1830-5

has gone but a little way towards the correction of anomalies very gravely disconcerting to foreigners as well as to all intelligent E lishmen; but it was nevertheless this firm belief that in the changes! he proposed he was only restoring the legitimate forms of the guage, added to his knowledge of English literature, and guided by. his unusual mastery of the ancient as well as of many modera tongues, which enabled him, even while arguing for the maintenance of principles and positions the most unstable and untenable, to make sound and important contributions in aid of what he so much de sired. The language is indebted to him for suggestions of the greatest value; and the character of them is intimated more or less in such passages as I am now about to quote from his letters, especially in those having reference to the system of spelling after sound, or of so remodelling orthography that it should follow pronunciation.

Of Grote's History.

"I am reading" (October, 1852) "Grote's History. Wonderful it seems to me that a writer so fresh from the Attic, and particularly so conversant with Thucydides, should stand up to his chin among the green-grocery of Covent Garden! It would however be ungrateful to collect blemishes of language from an author to whom we are indebted for so much diligence and infor-1 mation, so much learning and wisdom. The days of pure English were over with Southey, bright as they had been with Sterne, Goldsmith, azi Mrs. Inchbald. We now break loose and get among ambitions' and 'peo ples,' and many other such formidable features, repulsive as those whi Eneas met on entering the gates of hell. But everybody now is playing with these frightful cobras, and putting them into his bosom. As people do not perceive the loss of freedom until it is utterly gone, neither do they the loss of language: nor would they be persuaded though such a prophet as Milton rose from the dead."

Of Parts of Speech.

"I have been reading" (1853) "a clever book, A Month in the Camp before Sebastopol, and would have given five pounds rather than have dis covered in it such a word as traps. Surely this word ought to signify only the instruments of ratcatchers, molecatchers, and such like. Alas that we are sunk into the sludge of slang up to the very chin! I did think that we never could sink lower after we had discussed a dinner with the undergraduates. How the gravy flew about! and do not you sigh over the stains of soup and of lobster-sauce on your velvet waistcoat? I beg pardon: there is no such habiliment in modern use: vest is the name. I still wear breeches: no other man alive dares to appear in them: there are inexpressibles, unmentionables, pantaloons, continuations, shorts, and probably several more in the same department of wardrobe. We certainly are in these matters the most vulgar nation upon earth, excepting the Americans, who are our continua tions. And how poor we must be. We run to borrow a shirt from a Frenchman, calling it a chemise; and the lady we love takes refuge in the same quarter for what lies nearest to her heart, and gives it the same name. s Whatever is graceful, and whatever is disgraceful, we borrow from our neighbor; and keep for ourselves that only which lies between, and comes into ordinary and homely use."

f Corruptions of Language.

Here is a gentleman at Bath, Mr. Ellis, an excellent and most intelligent an, I hear, who has published a book recommending us to spell phonetically. phinstone, seventy or eighty years ago, wrote in this fashion. Imagine y surprise at being told that a work was composed on my principles of pelling. All my principles are merely the adoption of the best spellings f the best writers, and the rejection of the fopperies introduced with Charles the Second. The cavaliers (as fops were called) wished to make he ladies believe that they or their fathers had emigrated to France, and hought it as glorious to be unruly in their language as in their conduct. Cowley and Dryden were courtiers. Pope hated kings, who really were ateful; but he imitated the spelling of ladies, beautiful as his language is; ind before he died he had read and ridiculed Middleton, some of whose peculiarities, good and bad, I also have noted. For several years subsequently there were but few innovations. People threw into the lumberoom their old bandy-legged chairs, and would have nothing that was not stuffed with Latin and quilted into stiffness. It was hardly to be expected that dons and doctors would go into a dame's school; but Mrs. Inchbald and Mrs. Barbauld made themselves greater authorities than all Oxford and Cambridge. We have rarely had two better writers of English in the best of times. What I had in view when I began my letter is this. You have the power of a sanitary commissioner, and can command the stopping up of several open sewers in our language. Do order that paling to be removed which shuts up perhaps, indeed, and too when too means also. This has no parallel in any other language; and even those who commit the folly would abstain from it in writing French or Italian or Greek or Latin. The last innovation every where and no where in two words, as if where were a substantive. I find also every body: while body is inviolate, why should everybody be sawed asunder, like St. Bartholomew? I have now said my say and filled my sheet; so adieu.”

Of his own proposed Amendments.

