which I stood; and I really think that he would not have rusticated me, if he had not thought that by going home I should be reconciled the more soon to my father. He wrote a letter for this purpose; and expressed his wishes to me on parting that I should return again to college, and assured me that the whole affair should be forgotten."

Such indeed had been the anxiety of this good Doctor Chapman to treat Landor with excess of lenity, that one of the fellows openly expressed dissatisfaction. The letter to Birch does not at all exaggerate the favorable turn given to the sentence itself, in coupling it, as the dissentient fellow remarked, with "an unexampled formula." "Mr. Landor," said the president, "it is the opinion of the fellows that you be rusticated for two terms, at the expiration of which I invite you to return." And it was upon Landor's nevertheless earnestly entreating that his punishment might be of any other kind, however much severer, in order to save pain to his family, not himself, that Doctor Chapman wrote to his father. But the return home failed to bring about the proper understanding; the Birch letter itself too abundantly explaining why this could not be expected. The sacrifice which the son imagined he had made, was to the father very naturally an aggravation of offence; and it is impossible not to smile at the huffed and haughty tone taken up where entire and sorrowful submission might have seemed but small atonement. The extraordinary ease also with which at last the whole subject is carelessly dismissed will not fail to be observed.

"But my father and I are more different than any other two men. I have endeavored to make the greatest sacrifices to his happiness; but if I cannot make him happy, I certainly will not make him miserable. Because I sent to Oxford to give up my rooms, he imagined that I had no intention of returning. On this he used the most violent expressions, and the event is that I have left him forever. I have been in London about a quarter of a year, constantly employed in studying French and Italian. The former I could read before, but not speak. The latter is extremely easy both to read and speak, and I understand it as well as French, which I have been in the habit of reading four or five years. In about another month I think of going into Italy, but if the French should take me prisoner, Į will enter their harbors singing ça ira. I have excellent lodgings here, and nothing would give me greater pleasure than to see you."

He was not, however, to sing ça ira as yet, or to embark upon any such exciting adventure as he hints at. He remained a few weeks longer in London, having nothing afterwards to remember more noticeable than an accidental meeting with the son of Egalité; * and while

Speaking, in a letter to his sister Elizabeth, of the strong party feeling in Florence after the Three Days' Revolution in France, he describes a dinner at which he had met the Duc de Laval-Montmorency and Talleyrand's nephew, the Duc de Dino, who with infinite care avoided speaking to each other, and adds: "Their new king will, however, reconcile all that are worth reconciliation. He is the best, and almost the wisest, man in his kingdom. I once saw him in London in the year 1795. He was knocking at a door in York Place, where I also had a call to make. He was extremely handsome and thin, which he is no longer, and spoke two or three words in English perfectly

kind friends had been doing their best to heal the difference with his father, he had himself been chiefly and unconcernedly busy about his. volume of Poems.

VIII. FIRST PUBLISHED BOOK.

Mr. Robert Landor thus adverts to his brother's first published book in one of his letters to me. "The first of Walter's publications must have appeared almost seventy years ago. A small volume of poems, which were withdrawn or suppressed without any reason as I can remember,* excepting that he hoped to write better soon. There was nothing among them, I think, discreditable in any way to a man barely twenty years old. But he seems to have wished that they should be forgotten, even before the publication of Gebir two or three years later." The wish was a natural one, and it will be found very shortly that Landor himself gives good reasons for it; but a book is as hard to withdraw as to circulate, and there is no rule so common as the rule of contrary in such things. It may be shrewdly suspected that the Poems went further than Gebir for the very reason that suggested the desire to suppress them. A letter is before me written to Landor from Oxford early in 1795, by one who was already a fellow of his own college of Trinity, in which this remark is made: "For myself, what can I do? You know nescit vox missa reverti. But these little things promote the sale of the copies of your volume in the University, so that the booksellers here are at present out of a supply." The grave, good-natured writer, older than Landor by many years, and to whom a living had just fallen from his college, can thus without anger refer to some lines addressed to Doctor Warton, containing a personal attack on himself which seems to have been altogether wilful and unprovoked :

"Deign from thy brother's works to cull us
What bold Lucretius, sharp Catullus,

Divinely elegant Tibullus,

And all the grand Aonian quire

Would envy, or at least admire.

Then Oxford shall no more regret

The twofold night 'twixt C― and K———.”

