as a ground of competition; yet, from Dryden to Wordsworth, there is no one who has excelled, if any has equalled, this translation by a youth of nineteen. But to me the lines are interesting especially for their illustration of the growth of his own genius. If I had met with them anywhere, not knowing the lines of Virgil, I should have supposed them to be an original. poem of the writer's later life. He has nevertheless not passed the imitative stage. His own thoughts have to find their style, and their written character is yet to come. VI. AT TRINITY-COLLEGE, OXFORD. At eighteen years of age Landor entered as a commoner in Trinity-college, Oxford. It was the memorable year of 1793, which had opened at Paris with the execution of Louis Seize. Of the excitement that prevailed, and the conflicting passions that were raging everywhere; grief on the one hand at the downfall of ancient institutions, exultation on the other at supposed triumphs of justice and reason; it is needless to speak. To the young, it was natural to believe that a new world was opening; and the glorious visions that attended it descended largely, it may well be imagined, on the students at both universities. As Wordsworth says for himself, Society became his glittering bride, and airy hopes his children. I cannot find, however, that Landor was at any time much excited in this way. The American rebellion was oftener in his thoughts than the French revolution. He was a Jacobin, but so would have been if Robespierre and Danton had not been. He reasoned little; but his instincts were all against authority, or what took to him the form of its abuse. With exulting satisfaction he saw the resistance and conquests of democracy; but pantisocracy, and golden days to come on earth, were not in his hopes or expectation. He rather rejoiced in the prospect of a fierce continued struggle; his present ideal was that of an armed republic changing the face of the world; Bliss was it in the dawn to be alive, But to be young was very Heaven!' Wordsworth in Coleridge's Ode: the same words, with change of 'the' for 'that' in the first line, reappeared in his own Prelude. and as the outbreak of the revolution had not made him republican, neither did its excesses cure him of that malady. He gloried to the last in avowing his preference for a republic; though he would also date his hatred of the French, which he maintained with almost equal consistency, from the day when they killed their queen. Mr. Shandy might have connected all this with his birth on the anniversary of Charles I.'s execution. He remained at Oxford little more than a year and a half, between 1793 and 1794, and used to call the hours passed with Walter Birch in the Magdalen walk by the half-hidden Cherwell (the road of which Addison was so fond) the pleasantest he could remember, as well as the most profitable. Of his studies there is little to be said. For a portion of the time he certainly read hard, but the results he kept to himself; for here, as at Rugby, he declined everything in the shape of competition. Though I ' wrote better Latin verses than any undergraduate or graduate in the University,' he wrote to Dr. Davy, in 1857, I could 'never be persuaded, by my tutor or friends, to contend for any 'prize whatever. I showed my compositions to Birch of Magdalen, my old friend at Rugby; and to Cary, translator of Dante; 'to none else.' It is at the same time unquestionable that his extraordinary talents, and skill in both the ancient languages, had impressed greatly his tutor Benwell, and the president and fellows of Trinity; and I have heard him say frequently that Benwell (dear good Benwell') shed tears when his favourite pupil was obliged to quit the college. But the Universities then, with far less inducement to study than now, had even fewer restraints than at present exist for youths unable to restrain themselves; the license generally allowed left a man equally free to use, abuse, or waste his powers; and we have only to wonder how so many lads of fortune, let completely loose at that critical time, could manage to get on in after-life with any kind of credit. I hardly remember an allusion by Landor to the examinationhalls or lecture-rooms, except that in the latter, one day, Justin was given them to construe, and that though indignant at the choice of such an author, he was reconciled on finding there the story of the Phocæans, which he straightway began to turn into English blank verse, a measure he had not before attempted. A stronger interest had been awakened in him by the passing incidents of the day. The summer of 1794, when Landor's Oxford residence was about to draw to its close, was one of unexampled excitement, and some notice must be taken of the other than classical subjects in which his ardent temper engaged him. The Scotch judges had transported Muir and Palmer and Gerrard as felons, for desiring parliamentary reform; the English judges were expected to hang Holcroft and Horne Tooke as traitors, for 