is impossible to make a proportionate augmentation in the price. Now the last calculation, certainly not over-rated, gives us 1500 pages for the fourth and fifth volumes, and I think, therefore, you must determine on having a sixth." Still there came fresh disputes as time went on; a full year had interposed before Hare wrote again; he had in the interval been obliged to withdraw the two printed volumes from the publisher who had undertaken them; and it took a good deal of time (Hare wrote at the end of July, 1829) to find a substitute. "The Conversations are too classical and substantial for the morbid and frivolous taste of the English public, and few publishers, except my friend Taylor, look beyond the salableness of a work. Duncan has at length agreed on the terms of sharing the profits, if there are any. The sixth volume is not yet gone to a printer, and, as I am going abroad for a couple of months, must wait till October. I would that it were in my power to extend my journey as far as Florence, that our epistolary might be succeeded by a personal acquaintance; but I fear my time will not allow of that, as I must spend some days at Bonn to learn report of Niebuhr's second volume." He and Thirlwall were now engaged in translating that remarkable book; and, two years before, he and his brother Augustus had published anonymously their Guesses at Truth.

The weeks were passed at Bonn, but the journey was not extended to Florence, and until Landor's visit to England in 1832 the friends did not see each other. With the publication by Mr. Duncan in 1829 of the volumes above r ned, Hare's connection with the Imaginary Conversations may be said to have ceased. For the sixth volume he failed to find a publisher at his return, and that task somewhat later devolved upon me.

Meanwhile, in a letter of April, 1829, Southey told Landor that the first volume of his unpublished series (the first of the volumes afterwards issued by Mr. Duncan) had been sent to him. Some things in it he wished away, but as to very, very many more Landor would know how truly they must have delighted his old friend; and in especial, he said, Lucullus and Cæsar had thoroughly pleased him as through every line of it one of the most delightful of all. Southey added, in reference to certain passages on Keats and Shelley, in whose marvellous genius and untimely fate Landor had of late become deeply interested by intercourse as well with their writings as with personal friends of both, that he had been deceived concerning Shelley; not as to his genius, which was of a very high order indeed, but as to his character. He had himself believed as long as it was possible that Shelley's errors were only errors of opinion, and that he would ripen into a right-minded man. But now he knew how bitter was the mistake he had made.

It remains only that, as with the first series of the Conversations, I should give account of what the second series contained; but, the general character of the work and its mode of treatment having been

sufficiently placed before the reader, the task that now awaits me is easier, and may, with a few prominent exceptions, be briefly dismissed.

X. CONTENTS OF THE NEW SERIES.

The three volumes contained only nine more dialogues than were in the first series, but some were of greater length. Eleven of the subjects were taken from modern politics; three were of a personal turn and character; sixteen were illustrations of biography, eight of them relating to English worthies, and the other eight to Italian, French, or German; five might be classed as historical, the speakers being rulers or princes of past times; and there were five Greek and five Roman conversations. I will take them generally in this order. It was Landor's settled opinion, frequently expressed during his residence in Italy, that the sovereigns of the Continent then reigning were responsible for all the revolutionary tendencies that agitated Europe at the time; and the violent reaction witnessed by him even before his return to England was but the fulfilment of what he had confidently foretold. Prominent among the princes that seemed to him despicable, and for characterizing whom as the most ignorant and gross barbarians that had appeared since the revival of letters he is indeed not harshly to be judged, were the French and Spanish Bourbons, the kings of Spain and Portugal, the rulers of Austria and France, and the Pope (Leo XII.) with his confederates in Italy. In one of the political dialogues the speakers are Don Victor Saez and El Rey Netto; in a second the latter prince reappears with his brother sovereign of Portugal, its title being Don Ferdinand and Don John-Mary Luis; in a third, Miguel and his mother are introduced; and in a fourth we have Leo XII. and his valet Gigi. Throughout them the principal object is to show the inseparable connection of tyranny and superstition with cruelty; of cowardice with religious persecution; and of all with unspeakable silliness. Landor's apology for sometimes putting better talk into his dialogues than his assumed talkers were capable of, will here only apply in a Rabelaisian sense. Not a redeeming grace is given them here, unless in that relish for their own baseness which in the expression of it has a gusto of enjoyment so intense as to amount to genius. Few are the passages extractable from these dialogues that might not shock a reader unprepared for the lengths of infernal malignity and ferocious cruelty which fanaticism of any kind will not scruple to defend under the pretences of religion; and only three or four times does Landor plainly confess to the hidden meanings of satire underlying these repulsive utterances. One is where Victor Saez tells his master that a legitimate king can never have a surer ally than what is called a constitutional minister, because it is the experience of all those gentry that the people are a football to be fed with air, and that the party always sure to be the winner is the one that kicks it farthest. Another is in the information commu

