Few ancient pieces have been chosen oftener by translators as a ground of competition; yet, from Dryden to Wordsworth, there is no one who has excelled, if any has equalled, this translation by a youth of nineteen. Its minute fidelity to the spirit of the original I will indicate by a touch which all the others have missed. They make the nightingale sitting on "a" bough, but Landor restores "the bough; the fatal bough from which the spoiler had taken her brood. But to me the lines are interesting, and are here specially given, for their illustration of the growth of his own genius. If I had met with them anywhere, not knowing the lines of Virgil, I should have sup posed them to be an original poem of the writer's later life. He has nevertheless not passed the imitative stage. His own thoughts have not yet found their style. Their written character is still to come. VI. AT TRINITY COLLEGE, OXFORD. At eighteen years of age Landor entered as a commoner in Trinity College, Oxford. It was the memorable year of 1793, which had opened at Paris with the execution of Louis Seize. reason, Of the excite ment that prevailed; of the conflicting passions that were raging everywhere, grief on the one hand at the downfall of ancient institutions, exultation on the other at supposed triumphs of justice and it is needless to speak. To the young* it was natural to believe that a new world was opening; and the glorious visions that attended it descended largely, it may well be imagined, on the students at both Universities. As Wordsworth says for himself, society became his glittering bride, and airy hopes his children. I cannot find, however, that Landor was at any time much excited in this way. The American rebellion was oftener in his thoughts than the French revolution. He was a Jacobin, but so would have been if Robespierre and Danton had not been. He reasoned little, but his instincts were all against authority, or what took to him the form of its abuse. With exulting satisfaction he saw the resistance and conquests of democracy; but pantisocracy, and golden days to come on earth, were not in his hopes or expectation. He rather rejoiced in the prospect of a fierce continued struggle; his present ideal was that of an armed republic,† changing the face of the world; and as the outbreak of the revolution had not made him republican, neither did its excesses cure him of that malady. He gloried to the last in avowing his preference for a republic; though he would also date his hatred of the French, which he maintained with almost equal consistency, from the "Bliss was it in the dawn to be alive, Wordsworth in Coleridge's Ode. The same words, with change of "the" for "that" in the first line, reappeared in his own Prelude. † Speaking to Southey of Napoleon's career in 1811, he says: "This revives in my mind a toast I was accused of giving at Oxford: May there be only two classes of people, the republican and the paralytic!"" day when they slew their Queen. Mr. Shandy might have connected all this with his birth on the anniversary of Charles the First's execution. He remained at Oxford little more than a year and a half, between 1793 and 1794, and used to call the hours passed with Walter Birch in the Magdalen walk by the half-hidden Cherwell (the road of which Addison was so fond) the pleasantest he could remember, as well as the most profitable. Of his studies there is little to be said. For a portion of the time he certainly read hard, but the results he kept to himself; for here, as at Rugby, he declined everything in the shape of competition. "Though I wrote better Latin verses than any undergraduate or graduate in the University," he wrote to Dr. Davy, in 1857, "I could never be persuaded, by my tutor or friends, to contend for any prize whatever. I showed my compositions to Birch of Magdalen, my old friend at Rugby; and to Cary, translator of Dante; to none else." It is at the same time unquestionable that his extraordinary talents, and skill in both the ancient languages, had impressed greatly his tutor Benwell, and the president and fellows of Trinity; and I have heard him say frequently that Benwell (" dear good Benwell") shed tears when his favorite pupil was obliged to quit the college. But the Universities then, with far less inducement to study than now, had even fewer restraints than at present exist for youths unable to restrain themselves; the license generally allowed left a man quite equally free to use, abuse, or waste his powers; and we have only to wonder how so many lads of fortune, so let loose at that critical time, could manage to get on in after life with any kind of credit. I hardly remember an allusion by Landor to the examinationhalls or lecture-rooms, except that in the latter, one day, Justin was given them to construe, and that though indignant at the choice of such an author, he was reconciled on finding there the story of the Phocæans, which he straightway began to turn into English blank verse, a measure he had not before attempted. One other subject that interested him, however, finds mention in his letters. There is allusion in one of them to a small disquisition sent at this time to Dr. Parr, with whom an acquaintance, already formed at Warwick, was soon to ripen into intimacy. The object of the essay was to give opinion as to the origin of the religion of the Druids; and its argument may be very briefly stated. It appeared to Landor that Pythagoras, who settled in Italy and had many followers in the Greek colony of the Phocæans at Marseilles, had ingrafted on a barbarous and blood-thirsty religion the human doctrine of the metempsychosis; for that, finding it was vain to say, "Do not murder," as none ever minded that doctrine, he frightened the savages by saying, "If you are cruel even to beasts and insects, the cruelty will fall upon yourselves; you will be the same." He explained also the "beans" of the old philosopher in the exact way that Coleridge took credit for afterwards originating; though in this both moderns had been anticipated by sundry other discoverers, beginning with Plutarch himself.