-the offence of Clarke and Kett being explained in a note to have been, that the last had published Juvenile Poems at the age of forty, and the first an Edipus in prose. "Ouvrez, Messieurs! c'est mon well. I did not know who he was until I entered the house, and then I congratulated my-elf that I had insisted on his entering first, for I learned that he was so sensible and independent a man that he rather gained his bread by teaching French in two or three distinguished families than accept the two hundred a year which the king of Sardinia offered him. It was a lucky house, for the Abbé on whom I called was made Bishop of Agen by Bonaparte, though a Christian and a Royalist. I wondered as much at this as he once wondered at me for eating a red herring without mustard and vinegar, faute de salade." The kind word for Louis Philippe may fairly stand against many harsh ones uttered in later years.

* See post, p. 81.

Edipe en prose." The note, however, does not say all. The person with whom Clarke is coupled had done worse than publish Juvenilia at forty, having in fact been the solitary dissentient among the fellows of Trinity from Doctor Chapman's good-humored invitation that Landor should return; and to the close of Kett's unhappy life Landor resented this ill word. On the other hand there was no sufficient reason for putting Clarke into the pillory erected in the volume for Kett; and Landor seems himself to have regretted it, when from the letter just quoted he saw how good-naturedly it was taken.

There is no trace of anger in Clarke (for the letter is his); he thinks more of expressing his delight at the poetry and scholarship of the book than of taking offence at its personalities;* and what he says of various parts of the volume, and in especial of its fifty pages of Poematum Latinorum Libellus et Latine scribendi Defensio, testifies strongly now the impression made then upon the Oxford graduates and masters by the powers of this unruly lad of twenty. He thinks that Catullus himself might have been proud of the "Hendecasyllabi "; wishes that courts and courtiers could but be reformed by the political pieces; declares that Persius never excelled the ease and concinnity of his Invocation; † says of a couplet for a Quaker's tankard,

"Ye lie, friend Pindar! and friend Thales!
Nothing so good as water? Ale is!"

"You are somewhat severe," he says, "on my contemporary and fellow-collegian, Mr. Kett, whom you have also made collinear with myself, rather to the diversion of all our friends." He cannot help adding an epigram which had just come out as a reply

to Landor:

"Knot a poet! who dare say so?

Though not an Ovid, yet a Naso."

This shows that Kett was not strong in friends, even among men of his own standing. He must have had some merit (he was one year chosen Bampton Lecturer), but nothing he did seems to have been done successfully; and what is said to have induced him finally to commit suicide (not by hanging, as Landor supposed, but drowning) was some formal censure passed upon him in the University.

This Invocation is noticeable still for the treasonable bitterness of its last couplet, and for its terse summary of the so-called poets whom the general dulness had thrown into prominence since the deaths of Goldsmith and Gray. As yet the voice of Cowper had but faintly been heard; Burns had still to be naturalized to England; while Wordsworth, Coleridge, Lamb, and Southey were only trying and sounding their instruments in small publications at Bristol.

Though, Helicon! I seldom dream
Beside thy lovely limpid stream,
Nor glory that to me belong

Or elegance, or nerve of song,
Or Hayley's easy-ambling horse,
Or Peter Pindar's comic force,
Or Mason's fine majestic flow,

Or aught that pleases one in Crowe:
Yet thus, a saucy suppliant bard,

I court the Muse's kind regard

'O whether, Muse! thou please to give

My humble verses long to live;

Or tell me the decrees of Fate

Have ordered them a shorter date,

I bow. Yet O, may every word

Survive, however, George the Third!'"

that he had seen one of the dons laughing over it heartily; and of another at the hundred and thirty-third page, on Tucker's treatise concerning civil government in opposition to Locke,

"Thee, meek Episcopy! shall kings unfrock
Ere Tucker triumph over sense and Locke!"

avers that he saw Tucker himself overlooking page 133." This forgiving fellow of Trinity, in short, has only one regret in connection with his assailant, that he had, owing to some misunderstanding about the letting of his rooms to him at his first entering the college, lost the honor of having Landor for a tenant: "especially as but for that you might now have been a resident amongst us; and with the pipe of antiquity on which you so sweetly play, directed upwards, you might have charmed any uncouth inhabitant of your zenith, instead of having alarmed the horizon by an instrument placed at right angles with your shoulder."

