'ing. I told Lady Blessington I should not let any of her court
'stand at all in my way. When I am tired of them, I leave them.
'But if you come, I can fly to you at once in case of annoyance.
'Courtesy is not an unpleasant exercise for a little while. It is
like riding a spirited horse well enough to show we can keep
'our seat and do it gracefully, but there is no occasion to be at
'it all day long. It is quite enough to let the beast know that
' he has a master who is up to him and the worst of his curvets
and prances.' Not after the visit did he so speak of the house
in which his happiest London life was passed. Of all others it
was that in which he felt the least constraint, and found al-
ways the warmest welcome. Its attraction was even less the
accomplishment or grace of its mistress, than her constancy
and trueheartedness in friendship; and, of all who had familiar
access there, none had better reason to know it than Landor.
Again and again he dwells upon it in letters to his sister. From
the splendour of the mansion, the taste and order of its in-
terior, the extent and beauty of its pleasure-grounds, its com-
pany of men the most distinguished and of opinions the most
various and opposed, - he comes always back to its central
charm, the unaffectedness and warmth of heart that presided
over all, and formed its highest enjoyment to every one who
entered it. He had himself at last quite a tender friendship for
two lilac-trees that flowered under the terrace where he had his
favourite seat, overlooking what tradition still eagerly claimed
as the birthplace and deathplace of the two greatest of English
sovereigns, Elizabeth and Cromwell; and if he did not, as each
year came round, appear when those lilacs were in bloom, he
was playfully reminded that they waited and were drooping for
him. All are gone now; a public garden has swallowed up
house and terrace, and Cromwell-roads and Cromwell-houses
have covered once-memorable spots with mere shadows of a
name; but there are some who never pass where they once were
without thinking of her to whom their pleasantest associations
belong, and who merited so well the grateful affection which
Landor was always eager to express for her.

♦White and dim-purple breath'd my favourite pair
Under thy terrace, hospitable heart,

Whom twenty summers more and more endear'd;
Part on the Arno, part where every clime
Sent its most graceful sons to kiss thy hand,
To make the humble proud, the proud submiss,
Wiser the wisest, and the brave more brave.
Never, ah never now, shall we alight

Where the man-queen was born, or, higher up,

The nobler region of a nobler soul,

Where breath'd his last the more than kingly man.

Thou sleepest, not forgotten nor unmourn'd,

Beneath the chestnut-shade by Saint Germain.'

From other letters written to myself at this time I take one or two notes. The first arose out of some remarks made by me on his Pericles; and never, I think, was there better refutation of a common fallacy that great men who have succeeded to the great, and are mounted as it were on their shoulders, must necessarily be of taller stature and wider vision than their prede

cessors.

'Critics, in supposing that improvements were constantly made in poetry by the successors of the first great masters, add an apex to the accumulated foolery of ages. Thus not only was Virgil preferred to Homer (and especially in those very qualities in which he is most signally the inferior), but Euripides to Sophocles, and Sophocles to Eschylus. Whereas there is enough of materials in Eschylus to equip a troop of the first of these rivals, and a squadron of the second. . . Nothing is more skilful in the Attic scheme than the dramas of Eschylus, nude as the heroes and gods, and as well-proportioned and potent. In him there is no trickery, no trifling, no delay, no exposition, no garrulity, no dogmatism, no declamation, no prosing; none of the invidious sneers, none of the captions sophistry of the Socratic school; but the loud clear challenge, the firm unstealthy step, of an erect broad-breasted soldier. Depend on it that the reader to whom is granted an ardent mind with a clear judgment, will discover in Eschylus a far higher power of poetry than in those ancients who drug us with soporific apophthegms, or in those moderns who mystify us with impenetrable metaphysics. Our best sympathies rest ever among the generous, among the brave, among those who are fallen from the summits of the world; and our hearts are the most healthily warmed when they are drawn before their sufferings and wrongs. I scarcely dare lift up my eyes when I remember that on this subject I differ, although but in a degree, from Aristoteles. He however had seen only a few headlands: the continent of Shakespeare, with its prodigious range of inextinguishable fires, its rivers of golden sands, its very desarts paved with jewels, its forests of unknown plants to which the known were dwarfs, this unpromised and unexpected land, in all its freshness and variety and magnitude, was to emerge.'

In connexion with the same book and the specimens it con

tains of orators, I had asked him what he thought the finest thing in that kind, modern or ancient; and he answered without hesitation by naming these dozen words of Chatham: 'The 'first shot that is fired in America separates the two coun'tries.'

'What searching sagacity! what inevitable truth! The surest sign of a great prophecy is the coincidence of admiration and unbelief. For any thing like this of our last and almost only grand minister, we must press through the crowd of orators, we must pass Cicero, we must pass Demosthenes, we must raise up our eyes to Pericles, when he tells the childless of the Athenians that "the year hath lost its spring."'

Another of his supreme favourites was Romilly, for whom his love and admiration never changed or faltered. One of his letters to me written after his 80th year expressed the delight with which he had again been reading the memoir of him by his sons; and almost the earliest letter I had from him contained these sentences.

