6

' and my children. There was but one spot upon earth on which I had fixed my heart, and four objects on which my affection 'rested. That they might not hear every day such language as 'no decent person should ever hear once, nor despise both pa'rents, I left the only delight of my existence.' The conclusion nevertheless is forced upon us, that it was more for his own sake than for theirs the extraordinary determination was taken. He could not believe, if we are to trust the language always afterwards used by him, that, with his own mere withdrawal from his home, all indecency of language or temper was to cease there forever; and the more he condemns what had become unbearable by himself, the more he condemns himself for having left his children exposed to it.

It is true that attempts were made for him by friends, in which he took part more or less eagerly, to induce at least the two elder children to join him in England; he had so far settled as to engage to meet them at Verona with a hope of their coming back with him; in negotiations having this in view, or similar but more partial concessions, Francis Hare and his relative Mrs. Dashwood, Miss Mackenzie of Seaforth, his friend Ablett, and others very warmly engaged: there were even proposals for his own return urged in the year of his flight by his wife's relatives in England, pressed upon him two years afterwards by Crabb Robinson when visiting Italy with Wordsworth, and revived, at the instance of Mrs. Landor herself,* when Kenyon was at Fiesole with Mr. Bezzi two years later; but to these last overtures the only answer was a peremptory negative, and, under objections that would have seemed to me very far from insuperable, all the other endeavours broke down. I am bound to add, at the same time, that to an excessively urgent appeal from Mr. Ravenshaw, who had married one of his wife's sisters, Landor made detailed reply of such a character as to elicit from his brother-in-law frank admission of the strength of the grounds on

• Their mother' (I quote Mr. Bezzi's letter to Landor, 19th November 1839), as you well know, does not-perhaps cannot-exercise any wholesome control over them' (the children); she plainly admits this: and adduces it as a reason, among others, why she wishes and hopes 'you will return.'

which his refusal to comply was based; nor was the application from that quarter ever renewed. I am sure you are wanted at 'home,' wrote Crabb Robinson to him from the villa itself in June 1837, and that your presence might have the happiest 'effect on the character of your children.

as to the happiness of your daughter.'

It might be decisive 'I wish to Heaven

'Julia were with you,' Mr. James had written to him in the same month of the previous year 1836. It would be a com'fort to you and a blessing to her; for Italy, and Italy without

a father's care, is a sad land for young fair woman.' Between these dates I ventured myself to make inquiry if there were any chance of his consenting to return; and his reply gave me no hope whatever. The condition he would have imposed rendered it equally impossible that he should rejoin his children in Italy, or that, with the decision at which the elder ones had arrived respecting their mother, they should join him in England. He enclosed to me with his letter at the time, I well remember, a then unfinished Conversation in which he had just written these

sentences:

'Negligence of order and propriety, of duties and civilities, long endured, often deprecated, ceases to be tolerable, when children grow up and are in danger of following the example. It often happens that, if a man unhappy in the married state were to disclose the manifold causes of his uneasiness, they would be found-by those who were beyond their influence to be of such a nature as rather to excite derision than sympathy. The waters of bitterness do not fall on his head in a cataract, but through a colander: one however like the vases of the Danaides, perforated only for replenishment. We know scarcely the vestibule of a house of which we fancy we have penetrated all the corners. We know not how grievously a man may have suffered, long before the calumnies of the world befell him as he reluctantly left his house-door. There are women from whom incessant tears of anger swell forth at imaginary wrongs; but of contrition for their own delinquencies, not one.'

'Arrangements' continued nevertheless to be suggested, and there were even active measures on foot to give them trial, going so far in one instance as the engagement of a house near Plymouth, in which the mother might reside with all the children, the father living in lodgings near ;* but I believe his own resolve The unceasing efforts of Francis Hare and his cousin Mrs. Dashwood brought matters thus far. The latter wrote, in November 1837, to Landor's sister Elizabeth, that he had consented to allow the whole family

to have been now so decisively and so finally taken that at this point I quit the subject. Whatever farther illustration it receives in these pages will be from circumstances or allusions unavoidably incident to the narrative.

