repeat over and over and over, never tiring of the melody and the pathos. Here they are :—

“Ah, what avails the sceptred race,

Ah, what the form divine!

What

every virtue, every grace!

Rose Aylmer, all were thine.

Rose Aylmer, whom these wakeful eyes

May weep, but never see,

A night of memories and of sighs

I consecrate to thee!"

Meantime, growing into a tempestuous love for the wild Welsh country, he bargains for a great estate, far up in a valley which opens down upon the larger valley in which lies Abergavenny; and being rich now by reason of his father's death, parts with his beautiful ancestral properties in the Warwickshire region, lavishing a large portion of the sales-money upon the savagery of the new estate in Wales. He plants, he builds, he plays the monarch in those solitudes. He marries, too, while this mountain passion is on him, a young girl of French or Swiss extraction-led like lamb into the lion's grasp. But the first Welsh quarrel of this poet-monarch—who was severely

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classic, and who fed himself all his life through on the thunder-bolts of Jupiter-was with his neighbors; next with his workmen; then with his tenants; then the magistrates; last with everybody; and in a passion of disgust, he throws down his walls, turns astray his cattle, lets loose his mountain tarns, and leaving behind him the weltering wreck of his half-built home, goes over with his wife to Jersey, off the coast of Normandy. There she, poor, tired, frighted, worried bird — maybe with a little of the falcon in her would stay; he would not. So he dashes on incontinently-deserting her, and planting himself in mid-France at the old city of Tours, where he devotes himself to study.

This first family tiff, however, gets its healing, and his wife joining him they go to Como,

where Southey (1817) paid them a visit; this poet had been one of the first and few admirers of Gebir, which fact softened the way to very much of mutual and somewhat over-strained praises between these two.* From Como Landor went to

*In his Last Fruits from an Old Tree, p. 334, Moxon Edition, Landor writes: "Southey could grasp great subjects

Pisa-afterward to Florence, his home thenceforth for very many years; first in the town proper and then in a villa at Fiesole from which is seen that wondrous view none can forget who have beheld it of the valley, which seems a plain-of the nestling city, with its great Brunelleschi dome, its arrow-straight belfry of Giotto, its quaint tower of the Palazzo Vecchio, its cypress sentinels on the Boboli heights, its River Arno shining and winding, and stealing away seaward from the amphitheatre of hills on whose slopes are dotted white convents, sleeping in the sun, and villas peeping out from their cloakings of verdure, and the gray shimmer of olive orchards.

Landor in Italy.

It was in Florence that Landor wrote the greater part of those Imaginary Conversations which have given him his chief fame; but which, very possibly, may be outlived in the popular mind by the wonderful finish and the Saxon force which belong to many of his verselets.

and master them; Coleridge never attempted them; Wordsworth attempted it and failed." This is strongly ex parte !

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The conversations are just what their name implies the talk of learned, or distinguished men, on such topics as they were supposed to be most familiar with; all imagined, and set forth by the brain of Landor, who took a strange delight in thus playing with the souls of other men and making them the puppets of his will. One meets in his pages Roger Ascham and Lady Jane Grey, Milton and Andrew Marvel, and Achilles and Helena; then we are transported from Mount Ida to the scene of a homely colloquy between Washington and Franklin-about monarchy and Republicanism. Again we have Leofric and Godiva telling their old story with a touching dramatic interest; and can listen - if we will. to long and dullish dispute between Dr. Johnson and Horne Tooke, about Language and its Laws; from this-in which Landor was always much interested- we slip to the Philo-Russianism of a talk between Peter the Great and Alexis. There are seven great volumes of it all-which must belong to all considerable libraries, private or other, and which are apt to keep very fresh and uncut. Of course there is no logical continuity

no full exposition of a creed, or a faith, or a philosophy. It is a great, wide, eloquent, homely jumble; one bounces from rock to rock, or from puddle to puddle (for there are puddles) at the will of this great giant driver of the chariot of imaginary talk.* There are beauties of expression that fascinate one; there are sentences so big with meaning as to bring you to sudden pause; there are wearisome chapters about the balance of French verselets, in which he sets up the poor Abbé Delille on rhetorical stiltsonly to pelt him down; there are page-long blotches of crude humor, and irrelevant muddy tales, that you wish were out. As sample of his manner, I give one or two passages at random. Speaking of Boileau, he says:

"In Boileau there is really more of diffuseness than of brevity [he loves thus to slap a popular belief straight in the face]; few observe this, because [Boileau] abounds in short sentences; and few are aware that sentences may be very short, and the writer very prolix; as half a dozen

* I would strongly urge, however, the reading and purchase, if may be, of Colvin's charming little Golden Treasury collection from Landor.