of her family, two great-uncles, very wealthy London merchants; and so much of the original land of the Savages of Tachbrooke was thus restored to them. A condition of strict entail to the eldest son accompanied the bequest, as if the object were to revive so far the consideration and condition of the old family; and, Doctor Landor's paternal estates in Staffordshire being in like manner entailed, there remained for the younger children that might be born to his second marriage, apart from any possible bequests from other relatives' or prudent savings by their mother, only the succession to a smaller estate in Buckinghamshire left equally to her and her three sisters by the same Mr. Norris, after expiry of the life-interest in it of another descendant from the same family, the Countess of Conyngham. This estate was called Hughenden-manor, and is now the property of Mr. Disraeli.

Yet well-born as Walter Savage Landor thus was, on the side of both parents, no title can be established for such claim to high consideration or remote antiquity, on the part of either, as from time to time has been put forth in biographical notices of him, and even in his own writings. For here the reflection has to be made, strange in its application to such a man,—that, possessing few equals in those intellectual qualities which he was also not indisposed to estimate highly enough, he was not less eager to claim a position where many thousands of his contemporaries equalled, and many hundreds surpassed him. I had on one occasion the greatest difficulty in restraining him from sending a challenge to Lord John Russell for some fancied slight to the memory of Sir Arnold Savage, speaker of Henry the Seventh's first House of Commons; yet any connection beyond the name could not with safety have been assumed. When he says in one of his Imaginary Conversations that his estates were sufficient for the legal qualification of three Roman knights, he is probably not far from the truth; but it is much more doubtful whether any one of his forefathers of either family possessed in land an income equal to his own before it was squandered by him. Between the two classes of the untitled gentry of England, his family by both father and mother held a place of which any man might have been proud; but it was not exactly all he claimed for it. To the rank of those powerful commoners of a

former age who were not less than the noblest either in name or influence, it did not belong; but it ranked with the highest and oldest among that class of private gentlemen who stood between these and the yeomanry,-men of small but independent fortunes, equally respectable, and educated not less well; and, during several generations, the property of both Landors and Savages had thus been held and handed down by their eldest children. There is pleasant allusion to these matters, and to his brother's occasional weakness respecting them, in one of Mr. Robert Landor's letters.

It seems that the family was seven hundred years old, and 'several notices of my brother's death repeat the same tale. We may go back about half-way, but no farther. Some of us en'joyed provincial honours and offices; and Walter believed that ' a certain Arnold Savage was the speaker of the House of Com'mons of that name. One of my churchwardens had a sister with whom I searched the parish registers for certain ancestors ' of hers. Finding only parish officers, not one of whom rose higher than a yeoman, the lady, who was indeed very handsome, assured me that they were descended from Julius Cæsar quite directly; and was much pleased on learning from me that this Julius was descended from Iulus, the son of Æneas, the son of Venus: and thus I could account for beauty in herself, both divine and imperishable. She was forty; and I gained the character, soon lost again, of extreme politeness. I related this anecdote to my brother, who could not apply it. In a 'translation of Rabelais published about fourteen years ago, I found the word Landor* applied to such fools as were supreme among all other fools; and a long note was required to enumerate their varieties. Till then I did not believe that any language could contain so many opprobrious terms, so whimsical and contemptuous. The last time that my brother was at Birlingham I tried to read the long list of them, but was interrupted by such loud screams as must sometimes have shaken both your library and mine. There was not only astonishment but delight in his laughter. When I suggested that probably our an

The word 'landore,' the reader need hardly be told, is not a fantastic name, but the old French word for a heavy fellow.

cestor was the greatest fool among all those who accompanied the Conqueror, and thus acquired the highest place and name, 'he accepted the priority. But then he might have reserved for 'himself the power to escape. For it appears that our name originally was Del-a-La'nd (De la Laundes); and my brother Henry has in his keeping some old writings conveying an es'tate signed and sealed in that name. When it was that so

6 many Norman names gained English terminations, as must have 'been the case, the heralds know best.'

