เ niceties of the language, which he should have valued least, was exactly that on which my old friend prided himself most; and I should have said to anyone who wished to torment him, Don't question his morals or steal his money, but make him answerable for false quantities or other bad Latin. He raged against the poor printers for such innocent lapses as Angelina for Aufedina, and, not all at jocosely but quite angrily, asked what business the fools had to be thinking of their Angelinas of the Strand? Yet he knew that he ought to have been more patient. Truth is that unless I write with rapidity, I write badly, and unless I 'read with rapidity, I lose my grasp of the subject. It is curious that the word usrávora, which is chiefly used for repentance, is primitively after-thought; and the Italian painters 'call a correction a pentimento.' He gave forcible illustration of this the day after writing it by sending, in amendment of a poem that had been in print more than fifty-four years, a correction which he had intended to make at its first publication, and through all those years had recollected. 'I left my bed this morning at six, after lying awake since three, when I suddenly remembered a correction which I ought to have made fifty-four years ago.' Withal there was a lurking dread, an always-present fear, that he was less familiar with the language than formerly, which made him often self-distrustful without occasion; and I have had as many as half-a-dozen letters on the same day correcting in as many ways a correction found at last to be itself not necessary. Even yet I remember with a tender pity his sufferings, ludicrous in their exaggeration as they were, in connection with the first syllable in flagrans. He made it short, but, visited with a sudden fear that it was long, had sent me three several emendations of it. In his anguish he declared that he would have to cancel four pages, for now he felt only too certain of his deplorable oversight, stupidity, ignorance-no name could be too hard; but nobody else must ever know of it. It had kept him awake the whole previous twenty-four hours! and as he wrote he could no longer bid me good-night, for it was already far into morning. But, by the side of the letter of which this was the purport, and brought to me by the same post, lay another letter winding-up the story. The second night had proved sleepless as the first, and for some hours he had tossed. restlessly about under torture of a fresh misgiving that he might at first have been right after all; when suddenly, as the clock struck four on that winter morning, relief came in a remembered line from Virgil, and he sprang out of bed repeating the 331st verse of the first Georgic, • ille flagranti, Aut Atho, aut Rhodopen, aut alta Ceraunia telo,' &c. which he then and there set down, in the letter that announced to me the close of his trial. He might as well have waited until daybreak, for he gained nothing by so sacrificing rest; but it was his old impetuous way. He was always inflicting a needless trouble on himself and on me, and pleading still that each should be the last. 'Extremum hunc, Forstere, mihi concede 'laborem.' A week later, a strophe was added to one of the poems in the middle of the night, of which I had next day the quite illegible pencil-scrawl; and I may remark, of one of the best of his Latin poems subsequent to this volume, written Ad Heroinam amid the Italian excitements of 1849, and as much admired by Whewell of Trinity as by Aubrey de Vere, that this also was written with the like impetuosity, scrawled with pencil in the dark in the middle of the night, aud in that condition sent to me. We got through our printer's trials at last, so successfully that he believed the quickest eyes would not discover eight faults in the whole eight thousand lines; and then he was all eagerness for the publication, alleging two special reasons. Leipsic fair was coming on, the very market for such a book; and before it could be taken notice of in England it must be got into France and Germany, if we would not have it prohibited in both! Alas, he might have spared himself such anxieties. I never heard that anybody asked for it at Leipsic fair; and, sharp as were its epigrams against foreign as well as native rulers and statesmen, it may be doubted whether anyone noticed them save a few ripe scholars. High opinions from Whewell, Macleane, and others, to the effect that there had been no better Latin poetry since the Virgilian age, were sent him by Julius Hare; who added, for himself, that in spite of Landor's praise of Robert Smith, he suspected the greatest Latin poet since Lucretius and Catullus to be not Bobus, but a countryman of his. The special result of the publication was rather for English than Latin readers. It led to the Hellenics. Its reception had justified my warning to him that the day was passed in which imagination or fancy could count for anything in a Latin composition, and that, if he desired a judgment on his poetry rather than his Latinity, he must go before another bench. 