one bar-sinister on it. It would serve no purpose to drag up again the discreditable parts of his life from the deep waters of oblivion under which, so far as most people are concerned, they at present lie; but were they set in order, and exhibited in their bare unvarnished truth, they would afford a melancholy proof of the hopelessness of that gospel of art or beauty upon which so many at the present day are setting their hopes as the great regenerator of mankind. It is undeniable that beauty has a refining and purifying influence; that art has a tendency to elevate and ennoble the nature. They are God's blessed agents of civilization. But it is a woful mistake to suppose that they are sufficient for this purpose alone. Unmentionable, almost inconceivable, social depravity co-existed in Greece with sculpture, whose mutilated fragments, spared by time, have a loveliness which no modern art can hope to rival. We are shocked to see the grossest scenes and actions immortalised in those carved jewels, cameos, and intaglios, which are handed down to us from ancient times; the rarest skill and

the loveliest material combining to shed lustre upon all that is most vile in man's imagination and life. The cases of Byron, Edgar Poe, and Thorvaldsen, as well as of hundreds more, show to us that the finest poetic and artistic genius may be united with the disgraceful animalism of a satyr. It cannot be too often repeated, or too deeply impressed upon the mind, that the Gospel of Christ is the only means of purifying the heart and ennobling the life; and the beauty of poetry or sculpture, of painting or music, without it, can only move our sensuous nature, and create in many a keener relish for sensual pleasure. Bezaleel and Aholiab were filled with the Spirit of God in wisdom, and in understanding, and in knowledge, and in all manner of workmanship, in order to qualify them for constructing the Tabernacle according to the pattern shown in the Mount; and those who are artists among us, and we who enjoy their works, must both be possessed of the same heavenly spirit if the beauty of art is to produce on them and on us the purifying and ennobling influence which God intended.

THE two men whose names are placed at the head of this article passed through nearly ninety years of the most eventful period in European and American history. "Born," says Mr. Forster, of Landor, "in the year when the English colonies "in America rebelled; living through "all the revolutions in France and the "astonishing career of the great Na

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poleon; a sympathiser with the de"feated Paoli and the victorous Gari"baldi; contemporary with Cowper and "Burns, yet the survivor of Keats, "Wordsworth, and Byron, of Shelley, "Scott, and Southey; living while Gib"bon's first volume and Macaulay's last were published; to whom Pitt and Fox, and even Burke had been familiar, as were Peel and Russell; "who might have heard Mirabeau 66 attempting to save the French mon"archy and Mr. Gladstone predicting "the disruption of the American re"public: it would seem strange that a "single life should be large enough for "such experiences." Mr. Crabb Robinson had these same wide experiences. He lived to see the battle of Sadowa and the complete victory of Grant. Landor and Robinson were friends; and had many common friends. They were curiously, even comically, as unlike in temper and disposition as two men. of the same epoch could well be: one the least "clubbable" of men; the other made for society. As their biographies have appeared simultaneously there seems reason enough for speaking of them together, though the modesty of Mr. Robinson would have been

greatly shocked if it had been hinted to him that he should under any pretext be placed side by side with the author of "Gebir" and the " Imaginary Conversations.”

No one would have been qualified for a biographer of Landor who did not estimate these works very highly. Mr. Forster has shown the keenest appreciation of their beauties, and has bestowed valuable and discriminating criticism upon them. Every student and admirer of Landor may derive much instruction from his remarks. Still it may be a question whether they will contribute to the result which such a student and admirer would desire. We are rather saturated with criticism; when it is not flavoured with a little malice, as Mr. Forster's never is, one fears it may be passed over by the reader along with the passages which justify its truth. "Gebir," he admits, is caviare to the general. The simple announcement of that fact might whet the appetite of many a young man to show that he does not belong to "the general." If it were stated that Southey said he would go a hundred miles to see the author of that poem, and that Shelley devoured it so continually at Oxford that his friend Hogg had need to throw it out of the window of his room at University, in order to get an ordinary question answered; the desire to know something about the book might be still further enkindled. "Have you a copy of it? Is it in

the library of the club? I suppose one ought to read it? Perhaps one might purchase it at some second-hand bookseller's." So a certain man might speak to his neighbour at the dinnertable, till by degrees the volume which De Quincey pretended that no one had

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read but Southey and himself might be in a number of hands. The other method of compelling attention to a neglected book by vigorous panegyric is, no doubt, sometimes successful. few ardent youths preached Wordsworth incessantly, till the "Lyrical Ballads" and "Sonnets to Liberty" became tolerated in drawing-rooms. Professor Wilson, having every advantage of bodily as well as mental energy, insisted that a number of Edinburgh Pistols should eat the leek, who with wry faces did eat it accordingly. But when there is no poetical creed to be propagated, as there was in Wordsworth's case, such experiments generally fail. Men may be induced to read an unknown book on your recommendation, but they would rather find out its merits for themselves.

