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sult, though nothing more was said. Nevertheless, there are amazingly fine things put into Plato's mouth. There is one where he accounts for our not seeing the stars at eventide, oftener because there are glimmerings of light than because there are clouds intervening. "Thus many truths escape us from the obscurity we stand in; but many more from that crepuscular state of mind which induceth us to sit down satisfied with our imaginations and unsuspicious of our knowledge." But this sets the wrath of Diogenes in motion all the same. "Keep always to the point, or with an eye upon it," he retorts; "and instead of saying things to make people stare and wonder, say what will withhold them hereafter from wondering and staring. This is philosophy; to make remote things tangible, common things extensively useful, useful things extensively common, and to leave the least necessary for the last." Of the sayings having personal reference, some may be even the more interesting and better worth quoting for the fact that nothing personal was intended by them. As, where the remark occurs that great men too often have greater faults than little men can find room for; where it is said of Aristotle that he makes you learn more than he teaches, and whenever he presents to his readers one full-blown thought there are several buds about it which are to open in the cool of the study; where it is claimed for every great writer that he is a writer of history, let him treat on almost what subject he may, for that he carries with him for thousands of years a portion of his times; and where Diogenes prefigures the fate of all such enlighteners of the earth. "The sun colors the sky most deeply and most diffusely when he hath sunk below the horizon; and they who never said, How beneficently he shines! say at last, How brightly he set!"

Such sayings might be yet more largely added from the last of these Greek dialogues, the Epicurus, Leontion, and Ternissa; the conversation which, upon the whole, I should say, was Landor's supreme favorite, and which contains certainly more of those points of character that constituted the weakness as well as the strength of his own, than any other in the entire series. When Epicurus describes as dearest to him "those whose hearts possess the rarest and divinest faculty of retaining or forgetting at option what ought to be forgotten or retained," it cannot but occur to us, after experience thus far of the life set down in these pages, that the faculty has in it also something not divine, and that to forget at option what ought (perhaps) to be remembered is at the least a doubtful Epicurean virtue. The entire subject of the dialogue is the platonic intercourse of the philosopher with two handsome young girls of twenty and sixteen, to whom he shows his newly planted garden two or three miles from Athens, and explains while he practises the precepts of his philosophy. Of the safe applicability of the precepts at every season, my earlier narrative would hardly be a happy illustration; and of the trouble

not inseparable from such charming friends, its closing page will have something to say; but in this place mention has only to be made of the poetical wealth of the dialogue throughout, of the freshness of its pictures of external nature, of the delicacy of its criticism, of the wonderful beauty of many of its fancies and thoughts. Here is the saying that "the voice comes deepest from the sepulchre, and a great name has its root in the dead body." Here counsel is given to the young to pay a reverence to greatness both in rulers and writers, but to adjust it always by the consideration that the benefits of the one are local and transitory, while those of the other are universal and eternal. And here the philosopher of pleasure vindicates the serene endurance and triumph of philosophy over any weapons that can be brought against her. "There are nations, it is reported, which aim their arrows and javelins at the sun and moon on occasions of eclipse or any other offence; but I have never heard that the sun and moon abated their course through the heavens for it, or looked more angrily when they issued forth again to shed light on their antagonists. They went onward all the while in their own serenity and clearness, through unobstructed paths, without diminution and without delay; it was only the little world below that was in darkness."

The five Roman conversations were, Marcellus and Hannibal, Metellus and Marius, Tiberius and Vipsania, Epictetus and Seneca, and Lucullus and Cæsar: the three first named taking high rank in the class which I have set apart as prose-poems. In the first the conqueror of Syracuse lies with his death-wound before Hannibal, whose way it has cleared to Rome; in the second the tribune Metellus and the centurion Caius Marius meet at the siege of Numantia; and the third is that meeting after their divorce of Tiberius and Vipsania which can hardly fail to affect the most careless reader with something of the emotion its writer underwent in composing it.*. The eternal protest of every age against the sacrifice of human hearts to state convenience or policy seems to rise with the cry of anguish of the unhappy prince, as he thinks of the contentment and quiet that might have been his "though the palace of Cæsars cracked and split with emperors, while I, sitting in idleness on a cliff of Rhodes, eyed the Sun as he swang his golden censer athwart the heavens, or his image as it overstrode the sea." The Epictetus and Seneca is one of the shorter dialogues, but very striking in its contrasts as well of the character as of the philosophy of the high-bred man of learning and the low-born slave, and enforcing admirable rules of simplicity and naturalness in writing. The most generally interesting of all these Latin dialogues, however, and most deservedly Southey's favorite, was the Lucullus and Cæsar. The period chosen is when estrangement has begun between Cæsar and Pompeius, the former indeed only veiling, under a visit to his friend for the professed object of seeing

