Chapter XV: Part 15

I shall have occasion to quote a few more verses when speaking of Mr. Landor's life. His Imaginary Conversations is the work on which his fame, a worthy and well earned fame, will rest. From his great experience of men of various nations, and his familiar acquaintance with both ancient and modern literature, he has been enabled to introduce the greatest variety of characters and topics, and to make the dialogues a perfect treasury of the broadest and most elevated axioms of practical wisdom. As I have observed, his station and personal interests have not been able to blind him to the claims of universal justice. He attacks all follies and all selfish conventionalisms with an unsparing scorn, which, in a poor man, would have been attributed to envy; but in his case, can not be otherwise regarded than as the honest convictions of a clear-seeing and just mind. In all his writings he insensibly slides into the dramatic form; even in his Pentameron, not less than in his Citation and Examination of William Shakspeare. His Pericles and Aspasia is in the form of letters, a form but one remove from conversation; in fact, conversation on paper. He must raise up the prominent characters of all ages, and, bringing the most antagonistic together, set them to argue some great or curious topic suited to their minds and pursuits. Through all these the author's own sentiments diffuse themselves, and become the soul of the book. Whoever converse, we are made to feel that virtue, generosity, self-sacrifice, and a warm sense of the wants and the true claims of the multitude, animate the soul of the author, and maintain a perpetual warfare against their opposite qualities, and the world's acquiescence in them. Mr. Landor, no doubt, like his fellows, does not despise the advantages which fortune has conferred on him; but he prides himself far more obviously on the power which resides in his pen. In his conversation with the Marchese Pallavicini, that nobleman relates the atrocious conduct of an English general at Albaro, and says, "Your Houses of Parliament, Mr. Landor, for their own honor, for the honor of the service, and the nation, should have animadverted on such an outrage; he should answer for it." To which Landor replies:--"These two fingers have more power, marchese, than those two houses. A pen! he shall live for it. What, with their animadversions, can they do like this?"

In his conversation between Southey and Porson, he puts into the mouth of Southey a sentence which all people would do well to ground firmly into their minds, and remember when they are reading reviews:--"We have about a million of critics in Great Britain; not a soul of which critics entertains the least doubt of his own infallibility. You, with all your learning, and all your canons of criticisms, will never make them waver." Into Porson's mouth he puts also a great fact, which, had he been a poor man, would have been hurled back on his head, and have crushed him to death. "Racy wine comes from the high vineyard. There is a spice of the scoundrel in most of our literary men; an itch to filch and detract in the midst of fair-speaking and festivity. This is the reason why I have never much associated with them. There is also another. We have nothing in common but the alphabet. The most popular of our critics have no heart for poetry: it is morbidly sensitive on one side, and utterly callous on the other. They dandle some little poet, and never will let you take him off their knees; him they feed to bursting, with their curds and whey. Another they warn off the premises, and will give him neither a crust nor a crumb, until they hear that he has succeeded to a large estate in popularity, with plenty of dependents; then they sue and supplicate to be admitted among the number; and, lastly, when they hear of his death, they put on mourning, and advertise to raise a monument or a club-room to his memory."

In the same conversation he has a striking illustration of the nature of metaphysics. "What a blessing are metaphysics to our generation! A poet or any other who can make nothing clear, can stir up enough sediment to render the bottom of a basin as invisible as the deepest gulf of the Atlantic. The shallowest pond, if turbid, has depth enough for a goose to hide its head in." He has a remark, not the less happy, on the folly of our reading ill-natured critiques on ourselves, and on the light in which those who inform you of them ought to be regarded. "The whole world might write against me, and leave me ignorant of it to the day of my death. A friend who announces to me such things, has performed the last act of his friendship. It is no more pardonable than to lift up the gnat net over my bed, on pretext of showing me there are gnats in the room. If I owed a man a grudge, I would get him to write against me; but if any one owed me one, he would come and tell me of it."

Here are two opinions worthy of the deepest reflection. "In our days, only men who have some unsoundness of conscience and some latent fear, reason against religion; and those only scoff at it, who are pushed back and hurt by it."--Vol. i. p. 372. "More are made insurgents by firing on them than by feeding them; and men are more dangerous in the field than in the kitchen."--P. 379. Mr. Landor's opinion of gambling, even ordinary, everyday play in private houses for money stakes, is expressed with a virtuous force which proves the depth of the feeling against it. "You played! Do you call it playing, to plunder your guests and overreach your friends? Do you call it playing, to be unhappy if you can not be a robber, happy if you can be one? The fingers of a gamester reach farther than a robber's, or a murderer's, and do more mischief. Against the robber or murderer, the country's up in arms at once; to the gamester every bosom is open, that he may contaminate or stab it."-Vol. ii. p. 76. Stern to faults which are tolerated, nay, are cherished by society, Savage Landor would be lenient where the wide-spreading misery and degradation of women in the present day calls loudly for a change in our social philosophy.

"_Marvel._--Men who have been unsparing of their wisdom, like ladies who have been unfrugal of their favors, are abandoned by those who owe most to them, and hated or slighted by the rest. I wish beauty in her lost estate had consolations like genius.

"_Parker._--Fie, fie! Mr. Marvel! consolations for frailty!

