wrote vernacularly in the person of a peasant, he wrote cujum, not quorjum. Catullus employed the language of Cicero and Julius Cæsar; Virgil that of Augustus and his court. Fortunately we possess the comedies of Terence and of Plautus, the richest treasures of Latinity. We there see the very handwriting of the Scipios and the Gracchi. I much commend the publisher of Milton's works who observed his orthography. The same had already been done by Tyrwhitt in his Chaucer; and Spenser has been thought as capable of spelling as Dyche . . . Mr. Ellis asks, "Does not "common sense revolt against Tillotson's alterations of Bacon to make "him more eloquent?" But change of spelling can produce no such effect; and it is laughable to think of Tillotson working such a miracle. Mr. Elis also speaks of Wordsworth; but, though a poet of the highest claims, it is neither in the same kind nor in the same degree as Chaucer, whose invention, spirit, and variety are equalled by Shakespeare and by Milton only. Some sonnets Wordsworth has written that Milton might have owned, but he could no more have written the Canterbury Tales than he could have written Paradise Lost, the Samson Agonistes, the Allegro, the Penseroso, the Sonnet to Cromwell, or that sublimest of psalms, the Invocation to God on his murdered saints in Piedmont. Is it not perilous, Mr. Ellis asks, to let our spelling change with every generation? Yes indeed. Therefore I would set my foot against these changes as they are rolling on and accumulating. He "puts it to the mass of writers even among ourselves, whether they would wish to have their own punctua"tion preserved in their printed works." I know little about the mass of writers. I can only say that, to my certain knowledge, those who are not the mass have complained to me that theirs was not preserved; Southey in particular, and our English Thucydides, the illustrious historian of the Peninsular War: I will add myself; for you know, my dear Forster, that I yielded to you in the preparation of my collected works."

XIV. LAST DAYS IN BATH, AND FINAL DEPARTURE FROM
ENGLAND.

'I have been out of doors,' Landor wrote to me in the autumn of 1856, not more than twice in fifty-nine days, a few 'minutes in each. I think I will go and die in Italy, but not in my old home. It is pleasant to see the sun about one's 'deathbed.' It was only a passing wish he thus expressed, but it was destined to have sad fulfilment.

Knowing the condition of health in which he was at the opening of 1857, it was a great shock to me to find that he had been summoned to give evidence in the Bath county-court upon a miserable squabble about a governess. The case came on in January, when, in spite of a doctor's certificate of his unfitness to appear, he was brought to the court; and such was the ex

citement that followed and the exhaustion consequent upon it, that there was for some time reason to apprehend a very grave result. He could hardly have put any part of this affair into a conversation that should pair-off with his Epicurus, Ternissa, and Leontion; and yet, with all its miserable sequel, it must be said to have had its origin in desires and tastes closely akin to those expressed in that dialogue, where the love of the very old for the society of the very young is made enchanting by all that the Graces can surround it with. Poor Landor had always the belief, that, after the fashion of the ancient philosopher, and with the same sort of charming help, he might be able to smoothen and adorn, for himself also, the declivity of age; and if for the moment, to avoid mention of the names of the ladies who now make brief appearance in his story, I borrow for them the old Greek names, they at least will have no cause to complain. It is not the reality, but the fiction, which such a comparison will place at disadvantage; for, disastrous as the end was here, it does not therefore follow that Epicurus was wrong. Unhappily everything depends in such a case upon the choice of your Ternissa and Leontion.

This was nearly the first year in which we failed to meet on the 30th of January. Landor had found himself able however to write to his brother Henry on that day. Some question as to the burning-down of a barn at Llanthony had been referred to him; to which he replied, with even more than his usual unreason as to such things, that neither his cousin Walter Landor of Rugely (co-trustee with Henry of the Llanthony estate since his brother Charles's death) nor the manager of the property, Mr. Edwards, had mentioned the incident to him, knowing well his wish never to hear anything about his estate, and acting upon his repeated instructions that they should tell him nothing. He added that before he left England seventy-two thousand pounds had been sunk on Llanthony, and in the last thirty years three hundred a-year on an average, including a small part on Ipsley; and that there was nothing he now so little desired as that any more money should be laid out on any part of it in future.

Three months hence I shall once more purchase a landed property,

situated in the parish of Widcombe, and comprising by actual admeasurement eight feet by four, next adjoining the church-tower in said parish. No magpie drapery, no lead, no rascals in hatbands, no horses in full feathers for me. Six old chairmen are sufficient. I thought once of complying with your kind wish that I should lie at Tachbrook, but I am not worth the carriage so far.' (He alluded then to the illness that had borne down upon him so heavily; mentioned a bequest from Kenyon of a hundred pounds; and grieved that so hearty and genial a man, thirteen years younger than himself, should have died before him.) 'And now again about dying. Out of my hundred pounds, when I get it, I will reserve ten for my funeral, with strict orders that the sum may not be exceeded; and the gravestone and grave will amount to nearly or quite ten more. As I can live without superfluities, surely I can die without them.'

