ART. V.-1. Imaginary Conversations of Literary Men and Statesmen. By Walter Savage Landor, Esq. Second edition. 3 vols. 8vo. London. 1826.

2. Imaginary Conversations. Second Series. 2 vols. 8vo. 1829. 3. Pericles and Aspasia. 2 vols. 12mo. 1836.

4. Gobir, Count Julian, and other Poems. London. 12mo. 1831. 5. Idyllia Heroica. Pisis apud S. Nistrium. 4to. 1820.

6. A Satire on Satirists. London. 8vo. 1836.

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T is a perilous service to approach an author who challenges his critics to write dialogues. My four volumes,' says Mr. Landor, contain more than seventy dialogues; let the sturdiest of the connexion'-(meaning some of his critics, we know not whom, nor why thus distinguished), take the ten worst; and if he equals them in ten years I will give him a hot wheaten roll and a pint of brown stout for breakfast.' The offered reward may possibly be not unsuitable to the task proposed. If to equal the ten best had been the challenge, whatever might still have been thought of the singularity of such a defiance, no man could slight, and no modest man would willingly accept it; for the more excellent of Mr. Landor's dialogues contain specimens of eloquent composition,pure, concise, imaginative, such as it may be safely affirmed no living writer has surpassed. To attempt a rivalry with the ten worst would require an impudence of another description,-a brazen front, the exaggeration of caricature, and wit bordering on buffoonery. Let us hope that our notice of Mr. Landor's works will submit us to neither sort of competition.

Why will not this writer bear in mind,-what the simplest observer of our nature could suggest to him,-that he who wishes us to believe the sincerity of his contempt, ought to express the sentiment but rarely? The mere language of contempt is that which anger always uses; it is the first retort of vexation and resentment. Why will he, on every occasion, under whatever name he is writing, Demosthenes, or Aristotle, or Pericles, betray the same exacerbation of feeling towards persons and things professedly puny and indifferent? Why must the greatest and most successful orators be represented as smarting with the sense of unmerited censure or neglect? Why, in opposition to all dramatic propriety, must the head and features of Pericles be painted on the naked body of a St. Sebastian, all wounds and writhing? You are anxious,' it is thus that the most fortunate of Athenians addresses the fair Aspasia,

'You are anxious that I should be praised as a writer, by writers who direct the public in these matters. Aspasia! I know their value. Understand me correctly and comprehensively; I mean partly the intrinsic

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worth of their commendations, and partly (as we pay in the price of our utensils) the fashion. I have been accused of squandering away both the public money and my own; nobody shall ever accuse me of paying three obols for the most grandly embossed and most sonorous panegyric. I would excite the pleasure (it were too much to say the admiration) of judicious and thoughtful men; but I would neither soothe nor irritate these busybodies. I have neither honey nor lime for ants.'-Per. and Asp., vol. i. p. 245.

We take no pleasure in pointing out the triumph which, it will be suspected, has been obtained over this author's irritability. We would rather have watched him in his quiet efforts to establish an enduring reputation, to be gained, we cheerfully acknowledge, by other means than are sufficient to acquire the popularity of the day. The love of posthumous fame no writer has better vindicated. Fame they tell you is air; but without air there is no life for any; without fame there is none for the best.' And in a beautiful passage, very appropriately assigned to Cicero, he thus describes and justifies this love of glory:- Everything has its use; life to teach us the contempt of death, and death the contempt of life. Glory, which among all things between stands eminently the principal object, although it has been considered by some philosophers as mere vanity and deception, moves those great intellects which nothing else could have stirred, and places them where they can best and most advantageously serve the commonwealth.' We regret that one capable of feeling, and of so accurately appreciating, this passion for a lofty and enduring fame, could not secure to it a less divided empire over his own mind. Neither his habits nor his position in life rendered valuable to him the little buzz of temporary renown; he should have raised his mind to its highest elevation, and kept it there,-should have written his best, and his best only-and given it forth for critics to discover in it what they could, or what they pleased.

There is a never-dying feud, it seems, between those who write for praise, and those who take upon themselves the somewhat invidious office of its public distribution; nor is it an easy task to decide which party in the contest has exhibited the most unfairness, or betrayed the worst temper. But whatever the comparative force, or bitterness, which the rival factions may bring into the field, we may note, if the matter be worth an observation, that the victory will always ostensibly remain with the authors. Bad critics and bad authors are equally abundant; but while the despised author dies quickly out of sight, and is altogether forgotten, the hapless and transgressing critic is not always allowed the same refuge of oblivion. His name becomes attached to that which he vainly attempted to disparage; his disgrace is perpetuated; and rarely

is a celebrated poet led forth in triumph but a crowd of these unhappy caitiffs, with hands bound behind their backs, are doomed to make part of the procession. The writer who perishes leaves behind no materials for a trophy; he who survives holds up, as it hangs from his shield, the ineffectual weapon that had assailed him. The successful blow is inevitably forgotten in its own result, and in the frailty of the material on which it fell; the idle and presumptuous stroke is alone commemorated,-the axe lies in splinters at the root of the impenetrable oak.

At the risk of sharing, in this unenviable manner, the immortality of Mr. Landor,—at the hazard of being classed with those who, occupying themselves with the good compositions of others only to produce indifferent matter of their own, are here wittily enough described as exactly reversing the progress of the sculptor,

for this last begins with dirt and ends with marble, the critic begins with marble and ends with dirt,'-in the face of all this, of the rude chastisement or utter contempt that await us, we shall endeavour to form an impartial estimate of the merits and demerits of this writer,-a writer who deserves to be much better known than he is, but who, however his celebrity may increase, can never be allowed to escape from censures, many and severe.

