what the man of the hammer thought of them, we have things as characteristic as any in the conversations. The grandest old preachers are passed in review. "Lord help us! we have newer things by years and years." When Leighton, Taylor, Barrow, are dwelt upon, maybe, says the auctioneer, maybe; but here is "Doctor Hugh Blair, with his noble cassock and five-guinea wig, close, trim, and hard, as the feathers round an owlet's eye, he outsells them twenty to one." Whereat poor Mr. Normanby has to content himself with a philosophical reflection which Landor found frequently useful in his own case: Let no writer be solicitous of Fame; she is more uncertain and more blind than Fortune: let them do for the best and be prepared for the worst." But in sayings of individual significance the last of these personal dialogues was the richest of all.

Landor here was principal speaker himself, talking with two visitors at his palazzo, an Englishman and a Florentine, of such divers topics as arise in common conversation, but with a mastery of every subject handled and a precision of style that common talk is stranger to. The date of the dialogue was the time of the death of the reigning grand-duke (son of Leopold) whose virtues receive ungrudging homage, though, in displaying by some touching stories his delicate consideration for the meanest of his subjects, it is thought necessary at the same time to make grim apology for such trifling and idling in a man of his rank at a crisis "when the first princes and opera-dancers in the world were at the congress of Verona fixing the fate of nations." Opinion is also given of the city ruled by Ferdinand, though in terms of less unmixed eulogy than are applied to her ruler; for we are told that they are a stinging as well as honeyed little creatures who inhabit that central hive, not created for the gloom of Dante, but alive and alert in the daylight of Petrarch and Boccaccio. Those opinions of Shelley, too, we find to be here expressed which Southey thought to be less merited by his character than his poetry; and with these were joined some remarks on Keats in a spirit of keener appreciation. Ranking him with Burns and Chaucer, not merely for the freshness of his apprehension of objects of common life and external nature, but for what Sidney calls the elementish and ethereal" parts of poetry, Landor goes deeper in his criticism of Keats than is always his wont; and since the dialogue was written two more generations of readers of poetry have gone far to confirm its judgment, that "time alone was wanting to complete a poet who already surpassed all his contemporaries in this country in the poet's most subtle attributes."† Landor adds how

* Ante, p. 414. Something will have to be said of this hereafter.

+ I forbear from preserving now the scathing words directed against the malignity of personal abuse which then disgraced literature, and imbittered, if it did not actually shorten, the young poet's closing days. But these were followed by a fine remark: "Fame often rests at first upon something accidental; and often too is swept away, or for a time removed: but neither genius nor glory is conferred at once; nor do they glimmer and fall at a shout, like drops in a grotto. Their foundations in the beginning

great was his own regret that it had not been his fortune in Italy to know either of these young men who within so short a space of time had added two more immortal names to the cemeteries of Rome. With Keats the opportunity had not arisen; and from Shelley he had turned away when they both lived in Pisa, because of a story of the tragedy of the poet's first wife told him by Mackintosh. But what he further says in this dialogue of his general avoidance of the society of literary men, from a disinclination to take part in their differences, and to receive displeasure or uneasiness at the recital of their injuries, is within my experience true. Nor less true, as I tested abundantly during my long intimacy with him, is what he remarks upon his English visitor's request that he would repeat verses he had written on Keats and Burns. "I rarely do retain in memory anything of my own, and probably you will never find a man who has heard me repeat a line." Of his writings generally he adds that he is far from certain that in their inferences they are all quite sound; but he believes that they will give such exercise in discussing them as may tend to make other men's healthier. "I have walked always where I must breathe hard, and where such breathing was my luxury: I now sit somewhat stiller, and have fewer aspirations: but I inhale the same atmosphere yet." All the indifference he professed to the good opinion of his contemporaries, I cannot say that he felt; but of the tricks and arts of authorship he had none, and at the least no man had a better title to say that whether his books were read in that age or the next was a matter no more adding to his anxiety or occupying his speculation than whether it should be that morning or the next afternoon.

