Landor's side: for Dr. James had strongly insisted on, and the other as firmly had declined, the correction of an alleged false quantity found really not to exist. But, apart from the right or the wrong, an expression rudely used by the pupil was very sharply resented by the master, and only one result became possible. When between fifteen and sixteen,' writes Mr. Robert Landor, 'he was not expelled from Rugby, but removed, as the less discreditable punishment, at the head master's suggestion. There ' was nothing unusual or disgraceful in the particular transgres'sion, but a fierce defiance of all authority and a refusal to ask 'forgiveness.'* Yet not so should we part from his Rugby days. He has himself given a picture of one of the latest of them appealing to kindlier remembrance. Sitting by the square pool not long before he left, he had written a little poem on Godiva; and in a note to his imaginary conversation on the charming old Warwickshire story, he not only relates how the schoolfellow to whom he showed his earlier effort laughed at him, and how earnestly he had to entreat and implore him not to tell the other lads,' but he repeats the verses, with which, as he transcribes them in his Italian home, there comes back to him the very air of the schoolboy spot in which first they were written, and fervently he wishes that the peppermint may still be growing on the bank. by the Rugby pool. It is a pretty picture, and the lines themselves are of a kind to haunt the memory. In every hour, in every mood, O lady, it is sweet and good To bathe the soul in prayer; And at the close of such a day, When we have ceased to bless and pray, To dream on thy long hair.' V. AT ASHBOURNE. Rugby had nevertheless given pretty nearly all in the way of scholarship she had to give to Landor, when he was thus, though still too young for the university, compelled to bid her See his own account, quoted from a letter to myself, at the end of the second book. adieu. An intermediate place between school and college it was necessary to provide; and,' writes Mr. Robert Landor, at six'teen he was consigned to the tuition of a clergyman living in 'Derbyshire who had no other pupil, and who seemed well quali'fied for the office by patience and gentleness. Walter always 'spoke of him with respect; but though by no means ignorant, 'the tutor had very little more scholarship than the pupil, and his Latin verses were hardly so good as Walter's.' This was Mr. Langley, vicar of Ashbourne, the charming country village. Landor has so prettily described in his delightful conversation of Walton and Cotton; where he takes occasion also to render tribute not alone to Langley himself, but to the elegant and generous Sleath at Rugby, and to the saintly Benwell at Oxford. In a letter to myself, written hardly eleven years ago, he makes another allusion to the days thus passed in Derbyshire between sixty and seventy years before, which may be worth preserving. My ⚫ old tutor at Ashbourne, poor dear Langley, had seen Pope when 'he came to visit Oxford from Lord Harcourt's at Nuneham. Dr. Harrington, of Oceana's family, dined at Allen's, where he did not meet Pope, but did meet Fielding. Pope, I believe, 'was then dead. Harrington was almost a boy, fourteen or 'fifteen years old. He sat at dinner by his father, and Fielding on the other side. Warburton was there, and with great pomposity made a speech eulogistic of Allen, who had said a few words, modest and unimportant. "Gentlemen," said Warburton, "many of us have enjoyed the benefits of a university "education, but which among us can speak so wisely and judi"ciously?" Fielding turned his face round to Harrington, and said pretty loudly, "Hark to that sycophantic son of a 6.46 of “a parson!" I doubt whether the double genitive case was ever so justly, however inelegantly, employed.'+ When recollections Other similar allusions were frequent; as in a letter to me of 1851. It is exactly sixty years since I saw Chatsworth. I was at that time under ⚫ a private tutor at Ashbourne, having just left Rugby, and being a little too young for Oxford.' I permit myself to add, as every way very characteristic of the writer. then on the eve of his eightieth year, the closing lines of this letter of my old friend. He was waiting at the time the visit I generally paid him on his birthday. In the twentieth year of the British Republic some old such as these came back to Landor, he might be pardoned the exclamation we have lately heard from him, that surely he must have assisted in another life! Born in the year when the English colonies in America rebelled; living through all the revolutions in France, and the astonishing career of the great Napoleon; a sympathiser with the defeated Paoli and the victorious Garibaldi; contemporary with Cowper and Burns, yet