for the statement that Archbishop Beresford had placed them in the hands of his daughter, he alleged the authority of that most reverend person's son. A polished courtier and a virtuous prelate knew their value; and for his own part he thought that perhaps the neglect of them in modern days was one reason why a gentleman was become almost as rare as a man of genius.

What most had nettled him in Emerson's book, however, was not the report of any saying of his own, but a remark upon him made by Carlyle. 'Landor's principle is mere rebellion.' He maintained that quite the contrary was apparent and prominent in many of his writings. He had always been conservative; but he had the eager wish, wherever evil of any kind presented itself, political, moral, or religious, to eradicate it straightway, without reference to the old blockhead cry of what was to be substituted in its place. When docks or thistles were plucked up, was any such question asked? I have said plainly, more than once, and in many quarters, that I would not alter or 'greatly modify the English constitution.' He had no fondness. for mere innovation. Whatever is changed should rest, if possible, on what has been tried. A foundation, if ever solid, was the more solid the longer it had stood. It was because he approved of the hereditary character of the bulk of the House of Lords that he would have a better sort of life-peers introduced into it than were there at present; for he thought it the worst place in the world to put a bishop in, and would send a beadle after every overlooker that left his diocese except on service for the head of the church, his sovereign. As to such royal service, too, when rendered by the higher nobility, he would not have them paid for it as menials are paid: he had too much respect for the order. Not that he included in this order the peerage alone. Among the country gentlemen of England were men whose ancestors were noble when the ancestors of half the peerage were nothing better than serfs.

Thus he came by degrees to the avowal of a republicanism in which he recognised authority, as opposed to that mere democracy which he admitted to be the principle of rebellion.' His views were not such as to propitiate either Carlyle or Emerson, but have an interest for us here. He did not believe that

we should rest where we are; and was equally uncertain, when Enceladus should have shaken his shoulder and turned his side, whether we should then rest long. Democracy as it existed in America he declared to be his abhorrence. Lax and disjointed, it always wore out the machine. Republicanism was quite otherwise; but, alas, where did it now exist? Few had been the nations capable of receiving, still fewer of retaining, that pure and efficient form. The nations on the Ebro and the mountaineers of Biscay had enjoyed it substantially for century after century. Holland, Ragusa, Genoa, Venice, had been deprived of it by that holy alliance whose influence had withered the Continent, and changed even the features of England. One of the worst of public calamities, in Landor's opinion, was the overthrow of the Venetian republic. Then was swept away the oldest and truest nobility in the world. 'How happy were the Venetian states 'governed for a thousand years by the brave and intelligent ' gentlemen of the island city! All who did not conspire against its security were secure. Look at the palaces they ' erected. Look at the arts they cultivated. And look now at 'their damp and decaying walls.' But at this point he checked himself. The disbelief he indulged, while yet a resident of Italy, in all hope for Italian regeneration, was replaced by a better faith but a few years after his return to England; and it had become his conviction, when he thus remarked on Emerson's notices of Fiesole, that even within the damp and decaying walls of Venice lay the pledge of her ultimate restoration. Enter and there behold such countenances as you will never 'see elsewhere. These are not among the creatures whom God 'will permit any deluge to sweep away. Heretofore a better race of beings has uniformly succeeded to a viler, though a ' vaster; and it will be so again.' The several races of Italians had but to compose their petty differences, quell their discordances, stand united, and strike high. Miles, faciem feri, he reminded them, was the cry of the wisest and most valiant of the Roman race.

6

All this has carried me somewhat out of date; but the final reference I have to make to Emerson will bring us back to the exact time at which my narrative had arrived: that of Landor's

closing days in Fiesole. He was not displeased that Emerson should have noted in him, at that early time, a taste for the pre-Raffaellite painters of Italy, and he described the ignorance of them among the Italians themselves to be such that he was reckoned a madman for indulging his taste. He met a tailor one day with two small canvases under his arm, and two others in his hands; he had given a few paoli for them; and, when offered as many francesconi for his bargain, he thought the English signor must be fairly out of his wits. 'I was thought ' a madman, too,' continued Landor, 'as I sat under the shade of a vast old fig-tree, while about twenty labourers were extir'pating three or four acres of vines and olives in order to make 'somewhat like a meadow before my windows. Matti sono tutti gli Inglesi, ma questo poi... followed by a shrug and an aposiopesis.'

