In the same year (1845) he described to his sister his way of life.

'I walk out in all weathers six miles a day at the least; and I generally, unless I am engaged in the evening, read from seven till twelve or one. I sleep twenty minutes after dinner, and nearly four hours at night, or rather in the morning. I rise at nine, breakfast at ten, and dine at five. All winter I have had some beautiful sweet daphnes and hyacinths in my windows.'

Inquiring in another letter after her dahlias, which he fears the fogs will abolish, he tells her he never sees or hears the name without recollecting a story told of one of Sir Lucius O'Trigger's countrymen, to whom a lady said, 'Mr. Flanagan, I am quite certain you are an admirer of dahlias! Why then, 'faith, madam,' was his reply, they accuse me very wrong'fully. I know enough about 'em; but sure, on my conscience, I have had mighty little to say to 'em.' The experience of Mr. Flanagan, like that of Sir Lucius, had been limited to Delis, which the Irish pronounce the same.' This 1845 was the year of his brother Robert's publication of the Fawn of Sertorius, which, while everybody praised, nearly all persisted in throwing into the elder brother's lap, and Walter in another of his letters had to tell his sister that he had declared 'to a ⚫ dozen of them at least' that he neither wrote it nor was capable of writing it, nor had seen a single page of it before it was in print.

But having here anticipated somewhat, I go back for a few notices of earlier days. In 1841 he describes to his sister a visit to the rectory at Birlingham, of all places seen by him since his return to England that which had pleased him most; and where he had found their brother Robert the owner of fine pictures, and of grounds laid out with consummate taste, 'living like a prince-bishop.' In the same year he tells her, as already he had told his brother, of the delight and wonder with which he had read Robert's Tragedies, protesting that, in this 'century or the last,' there had been nothing like the Ferryman: and he tells her, too, of the singular grief and low spirits he was in at losing his greatest friend in Bath, with whom he usually spent some hours of every day, General William Napier, just appointed governor of Guernsey. In another letter he ex

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presses the wish that there should be a celebration of Robert's having reached his grand climacteric and got well into the sixties, by invitation from her to all the brothers, himself and Charles, Henry and Robert, to spend one more Christmas-day together. It could scarcely be so merry as several of the former ones had been, and perhaps the recollection of those might a little sadden them; but was not there something of sadness in all such days? Not at this latter part of life only, but at every other, he had himself been most inclined to melancholy on days of festival. 'My birthday, as long as I can remember, was a 'day of strange and unaccountable emotion to me; and in all 'my pleasures there has been more of softness than of serenity.' But, enjoyment may be just as keen for being shaded with a touch of sadness; and I had too frequent and large a part in the grave glad pleasures of that day not to know that he was able to get out of it, even to the very last of them enjoyed by us together, more mirth than melancholy. Acknowledging this letter, his sister gladly accepted its proposal, and in farther hospitable greeting sent him (his favourite dish at her Warwick breakfasts) a dried salmon. It has come,' he replied, 'in all its glory. At first I doubted whether it might not be an alligator, from the size of it; and I thought of opening my sash and calling a chairman to carry it to the Museum. But recollecting what you had promised me in a former letter, I staid 6 my steps.'

In the next year (1842) he sets her upon searching the old Warwick house for papers of his boyhood, remembered still. Anciently there were some bits of my Latin poetry and other 'such stuif in a chest of drawers which stood in my bedroom,

now a dressing-room. Most of these were translations of Cowley into Latin verse, and correcting his extravagance. This is 'curious at so early an age, for I did it at about sixteen.' In the same letter he speaks pleasantly of the marriage of his niece Teresita Stopford to Lord Charles Beauclerc; tells of an expected visit from Fiesole of his daughter and second son; and bids her inform his brother Henry that he beats him in flowers, having to boast in that October month of a tube-rose five feet high. I have also a young kitten; but she mews eternally,

and tells me in plain language that old people and young never do well together.' The way for Pomero had been prepared by this failure of the young kitten; in her place, after a very few months, the little hero was installed; and his sister heard as much of him in all the later years as I did. He wrote to her in the summer of 1844:

'Let me congratulate you on the accident that deprives you of your carriage-horses. Next to servants, horses are the greatest trouble in life. Dogs are blessings, true blessings. Pomero, who sends his love, is the comfort of my solitude and the delight of my life. He is quite a public character here in Bath. Everybody knows him and salutes him. He barks alond at all-familiarly, not fiercely. He takes equal liberties with his fellow-creatures, if indeed dogs are more his fellow-creatures than I am. I think it was Saint Francis de Sales who called birds and quadrupeds his sisters and brothers. Few saints have been so good-tempered, and not many so wise.'

And in the same kindly spirit to all dumb creatures he speaks in another letter of field-sports.

