BOOK SEVENTH. 1836-1857. ÆT. 61-82. TWENTY-ONE YEARS AT BATH. I. New and Old Friendships. -II. The Pentameron of Boccaccio and Petrarca. -III. Writing Plays. IV. Reviewing a Reviewer.-V. Visits and Visitors. VI. Death of Southey. - VII. Last Series of Conversations. — VIII. A Friend not Literary. IX. Reviews, Collected Works, Poemata et Inscriptiones, and Hellenics.-X. Summer Holidays and Guests at Home. XI. Deaths of Old Friends.-XII. Fruit gathered from an Old Tree. XIII. Silent Companions. - XIV. Last Days in Bath, and Final Departure from England. I. NEW AND OLD FRIENDSHIPS. I HAVE described in a former page the impression made upon me by Landor when I met him first in the summer of 1836. He and Wordsworth had come to town expressly to witness Talfourd's Ion; with Crabb Robinson they occupied the same box on the first night of that beautiful tragedy; and well satisfied they seemed with themselves and with each other, as, to many who watched them during the performance, they half divided the interest with the play. We all of us met afterwards at Talfourd's house; but of the talk that might have made such a night memorable I regret that I recollect only one thing, impressed upon my memory by what followed a little later, that when the absence of Southey was deplored in connection with the domestic griefs that sadly occupied him at the time, there was an expression of feeling from both Wordsworth and Landor of unrestrained and unaffected earnestness. When a very few weeks had passed after this, it was not a little startling to receive a Satire on Satirists, very evidently by Landor, in which Wordsworth was handled sharply for alleged disrespect to Southey. It is hardly worth mention here. It made Crabb Robinson very angry, and, to propitiate him, Landor good-naturedly called back the copy of the satire already on its way to Southey; but he stuck to his point that Wordsworth had been unjust to Southey's poetry, and had indeed small appreciation generally for the highest kinds of merit. To which Robinson made an excellent reply; going wider and deeper than he meant to go, or perhaps knew that he was going. "What matters it that he is insensible to the astonishing powers of Voltaire or Goethe? He is, after all, Wordsworth. In all cases I care little what a man is not; I look to what he is. And Wordsworth has written a hundred poems the least excellent of which I would not sacrifice to give him that openness of heart you require. Productive power acts by means of concentration. With few exceptions those only love everything who, like me, can themselves do nothing." Nor was the satire itself all satire; for not a few passages from it might be cited that rise equally above the injustice committed and the anger provoked by it. Pericles and Aspasia had at this time been published, and to Southey thanks are given for having encouraged its writer to efforts of which the fruit was its Agamemnon scenes. "Called up by genius in an after-age, That awful spectre shook the Athenian stage: Ever shall those to me be well-spent days; Sweet fell the tears upon them, sweet the praise." For some of the praise I was responsible; and very cordial acknowledgment of it reached me in a letter written from Heidelberg (1st September, 1836), whither he had gone in the vain hope of being joined there by his elder children; when at the same time he sent me a fresh scene of Orestes at Delphos, and told me that those that had been most admired were "written at our friend Kenyon's before breakfast, but chiefly in the bedtime morning, while the sheets of Pericles were passing through the press." Not praise only fell, however, but here and there a less kindly word for which he had little tolerance. "I returned from Germany a fortnight since," he wrote to me from Clifton, on the 29th of October, "but found myself so fatigued and spiritless that I remained only a night in London, not even going to pay my respects at Gore House. The splendid things you have written of me have aroused, it seems, the choler of Blackwood. I never have read until this moment (nor now) a single number of that worthy, who, I understand, has the impudence to declare that I have stolen, God knows what, from him and others. . . I am not informed how long this Scotchman has been at work about me, but my publisher has advised me that he loses £150 by my Pericles. So that it is probable the Edinburgh Areopagites have condemned me to a fine in my absence; for I never can allow any man to be a loser by me, and am trying to economize to the amount of this indemnity to Saunders and Otley. . . . I think it probable that I shall fix myself at Clifton for a year." The Blackwood review was really not a bad one, and, with a laugh for the absurdity of its parallel passages, might have satisfied any man; he described it himself as a mere kick on the shin between two compliments"; yet what was here threatened was soon afterwards actually done, and the hundred pounds which Mr. James had obtained for the MS. of Pericles was paid back by Landor to its publishers! It may be held perhaps hereafter among the curiosities of literature that an author should have done this. I am not acquainted with any other instance. 66 1830 ST. In the same letter he sent me a copy of the original edition of a book which had belonged to Swift's celebrated uncle Godwin, progenitor of the so-named first husband of his friend the Countess de Molandè, Milton's Defensio: and here I may say, once for all, that a continual and inexhaustible source of sympathy between us was our common admiration of those chiefs of our English Commonwealth to whom early studies had led me; and that even the glittering forms of antique gods and heroes never took more radiant shape in Landor's imagination, than the homely iron helmets and buffalo cuirasses of our own Hampdens, Iretons, Blakes, and Cromwells. At Clifton the winter was passed; but before I mention his meeting with the friend who joined him there, a couple of extracts from his letters addressed to that friend may be given. TO SOUTHEY FROM LLANBEDR HALL, 4TH FEBRUARY, 1836. "You too have had great sufferings" [this followed the mention already quoted of his own family sorrow], "but not hopeless, and every source of pride that virtue can open to assuage them. Pray tell me whether there is any certainty of your being in London soon. I abhor the very name, but I will meet you there if you will let me. But I am afraid you will hardly have patience with a man so obstinate and incorrigible in his politics. I detest the trickery and sheer dishonesty of many of the Whigs as much