*See ante, pp. 402, 403.

of reawakening

his new villa on the Apennines, a very eager purpose the old dislike of Lucullus to Pompeius, in the hope of thereby obtaining sanction to his own designs. In this he is baffled. From the conqueror of Mithridates, an old adversary of the extreme republicans, he receives only counsel to be content with his victories and a warning to make no attempt on the republic; experience having taught himself the hollowness of ambition, and luxury extinguished its last vestige in him. Fain would he persuade Cæsar that enough for the immortality he craved was already achieved by him, and that they who now refused him his place would have to yield it hereafter. "No one can measure a great man but upon his bier." Cæsar silently retains his own resolve; moved greatly, but not diverted from it, when Lucullus turns to the infirmities and passions of his own career, and enforces not without self-reproach the lesson they have taught him. "There is enough in us to be divided into two portions; let us keep the upper undisturbed and pure. A part of Olympus itself lies in dreariness and in clouds, variable and stormy; but it is not the highest; there the Gods govern." In the rest of the conversation the friends are merely host and guest; Lucullus enjoying Caesar's admiration, of the completeness of the equipments of his villa, as he is led through its various offices and halls to where its frescos reproduce his victories, and to the chamber where their banquet waits them. Everything that may be supposed to form part of the daily life of the most luxurious of Romans in the last years of the republic is reproduced with a vivid reality. Even the farm, the cows, the lake, the fish-ponds, the Adriatic itself visible from that height of the Apennines, all of them as much adjuncts to the local truth of the scene as the tapestries and pictures in the hall or the marble statues in the library, take their place in the little drama presented to us in this delightful conversation. "What a library is here! exclaims Cæsar. "Ah, Marcus Tullius! I salute thy image. Why frownest thou upon me? collecting the consular robe and uplifting the right arm, as when Rome stood firm again and Catiline fled before thee."

Such was the new series of Imaginary Conversations, of which it only remains that I should indicate the dates and forms of publication. Twenty of the dialogues were issued as a third volume of the original series, one of them (partly in verse) on Inez de Castro being subsequently withdrawn to form portion of a dramatic poem with that title; and this volume, with a dedication to Bolivar of the date of 1825 and a postscript supplied in 1827, was published by Mr. Colburn in 1828. Fifteen more formed the first volume of a new series, which a second volume of twelve more completed; one of the latter that had Peleus and Thetis for its speakers, in violation of the rule to exclude imaginary people, being afterwards transformed into a scene which is acted in the Epicurus and Leontion; and this " second series," its first volume dedicated in May, 1826, to Sir Robert

Wilson and its second in August, 1826, to Lord Guildford, was published by Mr. Duncan in 1829, the year to which my narrative has arrived.

I have stated on a former page that what Julius Hare had done for the first and second it devolved on me to do for the third series of the Imaginary Conversations; and as, out of these, eighteen had been completed, and eight more were partially written, before Landor left Italy, I will here mention what the subjects of them were.

Five were classical. In two, forming a bright little prose-poem, shaded with touches of character of the utmost delicacy and pathos, Æsop and Rhodope are the speakers. In a third, spoken over the fall of Carthage, and rising to even a grander theme in the immeasurable services of Greece to Rome, the speakers are Scipio and his Greek friends Panatius and Polybius. In the fourth, Pisistratus receives from Solon counsel and commiseration. In the fifth, where Lucius and Timotheus converse, and nearly every sentence is radiant with wisdom or wit, the great Greek satirist warns one of the leaders of the new Christian sect against the errors under which the old Gods had perished.