"_Marvel._--What wants them more? The reed is cut down, and seldom does the sickle wound the hand that cuts it. There it lies; trampled on, withered, and soon to be blown away."

Perhaps there is no one conversation in which so many popular fallacies and customs are so ruthlessly dealt with, as in that between the Emperor of China and his servant Tsing-Zi, who has been in England. His description of the Quakers is most characteristic. Tsing-Zi is astonished at the anti-Christian pugnacity of those calling themselves Christians. They make wars to make their children's fortune, and the preachers of the peaceful gospel are ready, if they disagree in a doctrine, to fight like a pair of cockerels across a staff on a market-man's shoulder. One scanty sect is different. "These never work in the fields or manufactories; but buy up corn when it is cheap, sell it again when it is dear, and are more thankful to God for a famine than others are for plenteousness. Painting and sculpture they condemn; they never dance, they never sing; music is as hateful to them as discord. They always look cool in hot weather, and warm in cold. Few of them are ugly, fewer handsome, none graceful. I do not remember to have seen a person of dark complexion, or hair quite black, or very curly, in their confraternity. None of them are singularly pale, none red, none of diminutive stature, none remarkably tall. They have no priests among them, and constantly refuse to make oblations to the priests royal."--Vol. ii. p. 119.

But there is, in fact, scarcely any great question of religion, morals, government, or the social condition, on which in these conversations the boldest opinions are not expressed in the most unshrinking style. Landor strips away all the finery in which follies, vices, and imposture are disguised for selfish ends, with a strong and unceremonious hand. He lifts up the veil of worldly policy, and showing us the hideous objects behind, says, "Behold your gods, O Israel!" His doctrines are such as would, less than ages ago, have consigned him to a pitiless persecution; they are such as, perhaps, in less than half another century, through the means of popular education, will be the common property of the common mind. The works of Savage Landor, both prose and poetry, place him among the very first men of his age. They are masterly, discriminating, and full of a genuine, English robustness. "They are energy and imagination that make the great poet," he has said in conversation. If he does not equal some of our poets in intensity of imagination, there are few of them who can compete with him in energy; and what is peculiarly fortunate, the instinct by which he cleaves to the real, and spurns the meretricious with contempt, makes him eminently safe for a teacher. You can find no glittering, plausible, destructive monstrosity, whether in the shape of man or notion, which Landor, like too many of our writers, has taken the perverse fancy to deify. His opinion of Bonaparte is a striking example of this. Hazlitt, acute and discriminating as he often was, placed this selfish and brutal butcher on a pedestal for adoration. Landor, in his conversation between "Landor, English visitor, and Florentine visitor," has given us an analysis of his character. He commences this with this remark. "Bonaparte seems to me the most extraordinary of mortals, because I am persuaded that so much power never was acquired by another, with so small an exertion of genius, and so little of any thing that captivates the affections; or maintained so long unbroken in a succession of enormous faults, such scandalous disgraces, such disastrous failures and defeats." He shows that he lost seven great armies in succession, which in every case of defeat he abandoned to destruction. If he has not said it in his works he has in conversation, that the true mark of a great man is, that he has accomplished great achievements with small means. Bonaparte never did this. He overwhelmed all obstacles by enormous masses of soldiery. He was as notorious for his recklessness of human life, for no possible end but his own notoriety, for his private cruelties and murders, as for his insolence and undignified anger; scolding those who offended him like a fishwoman, boxing their ears, kicking them, etc. Landor's words have always been my own--"It has always been wonderful to me, what sympathy any well educated Englishman can have with an ungenerous, ungentlemanly, unmanly Corsican."

Such is Walter Savage Landor as a writer, let us now look at him as a man. Landor's physical development is correspondent to that of his mind. He is a tall, large man; broadly and muscularly built, yet with an air of great activity about him. His ample chest, the erect bearing of his head, the fire and quick motion of his eye, all impress you with the feeling of a powerful, ardent, and decided man. The general character of his head is fine; massy, phrenologically amply developed, and set upon the bust with a bearing full of strength and character. His features are well formed and full of the same character. In his youth, Landor must have been pronounced handsome; in his present age, with gray hair and considerable baldness, he presents a fine, manly, and impressive presence. There is instantaneous evidence of the utter absence of disguise about him. You have no occasion to look deep, and ponder cautiously to discover his character. It is there written broadly on his front. All is open, frank, and self-determined. The lower part of his face displays much thought and firmness; there is a quick and hawk-like expression about the upper, which the somewhat retreating yet broad forehead increases. His eyebrows, arched singularly high on his forehead, diminish the apparent height of the head; but on looking at his profile, you soon perceive the great elevation of the skull above the line running from the ear to the eye. The structure, the air of the whole man, his action, voice, and mode of talking, all denote an extraordinary personage. His character is most unequivocally passionate, impulsive, yet intellectual and reflective; capable of excitement and of becoming impetuous, and perhaps headlong, for the fire and strength in him are of no common intensity. One can see that the quick instincts of his nature, that electric principle by which such natures leap to their conclusions, would render him excessively impatient of the slower processes or more sordid biases of more common minds. That he must be liable to great outbursts of indignation, and capable of becoming arbitrary and overbearing; yet you soon find, on conversing with him, that no man is so ready to be convinced of the right, or so free to rectify the errors of a hasty judgment. He has, in short, an essentially fine, high, vigorous nature; one which speaks forth in every page of his writings, and yet is so different to the stereotype of the world as to incur its dictum of eccentric.

