"By the side of, or rather above, the impulsive, reckless, creature, there was the critical, humorous, nature, as well aware of its own defect as any enemy could be, ever strong enough to show and probe the wound, but impotent to heal it, and pathetically striving to remedy, through the judgments of the intellect, the faults and the miseries of the living actor. Thus nowhere in the range of the English language are the glory and happiness of moderation of mind more nobly preached and powerfully illustrated than in the writings of this most intemperate man; nowhere is the sacredness of the placid life more hallowed and honoured than in the utterances of this tossed and troubled spirit; nowhere are heroism and selfsacrifice and forgiveness more eloquently adored than by this intense and fierce individuality, which seemed unable to forget for an instant its own claims, its own wrongs, its own fancied superiority over all its fellow-men."

The legend which grew up about Landor, both in England and on the Continent, was both varied and picturesque. The incidents which it included had some slight foundation of fact, but became grotesquely distorted as they passed from mouth to mouth. It was told of him, for example, that he had been expelled from school after thrashing the head master, who disagreed with him on the subject of a Latin quantity, that he had been removed from the university because he had taken a shot at one of the college fellows who had annoyed him, that he had been banished from England for knocking down a barrister who had cross-examined him, that when the authorities of Como charged him with libel he threatened them all with a fine thrashing (una bella bastonata), that in Florence he had challenged the Secretary of the English Legation for whistling in the

street when Mrs. Landor passed, and that he was banished from Florence for taking a bag of coin into the courtroom one day, and asking how much he must pay for a favourable verdict. These stories, and many others, were related about him, and lost nothing in the telling. All Englishmen are mad, runs the Italian proverb, and the Italians of Como and Pisa and Florence must have thought Landor about the maddest specimen of his race that they had even seen. To use a familiar phrase, he kept himself in hot water during the greater part of his life, engaging, as Mr. Stedman says, "at eighty-two in a quixotic warfare with people immeasurably beneath him, and sending forth epigrams, like some worn-out, crazy warrior toying with the bow-and-arrows of his childhood." It is unpleasant to dwell upon these accidents of Landor's life, and we turn from them with relief to the writings in which his better and truer self stands revealed. We turn with especial pleasure and satisfaction to those verses which embody his serene self-assurance, in which his calm acceptance of whatever life may bring to him finds expression, in which he faces old age and death with dignity of soul. "Nur die Lumpen sind bescheiden," says Goethe, and Landor, like Goethe, was neither the one nor the other. His scorn of the mob was such that he never sought to win its applause, and his attitude toward the masses of mankind had no slight resemblance to the attitude of Shakespeare's Coriolanus toward the Roman populace. He said in the preface

to "Gebir": "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." He wrote to Parr: "I never court the vulgar, and how immense a majority of every rank and description this happy word comprises! Perhaps about thirty in the universe may be excepted, and never more at a time." In the lines addressed to Joseph Ablett, he said:

"I never courted friends or Fame;

She pouted at me long, at last she came,
And threw her arms around my neck and said,
"Take what hath been for years delay'd,

And fear not that the leaves will fall

One hour the earlier from thy coronal.'"

He welcomed the decline of life with the reflection

that

"He who hath braved Youth's dizzy heat

Dreads not the frost of age."

The imminence of death found him resigned, but no less erect than ever in spiritual stature.

"Death stands above me, whispering low

I know not what into my ear:

Of his strange language all I know

Is, there is not a word of fear."

The most finished and faultless of all these epigrammatic confessions is the quatrain which is more frequently quoted, perhaps, than any other of Landor's verses, the quatrain with which this summary of his

essential aims and aspirations may most fitly be closed:

"I strove with none; for none was worth my strife,
Nature I loved, and next to Nature, Art;

I warmed both hands before the fire of life,
It sinks and I am ready to depart."

Robert Browning

It was in the year 1850, the central year of the nineteenth century, that the laurel which England bestows, sometimes worthily and sometimes unworthily, upon the poet chosen for this distinction, passed "from the brows of him that uttered nothing base" to the brows of him whose work, already outshining that of all his contemporaries, was destined to grow still further in the graces of power and of wisdom, and to rule with unrivalled domination the poetic thought of the Victorian period. The year in question thus marks a dividing line of more than ordinary significance. Of the six great poets who had made the first half of the century memorable, Landor alone remained among the living. Of the six great poets who were to make the second half of the century almost equally memorable, only two had been heard at all, and only one of those two had become really famous. The separation between the two groups of poets is thus almost complete; by the middle of the century a generation had arisen that had forgotten Byron and Coleridge and Wordsworth, that had hardly learned to know Keats and Shelley and Landor. New forms of human and artistic and intellectual interest, moreover, were calling for expression