The subject reappears in perhaps the finest of all the sixteen dialogues I have classed as illustrations of biography, where Newton talks with his old tutor Barrow at Cambridge before going up for his master's degree. Much of this is a comment on Bacon's Essays, which it is not extravagant to say is as good as the essays themselves; much has a personal reference; and every part is suggestive in the highest degree. Rise, but let no man lift you," is the counsel of the old divine. "The best thing is to stand above the world; the next is, to stand apart from it on any side. . . . Have no intercourse with small authors: cultivate the highest to reverence and to defend them. . . . Those who have the longest wings have the most difficulty in the first mounting. . .* Do not be ambitious of an

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may be scooped away by the slow machinery of malicious labor; but after a season they increase with every surge that comes against them, and harden at every tempest to which they are exposed." It is to be added, of our own days, that if "malicious labor" now seldom besets the start of the young claimant for the laurel, we seem, on the other hand, to be falling into the as profitless and dangerous habit of conferring genius and glory all at once. The danger now, to the old hands as well as the new beginners, is on the side of excessive praise.

The theme is pursued in another passage, where the slow recognition of genius is likened to the tardy discovery of the precious metals. "Thus it is with writers who are to have a currency through ages. In the beginning they are confounded with

carly fame such is apt to shrivel and to drop under the tree. Reputation is casual : the wise may long want it, the unwise may soon acquire it, a servant may further it, a spiteful man may obstruct it, a passionate man may maim it, and whole gangs are ready to waylay it as it mounts the hill." Newton having remarked as to some point that he is not quite satisfied: "those who are quite satisfied," rejoins his friend, "sit still and do nothing: those who are not quite satisfied are the benefactors of the world." To another of Newton's misgivings there is also a word of reassurance wisely as well as widely applicable, where Barrow tells him that quickness is among the least of the mind's properties, belonging to her in almost her lowest state, not abandoning her when reason itself has gone, and abounding on the race-course and at the card-table: "education does not give it, and reflection takes away from it." So, where the same speaker calls Newton a great inventor, says it is a silliness to apply the quality of invention in literature mostly or altogether to poetry or romance, and pronounces the imagination of the philosopher to be more wonderful than anything within the range of fiction, or where, speaking in

the same strain of secrets of science, he declares that in every great mind there must be some, for that every deep inquirer has discovered more than he thought it prudent to avow, as almost every shallow one throws out more than he has well discovered, we have still, in these as in numberless other instances, the sort of sayings all the dialogues are rich in (this one singularly so), sayings that seem to have so wanted to be said that the utterance makes them common property. I have heard Landor humorously complain of the many poachers without license or acknowledgment who thus had sported over the manor of this very conversation, protesting that he could forgive them if in taking his sentences they would take as well the advice contained in them, and declaring with his hearty laugh that never had he put so much wisdom into so few syllables as in the last words of Barrow to Newton. The younger Isaac has asked the elder whether a studious man ought to think of matrimony, and the elder has replied that poets, mathematicians, and painters never should; but that other studious men might, after reflecting upon it twenty years. Newton thereupon shows himself disposed to give up his mathematics and reflect the twenty years. To which says Barrow: "Begin to reflect on it after the twenty, and continue to reflect on it all the remainder; I mean at intervals, and quite leisurely. It will save to you many prayers, and may suggest to you one thanksgiving."

Another equally attractive dialogue in the class of which I am speaking was the Penn and Peterborough, founded on that passage

of

most others; soon they fall into some secondary class; next into one rather less obscure and humble; by degrees they are liberated from the dross and lumber that hamper them; and, being once above the heads of contemporaries, rise slowly and waveringly, then regularly and erectly, then rapidly and majestically, till the vision strains and aches as it pursues them in their ethereal elevation."

Spence where the friend of Swift and Pope says he took a trip once with Penn to his colony of Pennsylvania; introducing the friends as they traverse on horseback the yet untamed forests stretching in the direction of the Pacific, and for its principal themes of talk opening out fields of speculation and inquiry as vast and unreclaimed; forms and tenets of religion and government, institutions and establishments in their tendencies spiritual or social, and the direction or extent to which new communities should take example from old in the arrangements, usages, and graces of life. The dialogue is a very picturesque as well as powerful one. It would be hard to say which speaker talks the best, and the horses are as good a contrast as the men who ride them. The stout contemplative black mare with her bushy mane and tail, white in one fetlock and hoof and with a broad white streak down her forehead, one feels to be as much the proper animal to carry Penn, as, in the high-bred gelding with his silvery tail and body bright and flashy as a marigold, wide-nostrilled, loudsnorting, and slyly-snapping at his comrade, quick-paced, tricky, and mettlesome, we see the very beast to be bestridden by Peterborough ; and Landor's sympathy being quite as much with Penn's dislike of establishments and liking for republics as with Peterborough's freethinking and aristocratic tastes, fairer play than usual is shown to both sides in all the arguments. These of course I turn away from here; having only space remaining for a few pregnant words wherein the mischievous cry that would exclude a Shakespeare or a Milton,. supposing them likewise to have received the requisites of fortune, from being ever proposed or thought of for election in any borough where they might happen to be born, because forsooth it is men of business that are wanted, and not men of books or genius, is disposed of by Penn: "As if men of genius are not men of business in the highest sense of the word; of business in which the State and Society are implicated for ages!"