6

He might so have been engaged when, in the early spring of 1834, he received a visit from another American as little famous at the time as his former American visitor had been, but reserved for a future fame altogether different from Emerson's. This was Mr. N. P. Willis, whose fuss and fury of boundless hero-worship found in Landor an easy victim. I shall make my allusion to him as brief as possible. Upon quitting Florence, after receiving much hospitality at the villa, he took with him the manuscript of a new book by Landor, which, with a letter of introduction to Lady Blessington who had now taken up her residence in London, he was to deliver on his arrival there; and he carried off with him at the same time not only the author's copy, interleaved and enlarged, of all the published volumes of the Conversations, but also the manuscript of that additional unpublished volume of which already I have described the subjects and speakers; both being designed for publication, not in England but America. Landor's own account may be quoted.

through Tuscany, and He expressed a wish

'At this time an American traveller passed favoured me with a visit at my country-seat. to reprint in America a large selection of my Imaginary Conversations, omitting the political. He assured me they were the most thumbed books on his table. With a smile at so energetic an expression of perhaps an undesirable distinction, I offered him unreservedly and unconditionally

AA

my only copy of the five printed volumes, interlined and interleaved in most places, which I had employed several years in improving and enlarging, together with my manuscript of the sixth unpublished. He wrote to me on his arrival in England, telling me that they were already on their voyage to their destination.'

They had sailed from Leghorn, and the sequel of their adventures will shortly be stated. A few lines of a letter from Lady Blessington to Landor will tell us meanwhile of the other packet also taken charge of by the traveller. 'I have received' (9th June 1834) 'your manuscript, and am delighted with it. 'Mr. Willis delivered it to me with your letter, and I endea'voured to show him all the civility in my power, in honour ' of his recommendation.' The manuscript was the book about Shakespeare, of which we have seen mention in the family letters from time to time, as 'curious' and even wicked;' which was published in London in the autumn of 1834; and of which some account is now due.

VI. EXAMINATION OF SHAKESpeare for Deer-stealing.

The letter in the foregoing section, dated at the close of January 1835, is the last which Landor wrote to his sisters from Italy; and I have retained in it an allusion quite undeserved to a youthful criticism of mine upon the Shakespeare book, because it led to my acquaintance with the writer not many weeks after his arrival in England. The opinion then formed of that book I retain unaltered. One of the last things said to me by Charles Lamb, a week or two before his death, was that only two men could have written the Examination of Shakespeare-he who wrote it, and the man it was written on; and that is exactly what I think.

Landor's first notice of it to Lady Blessington had been in a letter of the previous April, in which, after mentioning that he had for some time been composing The Citation and Examination of William Shakespeare, Euseby Treen, Joseph Carnaby, and Silas Gough, Clerk, before the Worshipful Sir Thomas Lucy, Knight, touching Deer-Stealing on the 19th Day of September, in the Year of Grace 1582, now first published from Original Papers, he added, 'This is full of fun; I know not whether of

'wit. It is the only thing I ever wrote that is likely to sell.' This was a hint to his friend that she was to get him some money for it, which indeed he had already promised, with unquenched ardour of hope and all his old splendour of beneficence, to a school-fellow in distress. But by the time Lady Blessington wrote back to him that she could by no means get money for the anonymous venture (the joke of the Original Papers turning of course on the reality of Mr. Ephraim Barnett, their editor and reporter), Landor had discovered gaming to be the cause of his school-fellow's distress, and no longer cared to get money for him. Just as content, therefore, to pay for printing as to be paid for printing, his book crept into the world unrecompensed and unannounced in the autumn of 1834.

I did my best then to draw attention to it; but the popularity of the subject has not made it an exception to Landor's works in general, and what has been done for them remains here also necessary. By such passages as could be taken without impairment of their beauty, however, I could not hope to convey an approximate impression of what the book really is. Even if its richness of humour could be displayed, the variety of its wit, and what it presents of a very rare union of the higher order of imagination to pathos as well as character of the simplest kind, there would be something beyond all this, untold and still to be discovered. As Marlowe defied the combined powers of the poets to do justice to the face of his mistress, for that the highest reaches of a human wit might be attained by them, and

'Yet should there hover in their restless heads
One thought, one grace, one wonder at the best
Which into words no virtue can digest;'

so one finds here. There is a subtlety of genius as of beauty that escapes when we would fix the expression of any special charm; but at least one thing can be truly said of the book, that with its very grain and tissue there is interwoven a purpose profoundly human. It is steeped in the deepest waters of humanity. It would have been characterised as gentle when the word meant all that is noble as well as mild and wise.