'You were right,' he now suddenly announced to me. My resolution is 'taken to send you a translation of all the Latin idyls, including my Gebirus, out of the Poemata et Inscriptiones. You shall 'have one a week; and a project starts up before my mind. This is, to print them hereafter, together with the English' (he means the Hellenics already included in the Works), 'in one small volume. It is better, if we can, to breathe life into such figures as Pygmalion's than into such as decorate our London 'tea-gardens.' He kept his word, and the result was one of the most delightful of his books. The Latin became English idyls, retaining no trace of the coldness of translation, but all glowing and warm with original life. The Cupid and Pan, the Altar of Modesty, the Espousals of Polyxena, Dryope, Corythus, Pan and Pitys, Coresus and Callirhoë, Catillus and Salia, the Children of Venus, and the Last of Ulysses, were among those that thus took their place as English poems; and a collection so rich and various of classical scenes and images, limiting the word as we do in sculpture and painting, and associating it with Greece and Rome, does not exist in any other single book in our literature. Let the Corythus be studied, to understand the full value of its contents. Besides its beauty and wealth of imagery, there is also much beauty of form. Each idyl is for the most part exactly what the word implies, a short poem of the heroic cast, a small image of something great, epic in character, and in treatment too. There is a splendid touch in the Ulysses, where you see that by depriving Circe of her youth and restoring hers to Penelope it is meant to show how Vice loses her charms and perishes, and how impotent is Time against Virtue; but such meanings are never by way of sentiment obtruded. They are everywhere, but you must find them. It is not the eagerness to say everything, but the care to reject as much as possible, which impresses the reader throughout; and there is always the absence of exaggeration. When Jove looks, there is no need that he should frown. Wide-seeing Zeus lookt down; as mortals knew By the woods bending under his dark eye, And huge towers shuddering on the mountain tops, And over the deep waters all round earth. Certainly this little book, which appeared at the close of 1847, gave convincing proof that up to this date Landor's powers, even of fancy, had not ebbed a hand's-breadth on the sands of time, seventy-three years wide. IX. SUMMER HOLIDAYS AND GUESTS AT HOME. When I first visited Landor in Bath the city was only accessible by coach, and no coach left after eight o'clock in the morning. But these difficulties in the way of intercourse soon disappeared, and the travelling that had occupied two entire days took up little more than double the same number of hours. The first time Mr. Dickens went with me the railroad was open, and it had become possible to leave in the afternoon, dine and pass the evening with Landor, and breakfast the next morning in London. Still vividly remembered by us both are such evenings, when a night's sleep purchased for us cheaply the pleasure of being present with him on his birthday; and it was at a celebration of this kind in the first of his Bath lodgings, 35 St. James's-square, that the fancy which took the form of Little Nell in the Curiosity Shop first dawned on the genius of its creator. No character in prose fiction was a greater favourite with Landor. So interesting and pathetic did she seem to him, that he thought upon her, for a moment, Juliet might have turned away her eyes from Romeo, and Desdemona found her hair-breadth escapes almost witching as Othello's; so that when, a little later, the occasion and place of her birth were recalled to him, he broke into one of those whimsical bursts of comical extravagance out of which arose the fancy of Boythorn. With tremendous emphasis he confirmed the fact I have named, and added GG that he had never in his life regretted anything so much as his having failed to carry out an intention he had formed respecting it; for he meant to have purchased that house, 35 St. James'ssquare, and then and there to have burnt it to the ground, to the end that no meaner association should ever desecrate the birthplace of Nell. Then he would pause a little, become conscious of our sense of his absurdity, and break into a thundering peal of laughter. Another of these evenings, when Mr. Dickens and myself had travelled to him expressly to celebrate his birthday, returning the same night to London, is worth recalling because of our talk having led to his writing the fine quatrain adopted afterwards as the motto to his Last Fruit. It was his own version of the moral of his life in its aims and enjoyments; and, to all who could so accept it, a very terse and conclusive summing-up of Epicurean philosophy. But, on another subject, Landor also talked that night in a way that hardly befitted a true disciple of Epicurus, enlarging on the many tears that David Copperfield had caused him to shed; to which the author of that delightful book himself replied by a question, which, from so powerful and so gentle a master of both laughter and tears, startled us then, and may make the matter worth allusion still. 'But is it not yet more wonderful that one of the most popular 'books on earth has absolutely nothing in it to cause anyone ' either to laugh or cry? Such, he proceeded to say, was to be affirmed with confidence of De Foe's masterpiece; he instanced the death of Friday, in that marvellous novel, as one of the least tender, and, in the true sense, least sentimental things ever written; and he accounted for the prodigious effect which the book has had upon an unexampled number and variety of readers, though without tears in it, or laughter, or even any mention of love, by its mere homely force and intensity of truth. Not every schoolboy alone was interested by it, but every man who had ever been one. I may add, though connected with the night referred to solely by the subject thus introduced, that six years later, when a project was on foot to make provision for a then living and destitute descendant of the author of Robinson Crusoe, Landor sent a letter to the Times which |