the survivor of Keats, Wordsworth, and Byron, of Shelley, Scott, and Southey; living while Gibbon's first volume and Macaulay's last were published; to whom Pitt and Fox, and even Burke, had been familiar, as were Peel and Russell; who might have heard Mirabeau attempting to save the French monarchy, and Mr. Gladstone predicting the disruption of the American republic; it would seem strange that a single life should be large enough for such experiences, if their very number and variety did not suggest the exaggeration of importance that each in its turn is too apt to receive from us all, and impress us rather with the wisdom of the saying of the greatest of poets that 'We are such stuff As dreams are made of; and our little life Is rounded with a sleep.' When the two years at Ashbourne were passed, they had left some profitable as well as pleasant remembrances. He dated from this time his better acquaintance with some of the Greek writers, especially Sophocles and Pindar; he turned several things of Cowley into Latin Sapphics and Alcaics; he wrote a few English pieces; and he translated into verse the Jephthah of Buchanan, a poem afterwards destroyed, but of which he had himself so high an opinion that he said he could not have im man may recount tales of you and me. He will not be a very old man, if public affairs are managed another year as they have been this last. 'FORSTER! Come hither, I pray, to the Fast of our Anglican Martyr. Turbot our Church has allowed, and perhaps (not without dispensation) Pheasant: then strawberry-cream, green-gages, and apricot-jelly, Oranges housewives call pot, and red-rinded nuts of Avella, Filberts we name them at home,-happy they who have teeth for the crackers! Blest, but in lower degree, whose steel-armed right hand overcomes them! I, with more envy than spite, look on and sip sadly my claret.' proved it even after he wrote Gebir. Judging from his first published volume, I should strongly have doubted this; for he was still within the trammels of Pope's versification, and, though in conception often original, in execution was still imitative; if indisputable evidence of the higher character given gradually to his own style by the mere effort of translating, were not also before me. There was indeed but one stride to be taken to Gebir, which appeared within three years after the volume referred to; and the reader will probably admit, at that portion of my narrative, that a more remarkable advance in power was never made, and rarely such an achievement in literature by a man so young. But let me show also here, by example of a poem written at Ashbourne,* in what different ways the same subject was treated now, and in the days that were so soon to follow of his greater maturity of mind. It is the difference between a Pope translation and a Greek original. MEDEA AT CORINTH (1791). 'So, when Medea, on her native strand, Frantic, and raised them high above the shore. She spake in vain: then maddened with despair Then, O, unmindful of all former joys, Threw from her breast her inoffensive boys; And whirled around the coast the inexpiable gore!' THE SAME SUBJECT (a few years later). I will invoke the Eumenides no more I will forgive thee-bless thee-bend to thee In all thy wishes! do but thou, Medea, Tell me, one lives!" "And shall I, too, deceive?" Cries from the fiery car an angry voice; • In a note to one of its lines on the misfortunes of the king of France he remarks, that when this was written Louis had only returned to Paris after his flight,' which was in 1791; and to the fate which afterwards befell the king he applies a passage from the Electra of Sophocles. And swifter than two falling stars descend A mother's arm round each, a mother's cheeks He was more changed than they were,-doomed to show Poets of the highest originality take their point of departure from an imitative stage, and Landor in those earlier verses shows no exemption from the rule. But from the first the influence of his classical studies and temperament is more than ordinarily manifest, and the completeness and rapidity with which it formed his original style is worthy of remark. A splendid instance is in this second version of the Medea, and another more extraordinary presents itself in a translation of one of the most famous episodes in Virgil, which I have found in scraps of his handwriting of the date of 1794, and with the opening lines of which I shall close this section. The shell assuaged his sorrow: thee he sang, The mouth of Tænarus, the gates of Dis, Groves dark with dread, he entered; he approacht And Styx confines them, flowing ninefold round. The Furies, were astounded. On he stept, And Cerberus held agape his triple jaws: On stept the Bard... Ixion's wheel stood still.' Few ancient pieces have been chosen oftener by translators |