of his own dearest friends. Differences of opinion Napier had with Landor, and some not slight, but none that were not covered by a kindly tolerance. He could forgive him his onslaughts on the soldiership of Napoleon, though he would never let them disturb his own faith in it; as to which, he would say, he was as a rock, around which Landor, like the ocean, might rage as he would. 'If you will, you may submerge me, but you cannot shake 'me.' Nay, he could even tolerate an allusion of Landor's which he thought unfair to the memory of Charles Fox. 'I own to 'having been grieved for the moment,' he wrote, 'but we differ

as to so many public men, that this passed away instantly; 'because there is one public man upon whose character we are entirely and always agreed, namely, Walter Savage Landor. I know he is all truth, and sincerity, and honour, in feeling; and therefore his opinions, though as in the instance of Mr. Fox they may grieve, can never make me angry. It is a dif'ferent way of looking at a picture, nothing more.' In another letter to Landor of the same date (1851) he protests against a comparison of him to an American writer, made in one of the journals. Your vagaries, if I may without offending you use the word, are, in comparison with this man's, the gambols and boundings of a lion from light to shade and back again, to the mere mouthings and grimaces of a monkey at the moon.' Nor was Landor ever left in doubt of the value of his own good word to Napier, who repeatedly assured him, with affecting earnestness, that his genius was not a greater pleasure for all the world than his friendly feelings toward himself were a delight to him personally. I need not,' he wrote in one of the last of his letters written with his own hand (18th of April 1857), ‘I 'need not tell you now, my dear Landor, that your praise is manna to me; for, though I am not in a desart as to praise, 'most of it appears dry and unprofitable in comparison with 'yours. Not all, though; some others there are who give me ' quails.'

Such grateful offerings made directly to Landor himself require no confirmation, but for other reasons a few more words may be added. Napier had occasion to defend Landor, to a friend who did not know him, from a charge of having favoured assas

sination in an epistle on tyrannicide; and the feeling of his letter is as touching as it is noble. He wrote on the 10th of November 1856:

"This is the anniversary of the battle of the Nivelle, in which I won my lieut.-colonelcy. I was then strong and swift of foot; only one man got into the rocks of La Rhune before me, and he was but a step; yet eight hundred noble veterans, strong as lions, were striving madly to be first. I am now old, feeble, bent, miserable, and my eyes are dim, very dim, with weeping for my lost child; and my brain is weak also; I cannot read with pleasure, and still less can I think and judge of what other people write. You must not therefore expect from me an essay on Landor's noble letter; and it would require an essay, it is so full of meaning. I call it noble while differing on many points pushed out by him like needles against the world and its opinions and conventionalism. I call it noble, I say, because it is not Landor's writing, but Landor himself, bold, generous, brave, and reckless where his feelings as a human being are stirred. I have myself no objection to the death of King Bomba, or any other ruffian like him; hang them as high as Haman: but once allow tyrannicide, and the best man in the world is no longer safe. Well, but this mistake does not make Landor obnoxious to anybody who knows him, because it is not his feeling; he is reckless in expression only, not in deeds. And again I say his letter is Landor, bold, original, and vigorous, his right and his wrong alike. He is an oak with many gnarled branches and queer excrescences, but always an oak, and one that will be admired for ages.'

In the summer of the year before this letter was written, Landor had paid his final visit to London, and seen Napier there for the last time. It had become very difficult now to persuade my friend to leave Bath. He was readier than formerly with reasons for not visiting us; and his excuses were sometimes the reverse of complimentary, as when he explained (1853) his disinclination to come to the great city, because there if he saw three men he might be pretty sure that a couple of them were scoundrels, while out of the same number in the country it might be doubted if the villanous proportion would be more than one. The following year he gave a more touching reason, somewhat nearer the truth. 'I too often think at night of what I had been seeing in the morning, poor mothers, half-starved children, and 'girls habitually called unfortunate by people who drop the 'word as lightly as if it had no meaning in it. Little do they think that they are speaking of the fallen angels; the real So many

ones, not the angels of mythology and fable.

