the island of Capri, which I much regret. Elba I saw on my return: a very beautiful and fertile island, with the best harbour in Italy.'

He mentions in the same letter that he had just heard the day before that the third, fourth, and fifth volumes of his Conversations would be out in two or three months, early in the beginning of the ensuing year certainly. The third had been printed for a year and more, but the publisher had delayed it; and another publisher had undertaken the fourth and fifth. (The third appeared in 1828, but the others were still delayed for reasons to be presently named.) He was sick of writing. Never would he write anything more. He had burnt all the things he had begun, and many that he had nearly completed. He was now occupied in collecting pictures. With more money at command he could have made a fortune by the purchase of pictures in Italy. A man must live on the spot, and visit them daily, thoroughly to master pictures. He was but a child at it, yet the dealers thought him knowing. More of this hereafter.

The previous year (1827) had been that in which he made acquaintance with the kindest and most generous man in existence,' Mr. Ablett, of Llanbedr-hall in Denbighshire, the intimacy of whose wife's sister (Mrs. Young) with Mrs. Dashwood, a cousin of the Hares, had led to the fortunate meeting; and through Mr. Ablett, in the spring of 1829, the Fiesolan villa was bought which will forever be associated with Landor's name. The present was the year (1828) when the celebrated sculptor Gibson made, for Ablett, a bust of Landor, of which copies in marble reached England in this and the year following. It was the time, too, when his sister Arden died, and when from her, and from another friend deceased, some small additions were made to his fortune. His sister Ellen tells him of these; and at the close of her letter mentions his old friend Serjeant Rough, who had lately reappeared in the county, as having several times inquired kindly after him, and as having said that the Conversations should have produced him a good fortune. This last touch nettled Landor, and he retorted upon his old companion with an odd mixture of dislike and liking.

The mine of wealth derived from my Conversations brought me three hundred and seventy-two pounds, the two editions. One hundred and

seventy-two the first, two hundred the second. As to that impostor Rough, I never hear the fellow mentioned without fresh contempt. . . . However, if he had continued to cultivate poetry instead of those thistles called law, he would have been perhaps the best poet of the age. By the way, you have not read Keats and Shelley; read them!

Some other notices from his family letters of this date may also be worth giving. The title of the poem by his brother Robert was The Impious Feast; and it well justified the later and maturer praise it received from him as a poem of very various power, and presenting in the sustained structure of its verse a striking originality.

Gibson came to me the very day Ackelom brought me Robert's poem, and I give him two sittings, one in the morning, one in the evening. There have been three days, and there will be four more, before he takes the cast in plaster-of-paris. I am told that Chantry is equal to him in busts, but very inferior in genius. The one is English upon principle, the other Attic. On Sunday I read Robert's preface, which is well written. I shall not begin the poetry till I can give it an undivided attention; which will be when I get into the country, and lie under the vines all day. I hope to begin this mode of life on the 1st of July.' (April 1828.)

I have laid out nearly 1001. in pictures, part of which I sold again for 1801, and the better part is left yet. If I had had 3000l. eight years ago, I could have cleared 12,000l. in the two first years. The dealers here know only the Florentine school; and one of them, the best and most honest, often asks my opinion even on this. I have put a few hundred pounds into his pocket. Our friend Mr. Middleton could not be prevailed upon to buy a Raffaelle for 5001. It is worth 20001, and will bring it ere long. He buys Carlo Dolces and gentry of that kidney; but he has also bought a Pietro Perugino, who in my opinion comes immediately after Raffaelle and Frate Bartolomeo. I could have had it, if I had had the money, for 15l. It is worth about 300l. He gave seventy, I think. His picture of Julia is perfect. Arnold is much handsomer than he has made him. His face has the radiance of a young Apollo.' (June 1828.)

This portrait of his eldest son and daughter by Mr. Middleton was a present he had made to his mother, and it was taken to her by Augustus Hare. She thought it priceless; and until within a day or two of her death, morning and evening, used to salute the two little faces, and wish them good morning and good night.

This morning I met Sir Robert Lawley, who walked with me for half an hour, and made many inquiries about the family. He had taken it ill that I had declined two or three of his invitations to dinner parties; but I told him I never intended to be at one anywhere all the remainder of my life.... My friend Hare [Francis] has married Miss Paul, the daughter of

Sir John Paul, and has 20,000l. with her. His brother Augustus writes me word that he follows the good example in the summer, and that Lady Jones gives him 4001. a year. She is his aunt, and the widow of Sir William' (December 1828).

He tells his sisters, in the same letter, that his bust at Rome was greatly admired, and that he is sending a copy taken for his wife and another for his mother; to whom he also writes announcing this, and urgently entreating her to guard against sudden changes in the weather. The anxiety strongly expressed by him was but too well founded, for the new year then about to open was to be the last of his mother's life.

VII. ADDITIONAL DIALOGUES.

I now resume the narrative of the Imaginary Conversations from the point at which it was left on the publication of the first series. In the account sent to Landor by Julius Hare, in July 1824, of the critical notices that had appeared of the book, he reported from Taylor that its sale had been considerable but slow, and it was therefore very uncertain how soon it might become necessary to print a second edition. At the earliest it would certainly not be published till June in the following year, so that there would be ample time for all the emendations Landor might deem it advisable to make. Were they, then, to keep back the new dialogues in order to see whether a second edition might be wanted next spring? Or should they print a third volume by itself, which might come out at Christmas? At present the manuscript in hand looked less than its brethren, but he dared say would find itself considerably enlarged before it could see the light.

