varied and vivid pattern of the mingled yarn of which the web of every part of his own life was made, it will not now be out of place. At the date of the letter we had been corresponding about an Eton boy's cruelty to his fag, which the newspapers had got hold of and were sharply reproving. the "When I wrote about the cruelty of the Eton boy I had not forgotten a lighter case at Rugby. With what pleasure and even pride do I recall to memory that I was the first of that school who paid the lad he fagged. Poor little B. H. had three or four bottles to fill at pump in a hard frost, and was crying bitterly, when I took pity on him and made him my fag, at threepence a week, I think. This exempted him from obedience to others, and I seldom exercised my vested rights. Perhaps the head master, James, thought it an innovation to pay. He certainly hated me for my squibs, and had also threatened to expel me for never calling Will Hill Mister; I_having told him I never would call Hill or any other Mister unless I might call the rest so. At last he wrote to my father that I was rebellious and incited others to rebellion; and unless he took me away he should be obliged (much to his sorrow') to expel me. As I was within five of the head, and too young for Oxford, I was placed under a private tutor and matriculated at seventeen. Among my enormities was writing the verses I now send you. James had chosen some of my worst verses to play for, as we called it: that is, every half-holiday was supposed to be gained for the lads by the best verses of the day. Mine were always the best, but, out of malice I am afraid, the very worst of them were chosen; and this was my revenge." Of the extent of it, far exceeding the precisely similar instance referred to in a former page,* the reader must happily be left ignorant, the accompanying Alcaic verses not admitting of translation. But what they show of a man's intellect in youth entirely without guidance or control, the letter recalling them not less strikingly shows of the passions and impulses of youth surviving to extreme old age; and it will be well to take this double consideration with us into the years we have now to retrace. * Ante, p. 18. BOOK THIRD. 1805-1814. T. 30-39. AT BATH AND CLIFTON, IN SPAIN, AND AT LLANTHONY. -- I. Life at Bath.-II. Robert Southey. III. First Letters to Southey.-IV. In Spain. V. Letters to Southey on Spain and Spaniards. - VI. Letters on Kehama and Roderick. VII. The Tragedy of Count Julian.-VIII. In Possession of the Abbey.-IX. Marriage and Life at Llanthony.-X. Public Affairs. XI. Private Disputes.-XII. Departure from England. I. LIFE AT BATH. In the interval that immediately followed his succession to the paternal estate, Landor lived chiefly in Clifton or at Bath; and at the latter place his younger brother found him, soon after their father's death, "with the reputation of very great wealth, and the certainty, at his mother's death, of still greater. A fine carriage, three horses, two men-servants, books, plate, china, pictures, in everything a profuse and wasteful outlay, all confirmed the grandeur." Upon the whole not a life, for such a man, either profitable then to have lived or now to recall; and very little here shall be said of it. Some loveverses connected with the later portion of it can also afford to perish. Their heroine, Ioné, who translated far too easily into Jones, has retained not so much as a fragment of romance. Even of his Ianthe, to whom in these days much beautiful and tender verse was dedicated, there is little now remaining to claim a place in my story except such chance allusion as hereafter may drop from himself. The sort of life thus led in Bath, however, could not be passed without results more or less grave; and in little more than a year they showed themselves in a form for which the remedy was supposed to have been found in a project for selling the old paternal estate in Staffordshire, and reinvesting in other land at greater profit. Reserving these things to a year or two hence, when the necessary arrangements, meanwhile set on foot, became practicable and were completed, I shall dwell upon those incidents only of the intervening years out of which matter can be extracted that is worth remembering, or that throws any kind of light upon the variable career and character of which, with all its good and evil so capriciously intermixed, its comedy and tragedy, its clouds and sunshine, its generous emotions and tempestuous passions, its use and its waste of prodigious powers, it is my object in these pages to convey at the least no false impression. Remembering allusions formerly made to the wife of a friend very dear to him in early Warwick days, it will be proper not to omit the mention of her death, which occurred at this time. It should be given for such evidence as it affords that, amid his present daily and nightly round of "routs, plays, concerts, and balls," his heart was yet easily moved as ever, and keen in its susceptibility of suffering. The young wife of the physician who had succeeded to his father's practice in Warwick, the "angel" of his early letters, died so suddenly that he had not even heard of her illness, and now first read of it in a newspaper. Her infant daughter and herself had died together. "Poor Lambe, poor Lambe," he writes to Parr, at whose house the friends had so often met: "Poor little Elizabeth and her mother, now indeed divine! Yes, death has proved the fact, and not the contrary. For what is death? A change of situation, an enlargement of liberty, a privilege, a blessing, an apotheosis. What hours have we passed together, hours never to return, or to produce their likeness in this world! In vain have I tried every species of amusement: routs, plays, concerts, and balls. Her image rises up everywhere before me. I sicken at the sight of beauty. Did she not treat me as a brother? did she ever call me by more than one name? The sound of Walter was the sweetest of sounds. Pardon me, I will acknowledge it, she made me think myself a virtuous and great man. Certainly I never left her company but I was more happy and more deserving of happiness." The same unmistakable sorrow is expressed to his sister Elizabeth, one of his letters to her ending thus: "It was a shock from which I have not yet recovered, and which I shall feel, I believe, forever. "O Lambe, my early guide, my guardian friend, Do thus our pleasures, thus our prospects end! All that could swell thy heart, thy soul elate, Heaven gave, but pondering found one gift too great. · What now avails thee, what availed thee then, To shine in science o'er the sons of men; Each varying plant, each tortuous root to know, What latent pests from lucid waters flow; All the deep bosom of the Air contains, Fire's parent strength and Earth's o'erflowing veins ? The last unwelcome lesson