Walter Savage Landor was born at Warwick, on the 30th of January, 1775, consequently he is in his seventy-first year. The house in which he was born is near the chapel, and has a fine old spacious garden, well kept up by its present inhabitant, his only surviving sister. It is the best house in the town, and had a beautiful front before the improvement of the street required that four or five feet of the basement should be erased. Savage Landor's mother used to spend nearly half the year there, as his sister does now; for the garden has great charms, swarming with blackbirds, thrushes, and even wood-pigeons, which haunt several lofty elms and horse-chestnuts. His family had considerable estates both in Staffordshire and Warwickshire many centuries ago. His mother was eldest daughter and coheiress of Charles Savage, Esq., of Tachbrook, whose family were lords of that manor and of the neighboring manor of Whitmarsh, in the reign of Henry II. and much earlier. One of this family, according to Rapin, played a conspicuous part in demanding a charter from the weak king, Edward II., and in bringing his minion, Piers Gaveston, to his end. This was Sir Arnold Savage, whom Landor has commemorated by a conversation between him and Henry IV., and by a note at the end of it, viz.--"Sir Arnold Savage, according to Elsyne, was the first Speaker of the House of Commons who appeared _upon any record_, to have been appointed to the dignity as now constituted. He was elected a second time, four years afterward, a rare honor in earlier days; and during this presidency he headed the Commons, and delivered their resolutions in the plain words recorded by Hakewell." One of these was that the king should receive no subsidy till he had removed every cause of public grievance. Landor has come of good patriot blood. The Savages have also figured in Ireland; and Landor has introduced one of them, Philip Savage, Chancellor of the Irish Exchequer in Swift's time, in his Conversation with Archbishop Boulter, also connected by marriage with the Savage family. "Boulter," says Landor, "Primate of Ireland, and president of the council, saved that kingdom from pestilence and famine in the year 1279, by supplying the poor with bread, medicines, attendance, and every possible comfort and accommodation. Again, in 1740 and 1741, two hundred and fifty thousand were fed twice a-day, principally at his expense, as we find in _La Biographie Universelle_; an authority the least liable to suspicion. He built hospitals at Drogheda and Armagh, and endowed them richly. No private man, in any age or country, has contributed so largely to relieve the sufferings of his fellow-creatures; to which object he and his wife devoted their ample fortunes, both during their lives and after their decease. Boulter was certainly the most disinterested, the most humane, the most beneficent man that ever guided the councils of Ireland." Philip Savage, the chancellor, was so irreproachable, that even Swift, the reviler of Somers, could find in him no motive for satire and no room for discontent. Such was the ancestry of Walter Savage Landor.

Mr. Landor spent the first days of his youth at Ipsley-court, near Redditch, in Warwickshire, which manor belongs to him. You may trace his life and his residence by glimpses in his works; and of his old family mansion he speaks in his Conversation with the Marchese Pallavicini.

"_Pallavicini._--We Genoese are proud of our door-ways.

"_Landor._--They are magnificent; so are many in Rome, and some in Milan. We have none in London, and few in the country; where, however, the stair-cases are better. They are usually oak. I inherit an old, ruinous house, containing one, up which the tenant rode his horse to stable him."

In his poems, too, occurs this:--

WRITTEN IN WALES.

"Ipsley! when hurried by malignant fate
I passed thy court, and heard thy closing gate,
I sighed, but sighing to myself I said,
Now for the quiet cot and mountain shade.
Oh! what resistless madness made me roam
From cheerful friends and hospitable home!
Whether in Arrow's vale, or Tachbrook's grove,
My lyre resounded liberty and love.
Here never love hath fanned his purple flame,
And fear and anger start at Freedom's name.
Yet high exploits the churlish nation boasts
Against the Norman and the Roman hosts.
'Tis false; where conquest had but reaped disgrace
Contemptuous valor spurned the reptile race.
Let me once more my native land regain,
Bounding with steady pride and high disdain;
Then will I pardon all the faults of fate,
And hang fresh garlands, Ipsley, on thy gate."

Landor laughingly calls this old house a barracks. It is nearly a hundred feet in front, if not quite, but this portion formed only the offices of the old March-house, which the steward of the Savages, the clergyman, pulled down, and built his own with!

He received his education at Rugby, and at Trinity College, Oxford. At Rugby, as we are told by Mr. Horne in his New Spirit of the Age, he was famous for riding out of bounds, boxing, leaping, net-casting, stone-throwing, and making Greek and Latin verses. A droll anecdote is related of his throwing his casting-net suddenly over the head of a farmer who found him fishing in his ponds, and keeping him there till the fellow was tame enough to beg to be allowed to go away, instead of seizing Landor's net, as he had threatened. He was conspicuous there for his resistance to every species of tyranny, either of the masters and their rules, or the boys and their system of making fags, which he violently opposed against all odds; and he was considered arrogant and overbearing in his own conduct. All this, I have no doubt, is quite correct--it is most characteristic of the man and his writings; as well as that he was a leader of the boys in all things, and yet did not associate with them. This trait sticks by him to the present hour. He declares that he never can bear to walk with men; with ladies he can, but not with men, and that to walk in the streets of London drives him mad. To this peculiarity he alludes in the opening of the conversation between Southey and Landor; where also Southey mentions another, which no one can be long in Landor's society without noticing--his hearty peals of laughter at some merry story or other, often of his own.

