GEORGE FOURTH. 123 history; those great waves of Continental war which ended in Waterloo belonged to it; so did the American war of 1812; so did grave disaffections and discontent at home. He did not quarrel with his cabinets, or impede their action; he learned how to yield, and how to conciliate. Were it only for this, 'tis hardly fair to count him a mere posture-master and a dandy. He loved, too, and always respected his old mother, the Queen of George III. ;* loved too,in a way - and more than any other creature in the world except himself, that darling daughter of his, the Princess Charlotte, who at seventeen became the bride of Leopold, afterward King of Belgium, -she surviving the marriage only a year. Her memory is kept alive by the gorgeous marble cenotaph you will see in St. George's Chapel, Windsor. It was only when George IV. actually ascended the throne in 1820 that his separated wife put in a disturbing appearance again; she had been living very independently for some years on the Con * Queen Charlotte, d. 1818. tinent; and it occurred to her now that George was actually King— that it would be a good thing, and not impinge on the old domestic frigidities, to share in some of the drawing-room splendors and royalties of the British capital. To George IV. it seemed very awkward; so it did to his cabinet. Hence came about those measures for a divorce, and the famous trial of Queen Caroline, in which Brougham won oratorical fame by his brilliant plea for the Queen. This was so far successful as to make the ministerial divorce scheme a failure; but the poor Queen came out of the trial very much bedraggled; whether her Continental life had indeed its criminalities or not, we shall never positively know. Surely no poor creature was ever more sinned against than she, in being wheedled into a match with such an unregenerate partaker in all deviltries as George IV. But she was not of the order of women out of which are made martyrs for conscience's sake. It was in the year 1821 that death came to her relief, and her shroud at last whitened a memory that had stains. ence. A Scholar and Poet. We freshen the air now with quite another presYet I am to speak of a man whose life was full of tumult, and whose work was full of learning and power-sometimes touched with infinite delicacy. He was born four years after Sydney Smith and Walter Scott-both of whom he survived many years; indeed he lacked only eleven years of completing a century when he died in Florence, where most of his active- or rather inactive - life was passed. I allude to the poet and essayist, Walter Savage Landor. He is not what is called a favorite author; he never was; he never will be. In fact, he had such scorn of popular applause, that if it had ever happened to him in moments of dalliance with the Muses, and of frolic with rhythmic language, to set such music afloat as the world. would have repeated and loved to repeat, I think he would have torn the music out in disdain for * W. S. Landor, b. 1775; d. 1864. Gebir, 1798; Imaginary Conversations, 1824; Foster's Life, 1869. the approval of a multitude. Hear what he says, in one of his later poetic utterances : "Never was I impatient to receive What any man could give me. When a friend Give me wild boar, the buck's broad haunch give me, Such verse does not invite a large following, nor did the man. Pugnacious, tyrannic, loudmouthed, setting the world's and the Church's rubrics at defiance; yet weighing language to the last jot and tittle of its significance, and -oddwhiles-putting little tendernesses of thought and far-reaching poetic aspirations into such cinctures of polished verse-so jewelled, so compact, so classic, so fine- that their music will last and be admired as long, I think, as English speech *P. 465. Last Fruit from an Old Tree. lasts. Apart from all this man wrote, there is a strange, half-tragic interest in his life, which will warrant me in telling you more of him than I have told of many whose books are more prized by you. He was the son of a Dr. Landor, of Warwick, in middle England, who by reason of two adroit marriages was a man of fortune, and so secured eventually a very full purse to the poet, who if he had depended only on the sale of his literary wares, would have starved. Language was always young Landor's hobby; and he came, by dint of good schooling, to such dexterity in the use of Latin, as to write it in verse or prose with nearly the same ease as English. He loved out-of-door pursuits in boyhood and all his life; was greatly accomplished, his biographer says, in fishingespecially with a cast-net; and of the prey that sometimes came into such net there is this frolicsome record: "In youth 'twas there I used to scare |