They feel a consciousness that the foundations of our greatness are impaired, and have occasioned a thousand little cracks and crevices to let in the cold air upon our comforts. Ah, Nassau and Oliver! Quis vobis tertius hæres?" Certainly neither Sidmouth nor Castlereagh, Southey would himself have answered; and the mere tone of the question is some proof that the purchase from the old woman's stall was indeed a good one, and that to have read "attentively" at this time of life two such hearty old lovers of their country as Baker and Drayton had left a wholesome impression on this Rugby boy.

On the same form with him and Butler, all four having entered at about the same time, were Henry Cary and Walter Birch, both of them also Landor's contemporaries at Oxford. Writing from Florence at nearly the close of his eighty-fifth year,* he says: "Do not despise Cary's Dante.

He

It is wonderful how he could have turned the rhymes of Dante into unrhymed verse with any harmony: he has done it. Poor Cary! I remember him at Rugby and Oxford. was the friend of my friend Walter Birch, whom I fought at Rugby, and who thrashed me well. He was a year older, and a better boxer: we were intimate ever afterwards, till his death." Many letters remain to attest this intimacy, which, a few years after Landor's brief residence at Oxford, his brother Robert closely shared on coming into residence at Worcester College; Birch having by that time obtained a fellowship at Magdalen, and deservedly high repute among the most distinguished men in the other colleges. His elder brother was second master at Rugby; and Landor often generously spoke of Walter Birch himself as having been the best Rugby scholar, as well as the boy with whom he had formed his closest and indeed his only real friendship. "I see this morning," he wrote to me in 1854, "that Routh, the President of Magdalen, is dead. He was made president just before I entered the university. The first scholar admitted to his college after the election was my friend Walter Birch, the best scholar at Rugby, not excepting Butler. We used to walk together in Addison's walk along the Cherwell. From Rugby we had often gone to Bilton, one mile off, a small estate bought by Addison, where his only daughter, an old fat woman of weak intellect, was then living, and lived a good while after,- three or four years. Surely I must have assisted in another life!"

Beyond such glimpses as these there is little more to relate of his Rugby days. Though he had not many intimacies in the school, he

* October 23, 1960: the letter is addressed to Mr. Robert Lytton.

"Cary," the letter goes on in characteristic fashion, had some subordinate place in the British Museum. He was a learned and virtuous man. Our ministers of state were never more consistent than in their neglect of him. One would imagine that they were all poets, only that they did not snarl or scowl at him."

To this brother of his friend, Landor sent a copy of his Collected Works in 1846 with the subjoined note: "My dear Dr. Birch: My old friendship with your brother Walter, my only one at Rugby, gives me a right of sending to you what it is the will of Providence that I cannot send to him. Accept it as a mark of my esteem for your manly character and graceful erudition; and believe me, my dear Dr. Birch, yours sincerely, W. S. LANDOR."

was generally popular and respected, and used his influence often to save the younger boys from undue harshness or violence. This is mentioned in some recent recollections by one who was with him at Rugby; and an illustration may be added from a letter of his brother Henry's, when both had passed their seventieth year: "Do you think I ever forgot your kindness to me at Rugby, in threatening another boy who ill-used me if he again persisted in similar conduct? Or your gift of money to me at that time, when I verily believe you had not another shilling left for your own indulgences?"* A like interference on behalf of another school-fellow of his own standing, with whom otherwise he had little in common, led to an intimacy that should be mentioned here; not for anything it adds to our knowledge of his school-days,† but because it brought pleasant associations to his later life. Between him and Fleetwood Parkhurst, son of an old Worcestershire squire descended from the Fleetwoods and Dormers, there was a discordance of taste and temper in most things; yet their connection survived the Rugby time; they met frequently after their school-days; they visited each other's families; Parkhurst was the only Rugby boy who went with him to the same college at Oxford; and they travelled on occasions together until quite thrown asunder by a quarrel, which nevertheless in no respect abated the affection already conceived for his son's friend by the elder Mr. Parkhurst, and continued through the old squire's life. At Ripple Court, on the banks of the Severn, the family house, there was for years no happier guest; and when nearly half a century had passed, and Fleetwood's youngest sister had wedded a public man of distinction to be named later in this narrative, Landor reminded her of days still gratefully remembered.

Henry to Walter Landor: Tachbrooke, 2d January, 1847.