"_Landor._--The last time I ever walked hither in company (which, unless with ladies, I rarely have done anywhere), was with a just, a valiant, and a memorable man, Admiral Nichols.

"_Southey._--I never had the same dislike to company in my walks and rambles as you profess to have, but of which I perceived no sign whatever when I visited you, first at Lantony Abbey, and afterward on the Lake Como. Well do I remember four long conversations in the silent and solitary church of Sant' Abondio (surely the coolest spot in Italy), and how often I turned back my head toward the open door, fearing lest some pious passer-by, or some more distant one in the wood above, pursuing the pathway which leads toward the tower of Luitprand, should hear the roof echo with your laughter, at the stories you had collected about the brotherhood and sisterhood of the place."

At Oxford, Mr. Horne informs us, Landor was rusticated for firing off a gun in the quadrangle, and, as he never intended to take a degree, he never returned. On quitting the university, he published, in 1793, a small volume of poems. After spending some time in London studying Italian, he went to reside at Swansea, where he wrote "Gebir."

Having been pressed in vain by his friends to enter the army, or to study the law, he was moved by his old spirit of resistance to oppression, by the French invasion of Spain. He embarked for that country, raised a number of troops at his own expense, and--being the first Englishman who landed in Spain for the purpose of aiding it--marched with his men from Corunna to Aguila, the head-quarters of General Blake. For this, he received the thanks of the supreme junta, in the Madrid Gazette, together with an acknowledgment of the donation of twenty thousand reals from Mr. Landor. On the subversion of the constitution by Ferdinand, he returned the letters and documents, with his commission, to Don Pedro Cevallos, telling Don Pedro that he was willing to aid a people in the assertion of its liberties against the antagonist of Europe, but he could have nothing to do with a perjurer and traitor.

I suppose it was before he left Spain that a circumstance occurred which led to his being robbed by George III., of which he often talks. Expressing to a Spanish nobleman a desire to have a ram and a couple of ewes of his celebrated Merino breed, the nobleman replied, "Oh, I will give you a score." Mr. Landor thanked him, but replied, that he did not wish to tax his generosity to that extent. "Oh," said he, "I kill them for mutton; you shall have a score. The King of England is to have a cargo of them, and I will send yours in the same ship." The ship arrived; a letter from the Spanish nobleman also arrived to say, that, according to promise, there they were, and that on applying to the king's steward, he would have them. Away went Landor to the steward, showed his letter, and demanded his sheep. The steward said he had no commands on the subject. "But his majesty," suggested Landor, "has undoubtedly information of the fact." "That," replied the steward, "is in his own breast." "But on seeing this letter," continued Landor, "his majesty will certainly give commands for the sheep to be delivered to me. Be so good as to see that it is laid before his majesty." The steward declined, declaring that it would be at the risk of his place.

On this, Landor applied to a nobleman in high favor with the king, and who was well known to himself. On announcing that he wanted him to do him a service, the nobleman replied, "With all the pleasure in the world: any thing that is in my power." Landor then explained the case, showed his letter from the Spanish nobleman, and begged that his noble friend would lay the matter before the king. The nobleman seemed struck dumb. After a while, recovering his speech, he exclaimed--"Lay the case before his majesty! Advise his majesty to have a score of Merinos of this quality delivered up to you! Why, Landor, you must be mad. There is not a man in the kingdom who dare do any such thing. It would be his ruin." All similar efforts were in vain, and so the royal farmer kept Landor's sheep. They were at that time worth £1,000. He has the subject in his mind when he makes Sheridan say to Wyndham, "I do believe in my conscience he would rather lose the affection of half his subjects than the carcass of one fat sheep. I am informed that all his possessions in Ireland never yielded him five thousand a-year. Give him ten, and he will chuckle at overreaching you; and not you only, but his own heirs forever, as he chuckled when he cheated his eldest son of what he pocketed in twenty years from Cornwall, Lancashire, and Wales."--Vol. ii. p. 179. Landor never relates one of these facts without the other, adding, "When George was asked to account for the revenues of the duchies of Cornwall and Lancaster, and the Principality, during the prince's minority, he said he had spent the money in the prince's education! What an education George IV., the prince, must have had!"

If the life of Savage Landor was written, it would be one of the most remarkable on record. He has lived much abroad, in the most eventful times in the history of the world. He witnessed the progress of the French Revolution; saw Bonaparte made First Consul; saw him and his armies go out to victory; saw and conversed with the greatest of his generals, and the most remarkable men of those times and scenes. His conversation, therefore, abounds with facts and personages from his own actual knowledge, of which most other men have only read, and many of which no one has read. On the fall of Napoleon, he saw him ride, followed by one servant, into Tours, whose inhabitants hated him, and would have rejoiced to give him up to his enemies. He was disguised, but Landor recognized him in a moment. Hating and despising the man as he did, yet he never for a moment dreamed of betraying him. He, however, went close to the fallen emperor, and touching his arm, said, "You are not safe here. I have penetrated your disguise, and others may." "Sir," replied Bonaparte, "you are, I perceive, an Englishman. My secret is in good keeping." He mounted and rode away, wholly undiscovered by the townsmen.

