tell him that she is in a humour to preach a little to him. Is he disposed to profit by a lecture? He will say she is determined to disapprove of all his schemes; but against this journey to Italy she must loudly exclaim, as she would also against any other as distant. There she is decided. I would have people 'with superior worth and abilities stay and distinguish them'selves where example, in most wise and good things, is so much wanting. I really do not see,' she continued, proceeding to lay all the blame on the French revolution, though as wise and gentle a monitor might to the very close of his life have applied the words she is using now at its beginning: 'I do not see why you should be so disgusted with people in general of 'your own country, when to my certain knowledge you have more than your share of friends. But this vile party political work, which now rages through the whole world, destroys 'happiness both domestic and public, and I think we must all 'soon be of one opinion as to that.'

In any case, however, he must not go to Italy. In a previous letter she had named her uncles to him as very much on his side, and as having desired her to mention them to him as his sincere friends; and now that this project has been told to them, they are quite as eager as herself to prevent it. Hence, what she will now propose; and see with what a delightful energy she does it-being nothing less than determined that it shall be!

'I have a thousand things to say to you from my uncles. They talk of you much, and are ready to be mediators between you and your father. Let me, then, beg of you to consider on what terms and with what inducements you can be tempted to give up this voyage. Propose them to me, and I will commit them to my uncles, one of whom will make such proposals to your father as coming from themselves. I assure you they are bent upon restoring peace and content to you; and if they can serve you, do gratify their wish! Recollect in the course of nine months you will be of age. You will then have it in your power to increase your income if you do but approve of those only means to do it. Till then, suppose my uncle was to propose your going to Cambridge. And would you agree to giving a security to make amends to the younger part of the family if your father would allow you enough to support you in studying the law at the Temple, or living independent anywhere else in England? For I find the truth is, he cannot allow you sufficient to study the law without injuring his younger children. Three hundred a year my uncles talk of. Now this is really coming to the point. Not merely saying don't go, but thinking of

what you are to do if you stay. Let me entreat you, ther, to tell me the terms on which you will give up this melancholy scheme. Do lay them down to me, and I will acquaint my uncles of them. Nay, write to one of them yourself! Or, will you come down and stay a little while with them, and talk over schemes and projects to restore your happiness in England? I do hope sincerely you will take time to try if you do not find it sufferable to stay. Give it up till you are of age merely, and then determine! What can you do in Italy? I quite depend upon your making me your confidante, and that I shall hear from you immediately. I will attend at all times to anything that will serve you.'

There is something extremely touching in all this pretty, persistent, feminine earnestness for the youth so wayward and self-willed, who had yet the qualities to inspire such sisterly attachment and interest as are manifest in every line she writes. Nothing more of the correspondence is preserved; but immediately after the last letter reached Landor, he quitted London for Tenby in South Wales, and his having accepted the proposed mediation is to be inferred from the fact that it shortly afterwards took place, and the arrangement ultimately made for his living away from Warwick was founded upon it.

The notion as to Cambridge, and the plan for reading law at the Temple, were rejected; but a fixed yearly sum, about half of what his eager advocate suggested, was set apart for his use, with the understanding that his father's house was at all times open to him in aid of this allowance, for as much of the year as he chose to live in it. And so for that time there was a surrender of the flight to Italy, which had carried dismay to at least another female heart, humbler though perhaps not less true than Dorothea Lyttelton's. Honed Sir,' wrote the servant who had. nursed him in his infancy, 'May Health and Happiness attend 6 you, and may I Live to see you at the Head of that Family 'who, next to a Husband, as my Best Affections. I hope the providence of God will direct you in Every thing, but, O Sir, I hope you will Never go a Broad. My hart shuders at the thout of your Leaving England Least I shud see you no more. This letter, addressed to him at Tenby in the August of 1795, I found among Laudor's papers at his death with his indorsement, Mary Bird-my nurse.' She had married shortly before," a 'Molly Perry' was the maiden name of this old family servant, and was the name by which very recently, in the crisis of a dangerous illness,

present he then sent her now forming her apology for writing to him; and this small niche in his story may be fairly given to so old a friend of his family, whose return of the affection she bore them has record in a tablet placed to her memory in Warwick church by Henry Landor.

IX. A MORAL EPISTLE.

While he had thus been waiting to decide upon his future career, however, his letters to his interesting correspondent had not filled up all his time. Some weeks before he quitted London there came forth from the printing press of Messrs. Cadell and Davies, with no other name on the title-page, a tract of twenty pages in verse, A Moral Epistle to Earl Stanhope, of which, from letters addressed to him at Tenby, I lately discovered him to have been the writer. One of its lines indeed avows the authorship. I may not long detain the reader with it; but one or two characteristic points should not be omitted.

