Muses from the Temple; and to Mr. Julius's brother Augustus* I am under great obligation for having volunteered the tuition of my elder son, who is at New College, Oxford, and who, though he is not a youth of quick parts, promises from his assiduity and passionate love of classical literature to become an excellent scholar. By the by, he seems very proud of your Idyls and the accompanying Essay, as an honor to modern times."

The expectation of seeing that other friend who has been named, Mr. John Kenyon, had to wait several more years for fulfilment ; and for so long it was a loss to Landor of the joyousest and pleasantest of all his associates. "Probably Mr. Kenyon has resigned all idea of coming into Italy," he wrote to Southey, a few weeks after Augustus Hare left; "for it was only a few days ago that I received a letter from Wordsworth which he had put into some French postoffice; it bore the usual postmark of Chambery." This was the letter I have already quoted as partly written by Mrs. Wordsworth because of her husband's failing sight; and it had greatly alarmed Landor. "I replied directly, telling him what I had formerly done, and with great success, in about a fortnight. Sea-bathing and early hours were my remedies. I am convinced that those who read much and think little do not suffer; and that thinking has a greater share in the malady than reading, though perhaps neither would alone produce it." Southey is adjured at the end of the letter to tell what he is doing in the way of poetry. Spring being always his own idle season, he is himself doing nothing. He has not courage even to ripple the current of his thoughts with a pencil as he walks. Southey's reply was more about Wordsworth's than his own poetry; and in everything he wrote at this time about that greater master, whose slow but steady advance was all but overshadowing such small enjoyment of poetical fame as Byron's supremacy had left to himself, there is a generous, manly spirit. He has honest pleasure in bringing Landor to Wordsworth's side. His letters are filled with praise of the poet of Rydal Mount. His merits, he rejoices to think, are getting wider acknowledgment every day, in spite of the duncery that cannot understand him, in spite of the personal malignity that assails him, and in spite of the injudicious imitators who are his worst enemies. "He is composing at this time a series of sonnets upon the religious history of this country; and marvellously fine they are. At the same time, not knowing his intention and he not being aware of mine, I have been treating the same subject in prose, so that my volume will serve as a commentary upon his. Mine will go to press almost immediately; and I hope to send you both, with the first volume of the Peninsular War, early in the spring."

Not many weeks later, a letter from Wordsworth himself an

"Augustus Hare," writes Southey to Landor in May, 1822, "showed me yesterday what you had written of Wordsworth in a letter to his brother. It is a great pleasure to me when I meet with a person who knows your writings, and can talk with me about them and about you."

nounced two books as on their way to Florence: "Ecclesiastical Sketches, or a sort of a Poem in the Sonnet stanza or measure; and Memorials of a Tour on the Continent in 1820. This tour brought me to Como; a place that, with the scenery of its lake, had existed in my most lively recollection for upwards of thirty years. What an addition it would have been to my pleasure if I had found you there! Time did not allow me to get farther into Italy than Milan, where I was much pleased; with the cathedral especially; as you will collect, if ever you see these poems, from one of them entitled the Eclipse of the Sun."

The letter went on to announce but small improvement in the infirmity which made its writer so dependent on others, abridged his enjoyments so much by cutting him off from the power of reading, and involved such large losses of time. What was local in the disorder had indeed been aggravated lately by ill-regulated application, and by what was described as a weakness caused by feelings stronger than the writer's frame could bear. But he had, in one of his intervals of better sight, been reading Landor's Latin poems again, and he speaks in detail of some, especially the Polyxena,* as full of spirit and animation. Still he feels that he ought to tell his friend that he is himself no judge of Latin poetry, except upon general principles. He never himself practised Latin verse, not having been educated at one of the public schools. His acquaintance with Virgil, Horace, Lucretius, and Catullus was intimate; but as he never read them with a critical view to composition, great faults in language might be committed that would escape his notice. Any opinion of his on points of classical nicety therefore would be of no value, should he be so inconsiderate as to offer it.

Wordsworth appears nevertheless to have received real pleasure from the Latin poems, though, like Southey, he was impatient of time given to them which he thought might be better given to English poetry. "Still I must express the wish that you would gratify us by writing in English. In all that you have written in your native tongue there are stirring and noble things, and that is enough for In a tract of yours which I saw some years ago at Mr. Southey's, I was struck by a piece on the War of the Titans,† and I was pleased

me.