Before this time, however, he had done what gave him infinite annoyance. I quote the account from Mr. Horne: "In 1806, Mr. Landor sold several estates in Warwickshire, which had been in his family nearly seven hundred years, and purchased Lantony and Comjoy in Monmouthshire, where he laid out nearly £70,000. Here he made extensive improvements, giving employment daily, for many years, to between twenty and thirty laborers in building and planting. He made a road at his own expense, of eight miles long, and planted and fenced half-a-million of trees. The infamous behavior of some tenants caused him to leave the country. At this time he had a million more trees ready to plant, which, as he observed, 'were lost to the country, by driving me from it. I may speak of _their_ utility if I must not of my own.' The two chief offenders were brothers, who rented farms of Mr. Landor to the amount of £1500 per annum, and were to introduce an improved system of Suffolk husbandry. Mr. Landor got no rent from them, but all manner of atrocious annoyances. They even rooted up his trees, and destroyed whole plantations. They paid nobody. When neighbors and work-people applied for money, Mr. Landor says, 'they were referred to the devil, with their wives and families, while these brothers had their two bottles of wine upon the table. As for the Suffolk system of agriculture, wheat was sown upon the last of May, and cabbage, for winter food, was planted in August or September.' Mr. Landor eventually remained master of the field, and drove his tormentors across the seas; but so great was his disgust at these circumstances that he resolved to leave England. Before his departure he caused his house, which had cost him some £8000, to be taken down, that his son might never have the chance of similar vexations in that place."

To this there wants a few additional facts. It was not only the Suffolk farmers, but the general spirit and brutality of the people of the country which wearied and disgusted him beyond endurance. In the verses we have recently quoted he vents unmitigated hatred of the Welsh, as a "churlish nation," and a "reptile race." He seems to have been subjected to a system of universal plunder and imposition. None but they who have lived among such a rude, thievish, and unattractive crew can conceive the astonishment and exasperation of it to an intelligent and generous mind. He used to have twenty watchers on his moorland hills night and day to protect his grouse. He had twelve thousand acres of land, and never used to see a grouse upon his table. He says the protection of game that he never eat or benefited by, cost him more than he now lives at. Disgusted by all these circumstances, he left the place and resolved never to return to it. But it was not yet that he ordered the destruction of his new and splendid house, in which he only resided six months. He ordered his steward to let it. Five years went on, and it still remained unlet. He then chanced to meet with a nobleman in Italy who had once applied to him for its occupation, "How was it," he asked, "that you did not take my house at Lantony?" "How, why it was not to be let." "It has been to let this five years." "You amaze me. I was most anxious to take it, but your steward assured me it was not to be let on any account."

Landor immediately wrote to England to make particular inquiries, and found that the steward was keeping the house to accommodate his own friends, who came down there in parties to shoot his master's grouse. With characteristic indignation, Mr. Landor at once ordered the steward to quit his service and estate, and that the house should be leveled to the ground.

In 1811, Mr. Landor married Julia, the daughter of J. Thuillier de Malaperte, descendant and representative of the Baron de Neuve-ville, first gentleman of the bedchamber to Charles VIII. He went to reside in Italy, and, during several years, occupied the Palazzo Medici, in Florence. The proprietor dying, and the palace being to be sold, he looked out for a fresh residence, and found that the villa Gherardesca, at Fiesole, with its gardens and farms, about three thousand acres, was to be sold; and he purchased it. The villa Gherardesca lies only two miles from Florence, on the banks of the Affrico. It was built by Michael Angelo, and is one of the most delightful residences in the world. Here Landor resided many years, and here his family still resides. In both poetry and prose, he frequently refers to this beloved spot with deep feeling and regret, as in the verses commencing--

"Let me sit here and muse by thee
Awhile, aerial Fiesole!
Thy sheltered walks and cooler grots,
Villas, and vines, and olive plots,
Catch me, entangle me, detain me,
And laugh to hear that aught can pain me."--Vol. ii. p. 625.

And the

FAREWELL TO ITALY.

"I leave thee, beauteous Italy; no more
From thy high terraces at even-tide
To look supine into thy depths of sky,
Thy golden moon between the cliff and me,
On thy dark spires of fretted cypresses,
Bordering the channel of the milky-way.
Fiesole and Valdarno must be dreams
Hereafter, and my own lost Affrico
Murmur to me but in the poet's song.
I did believe,--what have I not believed?--
Weary with age, but unoppressed by pain,
To close in thy soft clime my quiet day,
And rest my bones in the Mimosa shade.
Hope! hope! few ever cherished thee so little;
Few are the heads thou hast so rarely raised;
But thou didst promise this, and all was well.
For we are fond of thinking where to lie
When every pulse hath ceased, when the lone heart
Can lift no aspiration ... reasoning
As if the sight were unimpaired by death,
Were unobstructed by the coffin lid,
And the sun cheered corruption. Over all
The smiles of nature shed a potent charm,
And light us to our chamber at the grave."--Vol. ii. p. 647.

