thus wrote there are immortal successes, such as "Dirce" or "Rose Aylmer," with many memorable epitaphs and epitomes, and some notable satires. By their side there is no inconsiderable number of petty trivialities, graceful nothings, jocose or sentimental trifles. With a far less instinctive sense of the capacities of his own language than Herrick, Landor refused to admit that what might make a poem in Latin could fail to be a poem in English. He won over many secrets from that close language; but the ultimate secrets of his own language he never discovered. Blake, Shelley, Keats, Coleridge, Wordsworth, among his contemporaries, could all do something that he could not do, something more native, more organically English, and therefore of a more absolute beauty as poetry. He reads Pindar for his "proud complacency and scornful strength. If I could," he says, "resemble him in nothing else, I was resolved to be as compendious and as exclusive." From Catullus he learned more, and his version of one of the lighter poems of Catullus has its place to-day, as if it were an original composition, among the mass of his collected lyrics, where it is not to be distinguished from the pieces surrounding it. Yet, if you will compare any of Landor's translations, good as they are, with the original Latin, you will see how much of the energy has been smoothed out, and you will realize that, though Catullus in Landor's English is very like Landor's English verse, there is something, of infinite importance, characteristic alike of Catullus and of poetry, which has remained behind, uncapturable.

Is it that, in Coleridge's phrase, "he does not possess imagination in its highest form ?" Is it that, as I think, he was lacking in vital heat?

No poet has ever been a bad prose writer, whenever he has cared to drop from poetry into prose; but it is doubtful whether any poet has been quite so fine, accomplished, and persistent a prosewriter as Landor. "Poetry," he tells us,

in one of his most famous passages, "was always my amusement, prose my study and business. I have published five volumes of Imaginary Conversations: cut the worst of them thro' the middle, and there will remain in this decimal fraction quite enough to satisfy my appetite for fame. I shall dine late; but the diningroom will be well lighted, the guests few and select." Without his prose Landor is indeed but half, if he is half, himself. His verse at its best has an austere nobility, a delicate sensitiveness, the qualities of marble or of onyx. But there is much also which is no more than a graceful trifling, the verse of a courtly gentleman, who, as he grows older, takes more and more assiduous pains in the shaping and polishing of compliments. It is at its best when it is most personal, and no one has written more nobly of himself, more calmly, with a more lofty tenderness for humanity seen in one's small, private looking-glass. But the whole man never comes alive into the verse, body and soul, but only as a stately presence.

He has put more of himself into his prose, and it is in the prose mainly that we must seek the individual features of his soul and temperament. Every phrase comes to us with the composure and solemnity of verse, but with an easier carriage under restraint. And now he is talking, with what for him is an eagerness and straightforwardness in saying what he has to say, the "beautiful thoughts" never "disdainful of sonorous epithets." And you discover that he has much more to say than the verse has quite fully hinted at: a whole new hemisphere of the mind becomes visible, completing the sphere. And in all his prose, though only in part of his verse, he has the qualities which he attributes to Pindar: "rejection of what is light and minute, disdain of what is trivial, and selection of those blocks from the quarry which will bear strong strokes of the hammer and retain all the marks of the chisel." He wrote far more prose than verse, concentrating his maturest years upon the writing of

IN the matter of ruined Norman castles, it is conceded that we cannot rival England; but during the last thirty years we have been cultivating our lawns hopefully, and not without success. Sixty years hence, if we keep on, we may have some fair specimens to show. But in England there are lawns - works of art and nature mingled-to which we can never approximate in this country. They have been perfected through centuries; they are a part of English history, and have enjoyed uninterrupted growth from the days of Chaucer until now. Cherished and protected age after age, they are the lovely product of feudal aristocracy; secluded within their mossy walls of ancient brick; bordered with dense hedges of box and holly; shadowed by trees ancient, sometimes, as themselves; overlooked by long, low façades of countryseats built of soft-hued gray stone, or mellow brick, or the cream-colored plaster and black oaken beams of the Tudors; flanked by beds of hollyhock, marigold, and rose, glowing and burgeoning in the still, soft air; diversified with VOL. 97 - NO. 6

