had written a little poem on Godiva; and, in a note to his Imaginary Conversation on the charming old Warwickshire story, he not only relates how the school-fellow to whom he showed his earlier effort laughed at him, and how earnestly he had to entreat and implore him not to "tell the other lads," but he repeats the verses. With which, as he transcribes them in his villa at Fiesole, there comes back to him the very air of the school-boy spot in which first they were written, and fervently he wishes that the peppermint may still be growing on the bank by the Rugby pool. It is a pretty picture, and the lines themselves are of a kind to haunt the memory.

"In every hour, in every mood,

O lady, it is sweet and good

To bathe the soul in prayer;
And, at the close of such a day,

When we have ceased to bless and pray,
To dream on thy long hair."

V. AT ASHBOURNE.

Rugby had, nevertheless, given pretty nearly all in the way of scholarship she had to give to Landor, when he was thus, though still too young for the university, compelled to bid her adieu. An intermediate place between school and college it was necessary to provide; and, writes Mr. Robert Landor, "at sixteen he was consigned to the tuition of a clergyman living in Derbyshire who had no other pupil, and who seemed well qualified for the office by patience and gentleness. Walter always spoke of him with respect; but though by no means ignorant, the tutor had very little more scholarship than the pupil, and his Latin verses were hardly so good as Walter's." This was Mr. Langley, Vicar of Ashbourne, the charming country village Landor has so prettily described in his delightful conversation of Walton, Cotton, and Oldways, where he takes occasion also to render tribute to his worthy old tutor, and makes Walton say of such masters and their scholars that they live like princes, converse like friends, and part like lovers. "He would take only one private pupil," he says in a note to that conversation, "and never had but

me.

The kindness of him and his wife to me was parental. They died nearly together, about five-and-twenty years ago. Never was a youth blessed with three such indulgent and affectionate private tutors as I was; before by the elegant and generous Doctor John Sleath at Rugby, and after by the saintly Benwell at Oxford." In a letter to myself written hardly eleven years ago, he makes another allusion to these days passed in Derbyshire between sixty and seventy years before which may be worth preserving.* "My old tutor at Ashbourne, poor dear Langley, had seen Pope when he came to

* Other similar allusions were frequent; as in a letter to me of 1851. "It is exactly sixty years since I saw Chatsworth. I was at that time under a private tutor at Ashbourne, having just left Rugby, and being a little too young for Oxford."

visit Oxford from Lord Harcourt's at Nuneham. Doctor Harrington of Oceana's family dined at Allen's, where he did not meet Pope, but did meet Fielding. Pope, I believe, was then dead. Harrington was almost a boy, fourteen or fifteen years old. He sat at dinner by his father, and Fielding on the other side. Warburton was there, and with great pomposity made a speech eulogistic of Allen, who had said a few words, modest and unimportant. 'Gentlemen,' said Warburton, many of us have enjoyed the benefits of a university education, but which among us can speak so wisely and judiciously?' Fielding turned his face round to Harrington and said pretty loudly, 'Hark to that sycophantic son of a of a parson!' I doubt whether the double genitive case was ever so justly (however inelegantly) employed." * When recollections such as these came back to Landor, he might be pardoned the exclamation we have lately heard from him, that surely he must have assisted in another life! Born in the year when the English colonies in America rebelled; living through all the revolutions in France, and the astonishing career of the great Napoleon; a sympathizer with the defeated Paoli and the victorious Garibaldi; contemporary with Cowper and Burns, yet the survivor of Keats, Wordsworth, and Byron, of Shelley, Scott, and Southey; living while Gibbon's first volume and Macaulay's last were published; to whom Pitt and Fox, and even Burke, had been familiar, as were Peel and Russell; who might have heard Mirabeau attempting to save the French Monarchy, and Mr. Gladstone predicting the disruption of the American Republic, it would seem strange that a single life should be large enough for such experiences, if their very number and variety did not suggest the exaggeration of importance that each in its turn is too apt to receive from us all, and impress us rather with the wisdom of the saying of the greatest of poets, that

"We are such stuff

As dreams are made of; and our little life

Is rounded with a sleep."

