ing to me in 1857 of Aurora Leigh, he exclaims: "What loads I carted off from Gebir in order to give it proportion, yet nearly all would have liked it better with incorrectness"; and in a letter to Southey, forty years earlier, he had written: "As to Gebir, I am certain that I rejected what almost every man would call the best part. I am afraid that I have boiled away too much, and that something of a native flavor has been lost in procuring a stronger and more austere one."

But though it is probable that some stop was thus put to the popularity of a poem where, as Coleridge said of it, the eminences were so excessively bright and the ground so dark around and between them, Landor is in a greater measure to be accounted fortunate, that thus early he could exercise the power invaluable to a poet, and which even to the best arrives often too late, of selection and compression. Among its advantages in the present case is undoubtedly this, that what the poem was at its first publication, it remains still; it has not been improved into something altogether different; and the reader's certainty that the passages of it now laid before him are unaltered since the boyish years when they were written, will increase his interest in the further development of so extraordinary a mind.

II. SOME OPINIONS OF GEBIR.

The publication is thus described by Mr. Robert Landor: "Of Gebir he had the highest expectations, and yet it was intrusted to a very small bookseller at Warwick, without any one to correct the press, in the form of a sixpenny pamphlet. Excepting to some personal friends, it remained quite unknown till an article appeared, written by Southey, in the Critical Review, full of generous commendation. This was the beginning of their friendship. A few literary men only Shelley, Reginald Heber, and, I think, Coleridge-read the poem even then; and hardly a hundred copies were sold, till a much better edition, with a Latin translation, was published at Oxford under my superintendence. I discharged the office of editor quite unassisted by the author, who always seems to have felt a nervous bashfulness which transferred his works to the care of other people. Bashfulness doubtful of their success, not of their merits." This remark explains the brief preface to the poem in which was thrown down so characteristically the measure of its author's expec

"I am reading a poem," he says, " full of thought and fascinating with fancy, Mrs. Browning's Aurora Leigh. In many pages, and particularly 126 and 127, there is the wild imagination of Shakespeare. I have not yet read much further. I had no idea that any one in this age was capable of so much poetry. I am half drunk with it. Never did I think I should have a good hearty draught of poetry again: the distemper had got into the vineyard that produced it. Here are indeed, even here, some flies upon the surface, as there always will be upon what is sweet and strong. I know not yet what the story is. Few possess the power of construction."

tations. After describing it as principally written in Wales, and the fruit of idleness and ignorance, for "had he been a botanist or mineralogist it never had been written," he mentions the Arabian tale he had taken the hint of its story from, speaks of the few English writers who had succeeded in blank verse, distinguishing above all "the poet of our republic"; and closes by saying: "I am aware how much I myself stand in need of favor. I demand some little from Justice: I entreat much more from Candor. If there are now in England ten men of taste and genius who will applaud my poem,. I declare myself fully content. I will call for a division; I shall count a majority."

The late Mr. De Quincey grudged him even the ten. He protested there were only two, and that he had for some time vainly "conceited" himself to be the sole purchaser and reader. Landor remarked upon this with amusing warmth in one of his letters to me in 1853: It must have been under the influence of his favorite drug that he fancied Southey telling him he believed they were the only two who had read Gebir. Mr. De Quincey was not acquainted with Southey until very many years after he had written a noble panegyric on the poem inserted in the Critical Review in 1798. He did not know me until long after but he had in that year recommended the poem to Charles Wynne, who told me so; and to the two Hebers; and to Coleridge, who praised it highly until he was present when Southey read or repeated parts of it before a large company, after which, if ever he mentioned it at all, it was slightingly. Mr. De Quincey appears to have had another dream, too, of a conversation with Southey in which they agreed that I imitated Valerius Flaccus, whose poem I never had opened, but have looked into lately, and find it intolerable to get through beyond 200 lines.* These dreams and the records of them will pass away; but exoriare aliquis nostris ex ossibus ultor.' I think I know who this will be, and I expect no earlier vindication."