Every extensive work presents us with parts of unequal merit, but nowhere do we remember to have met with so singular a discrepancy of this kind, as in the Imaginary Conversations. The light and darkness lie together in strong and frequent relief. The few passages we have already quoted, display the writer who can, on some occasions, as recklessly violate all the rules of taste, as, in other instances, he can fully comply with their most rigid demands. The same man who can deliver moral sentiments, of reflections upon human life, in language rarely excelled, whether in beauty of metaphor, in tenderness, or dignity, can be coarse in his allusions, absurdly extravagant, and forget all temperance whether of thought or of expression. Lampoon, and caricature, and the dialogue of a dull farce, are found mingled with conversations which would not have disgraced the lips of those celebrated sages and orators of antiquity to whom he has thought fit to at

tribute them.

The discordant materials of these dialogues leave upon the mind an impression equally mixed of the character of their author; we alternately honour and recoil, admire and denounce. Grossly unjust in his strictures upon others, and himself rankling with the sense of undistinguished merit, he seems to have engrafted on a morose disposition all the petty irascibility of a Sir Fretful. Yet the writer of the Imaginary Conversations, (and as such only are we acquainted with his character,) amidst his atrabilious

humours,

humours, his pitiable arrogance, his offensive intemperance, displays a certain generosity, and a chivalrous independence of opinion, to which we would willingly do ample justice. He is prepared at all times to be the champion of the weak, the ally of the defeated, the applauder of the unregarded or disesteemed. If to be fortunate, if to have attained popularity, or rank, or power, be manifest provocations of Mr. Landor's hostility, let it be also admitted that the neglect or censure of the world, or the impediment of adverse circumstances, are equally effective in securing his approbation or alliance. If our cynic growls, it is at the rich man, not the beggar: purple and fine linen he flies at and worries he is tame and civil-he fawns on the tatters of adversity.

The poetry of Byron does not exhibit more wayward and untameable passion than the prose of Landor. Both of these fugitives to Italy are fond of parading their love of seclusion and their indifference to the opinion of their countrymen, sentiments which are sometimes sincere, but never when uttered in a loud or angry voice: they are then the efforts only of a proud spirit to transmute some vexation or disappointment which it cannot overcome. They who really love seclusion do not find it necessary to raise a quarrel with the world in order to reanimate their content; nor is the man who can live without the praise of others, very solicitous to convince them of the fact. I,' says Mr. Landor in one of his prefaces, I, who never ask anything of any man.' A heartless boast, if true. He who is unable to receive, as well as to give, has learnt but the half of friendship.

But from the character of the man, which can rarely be ascertained with accuracy from his writings, we return to the works themselves of our author. In attempts at humour or gaiety-in all efforts to raise laughter or excite mirth-the writer of the Imaginary Conversations is signally unfortunate. The dialogue between the Duke de Richelieu, Sir Fire Coats, and Lady Glengrin, is one of the longest in the collection; it is intended to be pleasant and facetious; we question whether ten readers have been able to make a fair progress from the commencement to the end. What wit Mr. Landor possesses (and he is not without wit) is such as is calculated, not to raise a smile, but to cut and wound. He is too violent, too intolerant in his censures, ever to admit of the playfulness of satire. The animosity by which he appears to be actuated against every statesman of the time, is as injurious to his witticism as it is dishonourable to his judgment. If it be true (as he himself assures us, and we will not here take upon ourselves to dispute) that his Conversations are destined for immor

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tality-if those two fingers' and that 'pen'* mark out whomsoever he pleases for eternal applause or infamy-what black, hideous, and distorted portraits of some of the most illustrious of his contemporaries are fated to descend to future generations! 'Alas!' he exclaims in a penitential note to the dialogue between Bishop Burnet and Humphrey Hardcastle, Alas! my writings are not upon slate; no finger-not of Time himself, who dips it in the clouds of years and in the storm and tempest-can efface the written.' Alas, then-for it is left us only to re-echo the lamentation that calumny and ill-humour should be destined to endure so long, that invective so unjust, and so little animated by wit, should be imposed so irremediably upon all posterity!

Neither is our author happy in his descriptions. In these, whenever he attempts them, he is, with few exceptions, laboured and ineffectual, abrupt, overstrained, obscure. What was pro

bably conceived with feeling has been executed with mere rhetoric, and ends in a sort of frigid bombast. As an instance of this unfortunate species of writing, we select the brief introduction—and where failures are to be exemplified the briefest instance is the best-to the Conversation between General Kleber and some French officers.

'An English officer was sitting with his back against the base of the Great Pyramid. He sometimes looked towards those of elder date and ruder materials before him, sometimes was absorbed in thought, and sometimes was observed to write in a pocket-book with great rapidity. "If he were not writing," said a French naturalist to a young ensign, "I should imagine him to have lost his eyesight by the ophthalmia. He does not see us level your rifle-we cannot find a greater curiosity." The arts prevailed: the officer slided with extended arms from his resting-place; the blood, running from his breast, was audible as a swarm of insects in the sand. No other sound was heard. Powder had exploded; life had passed away; not a vestige remained of either.'— -vol. i. p. 197.

But if descriptive powers are not manifested in the pages of Mr. Landor;—if humour is absent, and wit but thinly scattered over them-if good taste is violated in many ways—if fair and equitable estimation of human character is seldom to be found,— yet, as we have already intimated, the Imaginary Conversations,' when the theme is grave or lofty, and the speaker dignified, display a congenial and appropriate eloquence-perspicuous, pow

*Pallavicini. Your houses of parliament, Mr. Landor, for their own honour, for the honour of the service and of the nation, should have animadverted on such an outrage: he should answer for it, he should suffer for it.

'Landor. These two fingers have more power, Marchese, than those two houses. A pen! he shall live for it. What, with their animadversions, can they do like this?'-vol. i. p. 194.

erful,