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CERTAIN references that occur in this volume might be misleading without a mention of the fact that the commencement of it was written in the winter of 1865, and that the English Edition of the first four books was printed off in the summer of 1867. The completion of the book has been necessarily delayed until now.

WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR.

BOOK FIRST.

1775-1797. ÆT. 1-22.

WARWICK, RUGBY, OXFORD, AND SWANSEA.

I. Introductory.-II. The Landors and the Savages.-III. Birth and Childish Days.-IV. At Rugby School. V. At Ashbourne. VI. At Trinity College, Oxford. VII. Before and after Rustication. VIII. First published Book. IX. A fair Intercessor. -X. A Moral Epistle. XI. Retreat to Wales.

I. INTRODUCTORY.

I AM not insensible to what is generally taken to be expressed, in matters of literature as in many other things, by great popularity. The writer whom crowds of readers wait upon has deserved his following, be it for good or ill; and the desire to read without the trouble of thinking, which railways have largely encouraged, and to which many modern reputations are due, has not prevented the growth of other reputations that will outlive the contemporaries who conferred them.

But with this popular literature, which in some form always exists, changing its form with the age, there has existed at all times a literature less immediately attractive, but safer from caprice or vicissitude; and finding its audiences, fit however few, the same through many ages. England has been very fortunate in it. Its principal masters have been the men who from time to time have purified, enlarged, and refixed the language; who have gathered to it new possessions, extending its power and variety; but whose relation for the most part to their reading contemporaries, far from that of the petted or popular favorite, has been rather that of the thoughtful to the little thinking or the learned to the little knowing. They have been too wise for the foolish, and too difficult for the idle. They have left unsatisfied the eager wish for the sensational or merely pleasurable, on whose gratification popularity so much depends; and they have never had for their audiences those multitudes of readers who cannot wait to consider and enjoy. Taking rank with this rare class is the writer, WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR, of whom I am about to give some account.

*

It is not my intention to speak otherwise than frankly of his character and of his books. Though I place him in the first rank as a writer of English prose; though he was also a genuine poet; and there is no exaggeration in the saying of one of his American admirers, that, excepting Shakespeare, no other writer has furnished us with so many or so delicate aphorisms of human nature; his faults lie more upon the surface than is usual with writers of this high order. It was unfortunate for him in his early years that self-control was not necessarily forced upon a temperament which had peculiar need of it; and its absence in later time affected both his books and his life disastrously. Even the ordinary influences and restraints of a professional writer were not known to him. Literature was to him neither a spiritual calling, as Wordsworth regarded it, nor the lucrative employment for which Scott valued it. Landor wrote without any other aim than to please himself, or satisfy the impulse as it rose. Writing was in that sense an indulgence to which no limits were put, and wherein no laws of government were admitted. If merely a thing pleased him, it was pre-eminent and excellent above. all things; what for the moment most gratified his will or pleasure he was eager to avouch wisest and best, as in the thing that satisfied neither he could find suddenly all opposite qualities; and though a certain counterpoise to this was in his own nature, his opinions generally being wise and true, and his sympathics almost always generous and noble, it led him frequently into contradictions and extravagance that have deprived him of a portion of his fame.

There is one person who better than myself could have done what I am about to attempt. The younger of Landor's two surviving brothers, the Rev. Robert Eyres Landor, would on every account have been the best biographer of one to whom he is not more closely akin by birth than by a curious similarity in his genius. But while this

yet was possible, the occasion had not arisen; and what Landor himself desired I should do is now undertaken at the further request of both those brothers, who have given to it all necessary help. Of what kind this has been, the reader will have ample means of judging; and if the early portion of the biography should awaken any interest in him, he will find it to have been chiefly derived from the characteristic and pleasing letters of Mr. Robert Landor.

II. THE LANDORS AND THE SAVAGES.

Landor's father was a physician. "It was, I believe, not unusual," his brother writes to me, speaking of ninety or a hundred years ago, "for even the eldest sons of private gentlemen to engage in some profession during their fathers' lifetime, if their fathers were not old. The regular army could afford but little room for them. Perhaps the

*Professor Lowell.

greatest mumber were educated in your profession, as best qualifying them to manage the business of after life. But some preferred medicine. Our father took his degree at Worcester College, Oxford, and succeeded Sir Charles Shuckborough, an old Warwickshire baronet. A still older baronet many years after, who lived in the adjoining parish to Ipsley Court, was first Doctor and then Sir Charles Throckmorton. The different branches of the medical profession were kept much more distinct a hundred years ago than at present. After the death of his father and his own succession to the two Warwickshire estates, our father resigned his practice, and lived part of the year at Ipsley Court and part at Warwick."

At Warwick was born Dr. Walter Landor's most famous son, the first issue of his second marriage. Of the six children born to his first marriage, with the daughter and heiress of Mr. Wright of Warwick, all but one died in childhood; and this daughter, on whom had been settled the bulk of her mother's fortune, married a Staffordshire cousin, Humphrey Arden of Longcroft. Doctor Landor's second wife was Elizabeth Savage, eldest daughter and co-heiress with her three sisters of Charles Savage, the head of an old Warwickshire family, the bulk of whose property had been transferred to a younger branch who bore the name of Norris. The paternal fortune, not very large even before it was divided, the eldest daughter shared with her three sisters; but after her marriage to Doctor Landor, two estates in Warwickshire, Ipsley Court and Tachbrooke (clearbrook), were bequeathed to her by the representatives of the Norris branch 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. The 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

In a letter to me of August, 1852, Landor described Ipsley Court, which with his Lanthony estate has descended to his eldest son, as having been purchased by Mr. Samuel Savage early in the last century, with some farms and a park. "He never resided there; and his steward, the rector of the parish, took down the noble old house, leaving only the two wings, one of which my father inhabited, adding a dining-room of thirty feet or more. The whole length exceeds ninety. The opposite wing contains offices, stables, coach-houses, &c. These wings were added in the time of Charles II. Nothing can be less architectural. The views are extensive, rich, and beautiful. My father cut down several thousand pounds' worth of oaks; my mother as many. It is about forty years since I saw the place; but there are still, I hear, oaks of nearly a century's growth." I must in candor add, that his earliest allusions are less complimentary. In a letter to his sister Elizabeth from Florence in 1830, he asks about the new tenant of Ipsley, and hopes he has taken it for many years. "Never was any

habitation more thoroughly odious, - red soil, mince-pie woods, and black and greasy needle-makers!"

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