to recognise as Landor's a detached passage of his prose, than to do the same for any other modern author, setting aside those cases where style has become a mere mannerism.

But with his verse the case is different. Lines there are in his poems, and even long passages, written with a pen cut from an eagle's feather. But in too many cases the ink has flowed from a humbler quill. He never attained that mastery over verse, which would have made it an instrument fit to express all his thoughts and fancies; for the aptest utterance of his graver and more majestic thoughts the reader must turn to Landor's prose. He was not unaware of this himself. In his prose works there are many passages which show the pride he took in his command of language. Many men have said with Horace, exegi monumentum aere perennius. Few have expressed that conviction as majestically as Landor. "What I write," he says in one place, "is not written on slate; and no finger, not that of Time himself, who dips it in the mist of years, can efface it.” But of his verse he never speaks so confidently. He ranked himself as the best of living prose writers, but in poetry he felt that there were men living who were his masters. He speaks with indifference of men who borrowed from his prose; he bitterly resented what he believed to be a theft from Gebir, committed by Wordsworth. In a man of Landor's temper this is no small indication that in his inmost heart he mistrusted his success as a poet.

And yet, when this is said, there is more to be added. Landor, though not in the first rank, stands above the

second. Indeed, in his most successful moments he stands alone. There has never been an English poet capable of the perfection and grace possessed by his shorter poems; and only one poet since Milton has written blank verse of so majestic and harmonious a sound. The only modern poem that can be placed beside Gebir in this respect is Hyperion; Count Julian stands alone. Could Landor have gone on writing in this vein, he would have won a high station as a poet.

But splendid as these two achievements are, each shows clearly that it is a solitary effort. In Gebir there are often passages of terrible obscurity; what is worse, there are instances of what look like perverse disregard of poetic dignity. The poem is pitched in a majestic vein of thought. But here and there are fatal touches of burlesque. When Tamar tells Gebir that the Nymph's feet

"resembled those long shells explored By him who to befriend his steed's dim sight Would blow the pungent powder in his eye,'

the reader can only marvel with De Quincey. Landor himself cut out the amazing lines which ran

"Tamar, who listened still amidst amaze

Held never thought on progeny."

But he did so because the passage contained a panegyric on Napoleon, and not because he saw the badness of them. Other passages of a like kind might be quoted. But these are enough to show that though no

lover of poetry can read Gebir without delight, none can avoid the conclusion that there are faults in it which spring not from inexperience but from a false conception of poetic art.

In the present volumes is included another poem in the same style as Gebir, called "From the Phocæans," which has never been reprinted since its first publication. It shows even more clearly than Gebir that Landor had chosen a method of writing in which it was impossible that success should be attained. In spite of many incidental beauties, "The Phocæans" is involved in style and narrative, always obscure and frequently unnatural. The author felt

poem, never re

this himself; he never finished the printed it, and never made another attempt of the kind. "Chrysaor," which he wrote during the same period, is a success, but a success which surprises the reader.

While making these attempts at Epic style, Landor was in fact discovering his real powers as a poet. The thoughts natural to a man's mind may be too turbulent and rugged to provide him with fit material for verse; and yet he may be a poet. In this case he mus do as Landor did, trust to external events for his subjects and write occasional verse. Any incident, even the slightest, may in this way result in a poem. If the incident and the poet are fortunate, that poem may be a stanza four lines long clinging to the memory with a charming persistency. Of such brief poems Landor has written a larger number than any English poet. Such verses as many of those among the first LXVI. of the Poems and Epigrams in these volumes cannot be matched else

where in English. They all have one source, Landor's love for Ianthe, the most enduring feeling of his life. And yet the reader will not find among them all one line to tell him what Landor thought in himself; on the other hand, in every poem it is easy to guess what kind of occasion provoked it.

The

This kind of verse has its triumphs; it has also its failures. A trivial incident, an unpoetic moment, may together produce a weak and pointless poem. number of such poems produced by Landor, especially in his later life, is terribly large. It is surprising that he should have cared to collect the album verses, the poetic tributes to young ladies, the mere scraps scrawled down by an idle pen, which make so large a show in his works, and obscure so much his real successes. To reprint this mass of verse is to prolong the injury Landor did to his own fame. I have preferred to run the risk of making a selection from Landor's poems, hoping that if by so doing I fall into some errors, I at least avoid the guilt of reprinting what Landor in his wiser moments never would have published.

There is, however, one group of Landor's poems to which these criticisms do not apply. He had all his life spent much time and trouble on writing Latin verses, and had attained a rare excellence in that kind of composition. It is not necessary here to give any detailed criticism of his Latin poems. Many of them are epigrams like those of Martial and Catullus, occasional verse, with the merits and faults of the English poems already mentioned. But the group of narrative poems, which, in their English form, Landor named

the Hellenics, stand on a different footing. In treatment they sometimes recall the writings of Ovid, but they are far more direct and less artificial. In the collected works of 1846 a large number appear for the first time in English, translated from the Latin originals. Here and there the verse has the failings likely to be found in translations; but in spite of this the Hellenics are good reading. The Hamadryad, in particular, is as graceful a setting of a graceful story as any poet could have devised. There is not a needless word in it, and yet not an opportunity for a fine touch is missed. The remaining poems do not quite reach this level, but in all there is an even excellence of treatment rarely to be found in Landor's work, either in prose or verse. There are not the splendid, though accidental, successes of the shorter poems; but there is, what is better, a sustained mastery and careful workmanship.

In every criticism the critic must take account of his own prejudices. I should not have thought it needful to say so much in dispraise of Landor's poems, were there not a disposition among critics to overpraise them at the expense of his prose. It is not hard to see the reason of this. Much of Landor's prose it is difficult to read with patience; the matter is full of offence, now to one side, now to the other. Every reader has a group of dogmas, social, political, and religious, which have crystallised in his mind under the various influences of training and character. Whatever these dogmas may be, Landor, in his prose works, is sure to outrage some of them before many pages have been turned, and to outrage them in a manner which might suit a grand inquisitor with a turn for practical joking. In his