hearts and all their soul and all their strength; but that envy and her companions in the Litany would not hear enough to induce them to blow their trumpets, and even abuse it into notoriety. And thus, by a hand skilful as generous, was the horoscope of Count Julian cast, and its fate exactly prefigured. VI. IN POSSESSION OF LLANTHONY ABBEY. Between Landor's return from Spain and his completion of Count Julian three years had passed, and personal incidents now calling for mention had occurred in the interval. The Staffordshire estate, which had been so long in his family, and which alone became absolutely his by his father's death (the Warwickshire estates of Ipsley-court and Tachbrooke not descending to him until the death of his mother), fell short in value of a thousand a year, and went but an inconsiderable way to the purchase of an estate with an estimated annual rental of more than three thousand. But after the failure of Loweswater and its lake he had set his heart on Llanthony and its abbey, and everything had to give way to his overpowering desire to possess it. In the end, his mother consented to sell Tachbrooke, the smaller of her two estates, to enable him to buy Llanthony, on condition of a life settlement upon her from the latter of four hundred and fifty pounds a year. What she thus gave her eldest son was the difference between that amount and the sum of twenty thousand pounds, for which Tachbrooke sold; but she imposed only the farther condition that the advowson of Colton should be surrendered to his brother Charles, to whom he had already presented that family living. An act of parliament, and the consent of all the brothers, were required to give effect to these arrangements; the settlement being the same as that of his mother's estates-upon Landor for life, with remainder to his issue, and that of his brothers successively in tail male. The act was also to enable additional sums to be raised upon the new purchase for improvements and to pay off mortgages, and to give to the tenants in possession power to charge the estate with marriage jointures of not more than five hundred pounds a year. The letter of January 1809, in which he told Southey that he had a private bill coming on before parliament, replied likewise to an invitation from his friend to the Lakes, giving him the additional startling information that since affairs had been going on so badly in Spain he had again offered his services, and that, if he went, there was little chance he should ever again see Derwentwater, or, what was next in beauty, and he hoped to have called his own, Loweswater. But that he was not going, all the rest of the letter showed pretty clearly. 'I wish I had settled in your country. I could live without 'Bath. As to London, its bricks and tiles and trades and fogs 'make it odious and intolerable. I am about to do what no man 'has ever done in England, plant a wood of cedar of Lebanon. 'These trees will look magnificent on the mountains of Llan'thony unmixt with others; and perhaps there is not a spot on the earth where eight or ten thousand are to be seen together.' He proposed to be in London shortly, and would lose all abhorrence of travelling if he could but hope that they should meet. No sooner did Southey get this news of the parliamentary bill than he was all eagerness to introduce his friend to his older friend Rickman, clerk to parliament, praised by everybody, and whom Charles Lamb thought to be the most perfect man-up to anything, down to everything, fullest of matter with the least verbosity-that he had ever known. He would manage all the house-of-commons part of the bill. To him Southey wrote accordingly, with no misgiving that he should raise too high his expectation of the friend he had to introduce. In seeing him, he said, Rickman would see one of the most extraordinary men that it had ever been his fortune to fall in with, and who would be one of the greatest if it were possible to tame him. He does more than any of the gods of all my mythologies, for his very 'words are thunder and lightning, such is the power and the 'splendour with which they burst out. But all is perfectly natural; there is no trick about him, no preaching, no parade, no playing off.' Of Rickman, at the same time, he wrote to Landor, that he was a man to whom he owed hardly less than to himself in the way of mental obligation; for it was not more true that he had learnt how to see for the purposes of poetry 6 from Landor than that he had learnt how to read for the purposes of history from Rickman. I doubt, however, if these two worthies ever saw each other. Everything preliminary to the bill had to be done exclusively in the upper house, and Landor failed to find Rickman, though he attempted it twice. He had matters greatly troubling him at the same date. Though hardly yet in complete possession of the abbey, his uninterrupted series of vexations and disappoint'ments in connection with it' had already begun. Not only his Welsh neighbours had been doing him some mischief, but one of his own servants had cut down about sixty fine trees, lopping others; and this, which he considered as the greatest of all earthly calamities, as he told Southey in a letter from Bath, had confined him to the house several days. 'We recover from ill'ness, we build palaces, we retain or change the features of the earth at pleasure-excepting that only! The whole of human life can never replace one bough.' But it is time that I should describe the place which was to be the source of so many anxieties, and whose acquisition cost him so much more than was repaid by any happiness it yielded him. 6 เ A letter to me nearly thirty years ago thus whimsically referred to it: Llanthony is a noble estate: it produces everything but herbage, corn, and money. My son, however, may 'perhaps make something of it; for it is about eight miles long, ' and I planted a million of trees on it more than thirty years ago. 