'corresponding' with the same desire; and by all this Landor was stung into writing a satire, making himself interlocutor with a clerical friend. He listens to the other's warning: Hush! why complain? of treason have a care; You hear of Holcroft and of Tooke-beware!' and indignantly rejoins: Before a tyrant Juvenal display'd Truth's hated form and Satire's flaming blade; Vice gazed and trembled-shriek'd and left the field. following up his question by vigorous denunciation of the war with France, and impassioned appeal to Poland, then once more awakening. But the friend again interposes: Mistaken youth! the milder plan pursue, To love what statesmen and what monarchs do. Thy death will hasten, or torment thy life. In the same steps the greatest men have trod, To which Landor: 'I believe in God. This only reason, courtly priest! I give. From three other poems of this date, none of them being elsewhere now accessible, very brief extracts may also be permitted. The first illustrates the war against liberty by picturing a desolated French village restored by the arms of the Republic; and in the form of the verse, never again used by him, but since familiarised to us by one of the laureate's masterpieces, there is great beauty. 'Twas evening calm, when village maids The second paints a Sunday morning in May. 'O, peaceful day of pious leisure! O, what will mark you as you run? Will Melancholy, or will Pleasure, Will gloomy clouds, or golden sun?' The third is an 'Ode to General Washington,' in which are lines that not many boys of nineteen have before or since excelled, in strength of expression or dignity of sentiment. Above where incense clouds the court of kings, Arise, immortal Muse, arise! Beyond the confines of the Atlantic waves, And even thou to Nature's law Wilt bend, with reverence and majestic awe, Nor with thy victories thy triumph ends. . . .' If the rumours that went abroad through Oxford of Landor's fierce and uncompromising opinions had rested only on pieces such as these, he might fairly have challenged the truth of epithets thrown against him by assailants; but unhappily his tongue was under less instinctive control than his pen, and, there being students of his own college who held opinions in the other extreme with as little disposition to withhold expression of them, the result was not favourable to peace in the halls of Trinity. Even among those of Landor's own way of thinking in the University, there were many who seem purposely to have kept aloof from him; not because he was a Jacobin, but because he was a 'mad' Jacobin; though it is not at all clear that the epithet might not have meant a more sensible Jacobinism than was popular in the particular quarters it proceeded from. 'At Ox'ford,' said Landor, recalling this time in his old age, 'I was เ เ ' about the first student who wore his hair without powder. Take care, said my tutor, they will stone you for a republican. The Whigs (not the Wigs) were then unpopular; but I stuck to my 'plain hair and queue tied with black ribbon.' As minister Roland, just before, had refused to go to court in either knee-buckles or shoe-buckles, Landor declined to go in powder into hall; and under influence of the same example, a youth at Balliol, six months older than Landor, had taken such fierce dislike to old ceremonies and usage that he too had resisted every attempt of the college barber to dress or powder him, and had gone into hall in flowing locks; yet the remark upon the madness of Landor's Jacobinism was given by this very student of Balliol, a few years later, as his only reason for not having now sought Landor's acquaintance. Gebir had then appeared, and been placed in the first rank of English poetry by the same youth, who in the interval had himself published Joan of Arc; and upon the name of the writer of Gebir being made known to him one day, all this Oxford recollection flashed back upon him. 'I now re'member,' Robert Southey wrote to his friend Humphry Davy at Bristol, who the author of the Gebir is. He was a contemporary of mine at Oxford, of Trinity, and notorious as a mad 'Jacobin. His Jacobinism would have made me seek his ac'quaintance, but for his madness. He was obliged to leave the University for shooting at one of the fellows through the win'dow. All this I immediately recollected on getting at his 'name.' The latter recollection was not quite accurate, but the substance of it unfortunately was true; and it is now necessary to relate the incident which closed Landor's career at Oxford. 6 I again avail myself of one of Mr. Robert Landor's letters to me. At eighteen he entered as a commoner in Trinity-college, Oxford, and was rusticated after a year's residence. Again, as at Rugby, there was no greater offence than might have been over'looked if the general character had been less ungovernable. He 'had fired his fowling-piece into the window of some one whom he hated for his Toryism. Refusing to make any concession, he was rusticated during one year; but he was almost requested |