Dolabella.

Antony.

VI.
Antony.
Agrippa.

Antony.

My Cleopatra! never will we part;
Thy son shall reign in Egypt.

Much I fear'd,
O Antony, thy rancour might prevail
Against thy prudence. Cæsar bears no rancour.
Too little is that heart for honest hatred.
The serpent the most venomous hath just
Enough of venom for one deadly wound;
He strikes but once, and then he glides away.

ANTONY SPEAKS OF HIS FRIENDS TO AGRIPPA.
But many yet are left me, brave and true.
When Fortune hath deserted us, too late
Comes Valour, standing us in little stead.
They who would die for us are just the men
We should not push on death or throw away.
Too true! Octavius with his golden wand
Hath reacht from far some who defied his sword...
I have too long stood balancing the world
Not to know well its weight: of that frail crust
Friends are the lightest atoms.

Agrippa.
Antony.

Not so all.
I thought of Dolabella and the rest.

VII. Agrippa. Antony.

ANTONY'S LAST REQUEST TO AGRIPPA.
Thy gladness gladdens me,
Bursting so suddenly. What happy change!
Thou hast a little daughter, my old friend,
And I two little sons-I had at least-
Give her the better and the braver one,
When by thy care he comes to riper age.
Agrippa. O Antony! the changes of our earth

Antony.

Are suddener and oftener than the moon's;
On hers we calculate, not so on ours,
But leave them in the hands of wilful Gods,
Inflexible, yet sometimes not malign.
They have done much for me, nor shall reproach
Against them pass my lips: I might have asked,
But never thought of asking, what desert
Was mine for half the blessings they bestow'd.
I will not question them why they have cast
My greatness and my happiness so low;
They have not taken from me their best gift,
A heart for ever open to my friends.

Octavius. Agrippa, didst thou mark that comely boy?
Agrippa. I did indeed,

Octavius.
Agrippa.

Octavius.
Agrippa.

IX.

Agrippa.

Mecanas.

Agrippa.

X.

Octavius.
Octavia.

There is, methinks, in him
A somewhat not unlike our common friend.
Unlike? There never was such similar
Expression. I remember Caius Julius
In youth, although my elder by some years;
Well I remember that high-vaulted brow,
Those eyes of eagle under it, those lips
At which the Senate and the people stood
Expectant for their portals to unclose;
Then speech, not womanly but manly sweet,
Came from them, and shed pleasure as the morn
Sheds light.

The boy has too much confidence.
Not for his prototype. When he threw back
That hair, in hue like cinnamon, I thought
I saw great Julius tossing his...

Adorn the triumph; but that boy would push
Rome, universal Rome, against the steeds
That should in ignominy bear along

The image of her Julius. Think; when Antony

Show'd but his vesture, sprang there not tears, swords,

Curses? and swept they not before them all

Who shared the parricide? If such result

Sprang from torn garment, what must from the sight

Of that fresh image which calls back again

The latest of the gods, and not the least,
Who nurtured every child within those walls,
And emptied into every mother's lap

Africa, Sicily, Sardinia, Gaul,

And this inheritance of mighty kings.

No such disgrace must fall on Cæsar's son.
Spare but the boy, and we are friends for ever.

OCTAVIA INTERCEDES FOR ANTONY'S CHILdren.
Are children always children?
O brother! brother! are men always men?
They are full-grown then only when grown up

Above their fears. Rome never yet stood safe;
Compass it round with friends and kindnesses,
And not with moats of blood. Remember Thebes:
The towers of Cadmus toppled, split asunder,
Crasht: in the shadow of her oleanders
The pure and placid Dirce still flows by.
What shatter'd to its base but cruelty
(Mother of crimes, all lesser than herself)
The house of Agamemnon, king of kings?
Octavius. Thou art not yet, Octavia, an old woman;
Tell not, I do beseech thee, such old tales.
Hear later; hear what our own parents saw.
Where lies the seed of Sulla? Could the walls
Of his Præneste shelter the young Marius,
Or subterranean passages provide
Escape? he stumbled through the gore his father
Had left in swamps on our Italian plains.
We have been taught these histories together,
Neither untrue nor profitless; few years

Octavia.

Octavius.

Octavia.

Have since gone by, can memory too have gone?
Ay, smile, Octavius! only let the smile
Be somewhat less disdainful.

