curacies of style I could collect from Addison. The number would surpass belief. The two earlier ones, the first between Lord Grenville and Burke, the other between Henry the Fourth and Sir Arnold Savage, were written more than twenty years ago, which no person would believe of the former; but I gave the substance of it to Robert Adair to get inserted in the Morning Chronicle, and a part of it (now omitted) was thought too personal, and it was refused. I hope your dialogues are printed, that they may give some credit and fashion to this manner of composition.' Thus employed, we leave him at the close of the first half of his life happier upon the whole than he has been since its outset in the Tenby and Swansea days, with a better outlet than has yet been open for his powers and faculties, and with even a little gleam of sunshine, from his mother's care and sacrifices, again lighting-up his personal fortune. In the letter to Southey just quoted he tells him of his hope to be able, some day soon, to fix himself permanently, not in Florence itself, but in a villa in its neighbourhood; and he says that he shall add a garden to it by converting a vineyard into one, which I cannot do unless 'I purchase it; and (a thing I never expected) this too is in my 'power.' Another thing as unlooked for he was soon also to find within his power. He never expected that, if any considerable number of people were found to praise or admire him, he should be able to entertain other than a mean opinion of himself; and of this excuse for every eccentricity, this foolish principle which has dominated over so much of his past life, he will very shortly be deprived. He will discover that when people praise him they do not necessarily lower him to their level; that they do not prove him to be, for that reason, only so much more like themselves; and that it is not therefore essentially a base or unworthy thing to desire or deserve, nay even in some small degree to obtain, popularity. We may not be sanguine indeed that this wiser experience will be permanent, or that old errors and extravagances will not still be abundant; but the promise is fairer than it has been, and from the last half of Landor's life there is at least the prospect of better results than have attended the years that are gone. [The First Volume of the original edition of this Biography closed with the Fourth Book.] BOOK FIFTH. 1822-1828. ÆT. 47-53. THE IMAGINARY CONVERSATIONS. 1. The Manuscript on its way. II. A Publisher found. III. What the Book contained. IV. How the Book was received. v. Correspondence with Southey. VI. Family Letters. VII. Additional Dialogues. I. THE MANUSCRIPT ON ITS WAY. 'JULIUS HARE will have the kindness to put this letter into the 'post-office when he reaches London. I have long expected to 'see Mr. Kenyon in hopes of reading your new poem, of which I have heard not indeed many but very high eulogies.' These are the opening lines of the first letter written to Southey by Landor, early in 1822, after Florence had become his settled abode; and in the whole of his later life there are not two pleasanter figures than the friends it names. It was not however Julius, but Augustus Hare, to whom the letter was intrusted, a later passage in it correcting the mistake; for it was not till towards the close of the year that Julius was returning to his law-studies in the Temple, after that visit to his brothers Francis and Marcus at Milan in the preceding winter, when he first made acquaintance with the name and writings of Landor, to whom all the brothers Hare, as we shall see, became ultimately known, Augustus and Marcus as well as Francis and Julius; but the latter two most familiarly. Hare-brained, Southey called them all; and there was sufficient truth in the playful imputation to recommend them especially to this new friend, to whom the impetuosity and eagerness as well as various information of Francis, and the scholarly acquirements and speculative turn of Julius, might have seemed but the reflection of a part of his own larger and more various nature. 'The Hares,' he wrote to his sisters in 1833, are beyond all comparison the 'most pleasant family of men I ever was acquainted with.' His knowledge of them began with Francis. This was the boy-friend of Palmerston, with whom, two years before the opening of the century, both having then reached the mature age of thirteen or so, the future prime-minister of England had discussed marriage, Don Quixote in the original, and the Greek and Latin classics; and whom Cyril Jackson distinguished, on his afterwards entering Christchurch, as the only rolling stone he had ever known that was always gathering moss. Landor met him first at Tours; and, soon after establishing himself in the palazzo Medici in Florence, they became so intimate that from Hare's society, he often said, he derived the animation and excitement that had helped him most in the composition of his Imaginary Conversations; nor did these friendly relations cease until the close of Hare's life at Palermo.t Not indeed without occasional interruption from that excess or over-vehemence of speech from which neither was free, and which their common friend, Lord Blessington, seems to attribute more especially to Hare, in writing of his marriage in 1827 that il Signor Francesco had been so much improved by it that he at last allowed other people to talk. There is even a hint of the failing in Landor's tender allusion to the friend, '... Who