three from Italy, Tancredi and Constantia, Tasso and Cornelia, Dante with his wife Gemma Donati, and Dante with his angel Beatrice. Galileo visited in his prison by Milton is the subject of a seventh; the eighth, filled also with pleasant memories of Florence and Fiesole, was a dialogue between the painter Fra Filippo Lippi and Pope Eugenius the Fourth; and La Rochefoucault talking to La Fontaine supplied the ninth, both speakers talking so well that one would hardly suspect the writer to have hated the first of these Frenchmen almost as much as he loved the second. The German subjects were three: Melancthon in colloquy with Calvin; and Sandt conversing with Kotzebue on the eve of the commission of his crime, and with Blucher afterwards in prison while waiting his punishment. The thirteenth and fourteenth, Cardinal Legate Albani and the Picturedealers, and the Emperor of China and his minister, formed portions respectively of two sets of papers, on High and Low Life in Italy, and on the Adventures of a Chinese statesman dispatched to Europe for a batch of first-rate professors of Christianity, with whose help his master, profiting by experience of the Jesuits, hopes to sow, among his enemies the Tartars, divisions and animosities that will destroy them.

The six latest were on English themes, all of them dialogues of character, interfused with intense passion in that where Mary of Scotland surrenders herself to Bothwell: and, in the rest, where the English Mary and her sister Elizabeth meet after their brother's death and the proclamation of Lady Jane; where the queen Elizabeth talks, after the massacre of Bartholomew, with Cecil and Anjou and the French Ambassador; where Bishop Shipley says adieu to Franklin after his mission of peace has failed; where Addison encounters Steele after the bailiffs have been with him; and where Andrew Marvell after a visit to Milton meets Bishop Parker in Bunhill-row,-showing at their very best Landor's humour and eloquence, grasp of individual portraiture, and play of wit and fancy. The last has, perhaps more than any, the greatest qualities of his writing consistently sustained, at their highest level and with the fewest drawbacks.

BOOK SIXTH.

1829-1835. ÆT. 54-60.

AT FIESOLE.

1. Closing Years in the Palazzo Medici. II. Mother's Death. III. The Villa Gherardescha. IV. England revisited. v. Again in Italy: old Pictures and new Friends. VI. Examination of Shakespeare for Deerstealing. VII. Pericles and Aspasia. VIII. Self-banishment from Fiesole.

I. CLOSING YEARS IN THE PALAZZO MEDICI.

'From France to Italy my steps I bent,
And pitcht at Arno's side my household tent.
Six years the Medicæan palace held
My wandering Lares; then they went afield,
Where the hewn rocks of Fiesole impend
O'er Doccia's dell, and fig and olive blend.
There the twin streams in Affrico unite,
One dimly seen, the other out of sight,
But ever playing in his smoothen'd bed
Of polisht stone, and willing to be led
Where clustering vines protect him from the sun,
Never too grave to smile, too tired to run.
Here, by the lake, Boccacio's fair brigade
Beguiled the hours, and tale for tale repaid.
How happy! O, how happy had I been
With friends and children in this quiet scene!
Its quiet was not destined to be mine:

'Twas hard to keep, 'twas harder to resign.'

So wrote Landor, in a little poem on his homes; but the Medicæan palace had not held his Lares five years when he moved into the country two miles from the Tuscan capital, and interposed the villa Castiglione between his homes in Florence and Fiesole. Here he lived, with a short interval in the winter of '28 and '29 at the casa Giugni, until he found his Fiesolan

home. A characteristic incident had closed his intercourse with the living representative of the Medici. Mr. Kirkup writes to

me:

'I remember one day, when he lived in the Medici palace, he wrote to the Marquis, and accused him of having seduced away his coachman. The marquis, I should tell you, enjoyed no very good name, and this had exasperated Landor the more. Mrs. Landor was sitting in the drawingroom the day after, where I and some others were, when the marquis came strutting in without removing his hat. But he had scarcely advanced three steps from the door when Landor walked up to him quickly and knocked his hat off, then took him by the arm and turned him out. You should have heard Landor's shout of laughter at his own anger when it was all over, inextinguishable laughter which none of us could resist. Immediately after he sent the marquis warning by the hands of a policeman, which is reckoned an affront, and quitted his house at the end of the year.'

The same anecdote is related to me in the letter of a family connection who passed some time at the Italian villa,* and who, after remarking that Landor's frequent outbreaks of intensely sensitive pride astounded the Italians more than anything, says truly enough that the secret of it was not the vulgar sense of importance attached to his position as an English gentleman, but the vast ever-present conviction of the infinity of his mental superiority. The smallest unintentional appearance of slight from a superior in rank would at any moment rouse him into a fury of passion, never thoroughly allayed till its last 'force had spent itself in an epigram.' Such incidents, at the worst never fraught with much gravity, often took even a highly amusing turn, during his earlier years in Italy, from his imperfect acquaintance with the language; and here Mr. Wilson Landor's letter confirms what was said on a former page.