See ante, p. 267; also, pp. 241 and 280.

†This allusion is to Chrysaor (republished in Hellenics, pp. 105-111), a poem of which the treatment as well as subject is Titanic. Southey equally admired it; singling out the impious address to Jove, "Whom nations kneel to, not whom nations know"; and the giant rebel's angry horror at his overthrow:

"... The Sacrilege

Raised up his head astounded, and accurst

The stars, the destinies, the gods.

But answer heard he none. The men of might

Who gathered round him formerly, the men
Whom, frozen at a frown, a smile revived,
Were far: enormous mountains interposed,
Nor ever had the veil-hung pine outspread

O'er Tethys then her wandering leafless shade."

That last image of the sail has a wonderful beauty in it.

to find also rather an out-of-the-way image in which the present hour is compared to the shade on the dial.* It is a singular coincidence that in the year 1793, when I first became an author, I illustrated the same sentiment precisely in the same manner." A comment of still more striking interest follows upon a passage in another book of Landor's, his Simonidea,† seen also on Southey's table.

Landor's observation was to the effect that the sonnet was a structure of verse incompatible with the excursive genius of our commanding language. "You commend," says Wordsworth upon this, "the fine conclusion of Russell's sonnet upon Philoctetes, and depreciate that form of composition. I do not wonder at this. I used to think it egregiously absurd, though the greatest poets since the revival of literature have written in it. Many years ago my sister happened to read to me the sonnets of Milton, which I could myself at that time repeat; but somehow or other I was then singularly struck with the style of harmony, and the gravity and republican austerity of those compositions. In the course of the same afternoon I produced three sonnets, and soon after many others; and since that time, and from want of resolution to take up anything of length, I have filled up many a moment in writing sonnets which, if I had never fallen into the practice, might easily have been better employed." In the same letter Wordsworth cleared up the mystery of the missing Mr. Kenyon. He had left Rydal Mount in the previous September with the intention of proceeding directly to Italy, but had

I have quoted the piece, ante, p. 109.

f The Simonidea, a half-crown pamphlet of 98 pages (ante, p. 154) printed at Bath in February, 1806, was so called because its opening short pieces were dedicated to the memory of the dead, a species of composition in which Simonides excelled. Among them, for example, were a portion of the lines to Rose Aylmer's memory, which I did not believe to have been printed so early (this exquisite poem I have given in a more perfect state from his later letters, ante, p. 305); those on Mrs. Lambe (p. 121) and others to Nancy Jones, the Ione of his youth (p. 120). The sonnet referred to by Wordsworth is characterized in the preface as "a poem on Philoctetes by a Mr. Russell, which would authorize him to join the shades of Sophocles and Euripides." By what slight touches delightful effects can be missed, or be produced, will be shown by mention of Charles Lamb's favorite little poem as published in this volume. The charm of the repetition of the words "Rose Avimer" at close of the first and opening of the second stanza has no existence here, "For, Aylmer, all were thine," being the original text, "Sweet Aylmer" immediately following; and the fulness of meaning which is given to the night of memories and of sighs" exhibits no trace in the tautology of the night of sorrows and of sighs" as printed in the original. The (anticipated) profits of the volume were of course given away, with a remark in the preface too characteristic to be lost. "I bear no disrespect towards men who write for emolument, although I never did; even when I was rather extravagant and very poor. For I always found enough anxiety attending composition, without the voluntary penance of supporting at the end of my exertions an outstretched expectation of gain. If anything of profit should arise from these trifles, the printer will give it to the hospital. This I think proper to mention, that the prudes of both sexes, who may discover or imagine certain sins in them, may also consider that something has been done for atonement and absolution." His last allusion anticipates the attack on some of the Latin verses which Byron subsequently made, and which the writer of Don Juan might hardly have been expected to make if Landor had not been Southey's friend. The volume ended with six pages of hexameters "Ad Robertum Fratrem," in which a certain critic who had made the brothers the subject of remark was mercilessly assailed.

