mine, and to place them at Ipsley. I thanked him at the time, and thank him again; but I am resolved to accept nothing whatever from any of my relatives. If my mother's picture was purchased at Llanthony, I would buy it gladly. Pray let me hear about it. I remember it at my grandmother's fifty years ago. Adieu. I am ill-disposed for writing more.'

Upon that incident of his expulsion from Tuscany, which was one of his last announcements to her, a few words are all it will be necessary to add. It might have seemed a little startling if told of any one else, but in his case it made hardly a perceptible difference in his relations to the magistracy and police of Florence, with whom he had generally some quarrel on hand. Three years earlier he had written to Southey that the things said about the Tuscans in his Conversations, and principally those in power, being translated with bitter comments by some literary men in Florence whom he could not admit into his house, had greatly exasperated against him the ministers of the grand-duke, whom however he did not know by sight, nor they him; so that it was a matter of perfect indifference to him. The ground of indifference lasted exactly two more years, at the end of which he obtained perforce a personal acquaintance with some of the ministers, having been called before the courts and threatened to be sent out of Tuscany. And now, another year having intervened, this threat was to be put in force.

A robbery of plate committed at his villa led to such an angry correspondence with the police respecting it, that their president, laying hold of some intemperate expressions in which Landor had ripped up older grievances, obtained from some of the ministers of the grand-duke an order for his expulsion from Florence. Paying no heed to this, he addressed to the grandduke himself a very spirited remonstrance; and this having been, though without his knowledge, strengthened by the intercession of Lord Normanby, Sir Robert Lawley, and others, the only farther notice of the matter was a public avowal by himself, silently received by the authorities, to the effect that, since they had thought fit to declare his continued residence among them to be distasteful, it was his fixed resolve to settle himself in Tuscany. He closed with similar avowal the account of the affair which he sent to Southey. Such being the case, I resolved to pitch my tent in the midst of them; and have now bought a villa,

belonging to the Count Gherardescha, of the family of C. Ugolino, and upon the spot where Boccaccio led his women to bathe when they had left the first scene of their story-telling. Here I shall pass my life, long or short, no matter; but God grant ' without pain and sickness, and with only such friends and such enemies as I enjoy at present.' The latter, it must be added, he did not cease to cultivate. He kept up fruitful sources of dispute with 'rascally' magistrates, as well as with 'pious' thieves; but on the whole, excepting for a quarrel with a neighbour about a watercourse to be presently related and which engaged all his energies for a time, Landor lived at his new villa quietly enough for nearly six more years. He had been impressed, perhaps more than was usual with him, by Francis Hare's warning, sent when he heard of the recent banishment from Florence, that he would never find anywhere on the Continent so suitable a home. Writing in August from Trinity-college where he was staying with his brother Julius, after eager expression of his delight at hearing of Landor again in Florence, Hare gave him several reasons for declaring it to be the best and fittest abode for him in Europe; implored him, by all their pleasant memories of it, to contrive not to get into any fresh scrapes that might finally drive him out of it; and pronounced it to be, by all the strictest laws of social intercourse, enough for one gentleman to cane one scoundrel once in one life. Telling him, then, that his brother Augustus had just received from New-college the Wiltshire living of Alton Barnes where Crewe wrote his poem of Lewisdon Hill, he closes with an abrupt question, Why is I in Italics short? which Landor has answered by scratching across the page the line,

'Omnia namque Italus promittere grandia gaudet.'

The villa, into which he had moved just before his mother's death, remains to be described; but first may be mentioned a visit to him which already had also occurred before she passed away. There had appeared in Florence, he told his sister Ellen, the dearest of all the friends he ever had or ever should have, his Ianthe of former years, now a widow of title who had buried two husbands, who remained nevertheless so handsome that an

English earl and a French duke were offering their addresses to her, and in these the Frenchman was persisting in spite of all discouragement. Talk of time not going back, why, the sudden vision of this one face had rolled back from him in an instant more than twenty years! With which thought, put into verse, he closes his letter:

Say ye that years roll on, and ne'er return?
Say ye the sun, who leaves them all behind
(Their great creator), cannot bring one back
With all his force, though he draw worlds around?
Witness me, little streams that meet before

My happy dwelling, witness Affrico,

And Mensola! that ye have seen at once
Twenty roll back, twenty as swift and bright

As are your swiftest and your brightest waves,
When the tall cypress o'er the Doccia

Hurls from his inmost boughs the latent snow.'

The 'happy dwelling' was the Fiesolan villa, his present great enjoyment of which, how he came into possession of it, and his way of life there, will be best understood from what he wrote about it to the old home in Warwick.