The like remark applies still more forcibly to Mr. Forster's reports of the "Imaginary Conversations," in his second volume. They should surely be left to tell their own tale. The best things that can be said about them will mislead anyone who will not study them for himself. He may fancy that they are altogether antique, and have no reference to his own time. He may fancy them so full of references to his own time that the purity of the antique is wholly lost. He may suppose that they imitate the style of certain thinkers and writers, or that they are not the least dramatic, and only embody the dogmas of the author. There is excuse for all these opinions; a phrase intended to represent certain characteristics of the book may confirm any one of them. The entire impression derived from the Dialogues themselves can alone correct and reconcile them. One can scarcely wish that Mr. Forster had not exhibited the critical ability to which these studies of his friend's works have given occasion. But for their sake it might, I think, have been better only to observe that able and accomplished teachers on the other side of the Atlantic, like Emerson and Lowell, are drinking with delight at the well of pure English undefiled which is to be found in the

"Conversations," whilst we are preferring streams muddy with vulgar rhetoric and slang. That comparison might

excite the inhabitants of the Smaller Britain to imitate the Greater.

Such grumblings as these would be very ungrateful if they were not intended to introduce the remark that Mr. Forster has supplied us with a commentary on these works which no criticism, even as good as his, could afford, -a commentary almost indispensable to the full understanding of them. The most well-disposed reader of the "Imaginary Conversations" must be frequently tormented by questions of this kind: What manner of man was the writer of this remarkable book? Was he an extreme Jacobin, or a flagrant aristocrat? Was he raised above ordinary prejudices, or was he drenched in them? Was he

a lover of his kind, or a hater of it? Was he the most cultivated of men, or the most savage? Was his difference from all the schools of thought in the midst of which he lived, and we are living, merely affected, or had he actually struck out a path of his own, in which he was determined to walk? A supercilious reader may affirm with a shrug of his shoulders, that it signities nothing what answer is given to these questions. But it does signify: one may like or dislike Landor's books heartily; they cannot be read with indifference. And those who do not read them with indifference must wish for satisfaction on these points, though they may despair of it. The satisfaction can only come from a biography. Mr. Forster has produced a thoroughly honest, a thoroughly affectionate one. He has determined that we should know his friend as he was. He has tasked other men's recollections of him, and has added his own testimony which we might account the most valuable, if Mr. Robert Landor had not aided him with a series of notes, clear, humorous, just, kind to his brother and to all with whom his brother was at strife,notes unrivalled for the illustration of a difficult and complicated character.

The result of these records-given in

the books-is nearly what we might have expected, and even hoped, to find. Landor was no pretender to a set of strange notions. The contradictions in

his writings faithfully express the contradictions in his life. He was a Jacobin from first to last. He was an aristocrat from first to last. In his boyhood his mother boxed his ears because he expressed a wish that the French would conquer England, and hang up George III. between the Archbishops of Canterbury and York. He could never agree with his other parent, a mild, intelligent physician, apparently too little disposed to assert his authority. He was removed from Rugby, though he wrote better Latin verses than any of his schoolfellows-Dr. Butler, afterwards the head master of Shrewsbury, being one of them for offering a gratuitous insult to the head master. At Oxford he wore no hair-powder, when to be without it was to confess revolutionary opinions. He did confess them in songs and in his habitual speech. He was nevertheless treated with a tolerance which, for a Tory college of those days, seems incredible, till he fired his fowling-piece into the window of a Mr. Leeds. It was, says Robert Landor, a mild form of protest against the Toryism of Leeds. Walter Landor himself places his justification on another ground. Besides being generally disagreeable, the offender had at that time a party of servitors and other raffs. This hatred of "raffs" went on pari passu with the growth of his Jacobinism. Neither in the least interfered with the other. He had an intense reverence for his family; could trace it back, amidst the jokes of his brother, to an unknown antiquity; in later years was hindered with difficulty by Mr. Forster from sending a challenge to Lord Russell, because in an unguarded hour he had written or spoken some words that sounded disrespectful about a Savage who was Speaker in the first Parliament of Henry VII., and whom, on somewhat suspicious evidence, Landor held to be a maternal ancestor. Of his primogeniture he was tenacious; when

he actually became a Welsh landlord, he maintained his position with much dignity, though he had the misfortune to fall out with most of the neighbouring gentry, to be cheated by his tenants and stewards, to find the Celtic peasants abominable.