"I have read attentively" (1854) "Mr. Ellis's observations on orthography. Different authors have given different reasons for varieties. Southey told me when he visited me at Clifton, now some twenty years since, that it would ruin him to spell right, for that fifty copies of his book would never sell. Archdeacon Hare, not inferior to Archbishop Whately in purity of style and correctness of thought, had the courage to follow my preterites and participles and other words. In my Last Fruits off an Old Tree I have added high authorities; in fact I never have spelt differently from the ladies and gentlemen now flourishing without high authority or strict analogy. Our language was first corrupted by the euphuists: it had reached perfection under the compilers of our Church service. It fell prostrate in the slipperiness and filth about Charles II., when every gentleman wisht it to be thought that he had been an exile for his adherence to royalty so long as to have forgotten his mother tongue. Cowley and Dryden, and South himself, were rudely slovenly. The sublime sanctity of Milton was as pure in utterance as in thought; he never was seized by the private influenza, he never went into places where it could be caught. Spenser, Bacon, Raleigh, Algernon Sydney, and De Foe are leaders' sermone pedestri'; but they varied in the spelling of several words. The French were no less ambitious of polishing their language than their manners. Montaigne and Charron had been contented with simplicity; Madame de Sévigné and Menage

added grace; but what even these had failed to supply came with Voltaire. Français the king was separated, as kings usually are, from François the people; and the people, and children, were taught to write aimait and aimaient. Mr. Ellis quotes a learned gentleman who reproves his son for ill orthography. What is ill orthography but ill right-spelling? He tells us that we no longer use ill as an adjective. The ill is ill-used. Do we not continue to say an ill-turn? and ill-recompensed? and ill-taught? and ilmanaged? In the same line he adds, 'nor insert do.' Surely we do insert it when we desire to lay stress on what we say. I do love; I do hate. In the next line he objects to th as the final letters of the present tense in the third person, where s would serve. Generally such a termination should be avoided, but never or very rarely when the next word begins with s. I dissent altogether from Mr. Ellis's proposition, that there is no one who would dream of altering a great writer's language. Yet we expect to find the spelling of the new book somewhat different from that of the old. Rusticus, and only Rusticus, expectat. Scholars and sound laborious critics have been careful in collating the editions of both ancient and more recent authors. Aulus Gellius tells us that Virgil wrote differently the same word. He wrote but twenty years after Catullus, yet although they were also of the same province, their spelling was unlike. Virgil never wrote quoi, as Catullus did uniformly; and although he wrote vernacularly in the person of a peasant, he wrote cujum, not quorjum. Catullus employed the language of Cicero and Julius Cæsar; Virgil that of Augustus and his court. Fortunately we possess the comedies of Terence and of Plautus, the richest treasures of Latinity. We there see the very handwriting of the Scipios and the Gracchi. I much commend the publisher of Milton's works who observed his orthography. The same had already been done by Tyrwhitt in his Chaucer; and Spenser has been thought as capable of spelling as Dyche. Paradise Lost was never indeed seen printed by the author, who had lost his sight before its publication: but there is little doubt that he ordered his daughter to observe the spelling of a few particular words, such as sovran, in which he adopted the Italian type preferably to the French. Mr. Ellis asks, 'Does not common sense revolt against Tillotson's alterations of Bacon to make him more eloquent?' But change of spelling can produce no such effect; and it is laughable to think of Tillotson working such a miracle. Mr. Ellis also speaks of Wordsworth; but, though a poet of the highest claims, it is neither in the same kind nor in the same degree as Chaucer, whose inven tion, spirit, and variety are equalled by Shakespeare and by Milton only. Some sonnets Wordsworth has written that Milton might have owned, but he could no more have written the Canterbury Tales than he could have written Paradise Lost, the Samson Agonistes, the Allegro, the Penseroso, the sonnet to Cromwell, or that sublimest of psalms, the Invocation to God on his murdered saints in Piedmont. Is it not perilous, Mr. Ellis asks, to let our spelling change with every generation? Yes indeed. Therefore I would set my foot against these changes as they are rolling on and accumu lating. He puts it to the mass of writers even among ourselves, whether they would wish to have their own punctuation preserved in their printed works.' I know little about the mass of writers. I can only say that, to my certain knowledge, those who are not the mass have complained to me that theirs was not preserved: Southey in particular, and our English Thucydides, the illustrious historian of the Peninsular War: I will add myself; for you know, my dear Forster, that I yielded to you in the prep aration of my collected works. In punctuation we differ from all other

nations. We think we are never safe without a sentinel on each side of Four perhaps, of too, of however, &c. In fact I think too many stops stop the way, and that every sixth or seventh is uncalled for. I have gone further into these questions than any of my countrymen has gone before; whether in a right direction will be decided in another age. I call upon no one to follow me, but to be obedient to grave authority, and never recalcitrant against strict analogy."

