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look at home! His friend had been too true a prophet. Our 'naval superiority stricken, the foundations of every establish'ment undermined, and the dragon's teeth sown all around us.' Happily for himself, however, he recovered spirits as the year went on; for the laureateship fell to him in the autumn, and it would never have done to open in less cheery strain than he did, rejoicing in the gift and exulting in the return he was able to make for it. The letter in which he told his friend all about his appointment: how Croker had applied on his behalf to the prince, who promised it to him; how Lords Liverpool and Hertford had meanwhile offered it to Scott, who waived it handsomely in his favour; and how, in taking it, he had neither fear of the newspaper jokesmiths nor distrust of his own power to make the office respectable: was written immediately on his return to Keswick, after a five-and-forty hours' mail-coach journey from London in the middle of November 1813. It was acknowledged by Landor in the same month from Swansea, with hearty congratulations on finding at the least so much honesty and discernment displayed by the men in power. I never thought that a place gave honour to any one, or that any one gave 'honour to a place; but there is something equally agreeable 'both to the reasonable and the romantic mind in reflecting that in war and in poetry, the elements of ardent souls, the first men of our country fill the first station.'

6

The interest in the great war-tragedy was meanwhile thickening fast, and the catastrophe was rapidly approaching. The battle of Leipsic had been fought in October, and before the end of the year Germany was free. Then, at the opening of the next momentous year, came out Southey's first laureate effort, the Carmen Triumphale; and Landor, whom business had taken to London at the time, was hoping also to sustain the feeling against France by a series of letters in the Courier with the signature of Calvus. Of these productions Southey heard through Coleridge, then also writing in the Courier; and in his next letter, everyway a characteristic one, asks if Landor had seen what he had himself been writing in the same paper, Who calls for peace at this momentous hour? For five years, Southey continued, he had been preaching the necessity of declaring Bona

parte under the ban of human nature; and if this had been done in 1805, even the emperor of Austria, 'wretch as he is,' could never have given him his daughter in marriage. Now his hope was that the other 'wretch' might require terms of peace that the allies would not consent to. Not that he wanted the Bourbons restored. Except when expulsions had been effected by foreign force, restorations were bad things. The Bourbons had been a detestable race, and adversity had failed to restore in them the virtues royalty had stifled. It was an old notion of his that the Revolution would not have done its work till the houses both of Austria and Bourbon were destroyed. Eager was Landor's reply. Yes, he was for the destruction of both; but Bonaparte's vanity had been his ruin. He ought to have restored Poland, and left only Russia standing of the old kings and emperors, when he might easily, by playing off the Russians, have ruined us in the East Indies.

There is something in that view of the case undoubtedly; but, on the whole, it is singular and not satisfying to observe how little of what we now should think the true moral of the momentous events then in progress was extracted from them by two such near lookers-on as these famous correspondents. What the mere politicians of the time might be forgiven for dropping out of account can hardly be excused to Landor or to Southey. Men of such activity of intellect, familiar with ancient and with modern history, and who had so clear an understanding of what the French Revolution involved, might surely also have been expected more clearly to see that so decisive an outbreak of democracy would have to run its natural course; that the principles embodied and represented by Bonaparte would survive his repression and abuse of them; and that the curtain about to fall on him would have to be uplifted again for them. It was supposed to have fallen in May 1814, when Bonaparte had left for Elba, when Wellington had been created a duke, and when Louis the Eighteenth had taken possession of the Tuileries. Southey then wrote exultingly: 'So the curtain has fallen after a tragedy of five-and-twenty years! The catastrophe is as it should be. Bonaparte's degradation is 'complete. Even his military reputation is lost, and he is suf

'fered to live because he may safely be despised.' But before that letter reached its destination Landor had quitted England; and the causes that led to his departure will appear in my resumption of the narrative of his residence at Llanthony.

IX. PRIVATE DISPUTES.

In the early months of 1813 Landor reminded Southey that the year had come which, according to his promise, was to be that of his second visit to Llanthony. Since his and Mrs. Southey's first visit the house had been enlarged, and there had been many improvements as to comfort; a truth of which he would not find much difficulty in persuading her. Could he also persuade her to make the trial? He could insure them wellaired beds, and his horses should meet them anywhere and at any time.