IX. A FAIR INTERCESSOR.

At Warwick meanwhile, as I have said, kind friends were interceding to clear the horizon from any further ill consequence of the alarm to the "uncouth inhabitant" of Trinity; and now that we are all dead, as Sydney Smith says, the name of one of the intercessors may be singled out.

This was Dorothea Lyttelton, the chosen and particular friend of Landor's eldest sister, Elizabeth; who lived with her two rich bachelor uncles at Studley Castle, fourteen miles from Warwick and adjoining Ipsley Court; who was known to be not only heiress to both uncles, but already to possess in her beauty a more enviable dowry; whom everybody for miles about naturally was in love with; and who had not yet smiled on any of those countless suitors, though youths of all but the highest rank were said to be among them. The whole of the brothers Landor she of course led captive; and a tale is told of the youngest, that when two or three years hence she had relented and was a bride, and he, a lad of fifteen, had gone into her presence bent upon slaying her bridegroom in single combat with spears or bows and arrows, she suddenly, to his extreme mortification, displaced those desperate thoughts by taking him in her arms and kissing him. We may gather at least from the story what the family intimacy with Miss Lyttelton was; and we have proof that an elder brother had been more presuming. "I ought to remember well that name, and little notes to my sister subscribed D. Lyttelton," wrote Landor

* Almost as I write these words the papers announce the death of this lady's son. We regret to announce the decease of Sir Francis Goodricke, Bart., at Malvern. Born in November, 1797, he was the eldest son of Francis Holyoake, Esq., of Tettenhall in Staffordshire, and Studley Castle, Warwickshire, by Dorothy Elizabeth, niece and heiress of Philip Lyttelton, Esq., of Studley Castle. He was member for Stafford in 1835; was afterward returned for South Staffordshire; in 1834, filled the office of highsheriff of Warwickshire; and in 1835 was created a baronet."

to me in his eightieth year, correcting Leigh Hunt's spelling of the name in his book about Kensington. "The estate of Studley Castle joined Ipsley Court, and there dwelt one whom Lady Hertford, the best judge of beauty in the world, called the most lovely and graceful creature she had ever known. Every day of the vacations I went over there. It soon was Walter and Dorothea; her uncles, too, called me Walter, and liked me heartily; and if I had then been independent, I should have married this lovely girl." Tales told by hope are often too flattering, but we have better means than usual of judging whether it was so here. Among his papers I found a packet of her letters carefully kept and indorsed by him, addressed to him at his London lodgings in Beaumont Street in those early months of 1795; and there will be now no breach of confidence in admitting the reader to some glimpses of them.

The first shows her very anxious about his sister Elizabeth, with whom she has been passing some days, when "she talked of you to me, and distresses herself more than you can imagine." He had been their constant theme. To talk about him was the only consolation for his absence, which had diminished the happiness of her own visit to Warwick. Never, she prays him, is he to be so cruel to her "nice little friend Elizabeth" as not to correspond with her. The omission was promptly repaired; and in her next letter she tells him how he had charmed his sister by writing to her, "and me by the compliment of attending to my request! She wrote to me in ecstasies."

Then there is a question as to some promise about a bit of ribbon he has charged her with having broken; but she will not regret an apparent forgetfulness that has proved his remembrance of her, and gratified her vanity by convincing her that the insignificance of a bit of ribbon may derive worth from her presenting it to him. At once, upon having his letter, she had sent to her "friend citoyenne Johnstone, who is now at that metropolis of dissension and aristocracy, Birmingham," to procure her the colors; and-would he believe it!

the citoyenne has sent a light blue instead of a dark purple! But really it is the ignorance that has angered her more than the delay; for, "to say the truth, I cannot think you mean in earnest I should pack off two or three bits of ribbon those number of miles! If I am mistaken, it rests with you to rectify it; and, upon demand, here will be the real colors to tie up for your watch-chain." This demand of course came, and the bits of ribbon went.

There is next the arrival of the Poems; which she sits up reading till one o'clock in the morning, and then cannot " compose herself to sleep" till she has told him what "exquisite delight" they had given her; and not the printed book only, but verses in manuscript! and lines addressed to herself! How is she to find words to thank him; and ought she indeed to thank him for making her inordinately vain! But what a talent it is! and, when existing with a disposition equally