At the close of the same letter there are uneasy references to the omissions; Hare remarking that the Middleton, if he can 'persuade Taylor,' shall be inserted in the second edition in its original shape. Most unwillingly had he acceded to any alteration, he added, except as to the two lines Southey consented to erase; but Taylor was so fixed, that the only way of saving any 'part of it was by some modification, which was as slight as he 'would let it be. As so much has come out without offending,

'he will perhaps not be quite so scrupulous next time.' In sc speaking to Landor of his publisher, allowance enough was hardly made for its probable effect on Landor's continued relations with Taylor. He was not the man to suffer patiently such a censorship over his writings, or that his bookseller should be permitted to usurp an authority which such men as Southey and Hare saw no sufficient ground for exerting. In circumstances the most favourable, even when sanctioned or committed by Southey, the omissions had been a sore subject with him, and in especial when dictated by considerations wholly personal to himself. You 'carried your tenderness too far,' he wrote to Southey about a passage left out of the Puntomichino, in suppressing my story ' of the thirteen lest I should be assassinated. Had I my choice ' of a death, it should be this, unless I could render some essen'tial service to mankind by any other.'

The completion of the third volume to which Hare's letter referred was sent over by Landor to Southey four months after that letter was written. He writes on the 4th November 1824:

'I have finished and send herewith for publication the third and last volume; or rather a few supplementary passages to it, for the greater part was finished long ago. I had composed parts, and large ones, for the following: Mahomet and Sergius; Charlemagne and the Pope; Tiberius and Agrippina; Seneca and Epictetus; Ovid and a Gothic poet; Francis the First and Leonardo; the Black Prince and the King of France; Queen Anne and Harley; Alexander and Porus; Sertorius and the Ambassadors of Mithridates; Sextus Pompeius, Octavius, and Antonius; Queen Mary and Philip; Algernon Sydney, Russell, and Lady Rachel; Harrington and Penn; Charles the Second and Sir Edward Seymour (prototype of Whig roguery); St. Louis and the Sultan of Egypt; Fénelon and Bossuet; Cornelia and Caius Gracchus. This last and the Tiberius would have been better than anything of any kind I have ever done. I shed a great many tears as often as I attempted the Tiberius. He is represented by Suetonius to have seen Agrippina but once after their forced separation and his marriage with Julia, and to have been deeply affected; so that care was taken they never should meet again. I make him grateful to Augustus and Livia, but attributing all his misery to their ambition. Agrippina draws their characters and gives some imaginary conversations. Tiberius betrays gradually his suspicious character, but love predominates. His description of the senate; his hatred of it; his resolution to retire to Caprea, which he describes; his eternal absence from Agrippina,—evident marks of madness on the mention of it. If I had preserved any one scrap of this, I would send it, although it would be good only by its contexture. It appears to me that I should have made a great deal more of Tiberius than I have of Gebir and Count Julian; but I have done nothing which

U

satisfied me in the part of Agrippina, and might perhaps have been a year before I could become acquainted with her for the purpose.'

Sufficiently long, that is, to dispense with those helps by way of explanation on points of history and character, which the audience (and there must always be an audience for a drama, real or imaginary) can never altogether dispense with in a dramatic composition the result of such too consummate form of the dramatic art being, that it meets the other extreme of a complete ignorance of its conditions, and is, for purposes of the stage and as far as any audience is concerned, no art that in the least addresses itself to them.* He continues:

'Cornelia and Caius Gracchus was the other conversation on which I should have exerted all my energy. Hardly anything was done in it. This volume would have been more elaborate and more important than the others, and would have cost me double the time of both. Three are enough: they will raise against me almost every man in England. I have not yet received my copy, but I have made large additions. Whether there will ever be another edition is uncertain however. My heart beats often for your Colloquies. I am glad that you have adorned them with some scenery. I do not recollect that I have done anything of the kind except on the entrance to Ashbourne, where Walton is the speaker. I stand agape at myself' (he says abruptly, at the close of this letter). Not only have I dared to introduce Cicero and Demosthenes, Bacon and Hooker, but Shakespeare himself, to whom they are cradled infants. What will you think of me? Here for the first time I shrink and shudder.'

The intention thus expressed being, as we see, to close with a third volume, the subjects enumerated are to show us what was lost by this decision; and it is curious enough that, though the three volumes became expanded to quite as much as three times that bulk, only the first, third, and fourth dialogue in the list, admirably chosen as most of the subjects are, ever reappeared; those three being ultimately sent over for the third volume. We shall find shortly, however, that in a fit of temper what he called the fourth volume was flung into the fire, and this may account for the loss. The Shakespeare took afterwards another shape; and the Queen Mary and Philip, though actually sent over to Hare, was lost on its way to the printer; but, out of all the rest, of only the three named do we hear again, and as to one of them a letter of seven days' later date gives farther curious de

See the remarks closing the fourth section of my Third Book.