nicated by Miguel to his mother, on the remark of somebody that the wit of "Don Jorge da Cannin" would immortalize him, that it was no good nowadays people trying to make themselves immortal, for that immortality, his confessor told him, had become so creaky and crazy that he would not be tempted by an annuity upon it at three years' purchase: in short, that true immortality in this world can come only from the Pope, two centuries or so after burial, and when all but his Holiness have forgotten the deeds and existence of the defunct about to be beatified. A third is where Don Ferdinand describes to his royal brother the two principal English ministers, Canning and Castlereagh, as the hot-water and cold-water ducts of the grand vapor-bath by which the Holy Alliance meant to cure all the maladies of nations, the one talking like a liberal while the other is crying down liberality of all kinds, but both in a conspiracy to chouse the people, and snatch the bread out of the mouths of the popular party. And a fourth is where the Pope's valet tells his Holiness that he had heard only a few days before of some one having said that the representative of St. Peter and the monarchs his friends and allies, striving and struggling to throw back the world upon the remains of chaos, reminded him of nothing so much as the little figures round Greek vases, which strained at one thing and stood in one place for ages, and had no more to do in the supporting or moving of the vases than the worms have. Ah! cries Leo, that is not your language. "Not an Italian's, not a Continental's! It breathes the

bluff air of England."

Of the political dialogues two more have each a crowned head for its hero, the King of the Sandwich Islands being one, and the King of Ava the other: the object being, in the first, to exhibit the ignorance of a savage who should imagine that court-dresses were an absurdity, or should expect that a title implying a duty carried with it the duty implied; and in the second, to caricature the claims as well as the achievements of royalty in the Western world by showing that what a monarch of Ava cannot but regard as falsehoods incredible and preposterous have been for scores of years in Europe ordinary matter-of-fact occurrences. Two others bring in leading European statesmen. In the one, Villèle and Corbière, displaying between them the condition of contempt to which they have reduced the country they govern, rejoice to have so gagged France that she dares not even talk of the Napoleon for whose glory she had sacrificed so much; and, having nevertheless no alternative but to consent to the recognition of Greece, find it not their least bitter mortification to be thereby obliged to agree with "an idle visionary, an obscure and ignorant writer, who in a work entitled Imaginary Conversations had been hired by some low bookseller to vilify all the great men of the present age, to magnify all the philosophers and republicans of the past, and to propose the means of erecting Greece into an independent state." In the other, Pitt has a farewell interview with Canning,

:

in which his experience of the proper way of serving the state is imparted much after the manner of Swift in advising servants of a lower grade, amounting in the whole, we may say, to three leading suggestions that he is to speak like an honest man, to act like a dishonest one, and to be perfectly indifferent what he is called. A striking passage on Pitt's poverty occurs in this dialogue; and I cannot pass unnoticed another in which, reassuring his protégé against the doubts that beset him, Pitt says he'll find the country going on just as it has gone on. "Bad enough, God knows!" exclaims Canning. "Yes," rejoins Pitt, "but only for the country. People will see that the fields and the cattle, the streets and the inhabitants, look as usual. The houses stand, the chimneys smoke, the pavements hold together; this will make them wonder at your genius in keeping them up, after all the prophecies they have heard about their going down. Men draw their ideas from sight and hearing. They do not know that the ruin of a nation is in its probity, its confidence, its comforts."

