'publications must have appeared almost seventy years ago. A small volume of poems, which were withdrawn or suppressed 'without any reason that I can remember,* excepting that he hoped to write better soon. There was nothing among them, "I think, discreditable in any way to a man barely twenty years 'old. But he seems to have wished that they should be forgotten, even before the publication of Gebir two or three years later.' The wish was a natural one, and it will be found very shortly that Landor himself gives good reasons for it; but a book is as hard to withdraw as to circulate, and there is no rule so common as the rule of contrary in such things. It may be shrewdly suspected that the Poems went farther than Gebir for the very reason that suggested the desire to suppress them. A letter is before me written to Landor from Oxford early in 1795 by Mr. Clarke, already a fellow of his own college of Trinity, in which this remark is made: For myself, what can I do? You know nescit vox missa reverti. But these little things 'promote the sale of the copies of your volume in the University, so that the booksellers here are at present out of a supply.' The grave, good-natured writer, older than Landor by many years and to whom a living had just fallen from his college, can thus without anger refer to some lines addressed to Doctor Warton containing a personal attack on himself, for which the only provocation seems to have been that he was friend to another of the fellows of Trinity named Kett, who had been the solitary dissentient from Doctor Chapman's good-humoured invitation that Landor should come back to the college; an ill turn which Landor resented to the close of Kett's unhappy life. There is however no trace of anger in Clarke's letter; he thinks more of expressing his delight at the poetry and scholarship of the book than of taking offence at its personalities; and what he says of various parts of the volume, and in especial of its fifty pages of Poematum Latinorum Libellus et Latine scribendi Defensio, testifies now very strongly to the impression made then upon the Oxford graduates and masters by the powers of this unruly lad of twenty. He thinks that Catullus himself might have been proud of the Hendecasyllabi ;' wishes that courts. • See post, second section of Second Book, p. 71. and courtiers could but be reformed by the political pieces; declares that Persius never excelled the ease and concinnity of a certain Invocation; says of a couplet for a Quaker's tankard, 'Ye lie, friend Pindar! and friend Thales! Nothing so good as water? Ale is! that he had seen one of the dons laughing over it heartily; and of another at the hundred-and-thirty-third page, on Tucker's treatise concerning civil government in opposition to Locke, Thee, meek Episcopy! shall kings unfrock Ere Tucker triumph over sense and Locke!' avers that he saw Tucker himself overlooking page 133.' This forgiving fellow of Trinity, in short, has only one regret in connection with his assailant—that he had, owing to some misunderstanding about the letting of his rooms to him at his first entering the college, lost the honour of having Landor for a tenant: especially as, but for that, you might now have been a resident amongst us; and with the pipe of antiquity on which you so sweetly play, directed upwards, you might have charmed any uncouth inhabitant of your zenith, instead of having 'alarmed the horizon by an instrument placed at right angles 'with your shoulder.' 6 A word may be added of the Invocation to which the letter refers, and which seems to me in some points noticeable still. The treasonable turn of its last couplet is characteristic; and, even for readers now, there is some interest in its terse summary of the so-called poets whom the general dulness had thrown into prominence since the deaths of Goldsmith and Gray. As yet the voice of Cowper had but faintly been heard; Burns had still to be naturalised in England; while Wordsworth, Coleridge, Lamb, and Southey were only trying and sounding their instruments in small publications at Bristol. Tho', Helicon! I seldom dream Or aught that pleases one in Crowe; Yet thus, a saucy suppliant bard, I court the Muse's kind regard "O whether, Muse! thou please to give Or tell me the decrees of Fate Have ordered them a shorter date I bow. Yet O, may every word Survive, however, George the Third!"' VIII. A FAIR INTERCESSOR. At Warwick meanwhile, as I have said, kind friends were interceding to rescue Landor from any farther ill consequence arising from the shot that had so startled the 'uncouth inhabit'ant' of Trinity; and now that we are all dead, as Sydney Smith says, the name of one of the intercessors may be singled out. This was Dorothea Lyttelton, the chosen friend of Landor's eldest sister, Elizabeth; who lived with her two rich bachelor uncles at Studley-castle, sixteen miles from Warwick and very near to Ipsley-court; who was known to be not only heiress to both uncles, but already to possess in her beauty a more enviable dowry; whom everybody, for miles about, naturally was in love with; and who had not yet smiled on any of those countless suitors, though youths of all but the highest rank were said to be among them. The whole of the brothers Landor she of course led captive; and a tale is told of the youngest, that when two or three years hence she had relented and was a bride,* and he, a lad of fifteen, had gone