'No ministry ever thought of raising Romilly to the peerage, although never was a gentleman of his profession respected more highly or more universally. The reason could not be that already too many of it had entered the house of lords; since every wind of every day had blown bellying silk gowns to that quarter, and under the highest walls of Westminster was moored a long galley of lawyers, chained by the leg to their administrations, some designated by the names of fishing-towns and bathing-machines they had never entered, and others of hamlets and farms they had recently invaded.'

II. THE PENTAMERON OF BOCCACCIO AND PETRARCA.

When Armitage Brown thanked Landor for this little volume, saying that never had he devoured a book with fiercer appetite, he also reminded him that already he had heard some portion of it under the hills of Fiesole. There it had been begun, and on every lustrous page of it will be found the genius of the country that so gave it birth. I have spoken of the memories of Boccaccio that were on all sides of Landor in his new home, from whose gate up to the gates of Florence there was hardly a street or farm that the great story-teller had not associated with some witty or affecting narrative. The place was everywhere peopled by his genius with creatures that neither seasons nor factions had been able to change. Landor had but to look

around him from his villa to see fulfilment of the prediction he puts in the mouth of Petrarca, that long before the Decameron would cease to be recited under those arching vines, the worms would be the only fighters for Guelph or Ghibelline; and that even under visitations as terrible as are described in its pages, they would remain a solace to all who could find refuge and relief in letters.

Such a refuge and relief had they been to Landor in every plague by which he had been visited, and this book was payment for a portion of the debt. Boccaccio is its hero; and the idea of it was doubtless taken from his letter to Petrarca accompanying the copy of Dante transcribed by himself for his use, inviting him to look more closely into it, and if possible to admire it more. In his illness at Certaldo he is visited by his friend; during interviews that occupy five several days, the Divine Comedy is the subject of their talk; and very wonderful talk it is that can make any subject, however great, the centre of so wide a range of scholarship and learning and of such abounding wealth of illustration, can press into the service of argument such a delightful profusion of metaphor and imagery, can mingle humour and wit with so much tenderness and wisdom, and can clothe in language of consummate beauty so much dignity and variety of thought. But amidst it all we never lose our interest in the simple and kindly old burgess of Certaldo and his belongings; his little maid Assunta and her lover; even the rascally old frate confessor, who suggests his last witty story: and not more delightful is the grave Petrarca when his eloquence is at its best, than in the quaint little scene where Assuntina has to girth-up his palfrey for him.

The title of the book should be given in full. The Pentameron; or Interviews of Messer Giovanni Boccaccio and Messer Francesco Petrarca, when said Messer Giovanni lay infirm at Viletta hard by Certaldo: after which they saw not each other on our side of Paradise: shewing how they discoursed upon that famous Theologian Messer Dante Alighieri, and sundry other matters. Edited by Pievano D. Grigi. And here I may remark that Mr. Kirkup, the greatest authority in everything relating to Dante, thinks it as much an error of his friend to have called

him Messer as if some Italian critic had called himself Sir Landor.

'In all the legal documents I have of the sale of Peter Dante's estate he is called Dominus Petrus filius Dantii Allighierii: Dominus being the Latin for Lord or Messire, the title applied to a judge in the republic, while poor Dante is named as a common citizen in the same legal deeds in which his son is always styled Messire, or Dominus.'

All which might be perfectly true, said Landor pleasantly, but perhaps the prete Grigi, who thought Dante memorable only for his theology, did not know it; and as on the title-page of the Shakespeare we find only Mr. Ephraim Barnett's name, so on this stands only Domenico Grigi's.

Landor had no ground for complaining of the reception of this book, by the few whose good opinion he valued and for the rest he had but to remember, what is said in the course of it, that what makes the greatest vernal shoot is apt to make the least autumnal; that what was true of the fame of Marcellus, 'crescit occulto velut arbor ævo,' is true of every other fame; and that since we can hardly hope for this, and enjoy immediate celebrity besides, the few may be held supremely fortunate to whom a choice between the two has been given. Upon the same subject, in that highest aspect of it which takes the form of admonition to the worshippers of immediate ascendencies, this very volume contained a saying remarkable for its beauty. It occurred in a note to the five dramatic scenes which originally closed the Pentameron with a Pentalogia; one of them being the quarrel of Bacon and Essex, where Bacon's proud belief in his own superiority to all living men, drawn from him by the contempt of Essex, is thus checked by Landor.

'Bacon little knew or suspected that there was then existing (the only one that ever did exist) his superior in intellectual power. Position gives magnitude. While the world was rolling above Shakespeare, he was seen imperfectly when he rose above the world, it was discovered that he was greater than the world. The most honest of his contemporaries would scarcely have admitted this, even had they known it. But vast objects of remote altitude must be looked at a long while before they are ascertained. Ages are the telescope-tubes that must be lengthened out for Shakespeare; and generations of men serve but as single witnesses to his claims.'

'I was at Talfourd's yesterday,' wrote Kenyon soon after the volume appeared, and was condemned to listen on all sides to