The remaining three dialogues, strictly political, had reference to the Greek revolution. In the Photo-Zavellas and Kaido the aspiration of the Greeks for independence, even as early as the beginning of the century, receives affecting illustration; a young chieftain resisting the importunity of his sister that he should not place himself in the power of one of the pashas, and quietly sacrificing life that his countrymen may be undeceived. The same purpose of illustrating Greek nobleness and hardihood is also in the conversation of Odysseus, Tersitza, Acrive, and Trelawney, where, by means of a visit made by an English sympathizer with the existing struggle, Shelley's and Byron's friend, to an outlawed Greek family in their fastness or cavern on Parnassus, their character and aspirations are vividly reproduced, in language picturesque as the mountain scene and eloquent with all its associations. "Nations live and remember," says Odysseus accounting for his countrymen in arms, "when princes have fallen asleep by the side of their fathers, and dynasties have passed away." Finally, in Nicholas and Michel we have the struggle on its political side; the Czar's brother informing him of the position in reference to it taken up by European states, and reporting also views and prophecies respecting it acquired from a travelling Englishman; the Czar himself thinking so highly of these that he is eager to offer to so wise a man the star of a privy councillor and a post on the Caspian; and Michel's comment on the offer giving us plainly to infer who the wise man was. "He informed me that having lately been conversant with Sophocles and Plato, he entertained the bestfounded hopes, in case of a maritime war, he should be nominated, on some vacancy, as worthy of bearing his Britannic Majesty's commission of purser to a fire-ship." *

In a preface afterwards cancelled Landor declared that his political dialogues had been the most difficult part of his task, for that "a man does not lose so much breath by raising his hand above his head as by stooping to tie his shoestring"; and to this a

Of the three conversations having a personal interest, the first, between Lord Coleraine, the Rev. Mr. Bloomsbury, and the Rev. Mr. Swan, with much ironical humor contrasted a couple of clergymen of the same church, the one a perfect type of what her liberal and forbearing practice should be, the other a methodistical impostor who forces himself into the sick-room of a racketing, gaming, dissolute Irish lord, by whom before his day of grace he had been plucked at the gaming-table, in the hope to get his money back as a legacy from the dying sinner. The second was in the form of a narrative, comprising several other dialogues besides that from which it took its title of the Duc de Richelieu, Sir Firebrace Cotes, Lady Glengrin, and Mr. Normanby: giving under the latter name some vigorous experiences only slightly disguised from Landor's own; showing Tom Paine in his lodgings in Paris shortly after Robespierre's fall; in the notices of Normanby's life including a full-length sketch of his father the village schoolmaster, some persecutions for opinion which even a life so humble could not then escape, and some love adventures in which a very genuine old-world humor alternates with delightful pathos; describing an Irishman's journey from Florence to Rome; and closing with some sketches of Ireland herself, impartial in their sunshine and their shade. This dialogue was a special favorite with Emerson, and deserved to be: for though travelling far afield, and too often losing connection by the way, it contains passages of mirth as well as sadness in a strain of tender delicacy not always usual with Landor; and in several places, as where Normanby relates his having called in an auctioneer to sell his father's library, and what the good schoolmaster thought of particular books † is noted side by side with few lines from a letter to myself may perhaps be worth adding. "Of course the fellows who attack me for personalities in my conversations, and for personalities about creatures perishable and sordid as themselves, never heard of Plato, or have the least notion that that earliest and most celebrated composer of prose dialogue has introduced contemporaries of as worthless and almost as mischievous a character as the worst in mine. Rely upon it that the book which carries about it nothing to mark its own age will rarely be very interesting to another."

*From its succession of pictures one may be taken. "We slept at Siena. . . . In the morning, instead of vineyards and cornfields, a vast barren country, cracked by the heat, lay wide open before me. It looked like some starved monster, from whose pow erless bones one still wishes one's self away. No hedge was there, no tree, nor bird of any kind to inhabit them if there had been. I saw no animal but one long snake, lying in the middle of the road."

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A part of what he said to his son when he gave him Potter's Eschylus to read shall be preserved here. 'Christopher, I doubt not that Thespis was preferred to him by the graver critics; there was something so unaffected in a cart, and so little of deception in wine-dregs; and yet, Christopher, the Prometheus is the grandest poetical conception that ever entered into the heart of man. Homer could no more have written this tragedy than Eschylus could have written the Iliad. Mind me, I do not compare them. An elephant could not beget a lion, nor a lion an elephant. Critics talk most about the visible in sublimity: the Jupiter, the Neptune. Magnitude and power are sublime but in the second degree, managed as they may be. Where the heart is not shaken, the gods thunder and stride in vain. True sublimity is the perfection of the pathetic, which has other sources than pity; generosity for instance, and self-devotion. When the generous and self-devoted man suffers, there comes pity: the basis of the sublime is then above the water, and the poet, with or without the gods, can elevate it above the skies. Terror is but the relic of a childish feeling: pity is not given to children."