When the two years at Ashbourne were passed, they had left some profitable as well as pleasant remembrances. He dated from this time his better acquaintance with some of the Greek writers, especially Sophocles and Pindar; he turned several things of Cowley into

*I permit myself to add, as every way very characteristic of the writer, then on the eve of his eightieth year, the closing lines of this letter of my old friend. He was waiting at the time the visit I generally paid him on his birthday. "In the twentieth year of the British Republic some old man may recount tales of you and me. He will not be a very old man, if public affairs are managed another year as they have been this last.

'FORSTER! come hither, I pray, to the Fast of our Anglican Martyr. Turbot our Church has allowed, and perhaps (not without dispensation) Pheasant: then strawberry-cream, green-gages, and apricot-jelly,

Oranges housewives call pot, and red-rinded nuts of Avella,

Filberts we name them at home, - happy they who have teeth for the crackers!
Blest, but in lower degree, whose steel-armed right hand overcomes them!

I, with more envy than spite, look on and sip sadly my claret.''

Latin Sapphics and Alcaics; he wrote a few English pieces; and he translated into verse the Jephthah of Buchanan, a poem afterwards destroyed, but of which he had himself so high an opinion that he said he could not have improved it even after he wrote Gebir. I should strongly have doubted this, upon examination of several poems of the present date, preserved in the volume collected and printed four years later, for he was still within the trammels of Pope's versification, and though in conception often original, in execution was still almost always imitative; but that other indisputable evidence is before me of the higher character given gradually to his own style by the mere effort of translating. There was indeed but one stride to he taken to Gebir, which appeared within three years after the volume referred to; and the reader will probably admit, at that portion of my narrative, that a more remarkable advance in power was never made, and rarely such an achievement in literature by a man so young. Let me show meanwhile, by example of a poem written at Ashbourne,* in what different ways the same subject was treated now and in the days that were so soon to follow of his greater maturity of mind. It is the difference between a Pope translation and a Greek original.

MEDEA AT CORINTH (1791).

So, when Medea, on her native strand,
Beheld the Argo lessen from the land;
The tender pledges of her love she bore,
Frantic, and raised them high above the shore.
Thus, thus may Jason, faithless as he flies,
Faithless, and heedless of Medea's cries,
Behold his babes, oppose the adverse gales,
And turn to Colchis those retiring sails.'

She spake: in vain: then maddened with despair
Tore her pale cheeks and undulating hair.

Then, O, unmindful of all former joys,

Threw from her breast her inoffensive boys;
Their tender limbs and writhing fibres tore,

And whirled around the coast the inexpiable gore!"

THE SAME SUBJECT (a few years later).

'Stay! spare him! save the last! ... I will invoke the Eumenides no more

I will forgive thee-bless thee

bend to thee

In all thy wishes! do but thou, Medea,

Tell me, one lives!' And shall I, too, deceive?'
Cries from the fiery car an angry voice;

And swifter than two falling stars descend
Two breathless bodies, warm, soft, motionless
As flowers in stillest noon before the sun,

They lie three paces from him. Such they lie,
As when he left them sleeping side by side,
A mother's arm round each, a mother's cheeks
Between them, flusht with happiness and love.

He was more changed than they were, - doomed to show

*In a note to one of its lines on the misfortunes of the King of France he remarks, that "when this was written Louis had only returned to Paris after his flight," which was in 1791; and to the fate which afterwards befell the king he applies a passage from the Electra of Sophocles.

Thee and the stranger, how defaced and scarred
Grief hunts us down the precipice of years!'

Even in the earliest poem here quoted, however, which contains also a paraphrase from Cowley, there is greater merit than the Medea passage would indicate. In single verses occasionally there is a happy delicacy of touch, as in the picture of Eve:

"And her locks of gold

Gales, airy-fingered, negligently hold."

From time to time, too, a personal trait is given with extraordinary force; as where he states his preference for nature and enjoyment over studies and self-mortification.

66

Thus, throughout nature every part affords

More sound instruction than from winged words.'

By me more felt, more studied, than the rules
Of pedants strutting in sophistic schools;
Who, argumentative, with endless strife,
In search of living lose the ends of life;"
Or, willing exiles from fair pleasure's train,
Howl at the happy from the dens of pain."