Let men do these things if they will. Perhaps there is no harm in it; perhaps it makes them no crueler than they would be otherwise. But it is hard to take away what we cannot give; and life is a pleasant thing, at least to birds. No doubt the young ones say tender things one to another, and even the old ones do not dream of death.'

The reader will understand why I thus desire Landor to be judged as well by his gentler sayings in private intercourse as by his louder public utterances. They in some sort explain each other, and certainly will help to the better understanding of each other. Sir William Napier well remarked to a friend offended by his intemperate assaults on King Bomba or some other favourite aversion:

You do not know Landor. In matters of that sort he is reckless in expression only. What is savage in his speech does not spring from anything savage in his nature. Those wild cries of his at seeing his fellow-creatures overridden by injustice or tyranny are but the sign of an honest human feeling and a deep compassion. He has the lion-heart that springs forward to tear the wrong-doer, and the chained lion's roar of fury when he finds that he cannot reach him. Yet, if he saw tyrannicide lifting the knife, I am well convinced he would rather himself receive the blow than let it fall on the man it was aimed at.'

Upon such outbreaks, as generally upon his vehement contributions to matters of public controversy during both his early

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and later years in Bath, I do not care to dwell, though I was chiefly responsible for giving them to the world. The Napier apology is worth much; but the evidence and the witness must be taken together, and the testimony is not without a flaw. Napier himself had much in common with his friend, not merely of chivalrous spirit, disinterested aims, and a character incapable of meanness, but also of arrogant temper, resentful impatience of differences of opinion, and a proneness to express with violence views somewhat recklessly formed. But having said this, there is nothing more to be said. A never-ceasing and quite unwearying hatred of oppression animated both; and whatever else was to be remarked of Landor's comments on passing events, the charge was not at any time to be made of siding with the strong against the weak, or of passing over the neglected and unregarded. Somebody at this time compared his weekly onslaughts on what he took to be scandals in church or state, to the growls of an ancient cynic worried by the sight of purple and fine linen, describing him as tame and civil before, nay as even fawning on, the tatters of adversity: and when that is nearly the worst that can be urged of an ungovernable temper, it is hardly an unpardonable sin. I will only add, before quitting this subject, that he wrote frequently on the condition of Ireland, and for the most part with a gravity and impartiality into which faults of temper entered rarely. He remonstrated with O'Connell, when at the height of his repeal agitation, for wasting upon a design both foolish and impracticable powers that might have forced upon attention the true and attainable remedies; and to Mr. Thomas Davis, the creator and leader of the party which subsequently broke down O'Connell's influence, he addressed truths not less unpalatable. Davis had, in my judgment, qualities that would have made him incomparably the ablest politician produced by Ireland in our day; and his premature death, before what was crude and immature in his opinions had time to ripen, was a great calamity. He had much admiration for Landor, and was especially grateful to him for the help he had given in various ways to Father Mathew's crusade against intemperance. Landor had indeed an excessive admiration for that worthy parish priest, to whose noble enterprise

he was never tired of sending money and other active help. I am not sure that he did not think the humble and reverend father to be the only true successor of the apostles living in our age.

IX. REVIEWS, COLLECTED WORKS, POEMATA ET INSCRIPTIONES, AND HELLENICS.

In August 1842 Robert Landor wrote to his brother that he had been reading with unusual satisfaction two reviews lately written by him, on Catullus and on Theocritus; and that besides the pleasure he had derived from the completeness and refinement of the criticism, they had given him a pleasure of another kind which he could hardly specify without implying something a little disrespectful.

They are as remarkable for their candour and moderation as for other qualities of which I felt more certain; and, in speaking of our own poets now living, there is the same freedom from prejudice as in your observations on those who have been dead these two thousand years. Nor can I believe that there is an idyl of Theocritus more tender or graceful, or even more classical, than that of the Hamadryad. The conclusion appears to me more like the sweetest parts of Gebir than anything you have written, and much more delicate in its pathos than any other person has written, since.'

These essays, as well as a later one on Petrarch, were written for a review at my request, and they well deserve what is thus said of them. For Pindar and Horace he also collected materials, and there is a passage in the Petrarch paper which makes it matter of special regret that they were not written. It was not his habit to be quite just to Horace, but here he says: 'One 'poet is not to be raised by casting another under him. Catullus is made no richer by an attempt to transfer to him what belongs to Horace, nor Horace by what belongs to Catullus. 'Catullus has greatly more than he; but he also has much, and let him keep it.' No injustice more grave is committed in criticism than when one writer is thus pitted against another. The genius of Catullus you may think supreme, but that Horace is more of a favourite with greater numbers of people is a fact as little to be doubted. A critic, if unable otherwise to account for the fact, should consider this power to engage and delight many minds as no small merit in itself; if nothing else, as at