Not in the year of its publication, but in the September of the year following, Southey's notice appeared in the Critical Review. This I shall remark upon here, because of its writer; though my mention of the only other published review, which dates several months later, and was conceived in a very different spirit, must be reserved to another section. Southey's criticism was thin and colorless, but his tone was sufficiently laudatory. An outline of the story was given ; such passages as "the Shell" were quoted, with the remark that the reader who did not instantly perceive their beauty must have a soul blind to the world of poetry; other passages were characterized as more Homeric than anything in modern poetical writing; and while,

That this was not altogether a dream, however, is presumable from the fact that Sathey, in a notice in the Annual Review of Landor's Poetry by the Author of Gebir, to be presently mentioned, used this very comparison; and probably De Quincey derived Es impression, not from the conversation, but from the review.

of the faults of the poem, those of an ill-chosen story and of a frequent absence of perspicuity in the language were pointed out as the most conspicuous, it was said of its beauties that they were of the first order, and that every circumstance was displayed with a force and accuracy which painting could not exceed. "It is not our business," Southey said in conclusion, after quoting the challenge from the author's preface given above, "to examine whether he has understated the number of men of taste and genius in England, but we have read his poem repeatedly with more than common attention, and with far more than common delight."

Before the review appeared, Southey had been speaking of the poem in the same strain to his private friends. To Cottle he wrote: "There is a poem called Gebir, of which I Know not whether my review of it in the Critical be yet printed; but in that review you will find some of the most exquisite poetry in the language. . . . I would go a hundred miles to see the (anonymous) author." To Grosvenor Bedford in the following month he wrote: "There is a poem called Gebir, written by God knows who, sold for a shilling; it has miraculous beauties." Of William Taylor, of Norwich, a few days later, he asked if he had seen the poem; called it the miraculous work of a madman; said it was like a picture in whose obscure coloring no plan was discoverable, but in whose every distinct touch the master-hand was visible; and compared its intelligible passages to flashes of lightning at midnight. After a few months he started for Lisbon to visit his Uncle Hill, and before going wrote to Coleridge: "I take with me for the voyage your poems, the Lyrics, the Lyrical Ballads, and Gebir, these make all my library. I like Gebir more and more; if you ever meet its author, tell him I took it with me on a journey." Detained on the point of sailing by westerly winds at Falmouth, he wrote to his brother the sea-captain that his time had been passed in walking on the beach sighing for northeasters, admiring the seaanemonies, and reading Gebir. On arrival at Lisbon he wrote again to Coleridge, advising him once more to read Gebir; "he grows upon me." He was now himself writing Thalaba, and in the preface mentions the great improvement to his own verse in vividness and strength which he was sensible of having at this time derived from the frequent perusal of Gebir. After his return, in another letter to Coleridge, he alludes to the circumstance of their friend Humphry Davy having fallen stark mad with a play called the Conspiracy of Gowrie, which was by Rough, and a mere copy of that wonderful original, Gebir. This was in July, 1801; at which date also he was writing to Davy himself the letter before quoted,* which notices his first acquaintance with Landor's name, and his recollection of him at Oxford: "How could you compare this man's book with Rough's? The lucid passages of Gebir are all palpable to the eye; they are the master-touches of a painter, there is power in them, and passion,

* Ante, p. 29.

and thought, and knowledge." The other he regarded as imitations merely, with a leading dash of Gebir through the whole.

This was not substantially unjust, though harshly expressed; but Rough nevertheless was a clever and noteworthy person, whose admiration Landor was glad to have for his own poem, and to repay in a generous fashion by no niggard praise of the poem written in imitation of it. They were for some time on very friendly terms; and some letters of Rough's between the date of 1800 and 1802 are preserved among Landor's papers. It will be time to advert to them when, with other friends of this early date connected with Warwick and its neighborhood, Rough will shortly reappear. I must not, meanwhile, omit to add that even among those Warwickshire acquaintance Gebir was not so fortunate as to find only friends.

At his father's house, in the two years between his retreat to Wales and the publication of his poem, Landor had been a frequent visitor; and during the seven unsettled years that followed before Doctor Landor's death, when neither pursuit nor place, nor, indeed, persons, attracted him for many months together, he was made welcome whenever he returned to Warwick; but to his father's especial friends, there can be little doubt, he was at all times less accommodating than he might have been. One of them was Miss Seward, a Staffordshire bluestocking so celebrated in those days that no less a person than Walter Scott became one of her editors; and her he flatly refused to meet only a few months before Gebir appeared. The lively lady remembered the slight; and took revenge characteristically in the remark of one of her letters,* that nobody but the author of such a poem as Gebir could have written the review of it in the Critical. Southey (whom she thought a greater poet than Wordsworth or Coleridge, and was fond of comparing to Milton) tried to propitiate Landor's wrath and protect his fair friend's memory, when this unlucky letter came to light; but he was not successful. Landor replied with