Though at last he understood it thoroughly, and spoke it with the utmost grammatical correctness and elegance, he acquired it with less facility than might have been expected. Mrs. Landor, without any study, could converse in it with ease and volubility long before her husband. When Southey visited them in Italy, although well acquainted with French and Italian, he showed himself a self-taught linguist, and his hearers were not a little amused at his oddities of pronunciation and speech.'

• Mr. Edward Wilson Landor, a cousin of the Landors of Rugely, now a police-magistrate in Perth (Western Australia), from whom, in September 1867, when the first four books of this biography had been printed off for more than two months, I received the letter above referred to.

It was in the palazzo Medici that Hazlitt visited Landor in the spring of 1825. I again quote Mr. Kirkup's letter.

I perfectly remember Hazlitt's being here. He wished to pay Landor a visit, but was advised not, unless he was well introduced. Armitage Brown, who was Landor's greatest friend here, offered him a letter; but Hazlitt said he would beard the lion in his den, and he walked up to his house one winter's morning in nankeen shorts and white stockings; was made much of by the royal animal; and often returned-at night; for Landor was much out in the day, in all weathers.'

My Australian correspondent confirms this story on the relation of Mrs. Landor, describing the great critic's garb as 'a dresscoat and nankeen trousers half-way up his legs, leaving his 'stockings well visible over his shoes: but his host,' Mr. Wilson Landor adds, 'would not know whether he was dressed in black or white. He wore his own clothes like Dominie Sampson, until they would hardly hold together; and when he visited his sisters at Warwick they used to resort to the expedient 'practised upon the dominie, and leave new garments for him ' at his bedside, which he would put on without discovering the 'change.'

In that there is overcolouring, but the frequent absence of mind could not be exaggerated; and I remember one such amusing instance of forgetfulness which perhaps originated the story, since it certainly led to the necessity at Warwick of supplying him with other clothes than his own. He had been so much put out at one of his visits by having left the key of his portmanteau behind him, that his sister was hardly surprised to see him, when next he appeared at her house, eagerly flourishing in his hand an uplifted key, at once knowing this to be his comforting assurance to her that any possible repetition of the former trouble had been guarded against. Storms of laughter followed from him as she expressed her satisfaction; and the last of his successive peals had scarcely subsided, when, inquiry being made for his portmanteau, the fatal discovery presented itself that to bring only a key was more of a disaster than to bring only a portmanteau. On this occasion the portmanteau had been left at Cheltenham.*

It was in 1843. He wrote to me at the time: My portmanteau and all my clothes were left behind at Cheltenham, against all my precau

'He was so frequently absorbed in his own reflections,' continues his relative, 'as to be unconscious of external objects, 'which indeed seldom much affected him. He would walk ' about Bath, as between Florence and Fiesole, with his eyes 'fixed on the ground, taking no heed of the world around him. 'I have known him to travel from London into Denbighshire and be quite unable to say by which route he had travelled, 'what towns he had passed by, or whether or not he had come 'through Birmingham.' My own experience also confirms this,* and some sentences from the same letter may illustrate what I have already said elsewhere.

'He was an enthusiastic friend; and as far as sound, violence, and unmeasured denunciation went, a bitter hater; but beyond unsparing vituperation, he would not have injured an enemy. He would certainly not have lent a hand to crush him. It was the strong whom he always rushed to attack. With all the violence of his dislikes and likings, he had also the softness and tenderness of the poetic temperament. He was passionately fond of young children. He was generous to profusion whenever he had the means. . . . Self-satisfied under all circumstances, he was without personal ambition or the desire of aggrandisement. His own conception of himself was too elevated to permit of his descending to ordinary meannesses. He neither desired money, beyond what the necessities of the hour demanded, nor rank, nor influence. . . . He noticed a man's appearance as little as he studied his own.'

What is pleasantest here, as well as most material, receives farther confirmation in the letters of Mr. Kirkup, and testimonies thus independent of each other will not be thought unimportant.

'I first knew him in 1824 through Mr. Armitage Brown, the great friend of Keats, and the most intimate and confidential friend of Landor

tions. The worst is the loss of much poetry and prose written in the last three months. I am not such a fool as to trouble my head about the clothes, nor wise enough not to trouble it about the pages. However, 'I never look after a loss a single moment.

"Quod vides perîsse, perditum ducas,"

says Catullus and say I.'

And worse.

He would find himself at Birmingham when he ought to have been elsewhere. You will wonder what I had to do at Birming'ham!' he wrote to me in the summer of 1844, explaining a hasty letter sent me the previous day with that postmark. Why! just nothing at all. should have changed trains at Coventry for Leamington, but the fools

' never cried out a word about that station.'