teaches this, Frail are alike our knowledge and our bliss. Against the storms of fate and throbs of pain His eldest sister was his constant correspondent at this time, and would have saved him from many a folly if cleverness and good sense could have done it. But he was no sooner out of one scrape than he was into another. "The battledore you talk of," he replies from Bath to one of her letters, "is called a cornet, and I play at it better than any man in England. I was taught in France. A little girl said to me, Jouez donc aux. cornets, monsieur? My reply was, A la bonne Ante, pp. 88, 90, &c. A portion of these verses (without the last two) will be found with variations in his published poems. heure, ma petite. Je ne me suis pas marié à présent. I played, nevertheless, and have played the same game since. I believe I am more in request here than I have ever been; not for myself, for we are not, like wine, improvable by age, but for Frolic and Favorite, and what is whispered of Llanthony." Frolic and Favorite were his carriage-horses. He ends his letter with a parable of a young lady whom a spectre was reported to have visited at night, until her mother, by taking her to sleep in her own room, exorcised the ghost, to which he had himself thereupon addressed these lines: "Thou, since she sleeps with her mamma, Lookst like a fox in some ha-ha, Who views, with nostrils opened wide, A pheasant on the other side, Pants, grumbles, whines with lank desires, And licks his whiskers, and retires!" Very well for the ghost that he could; but some enterprises there were out of which retirement was less easy, and they largely occupy his sister Elizabeth's letters. She is in a perpetual agitation of warning against any ill-advised marriage, one danger of this kind succeeding another very rapidly. She has indeed no objection to a well-considered proceeding of the sort; and sketches one in the language of an old servant who has come with her annual gift of a basket of chickens to the family at Warwick, and has declared herself "anackauntable glad Mr. Walter is growing jolly, and hopes he will marry some fine lady of a good family and fortin, as he ought, to be sure." Not that to the sister these appear indispensable, if their place is otherwise filled. "Birth and fortune," she tells her brother, "are not requisites, but good disposition and good understanding are; and how many innocents, only for being pretty, have you all your life been thinking sensible!" That was a home-thrust, and had some effect, the lady against whom in particular it was aimed not retaining her influence; but one of these affairs had gone very far before anything of it was known to her, and she has almost to resign herself to the confession that it must be. "I hope to God your choice may a fortunate one, for I never was and never shall be happy when you are otherwise. You are not just to me. I do wish you to be married; but I am sure the common sort are not calculated for you." be Happily escape came again; and in this case from the lady herself. Some offence had been taken by her, not clearly to be made out from Landor's letter, which dwells far less on the incident itself than upon the ball and supper where it happened, with its winter pines, peas, strawberries, and "sparagus," besides ice enough to cover the Nieper and beauty enough to thaw it all. To which his sister quietly rejoins that she hears with delight of his being again heart-free; makes neat allusion to the lady's predecessor as well as herself, by remarking that their friend "the old doctor" had declared "neither to be worthy of him"; hopes he may now have time, as her mother says, to "think of somebody worth something"; and tells him that the blaze of beauty over in Bath must be brighter than the fire by which she is writing if it succeeds in again making him intemperately warm. But the heats that Landor suffered from were not from that blaze only. His eager interest in politics had not meanwhile slackened; and unpalatable as many of his opinions were to the particular part of society which his present mode of living necessarily threw much in his way, moderation or compromise on any points, even in the matter of speech, was a virtue still unknown to him. "About sixty years ago," his brother writes to me, "an old friend of his who felt much esteem for him, a Major Tickell, the descendant of Addison's friend, expressed his surprise to me that my brother should have lived so long. We were occasional guests,' said he,' at the same public table in Bath two winters, where there were other military men; and if I had talked as he talked, there would have been half a dozen bullets through my body if the first five had been insufficient." Such dangers were in truth only escaped as his character became known for extravagance, and sometimes chiefly through the interposition of such friends as the major." On the other hand, it is to be remembered that there were estimable men in the major's profession then, to whom the mere praise of Mr. Fox would be a horrible Jacoextravagance; and the accession of that statesman and his friends to power on Pitt's death in the early part of the year had given unusual bitterness to party strifes and hatreds. Landor's intercourse with Parr it naturally drew closer; and it brought him again into correspondence with Adair, from one of whose letters we may gather something of the turn Landor's outlook in politics was taking at the time. More eager than ever against Bonaparte, and resolute for maintaining the efficiency of the power which had been thus far the only check to his ambition, he had written to Adair about the navy. The reply, very cordial in its tone, gives us a glimpse of the troubles of "All the Talents" from a source very near the fountain-head: bin "I concur entirely with you in opinion respecting the times, and the nature of the difficulties with which the new administration has to contend: I think also with you that whatever can be done by wisdom and humanity' will be done by Mr. Fox: but I confess that my hopes are not so great as my fears in any view I can take of the situation of our affairs. Indeed it is my firm belief that although, for reasons which appear conclusive to them, they think it more prudent to abstain from laying open to the country the true state of those affairs, they have found them in a much worse condition than they could have themselves believed at any time during their opposition. I have heard many plans suggested at various times for the manning of our navy, and for keeping up a sufficient number of seamen sudden without having recourse to pressing or similar methods; but for during peace to enable government to equip their fleets on a some reason or other, naval men have always rejected even the experiment. The present Board of Admiralty would, I should think, give a fair |