Julius! how many hours have we Spent with the sage and bard of old! In truth's bright armour none more bold. By friends around thy bed in death My name from those pure lips was heard. O Fame! how feebler all thy breath Than Virtue's one expiring word!' Towards the close of the same year, too, he lost a friend for whom he had a thoroughly genuine admiration and regard, and of whom, on the 25th of October 1855, he thus wrote to me: 'I am grieving, and shall grieve long, for Sir William Molesworth. When, on that desert heath the house of commons, will three such men for honest and useful work, as himself and Hume and Peel, ever meet again? Poor Sir William! The last time we met was at Pencarrow. We started a stote near the pool, and both ran after it, might and main. I ran faster than stote or baronet; but the creature must have been bred on whig land, for he doubled, and fairly escaped us.' The following year brought a much graver loss, and the name with which my melancholy list must close is that of one very dear to us both. The good, joyous, generous Kenyon died in December 1856, thinking of his friends to the last; and finding it his happiness in death, as it had been through life, to provide for the welfare and enjoyment of all who had ever been associated with enjoyments of his own. 'This indeed is a sad grief,' Landor wrote to me, after a quarter of a century's 'friendship. He was the kindest, the most genial of men ever 'known to me. I never saw a cloud upon his face. There was 'not a word he uttered, not a letter he wrote, that did not carry on its surface some ray of light from the happiness he was spreading around him.' Yet why should I scruple to add another name? Landor had lost in this year also the little Pomeranian dog who had been for more than twelve years his constant and sprightly companion. Pomero, dear Pomero died this evening' (10th March 1856) at about four o'clock. I have been able to think of nothing else. Everybody in this house,' he wrote a few days later, 'grieves for Pomero. The cat lies day and night upon his grave; and I will not disturb the kind creature, though I want to plant some violets upon it, and to have his epitaph placed around his little urn. O urna! nunquam sis tuo eruta hortulo: XI. FRUITS GATHERED FROM AN OLD TREE. To a republication in 1853 of Conversations, Critical Essays, Poems, and Miscellaneous Prose Pieces, all of which had been written, with few exceptions, in the interval of seven years since the collection of his Works, Landor gave the title of Last Fruit off an Old Tree; and allusion has already been made to such of it as consisted of new Conversations, or of critical studies on Theocritus, Catullus, and Petrarch. It remains, however, generally to speak of its other contents, and to bring under the same pretty and pathetic title, to which it more strictly applies, the yield of still later fruit from the old tree; or, in other words, such additions to Landor's writings as were either published, or collected with a view to publication, under the titles respectively of Scenes for a Study, Dry Sticks, and Hellenics Enlarged, before he finally departed for Italy in 1858. The principal prose pieces of the Last Fruit, apart from its reviews, were nineteen chapters on Popery British and Foreign,' and ten letters of a true believer to Cardinal Wiseman, laughing at the public alarm in 1850 over papal aggression, and condemning more gravely the legislation that followed. As if fifty car'dinals in England,' he wrote to me (and the remark will sufficiently describe his view of the case), 'could do us damage to 'the amount of five farthings! The high-church view in either communion, protestant or popish, had nevertheless small comfort or support from him. In the course of his chapters there is an eloquent passage on the services of Methodism in reclaiming, at a critical time, the most profligate of the people from turbulence and crime. On one side is the gentle and virtuous Wesley, bringing about him as great multitudes as ever surrounded the earlier apostles, and working as great marvels in their hearts; while on the other are the beneficed clergy everywhere setting their faces against him, and angry faces they are, 'partly from old prejudices, and partly from old port.' At nearly the time when these chapters were written, Landor had been corresponding about one of his Llanthony livings with the bishop of St. David's, Dr. Thirlwall, for whose character and learning he had high respect; and he has some excellent remarks on the inadequacy of the payment of curates, which were probably suggested by that correspondence. His conclusion upon the whole matter is to counsel moderation on all sides; and this he enforces in language not undeserving of respect, though little likely to have hearing as matters stand at present. It would grieve me to foresee a day when our cathedrals and our churches shall be demolished or desecrated; when the tones of the organ, when the symphonies of Handel, shall no longer swell and reverberate along the groined roof and painted windows. But let old superstitions crumble into dust; let faith, hope, and charity be simple in their attire; let few and solemn words be spoken before Him to whom all hearts are open, all desires known.' A similar set of letters or chapters written two years afterwards in the assumed character of an American, and dedicated to Mr. Gladstone, had for their subject the outset of the Crimean war, which was sharply criticised. These were issued separately: but, collected in the same volume with those on Popery, were others calling attention to