within such limit, and live meanwhile on his father's allowance, he had simply to qualify himself for improving or wasting them. This he too well knew; and though his father, as he observed in Walter the development of unusual intellectual promise, would eagerly have imposed upon him corresponding duties and obligations, the attempt only led to disagreements, and the unsettled wayward habit was never afterwards reclaimed. Of Landor's infancy or childhood there is no record more authentic than such expressions as he now and then himself let drop in old age. Writing in 1853 from the house in which he was born, and which his sister Elizabeth occupied till her death in the following year, when the last witness of his childish days passed away, he mentions having picked up from the gravel-walk the first two mulberries that had fallen; a thing he remembered to have done just seventy-five years before. There is now before me another letter of his to the same dear relative, in which, speaking of a visit he has just paid to her in Warwick, he describes the joy with which he had seen again the house that was the principal home of his childhood, with its dear old mulberry-trees, its grand cedars, the chestnut-wood with the church appearing through it, a cistus that she had planted for him, and the fig-tree at the window on whose leaves, when last he saw them, soft rain was dropping, and from which one little bird was chirping to tell another that there was shelter under them. Tachbrooke alternated with Warwick in these childmemories. From his seventh year he had associations with its garden; and when near his eightieth year he directed the then owner of Tachbrooke, his brother Henry, to the exact spot where he would find the particular apple-tree of one of their boyish adventures,' close upon the nut-walk, and just of the same size and ' appearance as it was seventy years ago.' To this old place he was indeed especially attached, and his allusions to it were incessant. It was the scene of his earliest games and sports, where his 'heedless childhood played, a stranger then to pain; where his boyhood too soon had run through its few happy days; and where often he wished that he might find his final rest. These are expressions continually applied to it in letters to members of his family, while his memory still could go back even beyond his seventh year. To his brother Henry in 1852 he exclaimed: 'Dear old Tachbrooke! It is the only locality for which 'I feel any affection. Well do I remember it from my third or 'fourth year; and the red filberts at the top of the garden, and 'the apricots from the barn-wall, and Aunt Nancy cracking the ⚫ stones for me. If I should ever cat apricots with you again, I 'shall not now cry for the kernel.' As soon as he could quit the nursery he had been sent to a school at Knowle, ten miles from Warwick; and even of this time, when he had reached the age of about four years and a half, his letters have a recollection which is worth preserving. Writing to his sister Ellen from Florence at the close of 1831, he says: I remember when I went to Knowle an old woman coming from Balsal-Temple to little Treherne for a guinea, which 'he paid her yearly. She was one hundred and two when I was 'four and a half; so that it is in the range of possibility that she might have seen people who had seen not only Milton, but Shakespeare, Bacon, Spenser, and Raleigh. I myself have con' versed with a man, not remarkably old, who had conversed with 'Pope, Warburton, and Fielding.' Another incident of a year and a half's later date he recalled when writing to Southey in 1811 of his Lanthony estate in the Vale of Ewias, and its infinite variety of flowers-those 'beauti'ful and peaceful tribes' he so often wished that he knew more about. 'They always meet one in the same place, at the same season; and years have no more effect on their placid countenances than on so many of the most favoured gods. I remember a little privet which I planted when I was about six years old, and which I considered the next of kin to me after my 'mother and elder sister. Whenever I returned from school or 'college, for the attachment was not stifled in that sink, I felt 'something like uneasiness till I had seen and measured it. There ' is no small delight in having a friend in the world to whom one dare repeat such folly.' With a delight that may perhaps be measured by the surpassing beauty of the lines in which it is expressed, he repeated the folly in later years to a wider audi ence: 'And 't is and ever was my wish and way To let all flowers live freely, and all die, Felt safe, unsoiled, nor lost one grain of gold.' But it was a worse cala Varied at the same time with these enjoyments of youth were its other commoner occurrences, which bring to most of us a foretaste of the later troubles. All the trials he ever underwent, he would tell you, were as nothing to his sufferings over grammar and arithmetic, of the last of which he remained ignorant all his life, according to the process in use.' mity, a deep lower than the lowest, that awaited him in dancing; so that when he came to have a son of his own present age, he had