And yet if any one concluded from these undoubted facts that Landor was an ungenial man who did not inspire affection, there is abundance of evidence to confute the opinion. His Rugby master parted with him reluctantly; his tutor at Trinity, "dear old Benwell," shed tears because, through Landor's own bad management, his fault could not be condoned. In his native Warwick he found a friend in Dr. Parr, who was attached to him through his life, though it could not be concealed that Landor used to call Charles James Fox a scoundrel. The affection of his mother, brothers, and sister seems not to have been shaken by all his eccentricities. A charming Dorothy Littleton, with whom all men were in love, came forward as an intercessor with his father, and showed more than the regard and more than the wisdom of an elder sister in her advice to him. Southey formed a friendship with him when both were grown men, with fixed and widely different opinions, which was never interrupted. He counted two clergymen, whose deepest convictions he must often have shocked, among the most firm of his friends. He was fond of children. And Mr. Forster says of him: "My own pre"dominant impression, from our years "of intercourse, during all which he was living alone, was that of a man genial, joyous, kind, and of a nature large and generous to excess, but of a temper so uncontrollably impetuous "and so prone to act from undisciplined impulse, that I have been less startled, upon a closer knowledge, to find it "said by others, unfaltering both in "admiration and true affection for him, "that during hardly any part of his life "between nine years till almost ninety "could he live with other people in "peace for any length of time; for that,

though always glad, happy, and good"humoured for a while, he was apt "gradually to become tyrannical when "he had power, and rebellious when "he had not" (p. 52).

The last words are spoken reluctantly, and without the least bitterness. They are unquestionably true. But they must be taken in their context; then they will leave an impression, painful indeed, full of warning for ourselves, but not one which can diminish our pity or even our respect for the subject of them.

So as to its prejudices. He felt the influence of the French Revolution as most thoughtful youths, just reaching the borders of manhood, felt it. Yet he hated Frenchmen, all the old John Bull feeling being strengthened by his conviction that they have no capacity for dispensing with an absolute ruler.

He was passionate in his zeal for the Spaniards; was willing to throw away money, of which he had a good supply at that time, in the Peninsular War. His life was at the service of the same cause; he went as a volunteer. But he fancied that some disparaging words spoken about another man were meant for him. The officer who uttered them explained that he was at that very time commending Landor's zeal and devotion. It was of no use. Though he had received a commission from the Junta, he returned home in disgust. He was evidently desirous to improve the Welsh till he went among them. He thought he preferred Italy to England till he became acquainted with Italians. He liked the President of the United States as an abstract representative of republicanism. But, as Mr. Forster remarks, with true insight and liberality, his republicanism was always negative, his friend Southey's always positive. Landor would have beheaded or hanged George III., but he never dreamed of a pantocracy; Southey in his most Tory days loved the people, while Landor only hated the king. He did in his heart of hearts detest injustice as injustice. But as he could never separate it from some man whom he supposed had

committed it, and as he thought himself the most ordinary victim of it, he was seldom more unjust than when denouncing it.

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So again his Culture was most refined and thorough; not dwelling on the surface of his mind, but penetrating it and possessing it. He might be inferior to a number of scholars, but his scholarship had an effect on his thought and his writing which is very rare. style surely bears such testimony as his, by its calmness and proportion, its freedom and its severity, to the influence of the best authors upon him, and to his own power of coping with them and mastering them. It is, moreover, adapted to this century, no copy of Taylor or Milton's, of South's or Addison's, though benefited and enriched by them all; still more by his classical reading, not corrupted or made the least pedantic by it. His style is never obtrusive, seldom leads you to think about it, but it always suggests a man of whose mind it must be the utterance. The dialogue was the rightly-chosen instrument of such a mind. He required it that he might present the different aspects of his own character; it kept up-t the balance of powers, each of which was always tending to excess. Mr. Emerson's praise of Landor that he was more devoted to pure literature than any man of his day has much justification; but it may be perverted to an entirely wrong sense. Pure literature is often taken to be dilettantism; the separation of letters from life. Landor was the very reverse of a dilettante. He was full of passion and of personality. Personality was his strength and his weakness; the secret of his power and the temptation to his greatest outrages.

This Culture, then, one is compelled to ask, which has made him so valuable to us, what could it do for himself? The oracle in the Eton Grammar frightens little boys from the faithful study of the ingenuous arts by telling them that it will not suffer them to be fierce. They might be encouraged to perseverance by Landor's example. This study, most