into her presence bent upon slaying her bridegroom in single combat with spears or bows and arrows, she suddenly, to his extreme mortification, displaced those desperate thoughts by taking him in her arms and kissing him. We may gather at least from the story what the family intimacy with Miss Lyttelton was; and we have proof that an elder brother * Almost as I write these words, the papers announce the death of this lady's son. We regret to announce the decease of Sir Francis Goodricke, Bart. at Malvern. Born in November 1797, he was the eldest son of 'Francis Holyoake, Esq. of Tettenhall, in Staffordshire, and Studley'castle, Warwickshire, by Dorothy Elizabeth, niece and heiress of Philip Lyttelton, Esq. of Studley-castle. He was member for Stafford in 1835; was afterwards returned for South Staffordshire; in 1834 filled the office of high-sheriff of Warwickshire; and in 1835 was created a baronet.' 4 6 had been more presuming. I ought to remember well that name, and little notes to my sister subscribed D. Lyttelton,' wrote Landor to me in his eightieth year, correcting Leigh Hunt's spelling of the name in his book about Kensington. 'The estate ' of Studley-castle joined Ipsley-court, and there dwelt one whom Lady Hertford, the best judge of beauty in the world, called 'the most lovely and graceful creature she had ever known. Every day of the vacations I went over there. It soon was 'Walter and Dorothea; her uncles, too, called me Walter, and liked me heartily; and if I had then been independent, I should have married this lovely girl.' Tales told by hope are often too flattering, but we have better means than usual of judging whether it was so here. Among his papers I found a packet of her letters carefully kept and indorsed by him, and addressed to him at his London lodgings in Beaumont-street in those early months of 1795; and there will be now no breach of confidence in admitting the reader to some glimpses of them. The first shows her very anxious about his sister Elizabeth, with whom she has been passing some days after the incident that had happened to him at college, when she talked of you to 'me, and distresses herself more than you can imagine.' He had been their constant theme. To talk about him was the only consolation for his absence, which had diminished the happiness of her own visit to Warwick. Never, she prays him, is he to be so cruel to her nice little friend Elizabeth' as not to correspond with her. The omission was promptly repaired; and in her next letter she tells him how he had charmed his sister by writing to her, and me by the compliment of attending to my ' request! She wrote to me in ecstasies.' 6 Then there is a question as to some promise about a bit of ribbon he has charged her with having broken; but she will not regret an apparent forgetfulness that has proved his remembrance of her, and gratified her vanity by convincing her that the insignificance of a bit of ribbon may derive worth from her presenting it to him. At once, upon having his letter, she had sent to her friend citoyenne Johnstone, who is now at that metropolis of dissension and aristocracy, Birmingham,' to procure her the colours; and, would he believe it? the citoyenne has sent a light blue instead of a dark purple! But really it is the ignorance that has angered her more than the delay; for, to say the truth, I cannot think you mean in earnest I should pack off two or three bits of ribbon those number of miles! If I am mistaken, it rests with you to rectify it; and, upon ' demand, here will be the real colours to tie up for your watch'chain.' This demand of course came, and the bits of ribbon went. 6 There is next the arrival of the Poems; which she sits up reading till one o'clock in the morning, and then cannot 'compose herself to sleep' till she has told him what 'exquisite de'light' they had given her; and not the printed book only, but verses in manuscript, and lines addressed to herself! How is she to find words to thank him; and ought she indeed to thank him for making her inordinately vain! But what a talent it is! and, when existing with a disposition equally happy, how great the power it gives its possessor to oblige all whom he may honour with the name of friend! These verses, how I could talk of them! What I have, I can repeat as fluently as the author himself, and am longing for my memory to be farther charged.' She had only to continue to long until the next post; which conveyed to her the proof of what her following letter expressed in thanking him, that her wish was become a command. If additional evidence were wanting, however, to show in all that has thus been quoted but the friendly familiarity of a good-humoured girl for the brother of her friend, a year or two younger than herself, whose cleverness she admired and whose attentions pleased her, the other contents of that last-named letter would supply it. She had been told of his intention, already named to Walter Birch, to betake himself to Italy; and not content with a vehement disapproval of this plan, she bestirs herself on the instant with much zeal to prevent it. She begins by thanking him for having taken so much trouble to explain his situation, for to talk of himself is more interesting to her than any other subject. They had already heard at Studley of the unfortunate misunderstanding between him and his father, and hoped it might be reconciled. But now she must |