that he may be managed with the greatest ease by 'civility' alone." Such always was Landor, when he would consent to submit himself to friendly influences.

"if

Again Mr. Browning wrote to me from Siena on the 5th of September. "At present Landor's conduct is faultless. His wants are so moderate, his evenness of temper so remarkable, his gentleness and readiness to be advised so exemplary, that it all seems too good; as if some rock must lurk under such smooth water. His thankfulness for the least attention, and anxiety to return it, are almost affecting under all circumstances. He leads a life of the utmost simplicity." From Florence also, to anticipate a very little the days immediately after their return, Mr. Browning wrote to me in the middle of October, being then himself on the eve of going to winter in Rome, that he should be grieved indeed to lose sight for a while of the wonderful old man, whose gentleness and benignity had never been at fault for a moment in their three months' intercourse. They had walked together for more than an hour and a half only two days before. His health had been perfect, his mind apparently at ease. "He writes Latin verses; few English, but a few; and just before we left Siena an imaginary conversation suggested by something one of us had said about the possible reappearance of the body after death. He looks better than ever by the amplitude of a capital beard, most becoming we all judge it." If," Mrs. Browning at the same time wrote to me, you could only see how well he looks in his curly white beard!" From his own letters to myself during the stay at Siena I should hardly have dared to judge so favorably, though there were some allowances to be made. His great immediate trouble being removed, he had now again unhappily set his heart on obtaining, through me, some means of making public reply to what had been publicly said of him in England in connection with the trial at Bath; and I had no alternative but to tell him plainly that the thing was quite impossible. He did not take this so well as the condition of mind above described might have led me to anticipate: but the case as affecting him involved, in many particulars, so much real hardship, it was so impossible to speak of what had been to him the original provocation, and all that followed had given to his punishment a proportion so exceeding his offence judged even at its very worst, that any wrong arising out of it incident to myself seemed but a part of a wretched complication not avoidable by either of us. Landor was very shortly to apply to his friend what the reader has seen shrewdly applied by Mr. Bennet in Pride and Prejudice to a friend in similar circumstances; and I was not to have the benefit of the same magnanimity. It is however the more incumbent on me to say, on the eve of our only estrangement in a quarter of a century of friendship, that the impression left with me altogether was exactly what Mr. Browning and Mr. Story depict in the foregoing letters, for that reason here introduced. The drawbacks have been described already. There were always those occasional outbreaks, very unwar

1358-64

rantable because generally unjust to others, which in so many instances I have shown to be as little rational as reducible to reason. Indeed I should say, on the whole, that in Landor's affections at their best, just as more rarely in even the finest parts of his books, there was a certain incoherency. But, in several leading qualities, his character was also quite as fine as his books, and the letters quoted do only justice to it. He had a disposition largely generous; an anger easily placable; and an eagerness to return, in quite chivalrous excess, whatever courtesy or attention he received, which was at all times delightful to witness. The conversation above referred to was not the only one written at Siena. I received another from him at the same date, with earnest appeal that I should endeavor by means of it to get some help for Garibaldi's wounded; and with this he sent me several pieces of writing having the same common drift, to recommend such a settlement of Italian affairs as might leave Venice and Florence independent republics, and King Victor Emanuel protector and president of the Italian states in union. I need hardly add that in this 1859 year the promise had gone suddenly forth, backed by French legions, of a free Italy from the Alps to the Adriatic; and the conclusion to which Landor at once had rushed he expressed in that form.

There appears to have been some difficulty in getting him back to Florence, increased by the effect produced upon him by some new step in the chancery proceedings consequent on the injunction against him recently obtained. He wrote to tell me that the object of all that was going on could be no other than to drive him mad; that the publication of his defence alone could save him; and that until this could be accomplished he must retire into utter solitude. His friends were about to leave Siena, and he should himself go into some cottage or hut at Viarreggio. Alas, what could I reply? I could only wait until a few days' later post brought me word that to the arguments employed to induce his return to Florence he had thought it right to vield. 'Nothing," he added in this letter to me, can exceed Mr. Browning's continued kindness. Life would be almost worth keeping for that recollection alone."

