less the distinguishing mark of their genius to be both in their conformation and in their mass almost strangely alike; and it is this unity in the astonishing variety, the fire of an irrepressible genius running through the whole, that gives to the book containing them its place among books not likely to pass away. What the earliest dialogues were, I have put perhaps sufficiently before the reader; and down to the very last, if I continued my review, the same wealth of character, thought, and style would present itself for description; but little more will now be necessary than simply to mention as they arise the subjects chosen and the names of the speakers. The intensity and the range of mental power displayed will thus also sufficiently declare themselves. There is scarcely a form or function of the human mind, serious or sprightly, cogitative or imaginative, historical, fanciful, or real, which has not been exercised or brought into play in this extraordinary series of writings. The world past and present is reproduced in them, with its variety and uniformity, its continuity and change. When the American writer Emerson had made the book his companion for more than twenty years, he publicly expressed to the writer his gratitude for having given him a resource that had never failed him in solitude. He had but to recur to its rich and ample page, he tells us, to find always free and sustained thought, a keen and precise understanding, an affluent and ready memory familiar with all chosen books, an industrious observation in every department of life, an experience to which it might seem that nothing had occurred in vain, honour for every just and generous sentiment, and a scourge like that of the Furies for every oppressor whether public or private. He felt how dignified was that perpetual Censor in his curule chair, and he wished to thank so great a benefactor. Mr. Landor,' continues Emerson, 'is one of the foremost of that small class who make good in the nineteenth century the claims of pure literature. In these busy days of avarice and ambition, when there is so little disposition to profound thought or to any but the most superficial intellectual entertainment, a faithful scholar, receiving from past ages the treasures of wit, and enlarging them by his own love, is a friend and consoler of mankind... 'Such merits make Mr. Landor's position in the republic of let

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'ters one of great mark and dignity. He exercises with a gran'deur of spirit the office of writer, and carries it with an air of 'old and unquestionable nobility. His acquaintance with the English tongue is unsurpassed. . . . Of many of Mr. Landor's 'sentences we are fain to remember what was said of those of 'Socrates, that they are cubes, which will stand firm place them 'how or where you will.' The author of this tribute gave also practical proof of the strength of the admiration that suggested it. The wish to see the faces of three or four writers' had been one of his principal motives for visiting Europe in 1833; and when fourteen years later he had crossed the Atlantic again, he told his countrymen, among other experiences of Europe, what his intercourse had been with those three or four writers whose faces he had so desired to see. Their names were Coleridge, Wordsworth, Landor, and Carlyle.

IV. HOW THE BOOK WAS RECEIVED.

In February 1824 Southey sent to Landor from England the first printed copy of his book, and in the letter accompanying it spoke, as with the views then held by him it might be supposed he would, with rapture of its genius and with reserve of its opinions. A few months later in the same year he bade Landor be of good heart, for a more striking work had never issued from the press in these kingdoms,' nor one more certain of surviving the wreck of its generation. The book is making you 'known, as you ought to be; and it is one of those very few 'which nothing can put aside.' This letter, written at the opening of December 1824, had the additional interest for Landor of two supplementary pages in the handwriting of Wordsworth.

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'I have begged this space from Southey, which I hope you will forgive, as I might not otherwise for some time have had courage to thank you for your admirable dialogues. They reached me last May, at a time when I was able to read them, which I did with very great pleasure. I was in London then, and have been a wanderer most of the time since. But this did not keep me silent. I was deterred, such is the general state of my eyes, by a consciousness that I could not write what I wished. I concur with you in so much, and differ with you in so much also, that though I could easily have disposed of my assent, easily and most pleasantly, I could not face the task of giving my reasons for my dissent!...

Your dialogues are worthy of you, and a great acquisition to literature. The classical ones I like best, and most of all that between Tully and his brother.... I long for the third volume; a feeling which after my silence I should not venture to express, were you not aware of the infirmity which has been the cause of it. I sent a message of thanks, from Cambridge, through Julius Hare, whom I saw at Cambridge in May last. Ever affectionately and gratefully yours, WM. WORDSWORTH.'

With well-founded pride Landor received this tribute from two such famous men. 'Your letter,' he wrote on the 6th of January 1825, with its closing lines from Wordsworth, gave me 'incredible delight. Never did two such hands pass over the 'same paper, unless when Barrow was solving some problem set before him by Newton.' He had already, on the 4th of the previous November, acknowledged what Southey said on the eve of the publication. I never ask what is the public opinion of anything I write. God forbid it should be favourable; for more people think injudiciously than judiciously. Your sentence has 'elated me. "De me splendida Minos Fecerit arbitria."