Of the other six conversations taken from English biography there are four, the Leofric and Godiva, the John of Gaunt and Joanna of Kent, the Lady Lisle and Elizabeth Gaunt, and the Walton, Cotton, and Oldways, which take rank with the Jane Grey and the Anne Boleyn as very exquisite prose-poems. Godiva was a favorite heroine of Landor's; in his boyhood he used to steal away from Warwick to attend her fairs and festivals ;* and with consummate delicacy he has treated her in this scene, showing how Leofric's vow was made and her own resolution taken, and what were her timid tender thoughts the night before she rode through the city. The time of the John of Gaunt scene is when the people have risen against his suspected intention of seizing his nephew's crown; when he is saved only by the interference of the popular idol, his brother's widow, the mother of the child he would have wronged; and the stronghold which angry missiles had wellnigh shaken down is in almost greater

See ante, p. 335.

danger of being rent asunder by wild acclamations of joy. "Lancaster!" exclaims Joanna; "what a voice have the People when they speak out! It shakes me with astonishment, almost with consternation, while it establishes the throne; what must it be when it is lifted up in vengeance!" The time chosen in the third scene is when that Elizabeth Gaunt is brought to Lady Lisle's condemned cell whom Penn saw place round her body with her own hands the fagots that were to consume her for the same crime as Lady Lisle's, of having given shelter to one of Monmouth's adherents; but unlike her fellow-martyr in the fact that she had not thereby saved a beloved one who loved her, but only a wretch who had saved himself afterwards from fresh peril by betraying his preserver. Yet there is no feeling in her heart of anger or reproach. Her sole anxiety is that self-reproach should be saved to him, that the taunts of others may not reach him, that the knowledge of her death should be withheld from him. "I saved his life," she says, "an unprofitable and I fear a joyless one; he by God's grace has thrown open to me, earlier than I ever ventured to expect it, the avenue to eternal bliss." The cry raised by Lady Lisle at these words, which at once makes us feel that from both sufferers the bitterness of death has passed away, closes worthily this pathetic little poem. Nor is the fourth, the Walton and Cotton, a less beautiful though a quite different idyl; fresh as a page of Izaak's own writing; a natural country landscape overrun with charming thoughts; and with a sweet soberness in its cheerfulness and sunshine that, as Walton says of the effect upon himself of sights and sounds of nature, makes us readier to live and less unready to die. "We mortals are odd fishes," the old angler adds. "We care not how many see us in choler, when we rave and bluster . and make as much noise and bustle as we can; but if the kindest and most generous affection comes across us, we suppress every sign of it, and hide ourselves in nooks and coverts." He is moved to the saying by some early love-pieces of Doctor Donne's, which the old retired tutor whom he and Cotton are visiting, and who in his youth had been Donne's curate, has preserved and exhibits for their admiration.*

Briefest mention may suffice for the two concluding subjects from English biography, Archbishop Boulter and Philip Savage, and Romilly and Perceval; the one a discourse on Irish grievances and reme

*The style of Donne is so happily caught in one of these pieces, not its extravagance only but its genius, that I cannot resist quoting it here. He must have had an eye on the Psalmist," says the good Oldways in reading it; "for I would not asseverate that he was inspired, Master Walton, in the theological sense of the word; but I do verily believe I discover here a thread of the mantle:

"She was so beautiful, had God but died

For her, and none beside,

Reeling with holy joy from east to west

Earth would have sunk down blest;

And, burning with bright zeal, the buoyant Sun

Cried through his worlds, Well done!"