friend and countrywoman Cleone, and the philosopher Anaxagoras; the figures in his foreground being wisely few, but their grouping and accessories such as to surround with all the greatness of their age his hero and heroine, who vie with each other in appreciation of the genius that is present with them, and in their knowledge of the glories of the past. There are several exquisite episodes; and that of Xeniades of Miletus, the rejected lover of Aspasia, himself as vainly beloved by Cleone, invests the latter with a softness and grace hardly second to Aspasia's own. These two women fill the book to overflowing with sensibility and tenderness, insomuch that one of Landor's American admirers has singled it out as in this respect preeminent over all his writings, a book that we are frequently forced to drop, and surrender ourselves to the visions and memories, 'soft or sad, which its words awaken, and cause to pass before 'the mind.' Yet a book also that perfectly sustains the interest which it vividly awakens. Not mean is the exploit when a writer can satisfy the most exacting scholarship while he revives the forms or imitates the language of antiquity. But here we have something more, resembling rather antiquity itself than the most scholarly and successful presentation of it. We are in the theatre when Prometheus is played; we are in the house of Aspasia when Socrates and Aristophanes are there; Thucydides is shown to us in the promise of his youth; we see the last of the triumphs of Sophocles; and in speeches and letters of Pericles upon the great affairs he is conducting, History acts herself again. The political antagonism of Cimon, and the war with its sad disasters, usher in the mournful close. Amid the horrors of the plague the farewell to Athens and Aspasia is written; and over a sun that is grandly setting the fiery star of Alcibiades is seen to rise. Altogether a magnificent subject very nobly handled. Landor had chosen for trial the bow of Ulysses, and it obeyed his hand.

Something to show manner and treatment might be added, but it would not express the charm that overspreads the book as with a wide and sunny atmosphere of clear bright air. It is

* My old friend Mr. Hillard of Boston, who published in that city nearly twenty years ago a volume of Selections from Landor.'

only to be understood from reading it how intensely Greek the mind of Landor was. Here his faults became beauties. What one inclines to object to very often in his writing, that his characters make too little allowance for human passions, that they leave too little room for what in mechanics is called friction, that, as during all his own life their inventor and maker was apt to do, they too much believe what they wish and too readily suppose to be practicable what appears to be desirable, is no objection here. What we forever associate with the Greeks, of buoyant grace, elaborate refinement, precision of form, and imagination more sensuous and fanciful than sentimental or spiritual, we shall always find in most perfect expression where the impulsive predominates over the reflective part of the intellect. The mind of Landor was not more Greek than his style was English, and here it was at its very best; perfect in form, solid in substance, in expression always concise and pure, and often piercing and radiant as light itself. It was said of the book by one who was herself a Greek scholar (Miss Barrett: 21st of August 1839), that if he had written only this, it would have shown him to be of all living writers the most unconventional in thought ' and word, the most classical, because the freest from mere clas'sicalism, the most Greek, because preeminently and purely English.'

At its close are three scenes in which Aspasia completes the story of Agamemnon. The first, where the shade of Iphigenia, unconscious of her mother's double crime, meets on his descent from death the shade of her father, by whose hand she had herself perished, is for the originality of its conception unsurpassed; and the second and third, representing the fate of Clytemnestra and the madness of Orestes, are, in my judgment, for the intensity and vividness of their dramatic expression, unequalled in the dramatic writings of our time. Of the book containing them he wrote to me afterwards: There is only one thought of ' another man beside myself in the whole of it, and this I have 'given twice, wishing it to be the one that weighed most with 'Pericles,—that he never caused an Athenian to put on mourn'ing. In the rest, prose and poetry, wherever I detected a simi'larity to another, I struck out the sentence, however loath, and

'however certain that it would have been mine. But, alas, the 'air we breathe is breathed by millions; so are the thoughts.' Though scrupulous not to commit the offence, he could not avoid the charge; and the reader will be amused to learn the effect hereafter produced by it. Suffice it now to say that Pericles and Aspasia was not published until the spring of 1836; and that in the interval Landor had left the villa Gherardescha, and taken up his residence in England.

VIII. SELF-BANISHMENT FROM FIESOLE.

I leave thee, beauteous Italy! no more
From the high terraces, at eventide,
To look supine into thy depths of sky,
Thy golden moon between the cliff and me,
Or thy dark spires of fretted cypresses
Bordering the channel of the milky-way.
Fiesole and Valdarno must be dreams
Hereafter, and my own lost Affrico
Murmur to me but in the poet's song.
I did believe (what have I not believed?)
Weary with age, but unopprest by pain,
To close in thy soft clime my quiet day,
And rest my bones in the mimosa's shade.
Hope! Hope! few ever cherisht thee so little,
Few are the heads thou hast so rarely raised;
But thou didst promise this, and all was well:
For we are fond of thinking where to lie
When every pulse hath ceast, when the lone heart
Can lift no aspiration. . . . Over all

The smiles of Nature shed a potent charm,

And light us to our chamber at the grave.'