gloomily to prophesy that he bid fair to be a worse dancer than he had himself been, for quite vainly had he striven to impress upon him the dreadful truth that all other miseries and misfortunes of life put together were nothing to this. IV. AT RUGBY SCHOOL. From Knowle, when about ten years old, Landor was transferred to Rugby; at that time under Doctor James, a scholar of fair repute, who did something to redeem the school from the effects of the long and dull mastership that preceded his. Many stories are told of Landor here, and some that in his old age obtained sanction from himself, which must nevertheless be pronounced apocryphal. He is said to have been without a rival in boxing, leaping, and all sports allowed or forbidden; to have been the boldest rider and most adventurous despiser of school-bounds in whom the Rugbeans of that day took pride; and to have astonished equally the townspeople, the schoolboys, and the masters by a reckless defiance of authority. That he defied authority, here as in most other places, is certain enough; but the methods and modes de where often he wished that he might find his final rest. These are expressions continually applied to it in letters to members of his family, while his memory still could go back even beyond his seventh year. To his brother Henry in 1852 he exclaimed: 'Dear old Tachbrooke! It is the only locality for which 'I feel any affection. Well do I remember it from my third or 'fourth year; and the red filberts at the top of the garden, and 'the apricots from the barn-wall, and Aunt Nancy cracking the stones for me. If I should ever eat apricots with you again, I 'shall not now cry for the kernel.' As soon as he could quit the nursery he had been sent to a school at Knowle, ten miles from Warwick; and even of this time, when he had reached the age of about four years and a half, his letters have a recollection which is worth preserving. Writing to his sister Ellen from Florence at the close of 1831, he says I remember when I went to Knowle an old woman coming from Balsal-Temple to little Treherne for a guinea, which 'he paid her yearly. She was one hundred and two when I was 'four and a half; so that it is in the range of possibility that she might have seen people who had seen not only Milton, but Shakespeare, Bacon, Spenser, and Raleigh. I myself have con' versed with a man, not remarkably old, who had conversed with 'Pope, Warburton, and Fielding.' Another incident of a year and a half's later date he recalled when writing to Southey in 1811 of his Lanthony estate in the Vale of Ewias, and its infinite variety of flowers-those 'beauti'ful and peaceful tribes' he so often wished that he knew more about. 'They always meet one in the same place, at the same season; and years have no more effect on their placid countenances than on so many of the most favoured gods. I remember a little privet which I planted when I was about six years Fold, and which I considered the next of kin to me after my 'mother and elder sister. Whenever I returned from school or 6 college, for the attachment was not stifled in that sink, I felt something like uneasiness till I had seen and measured it. There ' is no small delight in having a friend in the world to whom ' one dare repeat such folly.' With a delight that may perhaps be measured by the surpassing beauty of the lines in which it is expressed, he repeated the folly in later years to a wider audi ence: 'And 't is and ever was my wish and way To let all flowers live freely, and all die, Felt safe, unsoiled, nor lost one grain of gold.' Varied at the same time with these enjoyments of youth were its other commoner occurrences, which bring to most of us a foretaste of the later troubles. All the trials he ever underwent, he would tell you, were as nothing to his sufferings over grammar and arithmetic, of the last of which he remained ignorant all his life, according to the process in use.' But it was a worse calamity, a deep lower than the lowest, that awaited him in dancing; so that when he came to have a son of his own present age, he had gloomily to prophesy that he bid fair to be a worse dancer than he had himself been, for quite vainly had he striven to impress upon him the dreadful truth that all other miseries and misfortunes of life put together were nothing to this. IV. AT RUGBY SCHOOL. From Knowle, when about ten years old, Landor was transferred to Rugby; at that time under Doctor James, a scholar of fair repute, who did something to redeem the school from the effects of the long and dull mastership that preceded his. Many stories are told of Landor here, and some that in his old age obtained sanction from himself, which must nevertheless be pronounced apocryphal. He is said to have been without a rival in boxing, leaping, and all sports allowed or forbidden; to have been the boldest rider and most adventurous despiser of school-bounds in whom the Rugbeans of that day took pride; and to have astonished equally the townspeople, the schoolboys, and the masters by a reckless defiance of authority. That he defied authority, here as in most other places, is certain enough; but the methods and modes de |