* But not always so philosophical or remote were his labors out of the lecture-room. Much nearer lay London than either Justin or Pythagoras; the summer of 1794, when Landor's Oxford residence was about to draw to its close, was a time of unexampled excitement; and some notice must be taken of the other than classical subjects in which his ardent temper engaged him. The Scotch judges had transported Muir and Palmer and Gerrard as felons, for desiring Parliamentary reform; the English judges were expected to hang Holcroft and Horne Tooke as traitors for "corresponding" with the same desire; and by all this Landor was stung into writing a satire, making himself interlocutor with a clerical friend. He listens to the other's warning: "Hush! why complain? of treason have a care; and indignantly rejoins: "Before a tyrant Juvenal displayed Truth's hated form and Satire's flaming blade; Vice gazed and trembled, shrieked and left the field. following up his question by vigorous denunciation of the war with France, and impassioned appeal to Poland, then just rising again : The friend again interposes: "Mistaken youth! the milder plan pursue, To love what statesmen and what monarchs do. Thy death will hasten, or torment thy life. See De Quincey's Autobiographic Sketches, pp. 146, 147, and note. I subjoin what Landor wrote to me in a letter of the 23d, October, 1854. "To-day, having had a tooth drawn, and a jaw in danger of a divorce, I have been reading Mr. De Quincey's Selections. I was amused at finding attributed to the sagacity of Coleridge a remark on Pythagoras and his beans. I made the same remark in a letter to Parr, which Dr. John Johnstone wished to publish with all my others. It may be also found in the letters of Pericles and Aspasia, I believe. Mine to Parr was written in 1794 or thereabouts, and when the name of Coleridge had never reached me. These are estrays and waifs not worth claiming by the lord of the manor. Coleridge and Wordsworth are heartily welcome to a day's sport over any of my woodlands and heaths. I have no preserves." Since writing this note I have found among Landor's papers Parr's acknowledgment of the letter referred to. "Dear Walter," wrote the kindly old scholar, "I thank you for your very acute and masterly reasoning about Pythagoras, but I am no convert to his being in Gaul; for the doctrine of transmigration is much older, and prevailed among the Celts and Scythians long before Pythagoras. It is believed, even now, in the north of Europe, and would naturally suggest itself to any reflecting barbarian. However, you have done very well in your hypothesis. I am, with great regard and respect, dear Walter, your sincere friend, S. PARR." To which Landor: "I believe in God. This only reason, courtly priest! I give. From three other poems of this date, none of them being elsewhere now accessible, brief extracts may also be permitted. The first illustrates the war against liberty by picturing a French village, into which it had brought desolation, repaired again, and peace restored, by the arms of the Republic; and both in the thought and in the form of the verse (which, as far as I am aware, he never again used), there is considerable beauty. The "arms unbound" is a touch of the happiest kind, in its careless yet conscious keeping with the spirit of the poem. "Twas evening calm, when village maids With Gallia's tuneful sons advance "Their ancient sires that round them sit Renew in thought their youthful days; "But, O, the rulers of mankind Ruthless their fellow-creatures seize, "Smoke fills the air, and dims the day: No more the vine of matted green With smiles unfeigned and arms unbound, "Foes once, by force; now happy friends! The second, of which the opening stanzas show the sweet modulation of genuine verse, paints a Sunday morning in May. “O, peaceful day of pious leisure! O, what will mark you as you run! Will gloomy clouds, or golden sun? "O, shine serenely: let me wander Along the willow-fringed way, Charmed Isis wins a short delay." The third is an "Ode to General Washington," in which are lines that not many boys of nineteen have before or since excelled in strength of expression or dignity of sentiment. If the rumors that went abroad through Oxford of Landor's fierce and uncompromising opinions had rested only on pieces such as these, he might fairly have challenged the truth of epithets thrown against him by assailants; but unhappily his tongue was under less instinctive control than his pen, and, there being students of his own college who held opinions in the other extreme with as little disposition to withhold expression of them, the result was not favorable to peace in the halls of Trinity. Even among those of Landor's own way of thinking in the University, there were many who seem purposely to have kept aloof from him; not because he was a Jacobin, but because he was a "mad" Jacobin; though it is not at all clear that the epithet might not have been accepted to mean a more sensible sort of Jacobinism than was popular in the particular quarters from which it proceeded. "At Oxford," said Landor, recalling this time in his old age, "I was about the first student who wore his hair without powder. Take care, said my tutor, they will stone you for a republican. The Whigs (not the Wigs) were then unpopular; but I stuck to my plain hair and queue tied with black ribbon." Hardly for this eccentricity, however, was the epithet applicable in their mouths who applied it. His inspiration doubtless had been the minister Roland's refusal to go to court in either knee-buckles or shoe-buckles; and, under influence of the same example, a youth six months older than Landor was then also waging at Balliol so fierce a war against old ceremonies and usage, that he too had resisted every |