The satire, as its title implies, is in the manner of Pope, whose workmanship in some respects it cleverly reproduces. It is an attack upon Pitt; the Republican earl being put in contrast with the Tory minister; and its lines best worth recalling are those that denounce the shabby public vices encouraged by Chatham's son, as in him co-existing with private habits and indulgences, that in the elder time, nay even in his father's time, would have leaned too much to virtue's side, and been far too open and generous, for connection with any kind of meanness.

Ah, Bacchus, Bacchus! round whose thyrsus twined
Tendrils and ivy playing unconfined,

How art thou altered!'

Not the less now, for the bottle in each hand, did avarice and disingenuousness flourish; not the less did spies abound; and not safer was the confidence because given at the festive hour. One

Mr. Robert Landor, unconscious for the moment of more than eighty intervening years, called to her, supposing her still to be watching at his bed as in his infancy. Occasionally also, in letters between him and Walter, the mention of her occurs; and in some amusing comments on the disagreeableness of English hexameters, Robert makes exception for 'Sternhold's 104th Psalm as recited by Molly Bird.' (August 1856.)

can hardly imagine the lines that follow, with so much fullgrown thought and suitable expression, written by a lad of twenty.

'Yet O the pleasures! when mid none but friends

The trusty secret where it rises ends:

At which no hireling politician storms,

No snoring rector catches, and informs!
Now, even Friendship bursts her golden band,
Kens one with caution ere she shakes one's hand.

No longer gives she that accustomed zest
Which made luxurious e'en the frugal feast;
Nor hold we converse, in these fearful days,

More than the horses in your lordship's chaise.

Yet Wine was once almighty! silent Care

Filled high the bowl, and laughed at poor Despair;

Wine threw the guinea from the miser's hand,

Wine bade his wond'ring heart with alien warmth expand.
But-honest minister or sound divine-

He lies who tells us now there's truth in wine.

For George's premier, never known to reel,
Drinks his two bottles, Bacchus! at a meal.'

There is another passage, in which the shoulder-of-mutton of honest Marvel is hashed once more for downright Shippen, whom Walpole has visited in the hope of corrupting:

"Boy," quoth Shippen, "pray

What will thy master dine upon to-day ?"

"Sir? Mutton, sir!" "Speak boldly; why abasht?

Drest in what manner?" "Please your honour, hasht."'

-all of which is excellent, though only these lines may be taken. But an extract from a note to them is also worth giving, to show the readiness with which Landor used his learning; how intimately it was a part of himself even at this boyish time; and how early had begun those applications of it which habit, making more and more easy to him, rendered finally a second nature.

Remarking that Walpole's court was infamous to a proverb, he says, that, though comparisons would be odious, a time had very certainly at last arrived among themselves when nearly the whole of their worthy representatives might join the chorus in Sophocles:

ὅδ ̓ ἐστὶν ἡμῶν ναυκράτωρ ὁ παῖς· ὅσ ̓ ἂν

οὗτος λέγῃ σοι, ταῦτά σοι χἠμεῖς φαμεν.

They might sing, in other words, This youth here is our pilot, ' and whatever he tells you we also say:' a song very unlike that

later one in which the pilot' Pitt appeared, but in an odd kind of way, of which Landor is wholly unconscious, seeming to prefigure it. He adds that Sophocles often is a satirist; that if he had lived in England he would most surely have had his windows broken for freedom of speech; and that it is a great pity, in so immense a web of scholia as that which is entangled round him, not to be able to distinguish the characters he seems to have attacked. After which he gives us his opinion of the people's representatives in his own days, and of the need that existed for reform. So sweeping a reformer indeed was the ardent young poet, that, not content with addressing his Epistle to Lord Stanhope, or with declaring repeatedly that he despises the title as much as he admires the virtue of so distinguished a patriot, he thinks it necessary also to prefix a prose dedication in which he is 'bold enough to assert' that when Fortune placed on the brow of Lord Stanhope the tinsel coronet for the civic wreath, she must have been either more blind or more insulting than usual. For himself, she had nothing to give, because there was nothing he would ask. He would rather have an executioner than a patron.

The remark no doubt expresses very exactly the feeling with which Landor awaited at Tenby the result of the intercession with his father.

X. RETREAT TO WALES.

In the later memory of Landor the various matters consequent on his departure from Oxford continued to live only confusedly; and, at the time of his letter to me in 1855, he had the belief that Dorothea Lyttelton's intercession had obtained for him a separate allowance of four hundred a year, though his own non-compliance with certain conditions compelled him to surrender it. Her letters will not only have shown how such errors may have found place in his mind, but will account for sundry statements naturally repeated since his death because put forth with his authority while he lived; and in order to explain the interesting comment which these have received from Mr. Robert Landor, of whom I had inquired respecting them before Miss Lyttelton's letters were found, their substance shall here be briefly stated.