From the engraving, the arms and hands
are omitted. In the picture, they are, as
they were in nature, indispensable to a
correct reading of the vigorous face. The
arms were very peculiar. They were rather
short, and were curiously restrained and
checked in their action at the elbows; in
the action of the hands, even when
separately clenched, there was the same kind
of pause, and a noticeable tendency to
relaxation on the part of the thumb. Let
the face be never so intense or fierce, there
was a commentary of gentleness in the
hands, essential to be taken along with it.
Like Hamlet, Landor would speak daggers
but use none. In the expression of his
hands, though angrily closed, there was
always gentleness and tenderness; just as
when they were open, and the handsome
old gentleman would wave them with a
little courtly flourish that sat well upon
him, as he recalled some classic
compliment that he had rendered to some
reigning Beauty, there was a chivalrous grace
about them such as pervades his softer
verses. Thus, the fictitious Mr. Boythorn
(to whom we may refer without impropriety
in this connexion, as Mr. Forster
does) declaims " with unimaginable energy"
the while his bird is "perched upon his
thumb," and he " softly smooths its feathers
with his forefinger."

From the spirit of Mr. Forster's Biography
these characteristic hands are never
omitted, and hence (apart from its literary
merits) its great value. As the same
masterly writer's Life and Times of Oliver
Goldsmith is a generous and yet
conscientious picture of a period, so this is
a not less generous and yet conscientious picture
of one life; of a life, with all its aspirations,
achievements, and disappointments; all its
capabilities, opportunities, and irretrievable
mistakes. It is essentially a sad book, and
herein lies proof of its truth and worth.
The life of almost any man possessing
great gifts, would be a sad book to himself;
and this book enables us not only to see its
subject, but to be its subject, if we will.

Mr. Forster is of opinion that " Landor's
fame very surely awaits him." This point
admitted or doubted, the value of the book
remains the same. It needs not to know
his works (otherwise than through his
biographer's exposition), it needs not to have
known himself, to find a deep interest in
these pages. More or less of their warning
is in every conscience; and some
admiration of a fine genius, and of a great,
wild, generous nature, incapable of mean
self- extenuation or dissimulation—if
unhappily incapable of self-repression
too—should be in every breast. " There may be
still living many persons," Walter Landor's
brother, Robert, writes to Mr. Forster of
this book, " who would contradict any
narrative of yours in which the best qualities
were remembered, the worst forgotten."
Mr. Forster's comment is: "I had not
waited for this appeal to resolve, that, if
this memoir were written at all, it should
contain, as far as might lie within my power,
a fair statement of the truth." And this
eloquent passage of truth immediately
follows: " Few of his infirmities are without
something kindly or generous about them;
and we are not long in discovering there is
nothing so wildly incredible that he will not
himself in perfect good faith believe. When
he published his first book of poems on
quitting Oxford, the profits were to be
reserved for a distressed clergyman. When
he published his Latin poems, the poor
of Leipzig were to have the sum they
realised. When his comedy was ready to
be acted, a Spaniard who had sheltered
him at Castro was to be made richer by it.
When he competed for the prize of the
Academy of Stockholm, it was to go to the
poor of Sweden. If nobody got anything
from any one of these enterprises, the fault
at all events was not his. With his extraordinary
power of forgetting disappointments,
he was prepared at each successive
failure to start afresh, as if each had been
a triumph. I shall have to delineate this
peculiarity as strongly in the last half as in
the first half of his life, and it was certainly
an amiable one. He was ready at all times
to set aside, out of his own possessions,
something for somebody who might please
him for the time; and when frailties of
temper and tongue are noted, this other
eccentricity should not be omitted. He
desired eagerly the love as well as the good
opinion of those whom for the time he
esteemed, and no one was more affectionate
while under such influences. It is not a
small virtue to feel such genuine pleasure,
as he always did in giving and receiving
pleasure. His generosity, too, was bestowed
chiefly on those who could make small
acknowledgment in thanks and no return in
kind."

Some of his earlier contemporaries may
have thought him a vain man. Most
assuredly he was not, in the common
acceptation of the term. A vain man has
little or no admiration to bestow upon
competitors. Landor had an inexhaustible