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At last however he again came to us in 1855. He desired to see the palace at Sydenham, and my old friend Sir Joseph Paxton had promised to set the great fountains playing in his honour. I took rooms for him in the hotel adjoining; and a part of the time he passed with Napier, dining with him at Clapham-park, and inducing him to come over to his hotel. A few lines from a letter to Lady Sawle, written at the close of this visit, will very succinctly describe it, and the persons it enabled him to see. 'I found my old friend,' he writes (July 1855), 'in better health than I expected. He had never seen 'the Crystal-palace. Lame as he is, he came over the following day with Lady Napier, and we went together over the whole ́of it. And only fancy, the great fountains were set playing 'for me! The beautiful N. showed me her little girl, who was " very amiable with me, as little girls always were: I mean very ⚫ little ones. I was obliged to declare to Lady Napier that if she spoilt her grandchild, I would never make her a proposal. 'I spent some hours too with Kossuth, who could not dine with me and Forster, because he had to receive a deputation quite unexpected; and by no means the smallest part of my pleasure was the introduction to me, the following day, of Mr. 'Lytton. None of the younger poets of the present day breathes 'so high a spirit of poetry. Of what impressed me most in the palace itself I should tell you that I saw the statue of Satan by and the wonderful picture of Cimabue and Giotto by Alas! alas! every name flies off from my memory when 'I would seize it. Leighton, I should have said, is the painter: the sculptor is Lough.' In making this holiday visit, it was his intention to have gone with me at its close to pass a few days with Kenyon at Cowes; but when the time came he pleaded his eighty years, and, with amusing exaggeration of Southampton Water into a rolling tempestuous sea, protested that if he were to indulge his wish to accompany me, I should have to borrow a shroud from some sailor, and a couplet from Tibullus, made to fit:

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'Hic jacet immiti consumptus morte viator,

Forsterum terrâ dum sequiturque mari.'

This was his last visit to London : indeed his last absence

from Bath, until he quitted it for ever, with one exception. He went once more to Llanthony. 'Alas, my dear friend,' he wrote in January 1856, 'I would rather undertake a voyage to Baby'lon than to London. One sorrowful task is imposed on me'to take two ladies to my Abbey. Sad scene! sad remem'brances! Forty-three years have passed since I saw the place, ' and never had I wished to see it again.' A few days later brought me nevertheless my usual summons on his birthday:

'I am, but would not be, a hermit;

Forster! come hither and confirm it.

I may not offer "beechen bowl,"

But I can give you soup and sole,

Sherry and (grown half-mythic) port. .

Wise men would change their claret for't;

Quince at dessert, and apricot ..

In short, with you what have I not?'

Even our meetings on that day were now to close, as he too surely predicted in a touching letter after our last celebration of it. It appears to me that neither of us will have anything more to say on that subject. However, I have enjoyed better health this winter, such as it has been, than in almost any ' other since I left my paradise in Italy. Strength alone fails 'me in the corporeal, and memory in the mental. I remember 'what I would forget, and I forget what I would remember. I 'have nothing to do now but to look into the fire, and see it 'burn down, as I myself have done. Solitude was always dear 'to me; and at present more than ever; once a playful friend, 'and now a quiet nurse. Scarcely a soul of my old acquaintance is left in Bath. All have departed; the most part to that 'country where there neither are nor ever will be railroads. I 'must perforce remain where I am. I have only one more 'journey to make, and I hope it may be by an express train. I

was very near taking my ticket a little while ago, and now 'stop only in the waiting-room.' Within the last few years, death had indeed been busy around him; and it remains that I should give brief mention of his losses in this way, and the penalties he was paying for extreme old age.

X. DEATHS OF OLD FRIENDS.

The first loss by which Landor suffered keenly was that of Joseph Ablett, to whose generous kindness he first owed his Fiesolan villa. We were under promise together to visit Llanbedr in the spring of 1848; when, early in the January of that year, our loss was announced to us. 'Poor dear Ablett ! Landor wrote: 'at whose house we were to meet in the spring, died on 'the 9th, and I can remember few things that have caused tears 'to burst forth from me as this did. Never was there so kind'hearted a man. His manner (though never to us) often seemed 'cold but even then there was a hot spring gushing from a ' vast depth through a glacier. I heard almost at the same time of the death of a companion of my early childhood, on whose 'marriage I think I wrote my first verses; but her loss has grieved me incomparably less than that of my later friend. "Good, generous Ablett! one more tear for thee! He never would admit that age, which remembered its sorrows longer than youth, had even the poor advantage of feeling them less acutely.

The following year carried off the brother next to himself in years. My brother Charles,' he wrote to me on the 8th of July 1849, the liveliest, wittiest, most energetic and independ'ent of men, is lying on his death-bed. This very instant a ' letter tells me he is dead.' The handsomest of the family in person, Charles Landor had singularly genial and agreeable manners, and, though too passionately fond of field-sports and outdoor occupations to have time for cultivation of the pursuits that attracted his brothers, had many of the accomplishments in which they excelled, with a much keener observation in the affairs of life. Exactly a month before this death of his brother there had come the news of Lady Blessington's, and the way in which this affected her old friend has been seen. 'Yet 'why,' he wrote to me, 'call it sad? It was the very mode of 'departure she anticipated and desired: as I do too.' Before the year closed he had also himself a warning. Death had taken aim at him and missed him, he said; but let the next be more successful, if so he might be spared the sorrowing over friends.

HII