antique sundials, crumbling altars to that shyest and most beautiful of the gods in England, Apollo; lawns into which shadow and sunshine seem rather to sink than to rest, giving a depth and tenderness of tone never elsewhere seen. It is a

wondrous green, which we would seek in vain in the splendid, hard heart of the emerald; a sweet, cool gloriousness of hue, melting in iridescent changes beneath the eye, wooing the senses with a fresh, dewy caress, soothing the very soul with quiet delight. Their tranquil silence and repose are a powerful protest against the gospel of democracy, change, progress,

- against all the harsh, restless watchwords of to-day; their invitation and beguilement are to peace, to dreamful thoughts, to meditation on the storied past, to the mystic song of the lotus-eaters. Resting on such a couch, breathing the delicate fragrance of English flowers, gazing upward through boughs of cedar or of oak to the baby-blue of English skies with their clouds white and gray like the plumage of the sea-gull;-surrounded and shielded by these influences, the alarums

of the New Day sound remote, shallow, and crude, an uncongenial and factitious blatancy, making no true appeal to the inner wisdom of the human heart, and therefore destined to pass away. Surely there are lawns like these in Paradise; and shall we not do better to rest here, with Disraeli, on the side of the angels, than to follow the rash footsteps of revolution and reform through the "desarts vast and antres idle" of social and political speculation? Into one scale of the balance throw all the theories of Rousseau, Fourier, Mill, Marx, and their posterity; and into the other an historic English lawn with its appurtenances; and make your choice between them! But it is, perhaps, fortunate (and perhaps not) that never, in saecula saeculorum, can we possess or create an English lawn with its appurtenances in America. It would be giving to the Tories and Conservatives an unfair advantage!

Within arm's reach of London, however, such lawns are to be enjoyed; of an afternoon you may attend a garden-party on one of them, and that same evening dine in Belgravia. By dwelling during three or four years of the middle seventies in Twickenham, I managed even better. Horace Walpole had one, at his gingerbread palace estate of Strawberry Hill; Alexander Pope (or, in this age, Henry Labouchere, down by the river) another; the Orleans princes another; and so on. One of the most interesting belonged, at the time I write of, to one Doctor Diamond, an ancient and well-reputed physician of the insane; whom I often visited for no better reason, really, than to glut myself with the verdant intoxication of his lawn. The aspect of the old gentleman himself was sage and venerable in the extreme; he had a slow, sagacious manner; and in his speech a measured lilt which tempted to somnolence, especially after one of his excellent dinners, with their old-fashioned joints and puddings and silver covers and port and Madeira. Never have I devoured saddle-ofmutton in such perfection as at his table;

it melted away in the mouth ere the teeth had a fair chance at it, and, dissolving, left behind it savors of incomparable joy and juicy satisfaction. Moreover, the host had a conundrum about it, which he never failed to propound to us as soon as the brown and appetizing viand was set smoking on the table in front of him. "Why is a flock of sheep like this joint, ladies and gentlemen?" he would inquire. We would maintain a respectful, interrogative silence. "Because it's a saddle-of-mutton!" he would triumphantly answer himself. "D'ye see?—a sad deal of mutton!" After which, with low chuckles, he would help us to bountiful supplies.

