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; Imagi nary 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 I seek not many; many seek not me. If there are few now seated at my board, 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 fishing — especially 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 To walk beyond the third mill-pond Of shade for two, but not for three. Why must I bid you both adieu?"* At Oxford he was a marked man for his cleverness and for his audacities; these last brought him to grief there, and going home upon his rustication, he quarrelled with his father. Thereafter we find him in London, where he publishes his first little booklet of poems (1795); only twenty then; counted a fierce radical; detesting old George III. with his whole heart; admiring the rebel George Washington and declaring it; loving the French, too, with their liberty and fraternity song, until it was silenced by the cannonading of Napoleon; thenceforward, he counts that people a nation of "monkeys, fit only to be chained." But Landor never loved London. We find him presently wandering by the shores of Wales, and among its mountains. Doubtless he takes his * Colvin cites this from unpublished verses. ROSE AYLMER. 129 t; cast-net with him; the names of Ianthé and Ioné decorate occasional verses; a certain Rose Aylmer he encounters, too, who loans him a book (by Clara Reeve), from a sketch in which he takes hint for his wild, weird poem of Gebir, his first long poem-known to very few—perhaps not worth the knowing. It is blind in its drift war and pomp and passion in it-ending with a poisoned cup; and contrasting with these, such rural beatitudes as may be conjured under Afric skies, with tender love-breezes, ending in other beatitudes in coral palaces beneath the sea. This, at any rate, is the phantasmic outline which a reading leaves upon my own memory. Perhaps another reader may be happier. That shadowy Rose Aylmer, through whom the suggestion for the poem came, was the real daughter of Lord Aylmer, of the near Welsh country ; what Landor's intimacy with her may have been, in its promise or its reach, we do not know; but we do know that when she died, somewhat later and in a far country, the poet gave her name embalmment in those wonderful little verses, which poor Charles Lamb, it is said, in his later days, would |