as you do but I am convinced that we must yield to the impulse that has been given to men's minds, and that we must remove (since we cannot cure) what works upon their envy and malice. I have not been quite unoccupied. You will soon have the Letters of Pericles and Aspasia, which I could have greatly increased in number; but I often have had occasion to say to myself, 'Non profecturis litora bobus aras.' Now I should construe bobus not 'with the oxen,' but 'for the oxen.' Did you ever peradventure meet with Mr. Willis, the American?" [He tells the story already told, up to the assurance he had received, just before quitting Fiesole, that the books and MS. had been "consigned to an American near the Leghorn gate."] "I called on the American: he denied hat he had ever seen them, and was angry at such an intimation that he was deficient in punctuality. I took no more trouble about them. The corrections and additions cost me more trouble and time than the composi tion had done. But there is enough without any more. I am now on my way to my favorite Clifton, where my intention is to remain a month at least; for the fogs of London make my heart quite flabby, to say nothing of quinsey; TO SOUTHEY 'O, tormento maggior d' ogni tormento!'" FROM PENROSE COTTAGE, CLIFTON 30TH OCTOBER, 1836. "I have been in Germany three months, hoping that some of my family would meet me there. Here I am again at Clifton, and here I think I shall finish my days; the climate suits my health so perfectly. Again I hear the rumor, and this time I hope it is not a false one, that you are coming amongst us. God grant that the expectation may arise from some improvement in the health of Mrs. Southey. I shall never regret that you do not come, if I hear that you could consistently with your sense of duty; so 'That night the little chamber where they lay, I do not like the Rhine so much as many parts of Italy. Como, Sorrento, and Amalfi, to say nothing of Ischia and Capri, far surpass all without the Alps, I mean on this side of them. Let me hear anything which gives you satisfaction or hope." There was little of either, alas, left for Southey in this world; but such lights and shadows of the pleasant past as were still to be reflected from its old associations and memories, he now for the last time enjoyed in company with his friend. Their sympathies were close and affectionate as ever, widely as their opinions had diverged; and even of some later Conversations, in which idols of his own were overthrown, Southey had written shortly before to another friend : "What you have heard me say of his temper is the only explanation of his faults. Never did man represent himself in his writings so much less generous, less just, less compassionate, less noble in all respects than he really is. I certainly never knew any one of brighter genius or of kinder heart." With this bright genius and kind heart he now, accompanied by his son, walked for the last time over the downs of Clifton, and revisited in Bristol the places of his boyhood. The good old Cottle, who had published his Joan of Arc exactly forty years before, and advanced him the money to buy his wedding-ring, entertained them there; they went to the house of Southey's grandmother at Bedminster, and to the church which with her and his mother he had attended half a hundred years before; they went to his Aunt Tyler's in College Green; they included in their pilgrimage the house in which he was born, the schools he had been sent to, and what had been his father's shop. Nothing was omitted, and Southey seemed to have forgotten nothing; not even a short-cut or by-way of that strangely unattractive city; and as he darted down some alley, or threaded some narrow lane, he would tell his companions that he had not traversed it since his school-boy days. "Ah," said Landor to him, as they stumbled over some workmen in turning away from College Green, "workmen some day may be busy on this very spot putting up your statue; but it will be twenty years hence." "Well," was his friend's rejoinder, "if ever I have one, I would wish it to be here.” The wish has not had fulfilment, though more than thirty years have passed since then. "This was a pleasant visit," writes Mr. Cuthbert Southey, "and my father's enjoyment was greatly enhanced by the company of Mr. Savage Lander, who was then residing at Clifton, and in whose society we spent several delightful days. He was one of the few men with whom my father used to enter freely into conversation, and on such occasions it was no mean privilege to be a listener." Landor quitted Clifton in the early spring of 1837, was again for a time at Llanbedr, visited Lady Blessington in London and his sisters at Warwick, joined Kenyon and Torquay, and passed some of the later days of summer with his friend Brown at Plymouth. Yet idle as such a life might have been to another man, it was not so to him. Creatures of his fancy went with him everywhere; were present with him most in crowds; and were altogether much more real to him, when he cared to converse with them at all, than any actual living companions. Wherever pen and ink were accessible to him, and a sheet of paper, he was equipped for every enterprise. "When I think of writing on any subject, I abstain a long while from every kind of reading, lest the theme should haunt me, and some of the ideas take the liberty of playing with mine. I do not wish the children of my brain to imitate the gait or learn any tricks of others." All the time I have named was one of rich and ready productiveness; "conservative" letters, conversations, dramatic scenes, came forth abundantly; and a work was brought to completion which he had begun before quitting Italy, in which Boccaccio and Petrarca were the speakers, and which with the Shakespeare and the Pericles formed a trilogy so filled with the greatness and variety of his genius that it may be called, upon the whole, its most complete expression. My account of this work may be preceded by a few notes from letters written in the interval which will tell us something of the friends seen or books read by him while he had it in hand. At an old bookseller's in Bristol he picked up some of the writings of Blake, and was strangely fascinated by them. He was anxious to have collected as many more as he could, and enlisted me in the service; but he as much wanted patience for it as I wanted time, and between us it came to nothing. He protested that Blake had been Wordsworth's prototype, and wished they could have divided his madness between them; for that some accession of it in the one case, |