Doctor Diamond's house looked as old and substantial as himself, as well it might, for it had been in existence five hundred years and more, and is (I devoutly hope and believe) still existing; a two-storied structure of brick overlaid with plaster of a date nearly as remote, with ivy massed thick and secure over its southern exposure, and tall hollyhock plants leaning up against it. Adjoining it on the east was a more recent addition, where were housed the Doctor's brood of maniacs; they were understood to be of strictly good families, and their conduct was — all things considered - subdued and decorous. Their proprietor never exploited them to his unprofessional guests; and I never saw but one of them, a lady of middle age, with hollow cheeks and wandering eyes, who stood at one of the unobtrusivelybarred windows, slowly wringing her bony hands, and saying with monotonous rapidity, like a Parsee repeating his orisons to the rising sun at Bombay, “Oh, dear --oh, dear-oh, dear!" We were not encouraged to make inquiries concerning them; and once, when I tried to penetrate to the interior mysteries of insanity by asking the doctor what, in its essence, insanity really was, he foiled me by replying, after some consideration, "Well, you know, there are various kinds of insanity," and beyond this pregnant point his elucidation of the matter never proceeded.

The saddle-of-mutton and its accompaniments having reached their delightful close,—and, in my experience of them, this occurred always of a Sunday, -Doctor Diamond would distribute cigars, and conduct us to the garden. The company were always few in number, and, while seldom of conspicuous social eminence, yet invested with a certain flavor of lavendered gentility. Of them, the only one whom I can at this moment picture to myself with any vividness is Mr. William Carew Hazlitt, grandson of Hazlitt the Great, and the latter's biographer. By profession he was a lawyer; but his natural tastes were for literature and cognate subjects; he was an eccentric and a humorist, and he seemed to me especially created to appear at Doctor Diamond's Sunday dinners. Through him, we seemed to be placed in direct communication with the literary eighteenth century; so that, although he could not have been as much as fifty years of age, he gave the impression of being a contemporary of Lamb, at least, if not also of Johnson and Goldsmith. He wore an air of being always archly amused about something; so that whatever he might say carried with it the reminiscence of a laugh that had just passed away, or the promise of one that was hard

upon us. He was rich in anecdote and comment; acute, original, or comical on any topic that appealed to him; and, as we sat on rustic benches on the famous lawn, beneath the shade of a cedar of Lebanon (a species of tree for which Twickenham is renowned, and which, for aught I know, may have been planted by the Crusaders), with the blue spirit of the good tobacco incensing the air and mingling with the scent of the roses which stood erect on tall stalks as if to lift their fragrance to one's very nostrils, I felt myself immersed centuries deep in the very heart of Old England. There was glamour enough in the Madeira to obliterate so trifling a chronological discrepancy as a mere hundred years or two; and I should not have been surprised, or more than agreeably inter

ested, to behold crooked little Alexander come tripping in from his neighboring villa, to smoke his pipe with us and regale us with a few of his latest epigrams and couplets; or the aristocratic, manof-the-worldly Horace, to orient and refresh us with his arid humor and cold common sense; or beloved Charles, stuttering forth his precious frivolities; or the original William, with his penetrating apothegms and sad-hued wit. Their ghostly feet would have trod that enchanted lawn, leaving no impress on its yielding surface; their voices would have entered our ears without disturbing the still air; and, as evening drew on, they would have faded softly away in the increasing shadows, and we should have fancied that we did but dream of their presence. Perhaps they did come, without our being fully aware of it.

One feature of Doctor Diamond's lawn there was, however, material and yet romantic, which I have not yet mentioned, and which was probably unique in England. This was a sort of fence of rusty iron pickets, dividing one part of the garden from the other, in which grew, I think, an assortment of vegetables, rich and succulent enough to honor the worthy physician's dinner-table in companionship with the saddle-of-mutton. So peculiar was the aspect of the fence that, after in vain exercising my ingenuity for many weeks to divine what it was made of, I finally besought the doctor to unveil the mystery. "Why," quoth he, laying his hand upon one of the pickets,

'these are claymores, claymores picked up on the Field of Culloden!" So there sat we, within arm's reach of the weapons which had drunk hot blood on that tremendous day, one hundred and thirty years before, sprouting up, along with the peaceful roses and cabbages, out of the mould of the garden, as though the dead warriors were upstretching them from their graves. Meanwhile, in the east, the moon rose over invisible London; the English dew fell; the odors of the garden became rank; and the wraiths of