Southey hesitated, doubted if he could make the time suitable, desired it too much to drop it altogether, and was still entertaining it as not impossible, when, within three weeks of the former, a second letter reached him. It opened ominously, for already Southey had sufficient experience of his friend to know that any new literary enterprise was not unlikely to foreshadow some fresh personal vexation; the one being commonly used as a safety-valve or escape from the other. I have,' this letter began, written a comedy, and shall send it within a few days to your booksellers for you. This, in my opinion, may be acted. There is a prefatory discourse by the editor, much in the style of our great editors on the other side of the Tweed.' But the personal vexation, of which here was the sure forerunner, carried with it in this case a special annoyance to Southey himself. The letter, opening thus lightly, passed into tragical utterance in the very next line, as it conveyed the terrible announcement that with the tenant B, who had introduced himself on the strength of Southey's name; the 'agriculturist,' of whom so many letters had been written; the supposed man of capital, to whom the best farm of Llanthony had been let on terms extravagantly liberal; the real man of destiny, pre-selected to be a plague and torment to both friends; Landor was now

plunged over head and ears in disputes of an irreconcilable bitterness, and to which the only possible issue must be hopeless and irretrievable loss. The substance of his statement may be briefly given. Not on the man himself only, but on his father and other members of his family, he had, in his grand impetuous way, heaped no end of favours and liberalities for Southey's sake. He had put church-livings at the father's disposal, and out of them grew the first disputes. Besides the large farm originally let to B himself, he had, at the sacrifice of a good tenant, leased him another. During all the time he had been at Llanthony, he had never refused any request to the man, however unreasonable; and suddenly he had been made conscious of all he had lost by it. By a series of such conduct as might be expected from a sailor turned farmer, and by living at the rate ' of a thousand a year, he has succeeded in spending his wife's 'fortune of three thousand pounds, and in fifteen months I have ' received no rent from him.' Non-payment, indeed, had been the least of his misdeeds. As soon as B found that limits were to be put to the indulgences he expected, he declared open war against his landlord, subjected him to every kind of annoyance, brought three or four brothers to the place to poach over his manors and worry him the more, and, finally, 'discharged me and my gamekeeper from shooting on his farm.' Southey was startled by all this, as he well might be; and though partiality is hardly avoidable in stating one's own case, he did not find ultimately that Landor had much exaggerated. His own ominous remark upon B's ignorance of agriculture will be recollected; the man's previous employments having in fact been those of usher in his father's school, and afterwards of petty officer in an India Company's ship. Yet it was not his character only, but all his surroundings, that marked him out for the part he had to play. It was one of his sisters, as before we have seen, who induced Southey to recommend him. The old gentleman his father was the origin of Landor's first troubles with him. could a non-paying tenant present himself to a luckless landlord under conditions more aggravating, than those of giving bed and board to a quarter of a dozen idle brothers who had 'abandoned every other visible means of procuring an honest livelihood.'

Nor

'I forgot to tell you,' wrote Charles Lamb to Landor nearly twenty years later, in an unpublished letter now lying before me, 'I knew all your Welsh annoyancers, the measureless B's. 'I knew a quarter of a mile of them. Seventeen brothers and 'sixteen sisters, as they appear to me in memory. There was one of them that used to fix his long legs on my fender, and 'tell a story of a shark, every night, endless, immortal. How 'have I grudged the salt-sea ravener not having had his gorge 'of him! The shortest of the daughters measured five foot ' eleven without her shoes. Well, some day we may confer about them. But they were tall. Surely I have discovered 'the longitude-'Of course the hero of the shark was Landor's chief tormentor. He had been in the East and in the West Indies; and, for the sake of the whole family of sharks he was to bring up to have their gorge of Landor, the salt-sea ravener had spared him.

Southey's answer was written in the midst of family distress. His wife's brother had suddenly died while on a visit to them, and had left everything dismal and comfortless around them. But bitter beyond all was his grief and surprise at B's conduct. Personally he knew little of him, and never meant to recommend him; but the man certainly had come of a good stock, and if he had not himself implicitly believed in his honour and honesty he would never in an evil hour have directed him to the Vale of Ewyas. It was very strange, but misgivings about him, though not affecting his honesty, had occurred a few months ago. He had sent over to Keswick last summer from Abergavenny a very vulgar fellow with letters of introduction; and this had given Southey a bad opinion of his taste in companions.

Southey then talks of the comedy of the Charitable Dowager. He supposes the heroine drawn from the life, and thinks as a drama there is a want of incident, and, in that on which the catastrophe depends, of probability; but he had found the dialogue abounding with those felicities that flashed from Landor in prose and verse more than from any other writer. He remembered nothing but Jeremy Taylor that at all resembled them. Jeremy had things as perfect and touching in their kind, but a different kind: the same beauty, the same exquisite fitness;