Let us conclude our quotations with one from his Conversations, equally redolent of Italy. It is in his conversation between himself and the Marchese Pallavicini. The scene is on the lake of Como, and a more beautiful tribute was never paid to trees, especially to that soft, graceful, and fragrant tree, the linden.

"Grumello! Let me enjoy the sight while I can. He appears instinct with life, nodding the network of vines upon his head, and beckoning, and inviting us, while the fig-trees, and mulberries, and chestnuts, and walnuts, and these lofty and eternal cypresses, stand motionless around. His joyous mates, all different in form and features, push forward; and, if there is not something in the air, or something in my eyesight, illusory, they are running a race along the borders. Stop a moment; how shall we climb over these two enormous pines? Ah, Don Pepino! old trees in their living state are the only things that money can not command. Rivers leave their beds, run into cities, and traverse mountains for it; obelisks and arches, palaces and temples, amphitheaters and pyramids, rise up like exhalations at its bidding; even the free spirit of man, the only great thing on earth, crouches and cowers in its presence. It passes away and vanishes before venerable trees. What a sweet odor is here! Whence comes it? Sweeter it appears to me, and stronger than the pine itself."

"I imagine," said he, "from the linden; yes, certainly."

"Is that a linden? It is the largest, and, I should imagine, the oldest upon earth, if I could perceive that it had lost any of its branches."

"Pity that it hides half the row of yon houses from the palace! It will be carried off with the two pines in the autumn."

"O, Don Pepino!" cried I, "the French, who abhor whatever is old, and whatever is great, have spared it; the Austrians, who sell their fortresses and their armies, nay, sometimes their daughters, have not sold it; must it fall? Shall the cypress of Soma be without a rival? I hope to have left Lombardy before it happens; for events, which you will tell me ought never to interest me at all, not only do interest me, but make me--I confess it--sorrowful."

"Who in the world could ever cut down a linden, or dare, in his senses, to break a twig off one? To a linden was fastened the son of William Tell, when the apple was cloven on his head. Years afterward, often did the father look higher and lower, and search laboriously, to descry if any mark were remaining of the cord upon its bark! Often must he have inhaled this very odor! What a refreshment was it to a father's heart! The flowers of the linden should be the only incense offered up in the churches of God. Happy the man whose aspirations are pure enough to mingle with it!

"How many fond, and how many lively thoughts have been nurtured under this very tree! How many kind hearts have beaten here! Its branches are not so numerous as the couples they have invited to sit beside it, nor its blossoms and leaves as the expressions of tenderness it has witnessed! What appeals to the pure all-seeing heavens! What similitudes to the everlasting mountains! What protestations of eternal truth and constancy! from those who are now earth, they, and their shrouds, and their coffins! The caper and fig-tree have split the monument. Emblems of past loves and future hopes, severed names which the holiest rites united, broken letters of brief happiness, bestrew the road, and speak to the passers by in vain. To see this linden was worth a journey of five hundred miles!"

Walter Savage Landor now resides at Bath. In his modest house in St. James's-square, he has surrounded himself with one of the most exquisite miniature collection of paintings in the world. Every thing is select, from the highest masters, Raphael, Titian, Corregio, and older and more quaint hands, and every thing perfect of its kind. These, including some by our own Wilson, he collected in Italy. His larger collection of larger pictures he gave to his son, on leaving Italy, and brought these only as more adapted to the house he proposed to inhabit. Peace, meditation, and the gradual resumption of simple tasks and habits, seem the leading objects of his present hale old age. "I have a pleasure," said he, "in renouncing one indulgence after another; in learning to live without so many wants. Why should I require so many more comforts than the bulk of my fellow-creatures can get? We should set an example against the selfish self-indulgence of the age. We should discountenance its extravagant follies. The pride and pomp of funerals is monstrous. When I die, I will spend but six pounds on mine. I have left orders for the very commonest coffin that is made for the commonest man; and six of the stoutest and very poorest men to carry me to the grave, for which each shall receive one sovereign."

"But don't you pine for your beautiful Fiesole and its beautiful climate; don't you want your children; especially that daughter whose bust there opposite reminds one so of Queen Victoria?"

"I could wish it, but it is better as it is. _I_ can not live there. They can, and are happy. I have their society in their letters; they are well off, and therefore--I am contented."

With this he diverted the conversation to the decease of a mutual friend. "Ah! what a good, warm-hearted creature that was! There never was a woman so self-forgetting and full of affection. She lies in the church-yard just by here. We used to joke merrily on what is now half-fulfilled. 'I shall be buried in ---- church-yard,' she once said. 'Why, _I_ mean to be buried there myself. My dear Mrs. Price, we'll visit! Being such near neighbors, we'll have a chair, and make calls on one another!'" And at this idea he burst forth into one of those hearty, resounding laughs, that show in Landor how strangely fun and feeling can live side by side in the human mind.