Fourteen had for their speakers people famous in foreign lands. The East supplied one in Rhadamistus and Zenobia, a brief dialogue of intense passion to which character belonged also a subject from Spain, Philip the Second and Donna Juana Coelho; one from France, Joan of Orleans and Agnes Sorel; and three from Italy, Tancredi and Constantia, Tasso and Cornelia, Dante with his wife Gemma Donati, and Dante with his angel Beatrice. Galileo visited in his prison by Milton is the subject of a seventh; the eighth, filled also with pleasant memories of Florence and Fiesole, was a dialogue between the painter Fra Filippo Lippi and Pope Eugenius the Fourth; and La Rochefoucault talking to La Fontaine supplied the ninth, both speakers talking so well that one would hardly suspect the writer to have hated the first of these Frenchmen almost as much as he loved the second. The German subjects were three: Melancthon in colloquy with Calvin; and Sandt conversing with Kotzebue on the eve of the commission of his crime, and with Blucher while afterwards in prison waiting his punishment. The thirteenth and fourteenth, Cardinal Legate Albani and the Picture-dealers, and the Emperor of China and his minister, formed portions respectively of two sets of papers, on High and Low Life in Italy, and on the Adventures of a Chinese statesman despatched to Europe for a batch of first-rate professors of Christianity, with whose help his master, profiting by experience of the Jesuits, hopes to sow among enemies the Tartars divisions and animosities that will destroy them.

Lis

The last six were on English themes, all of them dialogues of character, interfused with intense passion in that where Mary of Scotland surrenders herself to Bothwell: and, in the rest, where the English Mary and her sister Elizabeth meet after their brother's death and the proclamation of Lady Jane; where the queen Elizabeth talks, after the massacre of Bartholomew, with Cecil and Anjou and the French Ambassador; where Bishop Shipley says adieu to Franklin after his mission of peace has failed; where Addison meets Steele after the bailiffs have been with him; and where Andrew Marvell after a visit to Milton meets Bishop Parker in Bunhill Row. showing at their very best Landor's humor and eloquence, his play of wit and fancy. The last has, perhaps more than any, the greatest qualities of his writing consistently sustained, at their highest level and with the fewest drawbacks.

BOOK SIXTH.

1829-1835. T. 54-60.

AT FIESOLE.

I. Closing Years in the Palazzo Medici.-II. Mother's Death.-III. Ordered to quit Tuscany.-IV. The Villa Gherardescha. - V. England revisited. VI. Again in Italy: Old Pictures and new Friends. - VII. Examination of Shakespeare for Deer-stealing. - VIII. Pericles and Aspasia. - IX. Self-banishment from Fiesole.

I. CLOSING YEARS IN THE PALAZZO MEDICI.

"FROM France to Italy my steps I bent,

And pitcht at Arno's side my household tent.
Six years the Medicaan palace held

My wandering Lares; then they went afield,
Where the hewn rocks of Fiesole impend
O'er Doccia's dell, and fig and olive blend.
There the twin streams in Affrico unite,
One dimly seen, the other out of sight,
But ever playing in his smoothened bed
Of polisht stone, and willing to be led

Where clustering vines protect him from the sun,
Never too grave to smile, too tired to run.
Here, by the lake, Boccacio's fair brigade
Beguiled the hours, and tale for tale repaid.
How happy! O, how happy had I been
With friends and children in this quiet scene!
Its quiet was not destined to be mine:

'T was hard to keep, 't was harder to resign."

So wrote Landor, in a little poem on his homes; but the Medicæan palace had not held his Lares five years when he moved into the country two miles from the Tuscan capital, and interposed the villa Castiglione between his homes in Florence and Fiesole. Here he lived, with a short interval in the winter of '28 and '29 at the casa Giugni, until he found his Fiesolan home. A characteristic incident had closed his intercourse with the living representative of the Medici. "I remember one day," writes Mr. Kirkup, "when he lived in the Medici palace, he wrote to the marquis, and accused him of having seduced away his coachman. The marquis, I should tell you, enjoyed no very good name, and this had exasperated Landor the more. Mrs. Landor was sitting in the drawing-room the day after, where I and some others were, when the marquis came strutting in without removing his hat. But he had scarcely advanced three steps from the door when Landor walked up to him quickly and knocked his hat off, then took him by the arm and turned him out.

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