I shall be forgiven for quoting a letter to myself of August, 1851, as well for its incidental mention of Rugby, and its other amusing references, as for its closing allusion to Walter Birch and Coplestone. Mentioning a writer" who likes to be fine," as having been "scornful at ladies (by possibility) eating with their knives," he goes on: "He means using them as we generally use forks. Everybody did it before silverpronged forks were common. When I was at Rugby we had only steel forks of three prongs, Verily do I believe, on recollection, that they were only of two until the age grew delicate. It is probable that our Sardanapalus George the Fourth had no silver fork at eight or nine years of age. Coryat, in his Crudities, is horrified at the luxury of the Venetians, among whom he first saw such a portent. I once observed a French lady of high rank, no less a personage than a duchess, not only use her knife as a baker uses his shovel, but pick her teeth with it, resting her elbow on the table. In France the Graces seem to leave the room when the ladies sit down to dinner. They are certainly more free and easy at such times than ours are. Nine in ten of ours would think it indecorous to cut their turbot, but would rather tear it in pieces, and besmear their plates with it. The more fools they, as well as the more inelegant. Turbot, by the fork alone, is almost as indomitable as venison. If I were anybody of consequeace, I should like to shock Squire 's ultra-Chesterfieldism by a display of my manipulation on a turbot four inches thick. He should see the precision of my quadratures. I am glad you think highly of Coplestone. He was the friend of my friend Walter Birch, who had only a single unworthy one, WALTER LANDOR."

I find in one of Landor's letters of 1844 a reference to the close of the life of this companion of his youth. He had fallen dead in the streets of Bristol. "Little as poor Parkhurst is to be respected, I am shocked and grieved at his death. A happier one, however, there could not be. I shall often think of our early friendship and our appier days."

"Where Malvern's verdant ridges gleam
Beneath the morning ray,

Look eastward: see Sabrina's stream
Roll rapidly away. . . . .

The lord of these domains was one
Who loved me like an only son."*

Remaining at Rugby till he was past his fifteenth year, he had meanwhile been joined there by his younger brothers Charles and Henry; and in a letter to the latter written in 1847 we get our first glimpse of their father, Doctor Landor, at this early time. Naming some communication received from the head of the Lawley family, he says Lord Wenlock had reminded him that their families had been intimate for sixty years, but that his own memory carries him further back. "It is sixty-five years since Sir Robert Lawley stood godfather to our brother Robert. I was at Canwell (so was Charles) with my father when I was about eleven years old. We went coursing, for we rode our ponies. One morning we went into the stable, and Sir Robert said to my father, stopping in a certain spot, 'Landor, how many bottles of port have we drank together just about here?' 'Better talk of dozens, Sir Robert,' said my father. He and his father must have known my grandfather, for he quoted as a saying of his father's that my grandfather was an honest dog for a Jacobite, and screamed with laughter as he said it." It was but a year after this incident that young Walter had a visitor who might have seemed not wholly unconnected with those dozens of port, and to have brought him unsought and premature instalment of his entailed estates of inheritance. The alarm was a false one, this particular legacy going to his younger brothers; but the reader will appreciate the quiet humor with which one of them, who received from his father no better portion, tells the tale.

"Though followed," writes Mr. Robert Landor, "by two younger brothers as soon as they could be received at Rugby, there remains nothing worth recording till he was twelve years old, when a violent fit of the gout - gout which might have qualified him for an alderman - restored him to his mother's care at Warwick. Never was there a more impatient sufferer; and his imprecations, divided equally between the gout and his nurses, were heard afar. It is also strange

The poem from which these lines are taken was sent to Mrs. Rosenhagen in May, 1839, with a letter, in which he tells her: "I am not quite so young as I was, nor quite so free from cares and infirmities as you remember me at Ripple. Believe me, I very often think of the very kind friends who received me there with such cordiality. Your father was as fond of me as if I had been his son; and never did I shed so many tears for the loss of any man." In one of his letters of 1830, from Florence, he prays his sister Elizabeth not to omit to tell her that he often thinks of the many happy days he spent at Ripple. "I believe I should shed tears if I saw the place again. No person in my early days was so partial to me as her father was." Finally, let me give from another of his letters a dialogue (not altogether imaginary) illustrative of this friend of his youth. "My excellent old friend, Mr. Parkhurst, was appointed by Lord North to be one of the commissaries to the armies in North America. On his return he met Lord North in the Park. What, Parkhurst! you a commissary! and in your old family coach? Yes, my lord! thank God! and without a shilling more in my pocket than when I set out.' 'A pretty thing to thank God for!' rejoined my lord.""