It is irreversible.'

What meanwhile had been the sentence generally upon the book I shall perhaps be expected to say. There can be no doubt that it produced at once an impression which it falls to the lot of few books in a generation to make that have not amusement for their principal design. Such readers as it obtained were thoroughly aroused by it. Even where its opinions met with the least favour, its mark was most decisive. It was not a book that any cultivated reader could put aside as of indifferent account; and its power and originality were admitted in the strongest objections it provoked. On the one hand, without challenge it might be said that no book had appeared in that generation comparable to it for the variety of its claims: imagination, wit, and humour; dramatic insight, and play of character; richness of scholarship; correctness, conciseness, and purity of style; extent of information; speculative boldness; many-sided interest; and sympathies all but universal. On the other hand, as unchallenged might the assertion be made that never had so masculine an intellect been weakened by so violent a temper, so many dur

able thoughts degraded by so many momentary humours, and such masterly discrimination of praise and blame made worthless by so many capricious enmities and unreasonable likings. I do not indeed find, in the criticisms published at the time, anything to my mind satisfactorily descriptive of the book, or any real subtlety of appreciation for either its strength or weakness: but this is fairly the tone that may be taken to express the differing verdicts of those who talked about it; and though no great circulation awaited it at the outset, it reached without difficulty the class of readers who most sensibly influence the general opinion in such things, and have always a great deal to do with the making or unmaking of books in the matter of immediate reputation. The entire result will better appear in the sequel. But at last Landor had won for himself a hearing; he contributed to the town talk for a whole season at least; at the universities, in particular, his name became a familiar word; and men who in those days were at Cambridge have declared to me that decidedly the literary sensation of 1824 was the Imaginary Conversations, and that Byron's last poem, even in this year of his death, had not more warmly been discussed at the bachelors' tables or in the common rooms.

Julius Hare had formed an exalted estimate of the book. He believed of it, and retained this belief to the end of his life, that it would live as long as English literature lived. Some of the conversations he thought unsurpassed by the masterpieces of poetic creation, ancient or modern; and by the style in all of them he was fascinated in the extreme. None other so good

was known to him in our language. There was hardly a dialogue which he did not think a model of what prose composition should be; and at its best, where the air of classic antiquity breathed about the speakers, the style seemed to him what Apollo's talk might have been, as radiant, piercing, and pure. But though he thus characterised as incomparable the manner of the work which he so largely had helped to bring into the world, to its sometimes questionable matter he was not insensible; from several opinions expressed in it his own shrank instinctively; and while its perversity even increased his own liking for it, as the wayward child is cared for most, he had a fear that other readers would be less

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forgiving. He saw the extreme probability that for some foolish faults of temper a book deserving honour in the highest might be waylaid at starting, suffer perhaps in consequence a long neglect, and emerge at last not without serious injury. It occurred to him that attacks of this kind might be so anticipated as to blunt their edge and sharpness, by combining, in the same fearless review of the contents of the book, earnest expression of all the praise deserved by it with ironical indication of all the abuse to which its impetuosities had exposed it; and he published such a paper in Taylor's London Magazine. It was excellently done for its purpose, and had the effect desired. Hazlitt had indeed the first word, in the Edinburgh Review; but though he dealt some heavy blows at the literary Jacobinism of the Southey connection, regretted Landor's want of temper and self-knowledge, and ridiculed unsparingly his dogmatism, caprice, extravagance, intolerance, quaintness, and arrogance, he at the same time admitted his originality, learning, and fifty other valuable qualities, placed in the highest rank his delineation of character, and conceded to him a power of thought and a variety and vigour of style which made him excellent wherever excellence could consist with singularity. After naming several of his dialogues from English history as taking rank with truth itself, Hazlitt ended by confessing freely that in the classical dialogues he had so raised himself to the level of the men portrayed that all narrow and captious prejudices had there been thrown aside, he had expanded his view with the distance of the objects contemplated, and into his style had infused such a strength, severity, fervour, and sweetness, as those orators and heroes had never themselves surpassed. In critical writing, however, blame goes so much farther than praise, and the objections of the Edinburgh were not only put so sharply but were apparently so justified by the illustrations given, that, if the Quarterly had followed with unmixed severity, very grave damage might have been done. Julius Hare prevented it. The onslaught had been prepared (for Gifford's detestation of Landor was in no degree abated by Southey's affection for him); but so much of it had been cleverly anticipated in Hare's whimsical parody, that on the appearance of the London Magazine in May the article which the Quarterly