III. THE VILLA GHERARDESCHA.

When Leigh Hunt, after many sad disappointments in Pisa and Genoa, found himself in Florence, his refuge from his troubles was to wander about Maiano, a village on the slope of one of the Fiesolan hills, two miles from the city, thinking of Boccaccio. On either side of Maiano were laid the two scenes of his Decameron; the little streams that embrace it, the Affrico and Mensola, were the metamorphosed lovers in his Nimphale Fiesolano; within view was his villa Gherardi, before the vil lage the hills of Fiesole, and at its feet the Valley of the Ladies. Every spot around was an illustrious memory. To the left, the house of Macchiavelli; still farther in that direction, nestling amid the blue hills, the white village of Settignano, where Michael Angelo was born; on the banks of the neighbouring Mugnone, the house of Dante; and in the background, Galileo's villa of Arcetri and the palaces and cathedrals of Florence. In the thick of this noble landscape, forming part of the village of San

Domenica di Fiesole, stood the villa which had now become Landor's. The Valley of the Ladies was in his grounds; the Affrico and the Mensola ran through them; above was the ivyclad convent of the Doccia, overhung with cypress; and from his iron entrance-gate might be seen Valdarno and Vallombrosa. Ten years after Landor had lost this home, an Englishman travelling in Italy, his and my dear friend, visited the neighbourhood for his sake, drove out from Florence to Fiesole, and asked his coachman which was the villa in which the Landor family lived.

'He was a dull dog, and pointed to Boccaccio's. I didn't believe him. He was so deuced ready that I knew he lied. I went up to the convent, which is on a height, and was leaning over a dwarf wall basking in the noble view over a vast range of hill and valley, when a little peasant girl came up and began to point out the localities. Ecco la villa Landora! was one of the first half-dozen sentences she spoke. My heart swelled almost as Landor's would have done when I looked down upon it, nestling among its olive-trees and vines, and with its upper windows (there are five above the door) open to the setting sun. Over the centre of these there is another story, set upon the housetop like a tower; and all Italy, except its sea, is melted down into the glowing landscape it commands. I plucked a leaf of ivy from the convent-garden as I looked, and here it is. For Landor. With my love.'

So wrote Dickens to me from Florence on the 2d of April 1845. He had complied with the expressed wish of Landor himself, on being asked what he most desired his friend should bring him from Italy; and when I turned over Landor's papers in the same month after an interval of exactly twenty years, the ivy-leaf was found carefully enclosed with the letter in which I had sent it. Here too may now be added what Dickens farther said when thus reminded of the incident. I quote from his review of the first edition of this biography in the last paper written by him in All the Year Round.

'The friend, on coming back to England, related to Landor that he had been much embarrassed, on going in search of the leaf, by his driver's suddenly stopping his horses in a narrow lane, and presenting him (the friend) to La Signora Landora." The lady was walking alone on a bright Italian winter-day; and the man, having been told to drive to the Villa Landora, inferred that he must be conveying a guest or visitor. “I pulled off my hat,” said the friend, “apologised for the coachman's "mistake, and drove on. The lady was walking with a rapid and firm step, nad bright eyes, a fine fresh colour, and looked animated and

agreeable." Landor checked off each clause of the description, with a stately nod of more than ready assent, and replied, with all his tremendous energy concentrated into the sentence: "And the Lord forbid that "I should do otherwise than declare that she always was agreeable-to 66 every one but me!"

Landor began the first New Year's-day (1830) passed in the villa Gherardescha by writing to his sisters. It had opened inauspiciously as far as weather was concerned. He had to tell them how terrible the season was out there, in what their letters were never tired of calling 'sunny Italy.' Owing to his living two miles from Florence, it was eight days since the children had been able to go to school, either on foot or in a carriage. The roads were covered with ice, and appeared like so many frozen cataracts. There had been for several days two woodcocks within a few yards of his door, where there was an open spring. He went on to tell them also that his mother's death had set him thinking of old times, and for several weeks there had been moving visibly before his eyes processions of the old Warwickshire faces. There was good ancient Mrs. Cook of Tachbrooke, so patient of him in his boyhood; how did she carry her many years? And yet they could not be so many, perhaps not seventy; though hers was the oldest of all living faces he remembered in his childhood. Poor Mr. and Mrs. Farman too, with all their Christmas kindnesses to him; and the Parkhursts, the Venours, the Wades, the Welds, the Cliffords, and many beside. He may perhaps visit England in another year: he has had so many invitations; and from Paris even more. 'But my country now is Italy, where I have a residence for life, and literally 'may sit under my own vine and my own fig-tree. I have some 'thousands of the one and some scores of the other, with myrtles, pomegranates, oranges, lemons, gagias, and mimosas in great quantity. I intend to make a garden not very unlike yours at 'Warwick; but, alas, time is wanting. I may live another ten 'years, but do not expect it. In a few days, whenever the 'weather will allow it, I have four mimosas ready to place 'round my intended tomb, and a friend who is coming to plant 'them.' He had also the inscription ready, intimating that he should have lived enough when the tear of that friend had been dried by him; and of course his Ianthe is presumably to be

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