Walter Savage Landor is one of those men who are sent into the world strong to teach. Strong in mind and body, strong in the clear sense of the right and the true, they walk unencumbered by prejudices, unshackled by force. They tread over the trim borders of artificial life, often oversetting its training glasses, and kicking over its tenderest nurslings. They break down the hedge of selfish monopoly, and carry along with them a stake from the gap, to have a blow at the first bull or _bully_ they meet in the field. They stop to gaze at the idol of the day when they reach the city, and pronounce it but the scarecrow of last summer new dressed. They enter churches, and are oftener disgusted with the dreadful religion made for God, than delighted with the preaching of that divine benevolence sent down by God for man. They weep at some recollected sorrow, but remembering that this is but a contagious weakness, they laugh, to make their neighbors awake from sad thoughts, and are pronounced unfeeling. They attack old and bloody prejudices, and are asked if they are wiser than any one else? They know it: the divine instinct, the teaching faculty within them, replies--"Yes." They go on strong and unmoved, though fewer perceive their great mission than feel them poking them in the delicate sides of their interests; fewer sympathize with their tenderest and purest feelings than are shocked by their ridicule of old and profitable humbugs. Misunderstood, misrepresented, and calumniated, they go on--nothing can alter them--for their burden and command are from above; yet every day the world is selecting some truth from the truths they have collected, admiring some flower in the bouquet of beauties they have gathered as they have gone through the wilderness, picking up some gem that they have let fall for the first comer after them, till eventually comparing, and placing all side by side, the world, with a sudden flash of recognition, perceives that all these truths, beauties, and precious things, belonged to the strange, rude man, who _was_ actually wiser than any body else. Long may Savage Landor live to see the fruit of his undaunted mind gradually absorbed into the substance of society!

LEIGH HUNT.

Some thirty years ago, three youths went forth, one fine summer's day, from the quiet town of Mansfield, to enjoy a long, luxurious ramble in Sherwood forest. Their limbs were full of youth--their hearts of the ardor of life--their heads of dreams of beauty. The future lay before them, full of brilliant, but undefined achievements in the land of poetry and romance. The world lay around them, fair and musical as a new paradise. They traversed long dales, dark with heather--gazed from hill-tops over still and immense landscapes--tracked the margins of the shining waters that hurry over the clear gravel of that ancient ground, and drank in the freshness of the air, the odors of the forest, the distant cry of the curlew, and the music of a whole choir of larks high above their heads. Beneath the hanging boughs of a wood-side they threw themselves down to lunch, and from their pockets came forth, with other good things, a book. It was a new book. A hasty peep into it had led them to believe that it would blend well in the perusal with the spirit of the region of Robin Hood and Maid Marian, and with the more tragical tale of that Scottish queen, the gray and distant towers of one whose prison-houses could be descried from their resting-place, clad as with the solemn spirit of a sad antiquity. The book was _The Story of Rimini_. The author's name was to them little known; but they were not of a temperament that needed names--their souls were athirst for poetry, and there they found it. The reading of that day was an epoch in their lives. There was a life, a freshness, a buoyant charm of subject and of style, that carried them away from the somber heaths and wastes around them to the sunshine of Italy--to gay cavalcades and sad palaces. Hours went on, the sun declined, the book and the story closed, and up rose the three friends drunk with beauty, and with the sentiment of a great sorrow, and strode homeward with the proud and happy feeling that England was enriched with a new poet. Two of these three friends have for more than five-and-twenty years been in their graves; the third survives to write this article.

For thirty years and more from that time the author of Rimini has gone on adding to the wealth of English literature, and to the claims on his countrymen to gratitude and affection. The bold politician, when it required moral bravery to be honest; the charming essayist; the poet, seeming to grow with every new effort only more young in fancy and vigorous in style--he has enriched his country's fame, but his country has not enriched him. It is still time to think of it, and it might save many future regrets, if a government becoming daily more liberal, were to show that it knows the wishes of the public, and is glad to fulfill them.

We have the authority of Mr. Leigh Hunt himself, in a memoir written six-and-thirty years ago, for the fact that he was born in 1784, at Southgate. His parents were the Rev. J. Hunt, at that time tutor in the family of the Duke of Chandos, and Mary, daughter of Stephen Shewell, merchant of Philadelphia, whose sister was the lady of Mr. President West. Thus the poet was by his mother's marriage nearly related to the great American painter; and here, he says, he could enlarge seriously and proudly; but this boasting, it turns out very characteristically, is not of any adventitious alliance with celebrated names, but of a truer and more happy cause of gratulation:--"If any one circumstance of my life could give me cause for boasting, it would be that of having had such a mother. She was, indeed, a mother in every exalted sense of the word--in piety, in sound teaching, in patient care, in spotless example. Married at an early age, and commencing from that time a life of sorrow, the world afflicted, but it could not change her: no rigid economy could hide the native generosity of her heart, no sophistical skulking injure her fine sense, or her contempt of worldly-mindedness, no unmerited sorrow convert her resignation into bitterness. But let me not hurt the noble simplicity of her character by a declamation, however involuntary. At the time when she died, the recollection of her sufferings and virtues tended to imbitter her loss; but knowing what she was, and believing where she is, I now feel her memory as a serene and inspiring influence, that comes over my social moments only to temper cheerfulness, and over my reflecting ones to animate me in the love of truth."