Not long after this letter was written I sent him the legacy; and soon discovered that even as much as ten pounds of it had not been reserved to himself, either for festivity or funeral. The whole of it went as a 'new-year's gift' to the youthful Ternissa, by whom one-half of it was subsequently transferred, without the knowledge of the original giver, to the less youthful Leontion, for part payment of costs incurred at the trial about the governess; and some differences arising thereon took afterwards a character of bitterness such as never can possibly belong to any but a woman's quarrel. Hardly had the strife broken out when Landor flung himself headlong into it; not by any means, wildly inconsiderate at all times as his conduct was, out of any impulse at the time to be called unworthy. Though the part he took could not at any stage of it be pronounced right, there were many excuses to be suggested for it until he had himself rendered it ignoble. He chose to assume, but less gratuitously in the particular case than was usual with him, not merely that he had himself suffered wrong (on which point a great deal might have been said, if he had not taken from his friends all power of saying it), but that a very young lady who had claims on his friendly protection had been made the victim of injustice by another lady not so young; and that upon him, in such circumstances, devolved the duty of hurling vengeance at her oppressor. An obligation of which he straightway proceeded to discharge himself, after no other than his most ordinary method.

Believing that he saw on one side a fiend incarnate and on the other an angel of light, he permitted his astounding credulity to work his irascibility into madness; and there was then

as much good to be got by reasoning with him as by arguing with a storm off Cape Horn. It was vain to point out to him that he had nothing himself to gain from so sordid a dispute; that what he had lost was gone irrecoverably; that the angel and the fiend had some points in common; and that there was no such mighty difference between that which he championed and that which he assailed, to justify or call for interference. Why should I once more repeat what this narrative has told so often? He rejected every warning, rushed into print, and found himself enmeshed in an action for libel.

On hearing this I proceeded to Bath, and he was extricated for a time; but I quitted the place with a sorrowful misgiving that the last illness of the old man, while it had left him subject to the same transitory storms of frantic passion, had permanently also weakened him, mentally yet more than bodily; and that, even when anger was no longer present to overcloud his intellect, there had ceased to be really available to his use such a faculty of discrimination between right and wrong, or such a saving consciousness of evil from good, as is necessary to constitute a responsible human being. He had now not even memory enough to recollect what he was writing from day to day; and while the power of giving keen and clear expression to every passing mood of bitterness remained to him, his reason had too far deserted him to leave it other than a fatal gift. He could apply no gauge or measure to what he was bent on either doing or saying; he seemed no longer to have the ability to see anything not palpably before him; and of the effect of any given. thing on his own or another's reputation, he was become wholly powerless to judge. Changes in him also there were which otherwise painfully affected me. He had so long and steadily consented to act on my advice exclusively in the publication of his writings, that here I believed I had still some efficient con trol. Unhappily it proved to be not so. There had come to be mixed up with the miserable quarrel a question as to a portfolio containing a great many scraps of his poetry, either of very old or of very recent date, in effect little more than the mere sweepings and refuse of his writing-desk; which he had lent to one of the parties in the squabble for transcription of some portion of

its contents, and which he professed to have been unable to get back until he had publicly advertised its unauthorised detention. The whole of this collection of pieces, for the most part entirely unworthy of him, I left him determined to put into print, against my earnest and repeated remonstrance. It was his plan to publish them as dry leaves; and they became ultimately the book called Dry Sticks. He grieved to do anything in the teeth of my advice, he said; but, if he did not publish the poems, others would. He had for the time persuaded himself that he had really no other motive: yet I could not but suspect that another, quite unconsciously to himself, lurked behind; and that he thought he might thus find excuse for occasional covert allusion to occurrences which the result of my interference had bound him, not indeed by express agreement on my part (as erroneously supposed at the time), but by honourable understanding on his, no longer to notice openly.

I left Bath in the September of 1857, and to the close of that year he never recovered strength. My weakness,' he wrote to me in the middle of October, 'is excessive. With extreme 'difficulty do I weigh myself up from my arm-chair. My good and most intelligent friend, Dr. Watson, is very attentive to 'me, and says my constitution will bear me through. I doubt 'whether this is good intelligence. The same spasms, in that 'case, will come over again some other time, and I wish it were 'all at an end now.' He had nevertheless persisted in his determination to print what I thought worthless as well as objectionable, having found a publisher to undertake it in Edinburgh, on my declining to have anything to do with it in London; he had farther availed himself of my continued opposition to withhold any sight of the proofs; and by the merest accident it came to my knowledge that the publication would be unworthy of him in more senses than one, for that certainly allusion would be made in it to what he ought to have felt himself bound not to reopen. I wrote upon this to his solicitors, and to a kindly and zealous friend (Captain B-); by whom again the case was stated to him, with all that a persistence in his disastrous course would involve; and from them came an assurance to me shortly afterward that everything wrong would be erased. Never, at