sir," said Hazlitt, "you never saw him, then? But you have seen a horse, I suppose?" Landor smiled, and he went on. "Well, sir, if you have seen a horse, I mean his head, sir, you may say you have seen Wordsworth." It should be added, however, that the poet's face had been a sore subject with Hazlitt ever since his luckless attempt to paint it twenty years before, when Southey had described the result as presenting Wordsworth at the foot of the gallows, deeply affected by his deserved fate, yet determined to die like a man. Hazlitt in those days," Wordsworth afterwards wrote, was practising portrait-painting with professional views "; and thus, at one of his first ventures, the ambitious young limner had stumbled on the threshold. The face had something in it, then, above and beyond the power the painter possessed of dealing with it: a severe worn pressure of thought about the temples, a fire in the eye as if more than outward appearances were seen by it, the forehead intensely marked, cheeks furrowed by strong feeling, and an inclination to laughter about the mouth strangely at variance with the solemn look of the rest of the countenance. Of all which there was nothing the critic cared to remember now but his early failure to do justice to any of it; nor could Landor himself have disposed with greater coolness or cleverness of a subject become displeasing to him. There was just enough truth to give humor to his whimsical comparison.

Many were the points of agreement, indeed, between Hazlitt and his host; and so heartily did each enjoy the other's wilfulness and caprice, that a strong personal liking characterized their brief acquaintance. Landor wrote to him after he left Florence, and Hazlitt replied from Rome at the beginning of April. He described himself and Mrs. Hazlitt crossing the mountains pretty well, but their journey as rather tedious. Rome had hardly answered his expectations. The ruins did not prevail enough over the modern buildings, which were commonplace things, to satisfy him: but one or two things were prodigious fine." He had got a pleasant lodging, but found everything very bad and dear. "I have thoughts of going to spend a month at Albano, but am not quite sure. If I do not, I shall return to Florence next week, and proceed to Venice. I should be glad, if I settle at Albano, if you could manage to come over and stop a little. I have done what I was obliged to write for the papers, and am now a leisure man, I hope, for the rest of the summer.† I

In his Recollections of Hazlitt Mr. Patmore tells us: "Of Landor, Hazlitt entertained a very high opinion, even before the production of his noble work, the Imaginary Conversations; ... but his intimate connection and friendship with Southey... seemed to throw a doubt on the sincerity, as well as the stability, of the opinions of both. He was not answerable, he told me, for the whole of the article on Landor in the Edinburgh Review, alterations and additions having been made in it after it left his hands.

The book was one after his own heart; and some parts of it he considered finer than anything else from a modern pen. ... .. Subsequently Hazlitt was formally introduced to Landor at his residence at Florence; and he returned to England with an improved and heightened opinion," &c., &c.

In another letter (dating from 33 Via Gregoriana) he wrote: "I am much gratified that you are pleased with the Spirit of the Age. Somebody ought to like it, for I am

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bought a little Florence edition of Petrarch and Dante the other day, and have made out one page." He devotes the rest of his letter to a Latin inscription copied by him from the monument to the Stuarts executed as a commission from the Prince regent by Canova ; requests that Landor will "ask Mr. Southey for his opinion on this Jacobite effusion"; and, sending a kind remembrance to Landor's wife, subscribes himself his much-obliged friend.

Such few notices as thus were accessible of friends and life in Florence it seemed right to interpose before resumption of my narrative, at the opening of the year of the removal to Fiesole; and I will now only add a note or two from Leigh Hunt's recollection of Landor himself at the time. He found him living among his paintings and hospitalities, in a style of unostentatious elegance very becoming a scholar that could afford it, but with a library the smallness of which surprised Hunt, and "which he must furnish out, when he writes on English subjects, by the help of a rich memory." He had some fine children, Leigh goes on to say, with whom it was his habit to play like a real school-boy; being as ready to complain of an undue knock as he was to laugh, shout, and scramble himself. His conversation was lively and unaffected, as full of scholarship or otherwise as his friends might desire, and dashed now and then with a little superfluous will and vehemence, when speaking of his likings and dislikes. "His laugh was in peals, and climbing; he seemed to fetch every fresh one from a higher story." Both his genius and scholarship greatly impressed his visitor. He could really fancy and feel with, as well as read, Ovid and Catullus. He had the veneration for all poetry, ancient or modern, that belonged to a scholar who was himself a poet; and showed a proper knowledge of Chaucer and of Spenser as well as of Homer. He seemed to Hunt, by his book of Idyls, to have proved himself to be by far the best Latin poet of our country, after Milton; more in good taste than the incorrectness and diffuseness of Cowley, and not to be lowered by a comparison with the mimic elegances of Addison. "Speaking of the Latin poets of antiquity, I was struck with an observation of his, that Ovid was the best-natured of them all. Horace's perfection that way he doubted. He said that Ovid had a greater range of pleasurable ideas, and was prepared to do justice to everything that came in his way. Ovid was fond of noticing his rivals in wit and genius, and has recorded the names of a great number of his friends; whereas Horace seems to confine his eulogies to such as were rich or in fashion and well received at court." Upon the whole, what Leigh Hunt had to say of this remarkable man, with whose poetry he had become acquainted but the year sure there will be plenty to cry out against it. I hope you did not find any sad blunders in the second volume; but you can hardly suppose the depression of body and mind under which I wrote some of those articles."

