second series of the Essays of Elia was collected into a book in 1833 with the Popular Fallacies. Charles Lamb died in Decem ber, 1834.

97. William Hazlitt, born at Maidstone in 1778, was the son of a Unitarian minister, who removed afterwards to Ireland, was in America three or four years from 1783 to 1787, and then settled at Wem, in Shropshire. At fifteen William Hazlitt was sent to the Unitarian College, Hackney. In 1798 he was at home when Coleridge, at that time preaching in Unitarian pulpits, visited the minister at Wem, became interested in the minister's son, and invited him to Nether Stowey. William Hazlitt thus became acquainted with Coleridge and Wordsworth. He gave up the thought of entering the ministry, and, following the example of an elder brother, John, resolved to become a painter. He spent four months in 1802 as an art student in Paris. In 1805 he published an Essay on the Principles of Human Actions, and in 1806 Free Thoughts on Public Affairs. In 1806 also he had a portrait of his father in the Royal Academy Exhibition. Through a brother of Dr. Stoddart's, whose sister he afterwards married, Hazlitt had become one of the friends of Charles Lamb, and a portrait of Charles Lamb as a Venetian Senator, produced about this time, was probably the last picture he painted. In 1808, after some earning by the pen, Hazlitt married Miss Stoddart. In 1811 he delivered Lectures on English Philosophy. He joined Leigh Hunt, and wrote criticisms, chiefly dramatic, in the Examiner newspaper. Results of this association were The Round Table: a Collection of Essays on Literature, Men, and Manners, published in 1817; Characters of Shakespeare's Plays, 1818; A View of the English Stage, containing a Series of Dramatic Criticisms, in the same year; also in the same year Political Essays, with Sketches of Public Characters. Another book of the same year 1818 was a volume of Lectures on the English Poets, delivered at the Surrey Institution. In 1819 followed Lectures on the English Comic Writers, delivered at the Surrey Institution; and in 1821 lectures at the same place on The Dramatic Literature of the Age of Elizabeth. In 1821 and 1822 Hazlitt published two volumes of Table Talk; or, Original Essays. In 1822 he was divorced from his wife, and two years afterwards he married again. In 1825 he published Spirit of the Age; or, Contemporary Portraits; and in 1828, in four volumes, a Life of Napoleon Bonaparte. He died in 1830. The best critical records of the

TO A.D. 1846.]

HAZLITT.

LANDOR.

935

English stage in the earlier part of the nineteenth century are to be found in William Hazlitt's writings.

98. We left Walter Savage Landor (§ 82) at Llanthony, where, after five years, his impetuous temper had surrounded him with troubles, and in which place he had sunk £70,000. In 1814 Llanthony was vested in trustees, other property was sold, and Landor left England, parting abruptly from his wife because she was unwilling to live in France. But reconciliation followed on that quarrel; for a time Mr. and Mrs. Landor lived at Tours, and then for three years at Como, where a son was born to them. A quarrel with a magistrate obliged Landor to leave Como. He was then chiefly at Pisa from 1819 until 1821, and at Pisa he published his Latin poems as Idyllia Heroica, with an Essay De cultu atque usu Latini sermonis. In 1821, Italy then sharing in active expression of the revived spirit of nationality, Landor addressed to the Italian people an Italian essay on Representative Government. After Pisa, Florence was Landor's home, and there, or in the immediate neighbourhood, he lived for the next eight years. There he worked at his Imaginary Conversations, of which two volumes were published in 1824. The dialogues, between speakers of many lands and many ages of the world, were developed through a vigorous prose, compact with thought, expressing in force and grace and combative opinion an individuality that was even the fresher for carrying with it everywhere, like Milton's prose, the scholarship and the sin cerity that gave precision to the style. Landor's sentences,

often Ciceronian, mark strongly the difference between strained rhetoric set forth in Latin English, and vigorous thought in English phrase with a style based on scholarly attention to the best prose of the Latins. The whole mind of Landor found expression in these dialogues, which closed with a poem on the national uprisings in Greece and Italy. In 1826 a second edition appeared, with an added third volume in 1828. Twentyseven more dialogues followed as a new series in 1829. More dialogues were written, but not published until 1846. Before Florence was left, Landor had a family of four children. His Imaginary Conversations gave him literary fame, and brought new friends who were fascinated by the charm of kindly genius under the headstrong impulsive character. His fiercest wrath, when it had way, would end usually in explosions of laughter. No man's compliments were more delicate than Landor's, and

his bluff sincerity gave them unusual value. It was at Florence that Lady Blessington made his acquaintance. He acquired at once a foremost place among her many friends.

Mary Power, Countess of Blessington, was born in 1799, the daughter of an Irish squire in the county of Waterford. She had beauty, vivacity, and natural refinement; but was most unhappily married before she was fifteen to an English officer, a Captain Farmer. After his death, she married, in 1818, an Irish peer, the Earl of Blessington, with whom her life became luxurious and easy. They spent some years in Italy, which yielded to Lady Blessington matter for books. Her Conversations with Lord Byron were published in 1832. She wrote also The Idler in Italy and The Idler in France. After Lord Blessington's death, in 1826, Lady Blessington settled at Gore House, Kensington. For the remaining twenty

years of her life, her house was a fashionable centre of intellectual enjoyment. There she was at home in 1837, forty-seven years old, at the beginning of the reign of Victoria. She wrote novels, she edited fashionable annuals, The Book of Beauty and The Keepsake, and she and Count D'Orsay had a pleasant welcome to her social circle for all the talents. Count Alfred D'Orsay, nine years younger than Lady Blessington, was the son of a General D'Orsay, and was in the French army till he attached himself to Lord and Lady Blessington. In 1827 he married Lord Blessington's daughter by a former marriage, but soon separated from her. In 1829 he returned with Lady Blessington to England, and was looked upon as one of the leaders of the fashionable world. Count D'Orsay had some skill in drawing and sculpture, with other artistic tastes. When Landor at Florence made the acquaintance of Lord and Lady Blessington, the count was their companion.