Southey's services in connection with the neglect of his family; and of these last the sequel may be worth relating. They had been published in a paper I had long been connected with, and at that time conducted; not better known for its liberal opinions, than for the incomparable wit and ability which the dear friend whom I followed as its editor, Albany Fonblanque, had associated with its name. Nor had only the letters been given. Comments had been made on the subject of them from time to time; and I had very strongly directed attention to the fact, that though a tory administration was in power when Southey died and until three years after his death, his son was still suffered to languish on less than a hundred a-year, in the church of whose interests his father had been so zealous a champion. This was a duty that should hardly have been left to a journal differing so strongly from many of Southey's views; but it was nothing to what occurred a little later, when I found myself-the editor of a paper of what was then called extreme liberal opinions-defending Southey against the Quarterly Review. At this very time however, in January 1851, unexpected help came from another quarter. The whig chancellor, Lord Truro, resolved that Southey's son should have a chancery living; and as his interest in the case had been awakened by a newspaper, he made its editor, throughout, the channel of his kindness. Not disdaining to seek information where great officials are apt to turn away in fright lest they should find it, he applied privately for such suggestion as I could give on the subject that had attracted his notice: having thus satisfied himself that the living would be worthily bestowed, he made me the means of conveying it; and at the close of the month I handed over to Mr. Cuthbert Southey the presentation under the great seal to a rectory of the value of upwards of three hundred a-year, besides house and glebe. Even the fees had been paid by Lord Truro. The transaction altogether, I need hardly add, was a wonderful surprise as well as pleasure to Landor. The most important of the poetical pieces in the volume I am now noticing, were five dramatic scenes on a subject familiarised already to poetical readers by a very great genius. Landor had been much moved by the story of Beatrice Cenci, of which he wrote to me in 1850, thinking it the most deeply pathetic of any in the annals of the world. 'When I was at Rome I visited frequently Lady Mary Deerhurst, afterwards Lady Coventry; and yet more frequently I forgot the object of my visit to palazzo Barberini, and turned impulsively to the room containing the portrait of Beatrice. Nothing else could fix my attention: my heart rose violently with more than one emotion. Shelley has shown great delicacy in overshadowing the incest, but the violent language he gives to Beatrice somewhat lowers her. Alas, alas, poor Cenci! she never told her grief. Of this I am certain. In her heart was the same heroism as that of Prometheus: no torture could extort the dreadful secret: she would have died without disclosing it. I had once an inclination myself to write a few scenes of this sad and sacred drama.' Not only his inclination is expressed here, but the manner in which he intended to treat his theme; and very soon he was at work upon it. At first the scenes were not to be in verse, but the passion and imagination of a subject of this kind over flow almost necessarily the low banks of prose. The first three scenes show Cenci's character and home, and the last two exhibit his daughter's sufferings and death. Of Italian character, in its highest and lowest grades, a singular and intimate knowledge is displayed; and there is marvellous skill in revealing just enough, and only enough, to render a horrible story intelligible but what is said by himself of the scenes is otherwise perfectly true, that 'they interfere very little with Shelley's ' noble tragedy.' When first sent to me they were inscribed to the memory of Beddoes, a man who wasted on wild and impracticable subjects a genius only second to the highest in tragic poetry. In laying these scattered lines of mine,' Landor wrote, ' on the recently-closed grave of Beddoes, fungar inani munere; 'but it is, if not a merit, at least a somewhat of self-satisfac'tion, to be among the earliest, if among the humblest, in my ' oblation. Nearly two centuries have elapsed since a work of 'the same wealth of genius as Death's Jest-Book hath been 'given to the world.' This he replaced afterwards by a dedication to Miss Lynn (since Mrs. Lynn Linton), a lady for whose character and attainments he had an extreme admiration, whose books gave him high pleasure and enjoyment of the most unaffected kind, and from whose visits and correspondence he derived not a small portion of his happiness in these later years. Of the other poems included in Last Fruit, or in the two later issues of Dry Sticks and Hellenics Enlarged, those that alone require present allusion from me are such as had any personal significance or interest. Some had formerly been printed in less perfect shape; a much larger number should never have been printed at all; a few, upon grave subjects, had his old exquisite grace of diction; and another few, even upon subjects almost too trivial to put into verse, were so good as to take rank with the best things of that sort to be found in books before book-making was. They are of what may be called the old style, in which he printed his first imitation of the manner of his favourite Latin poet. Aurelius, sire of Hungrinesses! Thee thy old friend Catullus blesses, |