* JACOBO III. JACOBI II. MAGNÆ BRIT. REGIS FILIO, KAROLO EDVARDO, ET HENRICO DECANO PATRUM CARDINALIUM, JACOBI III. FILIIS, REGLE STIRPIS STUARDLE POSTREMIS, ANNO M.VCCC.XIX. BEATI MORTUI QUI IN DOMINO MORIUNTUR.

before, after reading the book that had made him suddenly famous as "one of our most powerful writers of prose," is to be summed up in a remark already referred to. He had never known any one of such a vehement nature with so great delicacy of imagination; "he is like a stormy mountain-pine that should produce lilies."

II. MOTHER'S DEATH.

At the opening of 1829 there seemed to be less cause for anxiety as to his mother's health than had been expressed for some preceding years. Her letters had never been more frequent, and seldom more shrewdly or strikingly expressed. On the 7th of January she thanks him for the portrait of his two beautiful children; says how proud she is of what Mr. Southey in one of his books had been saying of her son; tells him of a living she had purchased for his brother Robert near Pershore, "in a pleasant country, and not far from Ipsley"; and adds that her daughters have been reading to her what had pleased her very much out of Bishop Heber's Journal,* where his name was mentioned, and some of his poetry quoted. On the 19th of March there is a letter from her filled with county news about the Lawleys, and with what was going on at Warwick Castle and at Guy's Cliff; telling how much Sir Robert Lawley had lamented “Walter's unwillingness" to see more of him in Florence, and what handsome things Lord Aston had said of the author of the Imaginary Conversations. In May she reports of her grandson Charles that he was in the fifth class at Rugby, and that the new master there was said to have wonderful influence; that the boys worked very hard to gain his approbation; and that flogging and fagging were nearly abolished altogether. This was Arnold. However, the old lady adds, "I hope the boys won't study more than is good for the health of them, and I did not like to hear that the play-ground is deserted." That was her last letter to her son in Florence, though she lived until the October following. She had an illness somewhat suddenly in the spring, from which she never quite rallied; and through the intervening months it is discoverable that she was becoming gradually weaker, though no immediate danger was thought to exist.

Landor continued to write to her as usual. He complained to her in January how much people had beset him with introductions since his Conversations appeared, and why it was that the last series was still delayed. However, it would really be out at the end of March; and she would find that he had mentioned his kind old friend Dr. Parr with the regard and gratitude he owed him. He writes to her in June of the pleasantest weather he can remember in Italy, and asks her to tell his sister to send him various fruit-seeds. He tells her a few days later that she was not to be alarmed by anything she

Heber says that the vast ruins of old cities in Upper India had brought to his mind the lines of Gebir on Masar. Ante, p. 58.

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heard of his having been expelled from Florence, because he was back again; and the grand-duke had only laughed when he heard that the real offence had been what he had said in his book of Florentine patriots and Florentine justice, and of one of the Florentine grandees selling his wife's old clothes before she had been dead a fortnight. And at the end of July he informs her of his great misfortune in the death by apoplexy of his friend Lord Blessington at Paris, from his eulogy of whom I will take a few lines.

"When he was Viscount Mountjoy he was very much noticed by the present King, who, in bringing his charges against the Queen, said, 'I hope I shall find in Blessington as warm a friend as I found in Mountjoy.' He replied that he was afraid the prosecution would make the Regent unpopular, and that he never could be the advocate of a measure that might lead to recrimination. We thought differently on many points, particularly on the political abilities and integrity of Canning. But nothing could diminish our mutual esteem." *

This must have been the last letter his mother received from him. He sent her over his bust by Gibson at the end of August; but the letter accompanying it was to his sisters. In this he told them to explain to her that it was the gift of his incomparable friend Ablett, whom they were to describe to her as a most religious man, who gave away many thousands a year to persons who had no suspicion from whom it came; and this was replied to by his sister Ellen, who said the bust had arrived without the slightest injury, that it was beautiful and much admired, and that Lord Aston in particular was delighted with it. She added that they were in the midst of gayeties; that the Studley Castle people were staying with them; that they had had a succession of archery meetings; and that their mother had just returned from Ipsley," very feeble, but insisting on the gayeties going on." This was on the 8th of September, and is the last glimpse of her, brave and self-denying to the close, which we are permitted to receive. She died in October, within one month of her 86th year.