held mute the joyous and the wise And by nearly the last remaining of the English residents of * See vol. i. pp. 5-9 of Lord Dalling and Bulwer's Life of Lord Palmerston; a work unhappily interrupted by the death of its author, who, distinguished as he was in literature and in the service of the state, has left his friends to regret a charm of manner, itself the reflection of one of the kindliest of natures, which gave singular fascination to him in private intercourse. † I will quote, as honourable to both, one of Hare's last letters from Palermo: My dear Landor, It did not require this fresh proof of your 'friendship to convince me that you were one of the most disinterested, 'one of the most zealous and constant of friends. That I have long 'known. Qualis ab incepto.' Landor had been making some exertion for Hare's children. เ ... those days in Florence, where his own name will always be remembered with love and honour, it has been lately mentioned to me. I used,' says Mr. Seymour Kirkup, 'to see him and his friend Francis Hare together; and it was a constant struggle ' of competition and display between them; both often wrong, although men of strong memory. They used to have great dis'putes, mostly on questions of history. . . . Hare was often ' astounded at being corrected. He was thought infallible; and 'I remember our consul-general at Rome calling him a monster ' of learning.' But only the pleasantest side of all this was remembered when, on going to England with his wife in 1827, Francis had asked for an introduction to Southey, and Landor described him as among the kindest and most intimate friends he ever had, to say nothing of his learning, his wit, and the inexhaustible spirit and variety of his conversation. 'I owe him ' as much pleasure as I can give him, and none will be a greater 'than what these few lines will procure him.' To Wordsworth, the real bearer of the letter of 1822 had become known some years earlier; and he makes interesting mention of both him and Julius in a letter to Landor early in 1824, where, after referring to Augustus as the Oxford tutor of his elder son, he says he has a strong desire to become acquainted with the Mr. Hare whom his friend had mentioned, and who, to the honour of Cambridge, was in the highest repute there for his sound and extensive learning. This was Julius, who corresponded with Landor most intimately many years before he personally knew him; and the expectation even of seeing that other friend named in Landor's letter, Mr. John Kenyon, had to wait several years for fulfilment, being a loss to Landor, for so long, of the joyousest and pleasantest of all his associates. At the end of the letter Southey was adjured to tell what he is doing in the way of poetry. Spring being always his own idle season, he is himself doing nothing. He has not courage even to ripple the current of his thoughts with a pencil as he walks. Southey's reply was more about Wordsworth's than his own poetry; and in everything he wrote at this time about that greater master, whose slow but steady advance was all but overshadowing such small enjoyment of poetical fame as Byron's supremacy had left to himself, there is a generous, manly spirit. He has honest pleasure in bringing Landor to Wordsworth's side. His letters are filled with praise of the poet of Rydal Mount. His merits, he rejoices to think, are getting wider acknowledgment every day, in spite of the duncery that cannot understand him, in spite of the personal malignity that assails him, and in spite of the injudicious imitators who are his worst enemies. 'He is composing at this time a series of sonnets upon the religious 'history of this country; and marvellously fine they are. At 'the same time, not knowing his intention and he not being aware of mine, I have been treating the same subject in prose, so that my volume will serve as a commentary upon his. Mine 'will go to press almost immediately; and I hope to send you 'both, with the first volume of the Peninsular War, early in the spring.' Not many weeks later, a letter to Landor from Wordsworth himself announced as on their way to Florence: Ecclesiastical 'Sketches, or a sort of a Poem in the Sonnet stanza or measure; ' and Memorials of a Tour on the Continent in 1820. This tour 'brought me to Como; a place that, with the scenery of its lake, ' had existed in my most lively recollection for upwards of thirty เ years. What an addition it would have been to my pleasure ' if I had found you there! Time did not allow me to get farther ' into Italy than Milan, where I was much pleased; with the 'cathedral especially; as you will collect, if ever you see these poems, from one of them entitled the Eclipse of the Sun.' The letter went on to say that in his intervals of better sight he had been reading Landor's Latin poems again, and he speaks in detail of some, especially the Polyxena, as full of spirit and animation. He was himself indeed no judge of Latin poetry, except upon general principles; but he had received real pleasure from these pieces, though impatient, like Southey, of time given to them which he thought might be better given to English poetry. Still I must express the wish that you would gratify us by writing in English. In all that you have written in your 'native tongue there are stirring and noble things, and that is ' enough for me. In a tract of yours which I saw some years ago at Mr. Southey's, I was struck by a piece on the War of 1 |