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better known than himself, and a part of the undefined charm of his character is, that while you feel the power of the fascination that lies on its surface, you are conscious that much is beyond, to which you have not yet been admitted."

"Does not somewhat of mystery hang over his early life," enquired Mr Bouverie. "I have never yet been able distinctly to trace his history."

"He has confided to me much regarding himself," replied Sydney; "but the sad events which marked his early life, perhaps render him unwilling to dwell much upon its details. He is descended from the younger branch of a noble family in England, and was left an orphan while very young. He was then committed to the charge of a distant relative who resided chiefly on the continent, where, with the exception of a few years spent at Oxford, Vernon has been entirely educated. He had lost this venerable friend about a year before I met him, and though in possession of an independent fortune, was left without a single near relative, and almost without a home.

"He has studied, as I told you, at Oxford, and is already in priest's orders, but he has not yet held any charge."

"A sudden thought has struck me, Sydney," said Lord Delamere, who had been a silent but attentive listener to this conversation. "I have long thought that we ought to have a chaplain here. We have paid too little attention to these matters, I believe," added he seriously; "but your friend, such as you describe him to be, would prove I am sure a real acquisition, and it would be a pleasure to us to make him feel this as a home." Sydney's countenance beamed with pleasure. "Thank you, my dear father," exclaimed he warmly, is indeed a delightful plan. I am sure, almost sure, that it will meet Vernon's wishes, and what happiness it will be to me to have him here."

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"We shall propose it then when he comes to visit us," said Lord Delamere, as he rose from the breakfast table, "and for your sake, my dear Sydney,

as well as ours, I hope he may consent."

Mr Vernon's arrival was expected early in the following week, and the interest that Sydney's description of his friend had called forth, excited a general feeling of expectation during the few days that intervened.

The snow had fallen heavily during the whole of the day on which Sydney expected his friend to arrive, and evening had closed in the midst of darkness and mist ere the traveller appeared.

After lingering in the drawing-room till a later hour than usual, the party at length dispersed to dress for dinner.

"I fear that I must abandon the hope of seeing my friend to-day," said Sydney, as he held the door open for Constance to leave the room.

"Oh, it is not yet too late to expect him," replied Constance, "I long so to see this friend of yours Sydney, that I shall be quite disappointed if he does not come."

She had just reached the landingplace of the stair that led to her apartments, when a slight bustle in the hall announced that the expected guest had arrived. She lingered for a moment until she heard Sydney's joyful greeting responded to by a voice of rich and singular melody; then entering her dressing-room she rapidly completed her toilet, and descended to the drawing-room. The door stood half open, and as she approached she again

heard the melodious tones of Mr Vernon's voice in conversation with her uncle and Sydney.

He was standing near the fire as she entered, and her first emotion was one of unqualified admiration, as her eye rested upon his noble and commanding figure, his classic features, and lofty brow, on which the lines of thought and feeling were deeply traced. But when his dark eye fell upon her, as Sydney eagerly advancing to meet her, hastened to present her to his friend, she involuntarily shrunk from its penetrating gaze, and an undefined sensation that she afterwards vainly tried to analyse, stole over her spirit, which the mild courtesy of his address had not power to dispel.

WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR.

Or contemporary writers we can think of no one more interesting to the critic than Walter Savage Landor. He is a striking example of how useless great talents may become, when unsustained by great purposes. He presents a problem worth solving. A man unquestionably of splendid abilities, yet exercising no more influence on his generation than an old curiosity shop. However we may admire the exquisite workmanship of certain details, it is impossible to feel any reverence for the whole. He has a certain name in literature; owing partly to personal connexions, and partly also to his talents. He was Byron's butt and Southey's friend. He is the author of the "Imaginary Conversations," and the "Pentameron." But we may seek in vain for the human being whom he has influenced; to whom he has been a spiritual guide into any region however humble. His collected works, which now lie before us, in two goodly double-columned volumes, will not, therefore, carry him downwards on the stream of time, but leave him stranded upon some shallow, whence no one will care to move him. While he is yet with us, therefore, let us learn, if we can, some lesson from his failure; for to-morrow it will be too late.