III. BIRTH AND CHILDISH DAYS.

The family identity of fools and Landors does not seem long to have survived the laughter of Rabelais. Some of the name did good service in the civil wars of Charles and Cromwell; and Staffordshire had a stout whig Landor for its high-sheriff in the reign of William the deliverer, whose grandson, falling off from that allegiance, stood up as stoutly for the Jacobites, and whose great-grandson was the leading physician in Warwick, when, on the 30th January 1775, in the best house of the town, facing to the street but overshadowed at the back by old chestnuts and elms, the eldest child of himself and Elizabeth Savage of Tachbrooke, christened Walter and Savage, was born. The other children of the marriage may at once be named. They were Charles, Henry, and Robert; Elizabeth, Mary Anne, and Ellen: born respectively in 1777, 1780, and 1781; in 1776, 1778, and 1783. The three daughters died unmarried; Charles and Robert entered the Church, after taking their degrees at Oxford; and Henry, who had been at Rugby with Walter and Charles, and desired to have gone like them to Oxford, had, upon his brother Robert obtaining a scholarship to that university from Bromsgrove-school, to yield to his father's doubt whether his income could properly support all three sons at college, and himself to enter the office of a London conveyancer.

It was the elder brother's misfortune, in his youthful days, that he alone should have wanted the healthful restraints which the others underwent of necessity. No care with a view to a

profession had any need to find a place in his thoughts. He stood first in the entail of the family estates; and if he could confine his desires within such limit, and live meanwhile on his father's allowance, he had simply to qualify himself for improving or wasting them. This he too well knew; and though his father, as he observed in Walter the development of unusual intellectual promise, would eagerly have imposed upon him corresponding duties and obligations, the attempt only led to disagreements, and the unsettled wayward habit was never afterwards reclaimed.

Of Landor's infancy or childhood there is no record more authentic than such expressions as he now and then himself let drop in old age. Writing in 1853 from the house in which he was born, and which his sister Elizabeth occupied till her death in the following year, when the last witness of his childish days passed away, he mentions having picked up from the gravel-walk the first two mulberries that had fallen; a thing he remembered to have done just seventy-five years before. There is now before me another letter of his to the same dear relative, in which, speaking of a visit he has just paid to her in Warwick, he describes the joy with which he had seen again the house that was the principal home of his childhood, with its dear old mulberry-trees, its grand cedars, the chestnut-wood with the church appearing through it, a cistus that she had planted for him, and the fig-tree at the window on whose leaves, when last he saw them, soft rain was dropping, and from which one little bird was chirping to tell another that there was shelter under them. Tachbrooke alternated with Warwick in these childmemories. From his seventh year he had associations with its garden; and when near his eightieth year he directed the then owner of Tachbrooke, his brother Henry, to the exact spot where he would find the particular apple-tree of one of their boyish adventures, close upon the nut-walk, and just of the same size and appearance as it was seventy years ago.' To this old place he was indeed especially attached, and his allusions to it were incessant. It was the scene of his earliest games and sports, where his 'heedless childhood played, a stranger then to pain;' where his boyhood too soon had run through its few happy days; and

'cestor was the greatest fool among all those who accompanied 'the Conqueror, and thus acquired the highest place and name, 'he accepted the priority. But then he might have reserved for ' himself the power to escape. For it appears that our name 'originally was Del-a-La'nd (De la Laundes); and my brother Henry has in his keeping some old writings conveying an es'tate signed and sealed in that name. When it was that so

many Norman names gained English terminations, as must have 'been the case, the heralds know best.'

III. BIRTH AND CHILDISH DAYS.

The family identity of fools and Landors does not seem long to have survived the laughter of Rabelais. Some of the name did good service in the civil wars of Charles and Cromwell; and Staffordshire had a stout whig Landor for its high-sheriff in the reign of William the deliverer, whose grandson, falling off from that allegiance, stood up as stoutly for the Jacobites, and whose great-grandson was the leading physician in Warwick, when, on the 30th January 1775, in the best house of the town, facing to the street but overshadowed at the back by old chestnuts and elms, the eldest child of himself and Elizabeth Savage of Tachbrooke, christened Walter and Savage, was born. The other children of the marriage may at once be named. They were Charles, Henry, and Robert; Elizabeth, Mary Anne, and Ellen: born respectively in 1777, 1780, and 1781; in 1776, 1778, and 1783. The three daughters died unmarried; Charles and Robert entered the Church, after taking their degrees at Oxford; and Henry, who had been at Rugby with Walter and Charles, and desired to have gone like them to Oxford, had, upon his brother Robert obtaining a scholarship to that university from Bromsgrove-school, to yield to his father's doubt whether his income could properly support all three sons at college, and himself to enter the office of a London conveyancer.

It was the elder brother's misfortune, in his youthful days, that he alone should have wanted the healthful restraints which the others underwent of necessity. No care with a view to a