That is a fine filial eulogy; but still finer and more eloquent has been the practical one of the life and writings of the son. Whoever knows any thing of these, perceives how the qualities of the mother have lived on, not only in the grateful admiration of the poet, but in his character and works. This is another proud testimony added to the numerous ones revealed in the biographies of illustrious men, of the vital and all-prevailing influence of mothers. What does not the world owe to noble-minded women in this respect? and what do not women owe to the world and themselves in the consciousness of the possession of this authority? To stamp, to mold, to animate to good the generation that succeeds them, is their delegated office. They are admitted to the co-workmanship with God; his actors in the after-age are placed in their hands at the outset of their career, when they are plastic as wax, and pliant as the green withe. It is they who can shape and bend as they please. It is they--as the young beings advance into the world of life, as passions kindle, as eager desires seize them one after another, as they are alive with ardor, and a thirst for knowledge and experience of the great scene of existence into which they are thrown--it is they who can guide, warn, inspire with the upward or the downward tendency, and cast through them on the future ages the blessings or the curses of good or evil. They are the gods and prophets of childhood. It is in them that confiding children hear the Divinity speak; it is on them that they depend in fullest faith; and the maternal nature, ingrafted on the original, grows in them stronger than all other powers of life. The mother in the child lives and acts anew; and numberless generations feel unconsciously the pressure of her hand. Happy are they who make that enduring pressure a beneficent one; and, though themselves unknown to the world, send forth from the heaven of their hearts poets and benefactors to all future time.

It is what we could hardly have expected, that Leigh Hunt is descended of a high Church and Tory stock. On his father's side his ancestors were Tories and Cavaliers who fled from the tyranny of Cromwell and settled in Barbadoes. For several generations they were clergymen. His grandfather was rector of St. Michael's, in Bridgetown, Barbadoes. His father was intended for the same profession, but, being sent to college at Philadelphia, he there commenced, on the completion of his studies, as a lawyer, and married. It was, again, curious that, the Revolution breaking out, the conservative propensities of the family broke out so strong in him as to cause him to flee for safety to England, as his ancestors had formerly fled from it. He had been carted through Philadelphia by the infuriated mob, only escaped tarring and feathering by a friend taking the opportunity of overturning the tar-barrel set ready in the street, and, being consigned to the prison, he escaped in the night by a bribe to the keeper. On the arrival of his wife in England, some time afterward, she found him who had left America a lawyer, now a clergyman, preaching from the pulpit, tranquillity. Mr. Hunt seems to have been one of those who are not made to succeed in the world. He did not obtain preferment, and fell into much distress. At one time he was a very popular preacher, and was invited by the Duke of Chandos, who had a seat near Southgate, to become tutor to his nephew, Mr. Leigh. Here he occupied a house at Southgate, called Eagle-hall; and here his son, the poet, was born, and was named after Mr. Leigh, his father's pupil.

Mr. Hunt, in his autobiography, describes his mother as feeling the distresses into which they afterward fell very keenly, yet bearing them patiently. She is represented as a tall, lady-like person, a brunette, with fine eyes, and hair blacker than is seen of English growth. Her sons much resembled her.

At seven, Leigh Hunt was admitted into the grammar-school of Christ's hospital, where he remained till he was fifteen, and received a good foundation in the Greek and Latin languages. Mr. Hunt describes very charmingly the two houses where, as a boy, he used to visit with his mother; one of these being that of West, the painter, who had married his mother's aunt; the aunt, however, being much of the same age as herself: the other was that of Mr. Godfrey Thornton, of the great mercantile house of that name. "How I loved," says Leigh Hunt, "the graces in the one, and every thing in the other! Mr. West had bought his house not long, I believe, after he came to England; and he had added a gallery at the back of it, terminating in a couple of lofty rooms. The gallery was a continuation of the hall passage, and, together with the rooms, formed three sides of a garden, very small, but elegant, with a grass-plot in the middle, and busts upon stands under an arcade. In the interior, the gallery made an angle at a little distance as you went up it; then a shorter one, and then took a longer stretch into the two rooms; and it was hung with his sketches and pictures all the way. In a corner between the two angles, and looking down the lower part of the gallery, was a study, with casts of Venus and Apollo on each side of the door. The two rooms contained the largest of the pictures; and in the farther one, after stepping softly down the gallery, as if respecting the dumb life on the walls, you generally found the mild and quiet artist at his work; happy, for he thought himself immortal." West, it is well known, was brought up a Quaker, and had been so poorly educated that he could hardly read. Leigh Hunt states his belief that West did a great deal of work for George III. for very little profit; then, as since, the honor was thought of itself nearly enough.

"As Mr. West," continues Leigh Hunt, "was almost sure to be found at work in the farthest room, habited in his white woolen gown, so you might have predicated, with equal certainty, that Mrs. West was sitting in the parlor reading. I used to think that if I had such a parlor to sit in, I should do just as she did. It was a good-sized room, with two windows looking out on the little garden I spoke of, and opening into it from one of them by a flight of steps. The garden, with its busts in it, and the pictures which you knew were on the other side of its wall, had an Italian look. The room was hung with engravings and colored prints. Among them was the Lion's Hunt, by Rubens; the Hierarchy, with the Godhead, by Raphael, which I hardly thought it right to look at; and two screens by the fireside, containing prints from Angelica Kauffman, of the Loves of Angelica and Medoro, which I could have looked at from morning till night."