1815-21. possessed in the same degree as he did. Nothing had ever been indifferent to him that affected humanity; poetry and history had delivered up to him their treasures; and the secrets of antiquity were his. The first beginnings of his enterprise were mentioned to Southey in a letter from Florence of the date of the 9th of March, 1822. "It is long ago," he writes, " since you first told me that you were writing some dialogues. I began to do the same thing after you, having formerly written two or three about the time when the first incometax was imposed. I have now written fifteen new ones, throwing into the fire one between Swift and Sir William Temple, and another between Addison and Lord Somers; the former because it was democratical, the latter because it was composed maliciously, and contained all the inelegances and inaccuracies of style I could collect from Addison. The number would surpass belief. The two earlier ones, the first between Lord Grenville and Burke, the other between Henry the Fourth and Sir Arnold Savage, were written more than twenty years ago, which no person would believe of the former; but I gave the substance of it to Robert Adair to get inserted in the Morning Chronicle, and a part of it (now omitted) was thought too personal, and it was refused. I hope your dialogues are printed, that they may give some credit and fashion to this manner of composition." Thus employed, we leave him at the close of the first half of his life happier upon the whole than he has been since its outset in the Tenby and Swansea days, with a better outlet than has yet been open for his powers and faculties, and with even a little gleam of sunshine, from his mother's care and sacrifices, again lighting up his personal fortune. In the letter to Southey just quoted he tells him of his hope to be able, some day soon, to fix himself permanently, not in Florence itself, but in a villa in its neighborhood; and he says that he shall add a garden to it by converting a vineyard into one, which "I cannot do unless I purchase it; and (a thing I never expected) this too is in my power." Another thing as unlooked for he was soon also to find within his power. He never expected, that, if any considerable number of people were found to praise or admire him, he should be able to entertain other than a mean opinion of himself; and of this excuse for every eccentricity, this foolish principle which has dominated over so much of his past life, he will very shortly be deprived. He will discover that when people praise him they do not necessarily lower him to their level; that they do not prove him to be, for that reason, only so much more like themselves; and that it is not therefore essentially a base or unworthy thing to desire or to deserve, nay even in some small degree to obtain, popularity. We may not be sanguine indeed that this wiser experience will be per manent, or that old errors and extravagances will not still be abundant; but the promise is fairer than it has been, and from the last half of Landor's life there is at least the prospect of better results than have attended the years that are gone. BOOK FIFTH. 1822-1828. ET. 47-53. THE IMAGINARY CONVERSATIONS. L Friends in Italy and England.-II. The Manuscript on its Way. - III. A Publisher found. -IV. What the First Volume contained.-V. What the Second Volume contained. - VI. How the Book was received. VII. The Southey Correspondence. VIII. Family Letters. IX. New Series of Conversations.-X. Contents of the New Series. L FRIENDS IN ITALY AND ENGLAND. "JULIUS HARE will have the kindness to put this letter into the post-office when he reaches London. I have long expected to see Mr. Kenyon in hopes of reading your new poem, of which I have heard not indeed many but very high eulogies." These are the opening lines of the first letter written to Southey by Landor, early in 1822, after Florence had become his settled abode; and in the whole of his later life there are not two pleasanter figures than the friends it names. It was not however Julius, but Augustus Hare, to whom the letter was intrusted, as appears from a later passage in it correcting the mistake; for it was not till towards the close of the year that Julius was returning to his law studies in the Temple, after that visit to his brothers Francis and Marcus at Milan in the preceding winter when he first made acquaintance with the name and writings of Landor, to whom all the brothers Hare, as we shall see, became ultimately known, Augustus and Marcus, as well as Francis and Julius; but the latter two most familiarly. Hare-brained, Southey called them all; and there was sufficient truth in the playful imputation to recommend them especially to this new friend, to whom the impetuosity and eagerness as well as various information of Francis, and the scholarly acquirements and speculative turn of Julius, might have seemed but the reflection of a part of his own larger and more various nature. "The Hares," he wrote to his sisters in 1833, “are beyond all comparison the most pleasant family of men I ever was acquainted with." His knowledge of them began with Francis, with whom he became intimate soon after establishing himself in the palazzo Medici in Florence; from whose society, he often said, he derived the animation and excitement that had helped him most in the composition of his imaginary conversations; and with whom his friendly relations continued to the close of Hare's life at Palermo.* Not indeed without occasional interruption from that excess or over-vehemence of speech from which neither was free, and which their common friend, Lord Blessington, seems to attribute more especially to Hare, in writing of his marriage in 1827 that il Signor Francesco had been so much improved by it that he at last allowed other people to talk. There is even a hint of the failing in Landor's tender allusion to the friend, Who held mute the joyous and the wise And by nearly the last remaining of the English residents of those days in Florence, where his own name will always be remembered with love and honor, it has been lately mentioned to me. "I used,” says Mr. Seymour Kirkup, "to see him and his friend Francis Hare together; and it was a constant struggle of competition and display between them; both often wrong, although men of strong memory. They used to have great disputes, mostly on questions of history. Hare avoided the classics and Landor the sciences, above all the exact,' and all relating to numbers, except dates, where, owing to his prodigious memory, he had generally the advantage when the other gave him the chance. Hare was often astounded at being corrected. He was thought infallible; and I remember our consul-general at Rome calling him a monster of learning." But only the pleasantest side of all this was remembered when, on going to England with his wife in 1827, Francis had asked for an introduction to Southey, and Landor described him as among the kindest and most intimate friends he ever had, to say nothing of his learning, his wit, and the inexhaustible spirit and variety of his conversation. "I owe him as much pleasure as I can give him, and none will be a greater than what these few lines will procure him." To Wordsworth, the real bearer of the letter of 1822 had become known some years earlier; and there is interesting mention of both Augustus and Julius in a letter of Wordsworth's to Landor early in 1824, where he says he has a strong desire to become acquainted with the Mr. Hare whom his friend had mentioned, and who, to the honor of Cambridge, was in the highest repute there for his sound and extensive learning. This was Julius, who corresponded with Landor most intimately many years before he personally knew him. "I am happy to say," continues Wordsworth, "that the Master of Trinity College, my brother, was the occasion of his being restored to the *I will quote, as honorable to both, one of Hare's last letters from Palermo: "My dear Landor, It did not require this fresh proof of your friendship to convince me that you were one of the most disinterested, one of the most zealous and constant of friends. That I have long known. Qualis ab incepto." Landor had been making some exertion for Hare's children. |