*From one of Lord Blessington's letters, out of many kept by Landor, I take a few lines to show the character of their intercourse, and the subjects that had interest for both. "You will be surprised to hear that Benjamin Constant and two of his party have been at a card-party of his most Christian Majesty. So that I think his most Catholic Majesty will be left in the lurch; and that the Cross will triumph over the Crescent But everything else political now gives way to the new administrations of England and France. Lord Lansdowne, they say, will be foreign secretary, and Lord Holland privy seal. The bar is not pleased by the appointment of Plunket to the Rolls with a peer age, but he will be a fine make-weight against Eldon in the next debate upon our Irish question. They talk of Lord Mount Charles coming here. I think he will be vicechamberlain. Sir John Leach will not go to Ireland. He is wrong, for he would do well there, and find excellent claret as well as pretty women, both of which, on dit, his honor has no objection unto On Tuesday, the 15th, Lord Normanby plays The Iron Chest. I do not know yet whether I shall come over for it or not. I love plays so much that I think I shall."

From a marble monument in Tachbrooke church I take the subjoined, written mainly by Landor himself, but with additional touches by his brother Robert: "Gual terus Landor, Roberto generoso, pio, integerrimo Patre natus: duas uxores duxit: $ prima filiam unicam, ab altera filios Iv. filias III. suscepit; lepidus, doctus, liberalis, probus, amicis jucundissimus; anno ætatis LXXIII. decessit.-Juxta, prout vivens

"My mother's great kindness to me," Landor wrote on the 12th of November to his sister Elizabeth, "throughout the whole course of her life, made me perpetually think of her with the tenderest love. I thank God that she did not suffer either a painful or a long illness, and that she departed from life quite sensible of the affectionate care she had received from both her daughters. I am not sorry that she left me some token of her regard; but she gave me too many in her lifetime for me to think of taking any now. You and Ellen will retain, for my sake, the urn and the books. I wish to have her little silver seal, in exchange for an Oriental cornelian which you and my brothers gave me, belonging to my father. I have his arms, which is enough. The one I mean is pretty in its setting, and contains the word 'Leitas' in Persian letters. My brother Henry was so kind as to purchase two Venetian paintings, once mine, and to place them at Ipsley. I thanked him at the time, and thank him again; but I am resolved to accept nothing whatever from any of my relatives. If mother's picture was purchased at Llanthony, I would buy it gladly. Pray let me hear about it. I remember it at my grandmother's fifty years ago. Adieu. I am ill disposed for writing more."

III. ORDERED TO QUIT TUSCANY.

The incident mentioned in one of Landor's last letters to his mother might have seemed a little startling if told of any one else, but in his case made hardly a perceptible difference in his relations to the magistracy and police of Florence, with whom he had generally some quarrel in hand. Three years earlier he had written to Southey that the things said about the Tuscans in his Conversations, and principally those in power, being translated with bitter comments by some literary men in Florence whom he could not admit into his house, had greatly exasperated against him the ministers of the grand-duke, whom however he did not know by sight, nor they him; so that it was a matter of perfect indifference to him. The ground of indifference lasted exactly two more years, at the end of which he obtained perforce a personal acquaintance with some of the ministers, having been called before the courts, and threatened to be sent out of Tuscany. And now, another year having intervened, this threat was to be put in force.

moriensque voluit, composita est uxor ejus Elizabetha, filia Caroli Savagii, conjux, mater, femina pia, optima, vix annos LXXXV. menses XI." "Pardon me," wrote Landor in 1856, when he sent me a copy of the inscription as originally drawn up by him, "pardon me, what I never can pardon in myself, the use of Latin in an Englishman's epitaph. which ought to be written for Englishmen to read. It was urged on me." An English inscription on an adjoining tablet in the same church may also here be given, though it anticipates some events in this memoir. "To the memory of Mary Anne Landor, second daughter of Walter and Elizabeth Landor, who died December 26, 1818, aged 40 years; and of her youngest sister, Ellen Landor, who died July 17, 1838, aged 55 years. Lastly, of Elizabeth Savage Landor, their eldest sister, who died February 24, 1854, aged 77 years."