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LV.

WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR.

1775-1864.

WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR was born at Warwick in 1775. His family, though hardly so distinguished as he imagined it to be, was of considerable antiquity. Few men of letters have ever had greater advantages of position and circumstances. But to Landor they were little else than drawbacks. At Rugby he gained his first classical laurels, but his defiant refusal to ask pardon for an offence caused his withdrawal. At Trinity College, Oxford, he fired a fowling-piece into the window of a resident Fellow. For this he was rusticated, and though he might have returned after temporary exile, he left Oxford for ever. After some years, spent to but little purpose as a young man of fashion, he became proprietor of a considerable estate in Monmouthshire. The experiment of residence on his property was unsuccessful, and in 1815 he quitted England, and settled after a time at Florence. In 1835, however, he left his wife and family at Florence, and returned to Bath, where his head-quarters were fixed until 1858. In consequence of a miserable libel issued by him in his old age, he had to leave England, and his last years were spent at Florence, where he died in 1864, after having experienced the utmost consolation which he was capable of receiving at the hands of genius and friendship.

The fame of Landor rests chiefly on his Imaginary Conversations. The first series was published in 1824, and the opinion of Archdeacon Hare, that the book 'would live as long as English literature lived,' was re-echoed by Southey and Wordsworth,

and some of the best thinkers of the age. The intense energy of the author's mind, his wide range of reading, and, it must be added, his extreme and passionate view of all political questions, are evident in every page of these dialogues. A second series showed no falling off in his powers, and Pericles and Aspasia, a more matured but less popular work, exhibits him as perhaps the most successful modern delineator of the manners and thought of ancient Greece.

The style of Landor in poetry and prose is, at times, unequalled. He chiefly excels in manly expression of thought, and in passages of pure pathos. Mr. Emerson has well said of him, 'whoever writes for the love of truth and beauty, and not with ulterior ends, belongs to a sacred class, among whom there are few men of the present age who have a better claim to be numbered than Mr. Landor.'

1. Dialogue between William Penn and Lord Peterborough.

Peterborough. The worst objection I myself could ever find against the theatre is, that I lose in it my original idea of such men as Caesar and Coriolanus, and, where the loss affects me more deeply, of Juliet and Desdemona. Alexander was a fool to wish for a second world to conquer: but no man is a fool who wishes for the enjoyment of two; the real and the ideal: nor is it anything short of a misfortune, I had almost said of a calamity, to confound them. This is done by the stage: it is likewise done by engravings in books, which have a great effect in weakening the imagination, and are serviceable only to those who have none, and who read negligently and idly. I should be sorry if the most ingenious print in the world were to cover the first impression left on my mind of such characters as Don Quixote and Sancho: yet probably a very indifferent one might do it;

for we cannot master our fancies, nor give them at will a greater or less tenacity, a greater or less promptitude in coming and recurring.

You Friends are no less adverse to representation by painting than by acting.

Penn. We do not educate our youth to such professions and practices. Thou, I conceive, art unconcerned and disinterested in this matter.

Peterborough. Nearly, but not quite. I am ignorant of the art, and prefer that branch of it which to many seems the lowest; I mean portraiture. I can find flowers in my garden, landscapes in my rides, the works of saints in the Bible, of great statesmen and captains in the historians, and of those who with equal advantages had been the same, in the Newgate Calendar. The best representation of them can only give me a high opinion of the painter's abilities fixed on a point of time. But when I look on a family picture by Vandyke; when I contemplate the elegant and happy father in the midst of his blooming progeny, and the partner of his fortunes and his joy beside him, I am affected very differently, and much more. He who there stands meditating for them some delightful scheme of pleasure or aggrandisement, has bowed his head to calamity, perhaps even to the block. Those roses gathered from the parterre behind, those taper fingers negligently holding them, that hair, the softness of which seems unable to support the riot of its ringlets, are moved away from earth, amid the tears and aching hearts of the very boys and girls who again are looking at me with such unconcern.

Faithfullest recorder of domestic bliss, perpetuator of youth and beauty, vanquisher of time, leading in triumph the Hours and Seasons, the painter here bestows on me the richest treasures of his enchanting art.

2. The Story of John Wellerby.

““ETHELBERT! I think thou walkest but little; otherwise I should take thee with me, some fine fresh morning, as far as unto the first hamlet on the Cherwell. There lies young Wellerby, who, the year before, was wont to pass many hours of the day poetising amid the ruins of Godstow nunnery. It is said that he bore a fondness toward a young maiden in that place, formerly a village, now containing but two old farm-houses. In my memory there were still extant several dormitories. Some love-sick girl had recollected an ancient name, and had engraven on a stone with a garden-nail, which lay in rust near it,

POORE ROSAMUND.

The next

He

I entered these precincts, and beheld a youth of manly form and countenance, washing and wiping a stone with a handful of wet grass; and on my going up to him, and asking what he had found, he showed it to me. time I saw him was near the banks of the Cherwell. had tried, it appears, to forget or overcome his foolish passion, and had applied his whole mind unto study. He was foiled by his competitor; and now he sought consolation in poetry. Whether this opened the wounds that had closed in his youthful breast, and malignant Love, in his revenge, poisoned it; or whether the disappointment he had experienced in finding others preferred to him, first in the paths of fortune, then in those of the muses; he was thought to have died broken-hearted.

"About half a mile from St. John's College is the termination of a natural terrace, with the Cherwell close under it, in some places bright with yellow and red flowers glancing and glowing through the stream, and suddenly in others

dark with the shadows of many different trees, in broad overbending thickets, and with rushes spear-high, and partycoloured flags.

"“After a walk in Midsummer, the immersion of our hands into the cool and closing grass is surely not the least among our animal delights. I was just seated, and the first sensation of rest vibrated in me gently, as though it were music to the limbs, when I discovered by a hollow in the herbage that another was near. The long meadow-sweet and blooming burnet half concealed from me him whom the earth was about to hide totally and for ever.

"Master Batchelor!" said I, "it is ill sleeping by the water-side."

"No answer was returned. I arose, went to the place, and recognised poor Wellerby. His brow was moist, his cheek was warm. A few moments earlier, and that dismal lake whereunto and wherefrom the waters of life, the buoyant blood, ran no longer, might have received one vivifying ray reflected from my poor casement. I might not indeed have comforted: I have often failed: but there is one who never has; and the strengthener of the bruised reed should have been with us.

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Remembering that his mother did abide one mile further on, I walked forward to the mansion, and asked her what tidings she lately had received of her son. She replied, that having given up his mind to light studies, the fellows of the college would not elect him. The master had warned him before-hand to abandon his selfish poetry, take up manfully the quarterstaff of logic, and wield it for St. John's, come who would into the ring. "We want our man," said he to me, "and your son hath failed us in the hour of need. Madam, he hath been foully beaten in the schools by one he might have swallowed, with due exercise." I rated him, told

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