Certainly it is rare to see one so gifted. All the fairies were invited to attend his christening, and each vied with each in generous gifts; so that the rosy boy might grow up to be a potent man. One gave him wealth, that he might enjoy a learned leisure wherein to accumulate the stores of ancient and of modern literature. Another gave him fancy and feeling; a third, wit; a fourth, eloquence; a fifth bestowed on him one of the rarest of all things, style. Thus furnished, he was sure to become a ripe, elegant scholar, a cultivated and accomplished writer. At this point a malicious fairy stepped forward and avenged the slight passed upon her in not being invited, and addressed the company thus:"Your boy is richly endowed, but you

have forgotten one thing, viz., that moral purpose which shall tip each shaft with a point of steel, and send the arrow home; that which shall give these talents coherence and dignity. I have that to give, but I retain it. That alone can sustain the mind in rectitude and unswerving search after truth; and I retain it. Your boy will be capricious, wilful; he will have no sense of the vital importance of things; he will sacrifice truth to prejudice or caprice; he will write what he wills, not what he thinks; and men will put no trust in him."

Such has he grown up. Although one loving to wander midst the groves of Academé, and to discuss with philosophers the vexed problems of our moral nature, he is anything but a philosopher. Although a vehement partizan, and taking a passionate interest in politics, he is a politician only in the worst sense: his opinions are mere whims; in the place of principles he has only prejudices; and the deficiency of largeness of view is made up by vehemence of party spirit, or rather let us say, of individual caprice. With him it is men, not measures. In every question he sees only some point upon which to fasten his sympathy or his hate. Too vain to accept the views of others and endeavour to support them by his own illustrations, so that he might be an useful if humble worker in the common cause of mankind; and too weak to originate views of his own, he has taken a purely personal view of each question; and, generally, out of mere love of idle singularity, has fastened upon subjects which politicians wisely regard as insignificant. Thus, out of the mere wilfulness of paradox, he, whose democratic declamation is always excited by kings and potentates, has chosen to laud the most execrated and execrable of living rulers, the emperor of Russia. In fact, all his political writing is at once turbulent and childish.

Landor has no ideas to put forth, and hence his want of influence. Men are

"Chatham.-What do you think of this jingle? Πρῶτον εὐλαβηθῶμέν τι πάθος μὴ παθῶμεν.

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not to be moved by whims and caprices, passage, selected for vituperation of however they may be amused by them. Plato. Unhappily the same causes which prevent his having any infuence on philosophy also prevent his influence on literature. Think of his varied knowledge and acquirements-his long familiarity with the great writers of ancient and of modern times-his powers of illustration, and admirable style-and then consider how pre-eminently he seems fitted for success as a critic on

taste, how worthy to guide the inquiring spirits of his day into the enchanted gardens of Armida, the solemn temples of Grecian art, or the wild luxuriance of our early literature! And yet the puniest whipster that wields a pen would be as safe a guide as Walter Savage Landor; for, in spite of the acuteness and taste he often displays, he nevertheless so repels the reader's confidence by the insolent ostentation of his will, or the childish extravagance of his caprice, that they quit his guidance in disgust. We do not allude to such things as his teaching Virgil how to write Latin, or his taking Plato to task for his Greek these are the insolent pedantries of a very vain man, but they merely cause the readers to smile. We allude to the mingled audacity and insignificance of his frequent onslaughts upon names honoured by all the world-onslaughts unjustified by any purpose, unsupported by any arguments of weight. We are for no blind reverence. Great as these men were, they may have their reputations scrutinized in perfect liberty; and although good taste would suggest that this scrutiny should be untainted by polemical vehemence or flippant levity, literature would profit by any serious discussion of their claims to renown. But Landor treats them as if they were his intimate enemies. Their writings are insults to him. He speaks of them with swaggering contempt. The passages he brings forward in justification are at the best extremely trivial, and, if worthy of notice at all, certainly quite unworthy of the importance he chooses to affix to them. In turning over his pages for an illustration of this, we met with the following

Chesterfield.—I really thought that his language was harmonious to the last degree."