III. IN FLORENCE.

The lodgings found for Landor in Florence, and where he remained until his death, were in a little house under the wall of the city directly back of the Carmine, in a by-street called the Via Nunziatina, not far from that in which the casa Guidi stands: a quarter always liked by the Florentines for its antiquity and picturesqueness, and having higher associations since both for them and for English visitors; to whom a marble slab upon the wall in its last-mentioned street, placed by order of the municipality of Florence, now indicates the house in which a great English poetess made Italy the subject of her latest song.

"He is in a small comfortable apartment," Mr. Browning wrote to me, "newly papered and furnished; a sitting-room, dining-room, bedroom, and book-room communicating with each other, on the first floor. Below are rooms for Mrs. Wilson and a maid-servant. There is a small garden attached. He professes himself quite satisfied with all our attempts to make him comfortable, and seems to like Mrs. Wilson much : but there is some inexplicable fault in his temper, whether natural or acquired, which seems to render him very difficult to manage. He forgets, misconceives, and makes no endeavor to be just, or indeed rational; and this in matters so infinitely petty that there is no providing against them." This letter was written from Rome (9th December, 1859), and only told what, knowing the condition of mind in which Landor still continued, I expected to hear, as soon as the personal influences and restraints should be withdrawn under which he had been living lately. In the same month I also heard from himself (December 21), that for the first time since his return to Italy it had been snowing all night, and that this alone was like England to him. "Bath has no resemblance on earth, and I never have been happy in any other place long together. If ever I see it again, however, it must be from underground or above. I am quite ready and willing to go, and would fain lie in Widcombe churchyard, as I promised one who is no more. It may cost forty pounds altogether. I cannot long survive the disgrace of my incapacity to prove the character of those who persecute me, and this you only can relieve me from. When I think of it, I feel the approach of madness; and so adieu." There was much else in this letter which I do not quote, but to which I found it absolutely necessary so to reply as to put clearly before him, without any kind of doubt, that what he desired could not be done. This led to the suspension of our correspondence. I continued to write to him for some time, but my letters were unanswered; and he did not write to me again until a year before his death.

In June, 1860, Mr. Browning had returned to Florence, and from him, in a letter dated the 15th, I had once more personal report of my old friend. "I find him very well, satisfied on the whole, busy with verse-making, and particularly delighted at the acquisition of three execrable daubs by Domenichino and Gaspar Poussin, most benevolently battered by time. He has a beautiful beard, foam-white and soft. He reads the Odyssey in the original with extraordinary ease. When he alludes to that other matter, it is clear that he is, from whatever peculiarity, quite impervious to reasoning or common sense. He cannot in the least understand that he is at all wrong, or injudicious, or unwary, or unfortunate in anything, but in the being prevented by you from doubling and quadrupling the offence. He spent the evening here the night before last. Whatever he may profess, the thing he really loves is a pretty girl to talk nonsense with; and he finds comfort in American visitors, who hold him in proper respect."

To even such a visitor, a young lady who saw him frequently in

one or two addition Describing the little street, with its bed

this and the following year, we are indebted for al glimpses of him in his last Florence home.* two-story casa, No. 2671, as half-way down the room, dining-room, and sitting-room opening into each other, she says that in the latter he was always to be found, in a large arm-chair, surrounded by paintings which he declared he could not live without (all of them very bad for the most part, excepting one genuine small Salvator), his hair snowy white and his beard of patriarchal propor tions, his gray eyes still keen and clear, his grand head not unlike Michael Angelo's Moses, and at his feet a pretty little Pomeranian dog called Gaillo, the gift of Mr. William Story. Another likeness the old man's look reminded her of which she was emboldened one day to name to him. "Mr. Landor, you do look like a lion." To which the reply came, "You are not the first who has said so. One day when Napier was dining with me, he threw himself back in his chair with a hearty laugh to tell me he had just discovered that I looked like an old lion." "And a great compliment you must have thought it," says the young lady, "for the lion is king of beasts." "Yes," he rejoined, "but only a beast after all."