See ante, p. 117.

changed his purpose and taken a wife instead; forgetting to send on to its destination the letter that was to introduce him to Landor. He was again talking of starting for the Continent with his wife, but only for the summer, so that this promised visitor would probably not reach Florence. But there were other visitors his friend would hear of soon. "It is reported here that Byron, Shelley, Moore, and Leigh Hunt (I do not know if you have heard of all these names) are to lay their heads together in some town of Italy for the purpose of conducting a journal to be directed against everything in religion, in morals, and probably in government and literature, which our forefathers have been accustomed to reverence. The notion seems very

extravagant, but perhaps the more likely to be realized on that account." Could he only see what was now the popular literature of London! His sojourn in Italy had at least removed him from the presence of the trash which issued hourly from the press in England, and tended to make disgusting the very name of writing and books. Wordsworth was himself so situated as to see little of it, but he could not stop his ears, and he sometimes envied Landor the distance that separated him altogether from the intrusion.

News of Southey was not forgotten. He had left Rydal Mount after a visit of two or three days, just before Landor's last letter reached it. He was well, and making continued progress in many works, his History of the Peninsular War; a Book on the Church of England; two Poems; "with regular communications in the Quarterly Review into the bargain." Had Landor heard of the attack of Byron upon him, and his answer? His lordship had lost as much by that affair as Southey had gained, whose letter was circulated in almost every newspaper in England. Southey's son, too, continued to thrive, promising well; and the rest of his family were flourishing. "I am glad," Wordsworth adds, "that you also are a father, and I wish for a peep at your boys, with yourself to complete the trio."

But beside his boys there was another production of Landor's of which his fellow-poet had lately heard, and wished also to peep at, perhaps more eagerly. Not only had Southey told him of the Manuscript Conversations shortly before, but that it was Landor's intention to offer to himself the dedication of them when printed; and thus ran the closing words of his present letter: "I expect your book with impatience. I shall at all times be glad to hear from you, and shall be proud to receive any public testimony of your esteem." Almost at the same moment Landor was writing to Southey of such of the Conversations as he had completed: "I have waited several weeks, hoping to find an opportunity of sending them to LongIf anything should prevent him from undertaking the publication, the terms of which I leave at his discretion, I would offer them to Mawman, to whose house I once went in company with Parr." The old swift impatience! Before he has even sent them to one publisher he is thinking of another, and multiplying all the pos

man.

sible sources from which disappointment or vexation could arise to him. With what results we shall see.

II. THE MANUSCRIPT ON ITS WAY.

Writing on the 3d of June to Southey, Landor tells him that, some little time before, Wordsworth had written, giving better account of him than of himself, and that his friend Dr. Richards had arrived since then, "and we conversed a good deal together about both of you. On his asking me what I had written of late or was occupied in writing, I could only say that I had sent a manuscript to London, which ought to have arrived on the eighteenth of April, by Captain Vyner of the Life Guards, but that Longman, to whom it was addressed, had given me no account of it."

This MS. was the first portion of the Imaginary Conversations. But a post-letter between Florence and London took then from eleven to fourteen days, and if the captain had dropped his precious freight in Paternoster Row at the instant of arrival, Landor could not by the promptest conceivable despatch have learnt this any earlier than the first week in May. Yet some days before even that date he had swiftly and decisively informed the Longmans by post in what way four copies of the book might be sent to him. Four copies of the printed book while yet the types to be used in composing it were without form or place! It was the old impetuous way; but though it probably surprised Paternoster Row a little, no sign was made from that respectable quarter. There was absolute silence up to the time when this letter of the 3d of June described the torments that the silence had occasioned.

"I left entirely to Longman the conditions on which he might publish my book, and I wrote again a full month ago to him informing him how he might forward to me four copies. He has taken no notice whatever either of my manuscript or my letters. Will you do me the kindness to request him to send the former to Mawman, who I believe will undertake it, leaving it at his discretion. This disappointment has brought back my old bilious complaint, together with the sad reflection on that fatality which has followed me through life, of doing everything in vain. I have however had the resolution to tear in pieces all my sketches and projects, and to forswear all future undertakings. I try to sleep away my time, and pass two thirds of the twenty-four hours in bed. I may speak of myself as of a dead man. I will say, then, that these Conversations contained as forcible writing as exists on earth. They perhaps may come out after my decease, and the bookseller will enrich some friend of his by attributing them to him, and himself by employing him, as the accredited author of them, on any other subjects. If they are not really lost, or set aside for this purpose, I may yet have the satisfaction of reading them here at Florence, and perhaps they may procure me some slight portion of respect."