Now, in the first place, nothing short of presumptuous coxcombry could venture to decide on such a delicate question as the harmony of a language, to the pronunciation of which we have notoriously lost the clue; in the second place, if our modern pronunciation be adopted, the above passage, although it may be read as a jingle, does not, we submit, naturally produce that effect. And grant all he says about Plato, what idle pedantry to select four weak sentences in a voluminous writer, and hold them up to scorn!

Plato is uniformly treated by Landor as a personal enemy. Because he was the first to write Imaginary Conversations? We know not; we only know that Landor is wroth with him for, among other things, his insincerity. Now, without here undertaking Plato's defence, we must say Landor has not brought forward any proofs to back his charge; meanwhile he himself is guilty of what looks very like insincerity in this example of Plato's quibbling :—

"Let me open at any page whatever, and I can supply abundantly the most capricious customer. Take for a specimen a pinch of the Polity. Here he carries his quibbles to such an extent as to demonstrate that justice is a sort of thief. These are his very words positive and express: no mere inference of mine."

It appears very extraordinary to us that, considering how many quibbles there are in Plato, this passage should have been selected, since it is no more

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Landor's objections are often directed against mere phantoms of his own creation; and when not against such μорμολúкeia, but against unquestionable errors, his argument has only force because it presents the brick as a specimen of a house. "Exhibit singly and broken off," says a favourable critic, "the grinning heads and crushed backs, and the water-spouts, and the griffins of a cathedral, and then triumphantly ask for the sublimity of the whole such is Mr Lander's method with the doctrines of Plato and the imagery of Dante." We believe the quantity of such carping objections in Landor, directed against the greatest writers, to be quite unparalleled elsewhere. He has had his fling" at every idol. A more resolute iconoclast we never met with. Perhaps nothing in the shape of retaliation was ever more severe than Mr Quilinan's article in Blackwood, wherein he assembled together the various passages in which Landor had vilified the idols of the world. Yet Landor himself has said with striking truth, "He who exults over light faults betrays a more notable want of judgment than he censures." We agree with him; and point to his own works as illustrations.

There is, in truth, a pettiness and peevishness in Landor, which looks like the wantonness of a spoiled child; and, connected with this, an overweening vanity displaying itself in trifles. Perhaps nothing gives the measure of a man's mind better than his estimate of trifles; for great occasions he braces himself up, and unbends only in ordinary life. Now Landor magnifies trifles into things of importance, because he throws his will and passions into them, and in so doing gives us his measure. His innovations in orthography may be cited as one example. Doubtless our language is very defective, not only in its structure but in its orthography. As a strong example, take the word stabile (stabilis) which is now always written stable in spite of the ambiguity arising from their being another and altogether different word so spelled; in spite also of our writing stability and not stablety. Yet the changes

(corruptions, if you will) that have taken place, have been so gradual, and have been adopted by our writers so unhesitatingly, that to set one's face against them, and pretend to reform that which is in the nature of things incapable of it, is mere wilful pedantry. Use and custom, which Horace tells us form the pattern of all speech and writing, have sanctified the modern orthography; and, however bad it may be, still when it is once accepted, to attempt its removal is to betray a want of proper sense of the relative importance of things; it is to make the means superior to the aim. Landor's orthography is an affected singularity, and as such a constant offence to the reader not, only in its assumption of superiority, but also in the triviality of its aim.