Of this young lady's recollections generally it must be said that, though the kindliest feeling and very delicate perceptions character ize them throughout, there are not many facts in them that were worth recording. They are too truly what they profess to be; "the old man of Florence in 1859, 1860, and 1861; just before the intel lectual light began to flicker and go out." His courtly manners, his memory for things of the past, and his humorous quickness in putting odd little sayings into verse, seem most to have impressed her. Reference having been made one morning to Monk Lewis's poem Alonzo the Brave, he recited it in cadences from beginning to end without the slightest hesitation or the tripping of a word, remarking that he had not even thought of the thing for thirty years. He undertook to teach Latin to his young friend; gave her a great many lessons with much zeal; and entered the room on each appointed day with a bouquet of camellias or roses, the products of his little garden.

of

him

Some fruit, too, the old tree had yet to shed. Calling upon one morning, she found him at work on some dramatic scenes dealing with a time of Greece before history was; introducing, by a somewhat daring stretch of chronology, Homer himself upon a visit to the father of Ulysses; and closing with the poet's death on a topmost peak above the palace overlooking all the kingdom of Ithaca. With an exception hitherto unpublished which I shall presently lay before the reader, these scenes were the last in which Landor's genius showed itself undimmed by age. He had carried out to perfection in them that old Greek simplicity of which I have formerly spoken, and of which in modern writing I really do not know another instance

have already quoted them, ante, pp. 105, 106.

*Papers in the Atlantic Monthly, entitled "Last Days of Walter Savage Landor." I

so entirely true. It is the simplicity, not of baldness, but of the youth of the world. The king bids his guest to supper while yet the dainties that are to compose it are still themselves enjoying life.

At hand is honey in the honeycomb,

And melon, and those blushing pouting buds
That fain would hide them under crisped leaves.
Soon the blue dove and party-colored hen
Shall quit the stable-rafter caught at roost,
And goat shall miss her suckling in the morn;
Supper will want them ere the day decline.

He orders afterward a bath to be prepared for their guest, and, as he does so, the thought of his lost Ulysses arises to him.

Now leave us, child,

And bid our good Melampos to prepare
That brazen bath wherein my rampant boy
Each morning lay full length, struggling at first,
Then laughing as he splasht the water up
Against his mother's face bent over him.

Is this the Odysseus first at quoit and bar?

Is this the Odysseus called to counsel kings,
He whose name sounds beyond our narrow sea?

I may not quote more, but here is enough to throw light on what the writer said to his young lady visitor.

"It will be thought auda

cious, and most so by those who know the least of Homer, to represent him as talking familiarly. He must often have done it, as Milton and Shakespeare did. There is homely talk in the Odyssey. Fashion turns round like Fortune. Twenty years hence perhaps, this conversation of Homer and Laertes, in which for the first time Greek domestic manners have been represented by any modern poet, may be recognized and approved. Our sculptors and painters frequently take their subjects from antiquity; are our poets never to pass beyond the mediæval? At our own doors we listen to the affecting song of the shirt; but some few of us, at the end of it, turn back to catch the song of the sirens."

Landor's American friends quitted Florence in the autumn of 1861, but during that spring and summer they had taken frequent drives in its neighborhood, and not forgetful in the least things, the old man, in spite of his years, would always insist upon taking the front seat, and was more active than many a younger man in assisting us in and out of the carriage." During one of their excursions, as they passed on a summer's day along the north side of the Arno, Landor gazed long and sadly at a terrace overlooking the water and forming part of the casa Pelosi, occupied of old by the Blessingtons. The description of another of these drives carries with it a painful interest. 66 Once we drove up to aerial Fiesole; and never can I forget Landor's manner while in the neighborhood of his former home. It had been proposed that we should turn back when only half-way up the hill. Ah, go a little farther, Landor said nervously; I should like to see my villa. Of course his wish was our pleasure, and so the drive was continued. Landor sat immovable, with head turned in the direction of