Of those same "winged words" that could offer instruction higher than the schools he speaks also not unworthily.

"Had verse not led in adamantine chains

The victims sacrificed on Ilion's plains,

Who would have heard of Hector? who have known

The rage of Peleus's immortal son?"

Nor will space be grudged for a few couplets more; from

poem not now obtainable, and which shows Landor's mastery in writing when he had hardly entered his seventeenth year. He describes the origin of pipe and pastoral.

"By bounteous rivers, 'mid his flocks reclined

He heard the reed that rustled in the wind.

Then, leaning onward, negligently tore
The slender stem from off the fringed shore.

With mimic breath the whisper soft assayed

When, lo! the yielding reed his mimic breath obeyed.

'T was hence, erelong, the pleasing power he found

Of noted numbers and of certain sound.

Each morn and eve their fine effect he tried,

Each morn and eve he blest the river's reedy side!"

Poets of the highest originality take their point of departure from an imitative stage, and Landor in these verses shows no exemption from the rule. But from the first the influence of his classical studies and temperament is more than ordinarily manifest, and the completeness and rapidity with which it formed his original style is worthy of remark. I have hinted at this in allusion to his Jephthah translation. A marked instance has been given in the second version of the Medea just quoted; and another more extraordinary presents itself in a translation of one of the most famous episodes in Virgil, which I

23

have found in scraps of his handwriting of the date of 1794, and with which I shall close this section.*

"The shell assuaged his sorrow: thee he sang,
Sweet wife! thee with him on the shore alone,
At rising dawn, at parting day, sang thee.
The mouth of Tænarus, the gates of Dis,
Groves dark with dread, he entered; he approacht
The Manes and their awful king, and hearts
That knew not pity yet for human prayer.
Roused at his song, the Shades of Erebus
Rose from their lowest, most remote, abodes,
Faint Shades, and Spirits semblances of life;
Numberless as o'er woodland wilds the birds
That wintry evening drives or mountain storm;
Mothers and husbands, unsubstantial crests
Of high-souled heroes, boys, unmarried maids,
And youths on biers before their parents' eyes.
The deep black ooze and rough unsightly reed
Of slow Cocytus's unyielding pool

And Styx confines them, flowing ninefold round.
The halls and inmost Tartarus of Death,
And (the blue adders twisting in their hair)
The Furies, were astounded.

On he stept,

And Cerberus held agape his triple jaws:
On stept the Bard Ixion's wheel stood still.
Now, past all peril, free was his return,
And now was following into upper air
Eurydice, when sudden madness seized
The incautious lover: pardonable fault,
If those below could pardon: on the verge
Of light he stood, and on Eurydice,
Mindless of fate, alas, and soul-subdued,
Lookt back

There, Orpheus! Orpheus! there was all

Thy labor shed, there burst the dynast's bond,

And thrice arose that rumor from the lake.

farewell!

'Ah, what,' she cried, what madness hath undone
Me, and (ah, wretched!) thee, my Orpheus, too!
For, lo! the cruel Fates recall me now,
Chill slumbers press my swimming eyes
Night rolls intense around me as I spread
My helpless arms. . . thine, thine no more... to thee.'
She spake, and (like a vapor) into air

...

Flew, nor beheld him as he claspt the void
And sought to speak; in vain: the ferry-guard

Now would not row him o'er the lake again:

His wife twice lost, what could he? whither go?

What chant, what wailing, move the powers of Hell?
Cold in the Stygian bark and lone was she!

Beneath a rock o'er Strymon's flood on high
Seven months, seven long-continued months, 't is said,
He breathed his sorrows in a desert cave,
And soothed the tiger, moved the oak, with song.
So Philomela 'mid the poplar shade
Bemoans her captive brood: the cruel hind
Saw them unplumed and took them: but all night
Grieves she, and sitting on the bough, runs o'er
Her wretched tale, and fills the woods with woe."

Since this was written, I find that these very lines, with extremely trivial alteration, were printed by him in the Examiner thirty years ago, as having been "written at college." He subsequently reproduced them without that prefatory remark, but with an interesting note, in his Dry Sticks.