'Tis unwise

To plant thy foot where Fortune's wheel runs on.
I lack not wisdom utterly; my soul

Assures me wisdom is humanity;

And they who want it, wise as they may seem,
And confident in their own sight and strength,
Reach not the scope they aim at.

Worst of war

Is war of passion; best of peace is peace
Of mind, reposing on the watchful care
Daily and nightly of the household Gods.

These Scenes were in my hands three weeks before the day he had promised them to me, and were indeed published on that very day (30th of January 1856), in a tract exactly resembling, as to size and price, that in which Gebir had appeared nearly sixty years before. That such attributes and powers of mind should so long have retained their freshness, that their unceasing exercise over so wide a space of time should have left them neither weakened nor strained, and that at its close this most delicate of all intellectual fruit should exhibit nothing of the chill of more than fourscore winters, may hereafter be accounted one of the marvels of literature. Nor did it pass without notice at the time; not publicly, for the Scenes had small acceptance

from the critics, but in quarters from which praise was more
grateful. What an undaunted soul before his eighty years,'
Mrs. Browning wrote to me (March 1856) after infinite praise
of the Scenes, and how good for all other souls to contemplate!
It is better than any treatise on immortality!' 'What a won-
'derful Landor he is,' was written by another hand in the same
letter. 'The eye
is not dim, nor the natural force abated. That
' is to live one's eighty years indeed. I wish, if you have a
way, you would express our veneration for what he is, has
'been, and we trust long will be.' Not that any undue con-
fidence in this undimmed intellect ever blinded Landor to the
sense of how near he stood to the inevitable presence; in these
Scenes very frequently, and scattered over all his last fruit, is
the lesson, not unwisely at any time enforced, of the tranquillity
with which the rest of death may be waited for; he was ever
ready to contemplate calmly in his own case what arises to the
thought of Antony,

I have been sitting longer at life's feast
Than does me good; I will arise and go:

and for that especially Mr. Carlyle at this time thanked him. 'You look into the eyes of Death withal, as the brave all do 'habitually from an early period of their course; and certainly 'one's heart answers to you. Yea, valiant brother, yea, even so! There is a tone as of the old Roman in these things which 'does me good, and is very sad to me, and very noble.'

Little more remains to be said of Landor's last literary labours in England. The old tree was to go on shedding fruit as long as there was life in trunk or bough, and the last was never to mean anything more than the latest. Of those under immediate notice the latest was the enlargement of his Hellenics; several new ones being added, and several of the old ones rewritten; but enough will have been said of it if I add that it had been especially his study, with advancing years, to give more and more of a severe and simple character to all his writing after the antique, and that this was exclusively the object, here, of the most part of his changes or additions. For this reason they deserve close attention. It was an old sagacious warning to a young writer, that if he should happen to observe

in his writing at any time what appeared to him to be particularly fine, he would do well to strike it out; and, in revising those pieces on classical subjects, Landor was following the advice as implicitly after he had passed his eightieth year as if he had not reached his eighteenth. I remember a close he had put to the exquisite Paris and Enone which I thought extremely striking. But no, he said; it ended the poem too much in a flash, which we below were fond of, but which those on the heights of antiquity, both in poetry and prose, avoided. And of course he was right.

The incidents that led to his final departure from England are now briefly to be named. But as in these latter years, when he had ceased to visit much, he had been deriving no inconsiderable enjoyment as well from the reading as from the writing of books, some notices of that kind of use of his leisure may have also some interest for the reader, and will here be properly interposed.

XII. SILENT COMPANIONS.

All the recent years, as they passed, had found my old friend content with his few associates in Bath, and more and more indisposed to other society. He made exception only for that of his books, and here it became my privilege still to have part. There was rarely a week in which he did not write to me of some book as of a friend he had been talking with; and often so characteristically, that any account of this portion of his life would be incomplete which did not borrow illustration from at least one or two of these letters. Dialogues not imaginary I may call them, with but one listener until now; and my only regret in presenting them is that space can be found for so few.

To the first I shall name he had been attracted, by remembering that when Southey visited him at Como, in 1816, he mentioned Blanco White with much affection as the most interesting character he had left behind him in England. But he 6 never mentioned him as the best dialectician and the most dispassionate reasoner. He rated less highly than I now perceive to be his due both his abilities and the beauty of his language.