His pettiness is also shewn in his love of paradox. In throwing out a startling paradox you may sometimes. clear the moral atmosphere. But his paradoxes are the result of restless love of singularity, aided by weak judgment, and consist in the simple opposition of his dictum against the dictum of the world. Indeed one may say that if you know the sentence of mankind upon any work, you have only to reverse it, and be certain you have Landor's sentence. Thus Dante being universally admitted to be perhaps of all poets the most sustained in excellence, Landor boldly declares that not a "twentieth part of the Divina Comedia is good," and "that at least sixteen parts in twenty of the Inferno and Purgatorio are detestable both in poetry and principle." How like him this is! He selects the two most favoured portions of a great work, and says that by far the greater part of them is detestable. But if a fifth only be excellent, how came Dante by his reputation?

Again, Ovid, a charming poet, whom Landor has chosen to take under his especial protection-being renowned for his prodigal superfluity-for the easy flow of commonplace verses mingled with the rich current of his muse

-Ovid is said of all poets that ever lived to have "written the most of good poetry, and in proportion to its quantity, the least of bad or indiffe

rent." A mere wilful flat denial of the world's judgment.

So Horace, in whom ancients as well as moderns have lauded the curiosa felicitas, is said to be fuller of "evidences to the contrary than any contemporary or preceding poet.'

These samples are sufficient, though we might fill some pages with more, and after considering them, we quote with peculiar satisfaction his own excellent remark :-"Paradox is dear to most people; it bears the appearance of originality, but is usually the talent of the superficial, the perverse, and the obstinate." Fiat applicatio!

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It may perhaps be objected that these criticisms are supposed to proceed from the imaginary interlocutors, not from the author. Indeed he has in guise of preface, affixed this sentence:- "Avoid attributing to the writer any opinions in this book, but what are spoken under his own name.' But any one the least familar with his writings, will at once admit that this wilfulness and love of contradiction, are essentially qualities of the author; the more so, as the opinions are by no means correct representations of those really held by the speakers. No; we cannot err in laying to his charge the turbulent boastfulness and silly love of singularity, which so disagreeably affect every reader of the Imaginary Conversations.

Doubtless much of what we signalize in Landor, as destructive of the influence his abilities ought to command, arises from his having lived an exile from his native land, shut out from all the modifying influences which, in society, correct the asperities of nature. Whoso lives apart from his country, wants an essential portion of his education, viz. that restraining discipline which results from the presence of exemplars, and the thousand minute but powerful influences which form the social man. Landor has lived in his study; among books, not among men ; in Italy, more than in England. The consequence has been, that he is not only a bookish man-a pedantic student, but that having been removed from daily contact with his countrymen, and not having breathed their

atmosphere, he has not that respect for others which would restrain the extravagancies of his caprice. Nothing has ever taught him respect for the public. Too rich to be obliged to consider for an instant either the public's likings or the public's wants, he has printed what he has written, as he has written it. He has had the field to himself, and has used it to cut capers and throw somersets. He writes like a spoiled child, accustomed to indulge its whims irrespective of all consequences.

Such, deliberately considered, appear to us to be Landor's faults. We shall, however, have been grossly misunderstood if, from the foregoing remarks, it be concluded that we are insensible to the great, we may say, splendid qualities, exhibited in his writings. If we have laid some stress on the faults, it was because the occasion demanded it. The collected works were before us; made up in a shape destined for posterity. We had, as critics, to enquire into the probability of their ever reaching their destination, and having pronounced a negative, we had to examine into the reasons of the author's failure.

Nevertheless, put these volumes on your shelves; they deserve a place there. We can point to no living writer, in our language, who in sustained stateliness and elegance of style, can be compared with him. Nor is this stateliness, stiffness; it is graceful and easy as calm and measured writing can well be. It is clear, harmonious, and correct; sometimes felicitously terse, sometimes sinuously flowing, and sometimes exquisitely musical, clothing by turns, in its appropriate garment, a moral aphorism, a description of some bit of nature, or a burst of enthusiasm. The command over language, idiomatic, without vulgarity, exhibited in these works, would alone make them precious to every man of letters.

We cannot do better than select some examples; they will form quite a little Anthology. Here is a lovely description of two swans on a river:

"The nobler one came sailing up from the lake, as swiftly and steddily as if some wind had blown him, though there was not a

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