W. 8. L.

'Among the unaccountable things in me, and many are so ' even to myself, is this, that I admired Pindar somewhat more ' in youth than in what ought to be a graver age. However, his wisdom, his high-mindedness, and his excellent selection of 'topics, in which no writer of prose or verse ever equalled him, render him worthy to spend the evening with one who has 'passed the earlier part of the day with Dante.' His old schoolfellow Cary had visited Italy, and to him these words were addressed, thanking him for his translation of Pindar. What also the course of my narrative requires that I should now relate, the reader must be content to accept among the 'unaccountable

'things.' No account can as yet be given of it which he will be able to regard as entirely intelligible.

In April 1835 Landor had left his villa, and was in Florence waiting a letter from Armitage Brown, at this time on his way to England. A few nights before his departure, when bidden to his last dinner at the villa, he had been present at the scene that had driven Landor from Fiesole; and in justification of this extreme step an account of what he witnessed had been asked from him. 'It was scarcely possible for me,' he wrote from Genoa on the 4th of April, to make such a reply as your letter ' required before I quitted Florence. As we have a day's rest here, I avail myself of it.' He grieves to have to be ungracious to one who had uniformly treated him with the utmost courtesy and kindness; but there are certain words, which, once ut'tered, whether directed towards myself or my friend, cancel every obligation; nor can I affect to feel their power lessened on account of their being uttered by the wife of my friend.' He then describes language used in presence of the elder children, which had constituted the unpardonable offence, and which he declares to have had no provocation. It commenced by upbraiding you for conduct excessively bad towards herself; ⚫ but her own statement, as well as your answer, certainly proved 'that you were blameless, and I ventured to point out her mis'take. Unfortunately no attention was paid to either of us; ' and still more unfortunately-' But the story is an old and familiar one, that it is the very consciousness of our own injustice which will make us add to the injury we inflict, and that, by doing all we can to aggravate the wrong we commit, we seem to justify ourselves for committing it.

'I am ashamed to write down the words, but to hear them was painful.... I am afraid my patience would have left me in a tenth part of the time; but you, to my astonishment, sat with a composed countenance, never once making use of an uncivil expression, unless the following may be so considered, when, after about an hour, she seemed exhausted: "I beg, madam, you will, if you think proper, proceed; as I made up my mind, from the first, to endure at least twice as much as you have been yet pleased to speak." After dinner, when I saw her leave the room, I followed, and again pointed out her mistake; when she readily agreed with me, saying she was convinced you were not to blame. At this I could not forbear exclaiming, "Well, then?" in the hope of bearing back

to you some slight acknowledgment of regret on her part: but in this I was disappointed. You conclude your letter with, "I feel confident you will write a few lines, exculpating me, if you think I have acted with propriety in very trying circumstances; and condemning me, if I acted with violence, precipitation, or rudeness." For more than eleven years I have been intimate with you, and, during that time, frequenting your house, I never once saw you behave towards Mrs. Landor otherwise than with the most gentlemanly demeanour, while your love for your children was unbounded. I was always aware that you gave entire control into her hands over the children, the servants, and the management of the house; and, when vexed or annoyed at anything, I could not but remark that you were in the habit of requesting the cause to be remedied or removed, as a favour to yourself. All this I have more than once repeated to Mrs. Landor in answer to her accusations against you, which I could never well comprehend. When I have elsewhere heard you accused of being a violent man, I have frankly acknowledged it; limiting however your violence to persons guilty of meanness, roguery, or duplicity; by which I meant, and said, that you utterly lost your temper with the Italians.'

It will not be supposed that these sentences, or even the entire contents of the letter, if it had been possible to quote them, are thought by me to afford the justification for which they were sought by Landor and written by his friend: but what they tell has the value of suggesting much that the writer had not the power to tell; the gentlemanly demeanour' and the 'unbounded 'love' are significant of more than was intended by such contrasted expressions; and in the scene referred to, taken at its worst, even in the step that followed, extravagant as it was, the reader of former passages of this work may possibly see but the sequel of what could not ever have been expected to have favourable issue. If, at the same time, I have delineated fairly the character it was my purpose to express, it will seem that no injury so fatal could be done, nor any offence so unpardonable be committed, as one that might wound such a man in his self-love by lowering him in his own opinion before others, with whom especially he desired to stand well. He fled from his young wife at Jersey, not because of her expressions, but because her little sister heard them; and he had now the same reason for deserting his home at Fiesole, without, alas, the same excuse for returning. It was a home that must in future have always listeners for such disputes; and perhaps, with every day that now passed, disposed more and more themselves to take part in them. 'It 'was not willingly,' he wrote to Southey, that I left Tuscany