In 1829, when Lady Blessington settled at Gore House, Landor bought, with help of money lent by a Welsh admirer, a villa at Fiesole, the Villa Gherardesca. Boccaccio's Valley of Ladies was within its grounds. There, with an occasional stormy outbreak and litigation about water-rights that would have delighted Mr. Tulliver, he was happy, and his children were his playfellows. At Fiesole he prepared a revised collec tion of his poems, which was published by Edward Moxon in 1831, Gebir, Count Julian, and other Poems. In 1832 Landor revisited England, but he returned next year to Fiesole. In 1834 Lady Blessington superintended for him the anonymous

TO A.D. 1837.] LADY BLESSINGTON.

LANDOR.

937

publication of his Citation and Examination of William Shakespeare. Landor joined with it a dialogue between Essex and Spenser after Spenser had been driven from Kilcolman. Another of Landor's books written at Fiesole was his Pericles and Aspasia, in two volumes of letters. The publishing of these was managed for him by his friend and sometime neighbour at Fiesole, the novelist George Payne Rainsford James, who had published his first novel, Richelieu, in 1825, when he was twenty-four years old, and when Walter Scott, by whose historical novels he was moved to imitation, was still writing. In 1835 Landor, happy in his children but not in his wife, had his home at Fiesole broken up by domestic feud. Not enduring his wife's speech to him in presence of his children, he parted from his family and, after a few months by himself at Lucca, came to England. He remained in affectionate correspondence with his children, and did not quarrel with his wife's relations. He went for a time from place to place in England before settling again, and then, at the beginning of the reign of Victoria, in October, 1837, being nearly sixty-three years old, he returned to Bath. In the same year he published his Imaginary Conversations between Petrarch and Boccaccio, supposed to have been held on five successive days, which he called The Pentameron, adding to the book five various dramatic scenes, Pentalogia. When in London, Landor was happiest as guest at Gore House, where at the crowded assemblies he came to know men of the rising generation, and where, among others, he first found his friend John Forster, afterwards his warm-hearted biographer, and Charles Dickens, who transferred one or two of his outward peculiarities to Mr. Boythorn in Bleak House. Landor died at Florence in September, 1864, at the age of eighty-nine.

CHAPTER XIII.

IN THE REIGN OF VICTORIA,

1. AMONG the oldest writers who lived at the beginning of the reign of Queen Victoria, and had not wholly ceased to produce, were Joanna Baillie, seventy-five years old; Robert Plumer Ward, seventy-two; and Isaac D'Israeli, seventy. Joanna Baillie had published her first Plays on

the Passions in 1798. In 1809 Walter Scott had superintended the production of a play of hers at Edinburgh, and in 1836 she had published three more volumes of plays. Though her plays may be little read in future time, two or three homely ballads written by her in her earlier days, such as Woo'd and Married and a', or The Weary Pund o' Tow, will live with other delicate and homely pieces which have the simple tenderness or playfulness of old ballads that were written often, there is reason to think, by cultivated women. So Lady Nairne, who died in 1845, aged seventy-nine, wrote The Laird o' Cockpen, Caller Herrin', and The Land o' the Leal. Joanna Baillie lived very quietly at Hampstead during the first fourteen years of the reign, and died at the age of eighty-nine, in 1851. Miss Edgeworth died two years earlier, and, though her active life as an author closed in 1834, she published last novel, Orlandino, in the year before her death.

2. Robert Plumer Ward, who was seventy-two in 1837, had begun life as a barrister, and in 1805, having entered_Parliament, he became Under-Secretary for Foreign Affairs, under Lord Mulgrave. In 1807, he was a Lord of the Admiralty, and from 1811 to 1823, when he retired from public life, he was Clerk of the Ordnance. He inserted the name Plumer between his Christian and surname to please the second of his three wives. Robert Plumer Ward made his more permanent mark as a writer with two novels, Tremaine, in 1825, and De Vere, in 1827. They painted society and political life, and in society were popular, although their tone was that of a thoughtful, cultivated man, whose speculations touched essentials, and who asked thought from his reader. Robert Plumer Ward continued to write during the earlier years of the reign of Victoria. In 1838 he published Illustrations of Human Life. He discussed, in another book, what he took to be The Real Character of the Revolution of 1688. In 1841 and 1844 he produced novels, De Clifford and Chatsworth. In 1846 he died, aged eighty-one, and in 1850 the Hon. E. Phipps published his "Memoirs and Literary Remains."

The last of the septuagenarians who remained active after the accession of Victoria was Isaac D'Israeli, father of a more famous son. He was the son of a Venetian merchant settled in England, and drawn from his father's profession by a love of books. At two-and-twenty he printed A Poetical Epistle on Abuse of Satire, and in 1791, at the age of twenty-four, pub