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that there never was any return of this disorder. Our father suffered from it, and all three of the younger brothers; but though Walter's appetite much surpassed the best of ours (or the worst), he escaped it during more than seventy years. However active at dinner, he was always temperate after it; and I never saw the smallest sign of excess, though he greatly enjoyed three or four glasses of light wine. He remained at Rugby till fifteen or sixteen, and gained the character of more than common scholarship by his Latin verses especially. However violent his temper might have been, I think that he was liked as well as respected by his school-fellows; for some of them, whom I knew many years later, always remembered him with pleasure."

But, before finally quitting Rugby, an event of importance in a poet's life is to be recorded. While still in the school, and not more than fourteen, he had written his first original verses; with a certain sobriety of tone as well as absence of commonplace in the metre not usual in so young a beginner, and probably derived from exercises previously made in translations of which we can premise a word or two on his own authority. "The only Latin metre I ever tried in English," he told Southey when thanking him for his Vision of Judgment in 1824, "is the Sapphic. This is extremely easy. When I was at Rugby I wrote a vast number, and some few at Oxford. My earliest attempt was the translation of Sappho's odes: of which I remember only a part of the first stanza, -no very good specimen. First I had written, 'O Venus, goddess'; afterwards, Venus! O goddess both of earth and heaven.' The next I forget.. The third was,

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'From the sublime throne variously tinged
Hear my petition!'"

This sort of practice was no bad preparation for his first original attempt, made upon a cousin's marriage at her own request, and on the whole not worse or better than such things commonly are. But more interesting than the verses themselves is the letter I find with them in his papers, indorsed by himself "Miss Norris," addressed to "Mr. Landor, at Rugby," and written from his father's house in Warwick. The writer, who was of the family from whom his mother derived the estates of Ipsley and Tachbrooke, had obtained some influence over him, and here uses it to confirm what was best in his tastes and temper, with correction of what was worst in both. She thanks him for his poetry, thinks it exceeedingly pretty, and wonders he should hesitate a moment to present it to the lady who requested he would write it for her. He is to recollect that at his age people are not to expect a Milton or a Pope; and that should any inaccuracies occur, which she assures him she has not been able to discover, they will be attributed to youth and inexperience. She says that Mrs. Landor desires her love to him, and hopes he received her letter and some pigeons she had sent for him and his brothers. She sends

Doctor Landor's respects; and says he has not been able to find for her an earlier poetical piece containing Walter's thoughts on public and private education, which he had wished that she should read. "I cannot help," she continues, "admiring your way of employing Youth is doubtless the season for study and improveyour time. ment; and though we may not at all times find it agreeable, yet when we consider how despicable a figure the ignorant and uninformed make, it excites us to persevere with unceasing industry. I think you are much in the right to make the most learned your friends and companions; but permit me to say, that though I think a proper spirit commendable and even necessary at times, yet in my opinion it is better to submit sometimes to those under whose authority we are, even when we think they are in fault, than to run the risk of being esteemed arrogant and self-sufficient." The date of the letter is the 23d of September, 1790, little more than a year after the fall of the Bastille; and the revolt against authority it rebukes with such wise tenderness has relation to one of the many differences between the scholar and his master which had occurred at this time. Landor was afterwards so willing to forget these encounters, and to recall nothing of the old doctor not kindly and grateful, that the allusion to them now shall be brief.

He seems to have thought, when in the school, that Doctor James either would not or could not appreciate what he did in Latin verse, and that when he was driven to take special notice of it, he took the worst, and not the best, for the purpose. Thus, when told very graciously on one occasion to copy out fairly in the Play-book verses by himself of which he thought indifferently, Landor in making the copy put private additions to it of several lines, with a coarse allusion beginning, "Hæc sunt malorum pessima carminum quæ Landor unquam scripsit," &c. This offence was forgiven; but it was followed by another of which the circumstances were such as to render it impossible that he should continue longer in the school. The right at first was on Landor's side, for Doctor James had strongly insisted on, and the other as firmly had declined, the correction of an alleged false quantity found really not to exist. But, apart from the right or wrong of the dispute, an expression in the course of it rudely used by the pupil, and not necessary to be repeated here, was very sharply resented by the master; and when the matter came to be talked about, only one result was possible. "When between fifteen and sixteen," writes Mr. Robert Landor, "he was not expelled from Rugby, but removed as the less discreditable punishment, at the head-master's suggestion. There was nothing unusual or disgraceful in the particular transgression, but a fierce defiance of all authority, and a refusal to ask forgiveness."

Yet not so should we part from his Rugby days. He has himself given a picture of one of the latest of them appealing to kindlier remembrance. Sitting by the square pool not long before he left, he