'I lived there little more than eight months altogether, and built a house to pull it down again. Invent a hero, if you can, who has 'performed such exploits.' Here was an instance of my old friend setting down as the thing he did the thing he only intended to do; for his million of trees fell considerably short, in the reality, of perhaps a tenth of the number at which his fancy reckoned them. Such as they were, however, his plantations have been the most profitable part of the estate; which might in other points also have deserved as little the irony applied to it, if its capabilities even to the same extent had been seen and used. Very far from ill laid out would have been the whole seventy or eighty thousand pounds drawn into it, if they had but been expended with competent skill and prudent management. I saw it lately. From Abergavenny I posted along those eight miles of hill and vale which belong still to Landor's son: the mountains on either side becoming more steep, and the valley more rich and picturesque, as, twining round and round the circuitous approach, Llanthony comes in view. Less of corn than pasture there is of course, and much of unreclaimed and mountain waste; but I saw also, through the whole extent of valley that we passed, abundance of fair meadow-land; farms to all appearance under good cultivation, and sheep feeding on the slopes that even the famous breeds which Landor boasted to have brought over from Spain could hardly have excelled. At almost the farthest corner of the northern angle of Monmouthshire, into which the estate projects itself, stands what is left of the abbey from which it takes its name; and it would not be easy to find in any part of Britain a ruin amid nobler surroundings. It is at the base of an amphitheatre of lofty hills, forming part of the chain of the Black Mountains, through which runs the rich deep vale of Ewyas. Drayton has described the place in that good old book, the Polyolbion, which Charles Lamb himself could hardly have liked better than Landor did: "Mongst Hatterill's lofty hills, that with the clouds are crown'd, The valley Ewyas lies, immur'd so deep and round, As they below that see the mountains rise so high Might think the straggling herds were grazing in the sky: As nature at the first appointed it for pray'r:' -and that still is the impression it gives. As it may have been two hundred or twelve hundred years ago, as when the old poet saw it, or when the uncle of king Arthur is fabled to have chosen it for his retreat, it strikes the visitor now. I saw it in the later days of autumn; but the gaiety of summer would not have been so suited to the scene. Beautiful as the principal portion of the ruin is, the sense of beauty is not the feeling it first awakens. All that instantly attracts and fascinates the eye in the lovely and light picturesqueness of Tintern, is absent from Llanthony: but deeper thoughts connect themselves with the solid simplicity of its gray massive towers and the severely solemn aspect of its ruined church, taking from nature no ornament other than that worn by the hills around-majestic and bare as they, and even in ruin seeming as eternal. A place to meditate or pray in; but not, one cannot but instinctively feel in looking at it, to carouse or build a house in. What is yet standing of the house once attempted to be built there-something less than half a mile up the slope at the back of the abbey-is nearly all that is left upon the spot to point the moral of the story I am to tell. Of the million trees that were to have enriched the estate, but a small tithe are visible in the plantations now. The bridge built over the river Hondy that crosses the valley was swept away by floods. The praiseworthy design of restoring the magnificent centre nave, for which many Saxon and Norman stones were taken down and numbered, added only fresh fragments to the ruin. The road that was to connect the abbey with the mansion has allbut passed away without a trace. But in three high ragged walls open to the sky, and, when I saw them, enclosing a haystack; and in some ruined but not yet unroofed stables and cellars, built on the very edge of a mountain stream that rushes swiftly past into the valley; what had once been an inhabited dwelling presents itself still. And the visitor who doubts the wisdom of building in such a scene at all, has his wonder infinitely raised at the spot selected for the mansion. Fifty-six years ago appeared the well-known Beauties of England and Wales, in which Landor is stated to have become recently proprietor of the abbey, and is reproached for indifference. to its artificial beauties by having 'directed many alterations to be made in the ruins, and fitted up some parts for habi'tation.' This, however, is not just. Landor's only wish was to restore; and it was not his act, but that of his predecessor, to build among the ruins. In March 1809, a year before that book was published, he was thus writing to Southey: 'I am about to remove an immense mass of building which Colonel Wood erected against the abbey, and with which he has 'shamefully disfigured the ruins. I would live on bread and 'water three years to undo what he has done, and three more 'to repair what he has wasted. It is some consolation to have ⚫ the idea of receiving you in Monmouthshire next season. 1 L |