* The letter is dated in July, 1800, and addressed to one of the hangers-on of Parr, a clergyman named Fellowes, who wrote a "Picture of Christian Philosophy" and other volumes savoring more of the sentimental than the orthodox; but known in later years more favorably by active participation in some good works. "There is no longer

y wonder that the Critical Review should praise that obscure fustian epic, Gabor (sic), since I learn from you that the author and critic are one person. I have been told that he has considerable talents and learning. Gabor is no proof of the first, since to think clearly is inseparable from great strength of intellect; though we often see scholastic knowledge exist in a mind where the lights of imagination, if they shine at all shine but by glimpses, and where the judgment is wholly opake" (v. 295). A couple of years later she wrote to Todd, the editor of Spenser and Milton, to console him for some adverso notice in the Critical by telling him how malicious she had always found that tract" to be in noticing herself; "though I think I can stand it unwounded, beneath the reflection that I have seen that tract lavishing encomiums on the most unintelligible fustian that ever bore the name of an epic poem. It called itself Gebir." (She had got the right name at last.) "Southey told a friend of mine lately that it was the finest poetic work which had appeared these fifty years. So Johnson stilted up Blackmore" (vi. 29). A few months later, too, when Mr. Fellowes had sent a fresh supply of ill-natured gossip about Landor, she tells him how charmed" she is with what he says of the author of Gebir," and his other projected enic" (vi. 77). One cannot but feel that there is a relish of personal offence in all this, and that Landor's way of accounting for it is probably the right one.

a heat which, in its amazing disproportion to both the offence and the offender, is too characteristic to be lost.

"I shall not see anything more than the backs of Miss Seward's Letters. I attempted to read her Life of Darwin, but was so disgusted by her impudence I threw it down. Some of her poetry may be better. My father and my aunts were rather intimate with her. I never saw her. She was so polite as to say she should be very happy to see me, and added some high-flown and idle compliment on verses, very indifferent, which I wrote at seventeen. I am not surprised she liked them better than Gebir. They were more like her own. In reply to her courtesy I said what she never should have heard, 'that I preferred a pretty woman to a literary one.' From that time to the present, about thirteen years, I never heard anything more about her in which I was concerned. It vexes, I must own to you it more than vexes, it afflicts and torments me, to have it disseminated in circulating libraries and country book-clubs that I condescended to that last and vilest of all baseness, my own praises in a review. I know not any accusation so hateful. And this impudent seems well to have known my character in selecting it for her rancor. I do not imagine that Mr. Gifford himself said this. Other men have the privilege of complaining which God and nature never permitted me. This stigma may burn into me till it burns through me: meaner men would bite and scratch it off."

This letter was written in 1811, before I was born; and a quarter of a century later, as I well remember, one of the first of his letters addressed to myself contained an entire battery of the epigrams which he had now fired off against Miss Seward and her friends, and had thought worth preserving all those years.

One of the friends was the Mr. Fellowes who seems to have told her first of the supposed identity of the poet and his critic, “ very cavalierly," as Southey wrote to his friend. "This Fellowes," Landor replied, "is a person I often met at Parr's. I never knew that he spoke cavalierly except to his wife, whom he beat and separated from. I never exchanged a syllable with him.* At Parr's I converse only with Parr." Somewhat unconsciously a characteristic trait is here let drop, of which there is an accurate illustration in one of his brother's letters. Referring to what was certainly true of Landor to the last, that, with noble bursts of energy in his talk, his temperament disqualified him for anything like sustained reasoning, and he instinctively turned away from discussion or argument, his brother had mentioned having seen him in his youth rush from the table of one of his own political friends, provoked by some slight contradiction that appeared disrespectful, when in truth there was no disrespect

That remark would probably explain the sentence in one of Mr. Fellowes's letters which quite enchanted Miss Seward when she read it. "The author of Gebir, who lives in this neighborhood, has lately made another attempt to convey the waters of Helicon by leaden pipes, and many dark subterranean ways, into the channel of the Avon. I have not seen these last effusions of his Muse; but, having trod the dark pro found of Gebir, I feel no inclination to begin another journey which promises so little pleasure, and probably where only a few occasional flashes will enlighten the road." The attempt thus charitably spoken of was a thin little volume of Poetry by the Author of Gebir to be presently again mentioned.