XIV. LAST DAYS IN BATH, AND FINAL DEPARTURE FROM ENGLAND.

"I have been out of doors,” Landor wrote to me in the autumn of 1856, "not more than twice in fifty-nine days, a few minutes in each. I think I will go and die in Italy, but not in my old home. It is pleasant to see the sun about one's death-bed." It was only a passing wish he thus expressed, but it was destined to have sad fulfilment.

Knowing the condition of health in which he was at the opening of 1857, it was a great shock to me to find that he had been summoned to give evidence in the Bath county court upon a miserable squabble about a governess. The case came on in January, when, in spite of a doctor's certificate of his unfitness to appear, he was brought to the court; and such was the excitement that followed and the exhaustion consequent upon it, that there was for some time reason to apprehend a very grave result. He could hardly have put any part of this affair into a conversation that should pair off with his Epicurus, Ternissa, and Leontion;* and yet, with all its miserable sequel, it must be said to have had its origin in desires and tastes closely akin to those expressed in that dialogue, where the love of the very old for the society of the very young is made enchanting by all that the Graces can surround it with. Poor Landor had always the belief, that, after the fashion of the ancient philosopher, and with the same sort of charming help, he might be able to adorn and smoothen, for himself also, the declivity of age; and if for the moment, to avoid mention of the names of the ladies who now make brief appearance in his story, I borrow for them the old Greek names, they at least will have no cause to complain. It is not the reality, but the fiction, which such a comparison will place at disadvantage; for, disastrous as the end was here, it does not therefore follow that Epicurus was wrong. Unhappily everything depends in such a case upon the choice of your Ternissa and Leontion.

This was nearly the first year in which we failed to meet on the 30th of January. Landor had found himself able however to write to his brother Henry on that day. Some question as to the burning down of a barn at Llanthony had been referred to him; to which he replied, with even more than his usual unreason as to such things, that neither his cousin Walter Landor of Rugely (co-trustee with

* See ante, p. 429.

1836-57

Henry of the Llanthony estate since his brother Charles's death) nor the manager of the property, Mr. Edwards, had mentioned the incident to him, knowing well his wish never to hear anything about his estate, and acting upon his repeated instructions that they should tell him nothing. He added that before he left England seventy-two thousand pounds had been sunk on Llanthony, and in the last thirty years three hundred a year on an average, including a small part on Ipsley; and that there was nothing he now so little desired as that any more money should be laid out on any part of it in future. "Three months hence I shall once more purchase a landed property, situated in the parish of Widcombe, and comprising by actual admeasurement eight feet by four, next adjoining the church tower in said parish. No magpie drapery, no lead, no rascals in hatbands, no horses in full feathers' for me. Six old chairmen are sufficient. I thought once of complying with your kind wish that I should lie at Tachbrooke, but I am not worth the carriage so far." He alluded then to the illness that had borne down upon him so heavily; mentioned a bequest from Kenyon of a hundred pounds; and grieved that so hearty and genial a man, thirteen years younger than himself, should have died before him. "And now again about dying. Out of my hundred pounds, when I get it, I will reserve ten for my funeral, with strict orders that the sum may not be exceeded; and the gravestone and grave will amount to nearly or quite ten more. As I can live without superfluities, surely I can die without them."

Not long after this letter was written I sent him the legacy, and soon discovered that even as much as ten pounds of it had not been reserved to himself, either for festivity or funeral. The whole of it went as a "new-year's gift" to the youthful Ternissa, by whom one half of it was subsequently transferred, without the knowledge of the original giver, to the less youthful Leontion, for part payment of costs incurred at the trial about the governess; and some differences arising thereon took afterwards a character of bitterness such as never can possibly belong to any but a woman's quarrel. Hardly had the strife broken out when Landor flung himself headlong into it; not by any means, wildly inconsiderate at all times as his conduct was, out of any impulse at the time to be called unworthy. Though the part he took could not at any stage of it be pronounced right, there were many excuses to be suggested for it until he had himself rendered it ignoble. He chose to assume, gratuitously enough, but less so in the particular case than his custom ordinarily was, not merely that he himself had suffered wrong (on which point there was a great deal to have been said, if he had not taken from his friends all power of saying it), but that a very young lady who had claims on his friendly protection had been made the victim of injustice by another lady not so young and that upon him, in such circumstances, devolved the duty of hurling vengeance at her oppressor. An obligation of which

* Ante, p. 443, note.