In the month when he quitted Florence he had a letter from Francis Hare, at this time in Rome, full of pleasure and wonder at his Shakespeare; telling him his genius had become stronger of wing under the heights of Fiesole; hoping that his volume of unpublished Conversations had been found; and suggesting as a subject for a new conversation to be added to it, the meeting and dinner of Pope Julius the Second, during his flight from Rome, with the two cardinals that succeeded him as Popes Leo and Clement. It was a good subject, but an unlucky time; and as to the missing Conversations Landor had to reply even less favourably. He had just received a letter from Mr. Willis giving doubtful hope of their recovery. The effusion was characteristic.

'I have to beg that you will lay to the charge of England a part of the annoyance you will feel about your books and мs. I was never more flattered by a commission, and I have never fulfilled one so ill. They went to America viâ Leghorn, and I expected fully to have arrived in New York a month or two after them. But here I am still, and here I fear I shall be for six months or a year to come. I will write immediately to the United States for them.'

England was the culprit for having treated Mr. N. P. Willis so well that he could not find it in his heart to quit the entertaining land. He was become Anglomane. I think no king ' in Europe lives half so well' as he had lived in Gordon-castle and other Scotch houses, and in the hospitable halls of Lady Blessington. As for what Landor had written to him in praise

to come to England in the following April. 'A more affectionate letter 'than usual from Arnold, and a most kind and sensible one from my ex'cellent cousin Francis Hare, strongly advising the step for his children's sake, have led to this.' Landor had written to her: 'I shall tell him (F. H.) that they may all come next April, on condition that I never see her.' Of course it all went off; and in the next following month, at the end of a letter describing a proposal of Dr. Conolly's to restore 'Shake'speare's chapel,' to which he had subscribed five pounds, he named Mrs. Dashwood's scheme to me as a thing of the past, speaking at the same time very highly of her kindness.

of New England,-well, Mr. Willis thought that country really did deserve not ill of his respect':

But it is an ungracious people, and best judged at a distance. They would offend your notions of what is due from one gentleman to another every hour if you lived among them, while in the great outline (all that is seen in the distance) they are a just and intelligent race, and good trustees of one's birthright of national pride. The perfection of good fortune, I think, is to be an American and live with Englishmen.'

Landor will be thought perhaps not without excuse for the way in which he always afterwards spoke of Mr. N. P. Willis. Before quitting Italy he stayed some time at the Baths of Lucca, and he did not arrive in England until the autumn of 1835. He stayed three months at Llanbedr-hall with Mr. Ablett, passed the winter months at Clifton, and rejoined his friend at Llanbedr in the spring of 1836.

Bb

BOOK SEVENTH.

1836-1857. ÆT. 61-82.

TWENTY-ONE YEARS AT BATH.

1. New and Old Friendships. 11. The Pentameron of Boccaccio and Petrarca. III. Writing Plays. IV. Visits and Visitors. v. Death of Southey. VI. Last Series of Conversations. VII. A Friend not Literary. VIII. Reviews, Collected Works, Poemata et Inscriptiones, and Hellenics. IX. Summer Holidays and Guests at Home. x. Deaths of Old Friends. XI. Fruit gathered from an Old Tree. x. Silent Companions. XIII. Last Days in Bath, and Final Departure from England.

I. NEW AND OLD FRIENDSHIPS.

1 HAVE described on a former page the impression made upon me by Landor when I met him first in the summer of 1836. He and Wordsworth had come to town expressly to witness Talfourd's Ion; with Crabb Robinson they occupied the same box on the first night of that beautiful tragedy; and well satisfied they seemed with themselves and with each other, as, to many who watched them during the performance, they half divided the interest with the play. We all of us met afterwards at Talfourd's house; but, of the talk that might have made such a night memorable, I regret that I recollect only one thing (impressed upon my memory by what followed a little later), that when the absence of Southey was deplored, in connection with the domestic griefs that sadly occupied him at the time, there was an expression of feeling from both Wordsworth and Landor of unrestrained and unaffected earnestness. When a very few weeks had passed after this, it was not a little startling to receive a Satire on Satirists very evidently by Landor, in which Wordsworth was handled sharply for alleged disrespect to Southey.

It is hardly worth mention here. It made Crabb Robinson very angry, and, to propitiate him, Landor good-naturedly called