fund. He thought well of his writings, or
he would not have preserved them. He said
and wrote that he thought well of them,
because that was his mind about them,
and he said and wrote his mind. He was
one of the few men of whom you might
always know the whole: of whom you
might always know the worst, as well as
the best. He had no reservations or
duplicities. "No, by Heaven!" he would say
(" with unimaginable energy"), if any good
adjective were coupled with him which he
did not deserve: " I am nothing of the
kind. I wish I were; but I don't deserve
the attribute, and I never did, and I never
shall!" His intense consciousness of
himself never led to his poorly excusing himself,
and seldom to his violently asserting himself.
When he told some little story of his bygone
social experiences, in Florence, or where
not, as he was fond of doing, it took the
innocent form of making all the interlocutors,
Landors. It was observable, too,
that they always called him "Mr. Landor"
rather ceremoniously and submissively.
There was a certain " Caro Pádre Abáte
Marina"—invariably so addressed in these
anecdotes who figured through a great
many of them, and who always expressed
himself in this deferential tone.

Mr. Forster writes of Lander's
character thus:

"A man must be judged, at first, by
what he says and does. But with him
such extravagance as I have referred to
was little more than the habitual indulgence
(on such themes) of passionate feelings
and language, indecent indeed but
utterly purposeless; the mere explosion of
wrath provoked by tyranny or cruelty;
the irregularities of an overheated
steam engine too weak for its own vapour.
It is very certain that no one could detest
  oppression more truly than Landor did in all
seasons and times; and if no one expressed
that scorn, that abhorrence of tyranny and
fraud, more hastily or more intemperately,
all his fire and fury signified really little
else than ill- temper too easily provoked.
Not to justify or excuse such language, but
to explain it, this consideration is urged.
If not uniformly placable, Landor was
always compassionate. He was
tender-hearted rather than bloody-minded
at all times, and upon only the most partial
acquaintance with his writings could other
opinion be formed. A completer knowledge
of them would satisfy any one that
he had as little real disposition, to kill a
king as to kill a mouse. In fact there is
not a more marked peculiarity in his genius
than the union with its strength of a most
uncommon gentleness, and in the personal
ways of the man this was equally
manifest."—Vol. I. p. 496.

Of his works, thus:

"Though his mind was cast in the
antique mould, it had opened itself to every
kind of impression through a long and
varied life; he has written with equal
excellence in both poetry and prose,
which can hardly be said of any of his
contemporaries; and perhaps the single
epithet by which his books would be best
described is that reserved exclusively for
books not characterised only by genius, but
also by special individuality. They are
unique. Having possessed them, we should
miss them. Their place would be supplied
by no others. They have that about them,
moreover, which renders it almost certain
that they will frequently be resorted to in
future time. There are none in the language
more quotable. Even where impulsiveness
and want of patience have left
them most fragmentary, this rich
compensation is offered to the reader. There
is hardly a conceivable subject, in life or
literature, which they do not illustrate by
striking aphorisms, by concise and profound
observations, by wisdom ever applicable
to the needs of men, and by wit as
available for their enjoyment. Nor, above
all, will there anywhere be found a more
pervading passion for liberty, a fiercer
hatred of the base, a wider sympathy with
the wronged and the oppressed, or help more
ready at all times for those who fight at
odds and disadvantage against the powerful
and the fortunate, than in the writings of
Walter Savage Landor."—- Last page of
second volume.

The impression was strong upon the
present writer's mind, as on Mr. Forster's,
during years of close friendship with the
subject of this biography, that his
animosities were chiefly referable to the singular
inability in him to dissociate other people's
ways of thinking from his own. He had, to
the last, a ludicrous grievance (both Mr.
Forster and the writer have often amused
themselves with it), against a good-natured
nobleman, doubtless perfectly unconscious
of having ever given him offence. The
offence was, that on the occasion of some
dinner party in another nobleman's house,
many years before, this innocent lord (then
a commoner) had passed in to dinner,
through some door, before him, as he
himself was about to pass in through that same