'ture began to wear away on Paradise Lost, and even the great 'hexameter sounded to me tinkling when I had recited aloud, in my solitary walks on the sea-shore, the haughty appeal of 'Satan and the repentance of Eve.' In such walks for the most part, and under such influences, Gebir was composed; and it was probably no mere illusion of his fancy which led him to say repeatedly in after life that he was never happier than when thus writing it, and not exchanging twelve sentences with men. Copper works had not as yet quite filled the woods around Swansea among which he lived, and he might take his daily walks over sandy sea-coast deserts covered only with low roses and nameless flowers and plants, and with nothing save occasional prints of the Welsh peasantry's naked feet to give token of the neighbourhood of human creatures. Hardly human indeed, in their savagery in those days, were the lower orders of the Welsh. The English visitor might have some excuse for regarding them as only something a very little higher than the animals, and as much mere adjuncts to his landscape as its stranded boats or masses of weed.

The accident which led him to the subject I have often heard him relate. He was on friendly terms with some of the family of Lord Aylmer, who were staying in his neighbourhood, and one of the young ladies lent him a book, by a now forgotten writer of romances, from the Swansea circulating library. Clara Keeve was the author; but Landor, confusing in his recollection a bad romance writer with a worse of the same sex, thought it was that sister of Mrs. Siddons and John Kemble who lived in the small Welsh town, and wrote under the name of Anne of Swansea. Few of my readers will have heard her name, and I may warn them all against her books, which are mere nonsensical imitations of Mrs. Radcliffe; but Clara Reeve had really some merit, though not discoverable in the particular book lent to Landor. He found it to be a history of romance, having no kind of interest for him until he came at its close to the description of an Arabian tale. This arrested his fancy, and yielded him the germ of Gebir. More than sixty years later he wrote to me from Bath (30th November 1857), that he had just discovered and sent to a lady living near him, Mrs. Paynter, also

of that Aylmer family, a little piece called 'St. Clair' written all those years ago for her who thus lent him the book. She was the same Rose Aylmer on whose death, a few years later, he composed the most enchanting of his minor poems.

One of his critics afterwards charged him with having stolen his Gebir story, and merely imitated Milton in telling it. On both points light will very shortly be thrown. He was now to quit the levels, and rise to the heights, of English verse; and to this extent he had profited by his recent study of Milton. But that was the whole of his present debt to the incomparable master; and whether, to anybody, his Muse owed anything whatever for the story in which she was to find herself involved, the reader of what follows will probably think more than doubtful.