drew his warmest sympathies. He represented to his friends with the explosive candour that ever distinguished him his full approval of the excesses in Paris and his longing for the guillotine in London for George the Third and the dignitaries of the church. At Rugby his rebellious spirit brought him into conflict with his master over a false quantity, and he had to leave the school at sixteen and went into the house of a private tutor. At eighteen he entered Trinity College, Oxford, and at once got the name of the "mad Jacobin". He had not been long there before his defiance of authorities led to his rustication. Going home, he quarrelled with his father over his conduct in this affair, and he shook the dust of his home in Warwick off his feet. He settled in London in 1794, and by the intervention of friends had the quarrel patched up and an allowance of £150 made him. With this he returned to Wales where he spent the next three years. During the last years of the century he shifted about from place to place, now in Wales, again at Bath, sometimes in Warwick, sometimes in London. He was never and could never be at rest.

13. Republicanism and verse were the first instinct of such a temperament, and, though he never wholly abandoned either, he came soon to hate and scorn the French, and he failed to achieve anything in the latter. Bold and passionate as his revolutionism was, it never amalgamated with his poetic spirit. In his first publication "The Poems of Walter Savage Landor, London, 1795" there are some evidences of his opinions, an Ode to Washington, and a piece called French Villagers, and his second also belonging to that year was an anonymous satire against Pitt; but the new spirit has little to do with the atmosphere of his verse taken as a whole. His literary faculty was long dominated by the eighteenth century, and by his classicism, which he substituted for its pseudo-classicism. It was Dryden, Pope, Gray, that were his models in his earlier poems, when he did not prefer Latin to English. In his first volume most of the pieces are in the heroic couplet, and the themes are evidently inspired by the Queen Anne age, The Birth of Poesie, An

Apology for Satire, Abelard to Eloisa. modern dress; his

Pyramus and Thisbe, An Epistle from His contemporary themes have a more Ode to Washington is in the manner of Gray, and his French Villagers is in a four-lined stanza. But his anonymous satire, A Moral Epistle, is a manifest imitation of Pope. There were also in his earlier volume a large number of Latin pieces of verse and a Latin piece of prose defending the continued use of the classical tongue as a medium of expression. The English Epigrams in the book were partly inspired by Martial, partly by the Queen Anne age.

14. Afterwards he changed his allegiance. My prejudices in favour of ancient literature began to wear away on reading Paradise Lost". Blank verse drove out his love of the heroic couplet and the ode, and his poetry became thereafter more epic on the one hand and more lyrical on the other. Yet even to his last days he occasionally used the favourite verse of Pope, and the octosyllabic verse of Swift was not unusual with him. His greatest effort and longest poem, Gebir, the product of his Welsh period, is in blank verse. It was printed and published in Warwick in 1798, the year of the appearance of the first volume of Lyrical Ballads. He had also been strongly stirred in Wales by three different passions, one for Rose Aylmer whom he names in some of his brief lyrics, another for a Miss Jones whose name appears in his lyrics as Ione, and a more lasting one for a Miss Sophia Jane Swift afterwards Countess of Molande and later Duchess of Luxembourg; the second name of this lady he poetised into Ianthe, and this word is liberally sprinkled over his amorous and fanciful lyrics. For the ever-varying metres and styles of the third decade of his life it is evident that he studied Elizabethan songs; yet none of them have that spontaneous melody or that natural grace which belongs to the best of these only half-artificial bursts of music; his zigzagging passions lead him into abrupt changes of thought and expression; the warmth of his feeling is more apparent than its naturalness; placed beside any one of Burns's or Shelley's, these, two of the best, appear artificial and spasmodic, if not prosaic ;

X

"Thou hast not raised, Ianthe, such desire
In any breast as thou hast raised in mine.
No wandering meteor now, no marshy fire,
Leads on my steps, but lofty, but divine.
And if thou chillest me as chill thou dost,
When I approach too near, too boldly gaze,
So chills the blushing morn, so chills the host
Of vernal stars, with light more chaste than day's."
"Soon as Ianthe's lip I prest,

Thither my spirit winged its way;

Ah, there the wanton would not rest!
Ah, there the wanderer could not stay

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He was, in fact, too imitative to give his feelings new and natural expression. His latest studies always guided his somewhat reluctant utterance. Towards the close of the century he had come across the translations of Sir William Jones and Dr. Nott from the Arabic and the Persian, and in 1800 he published in pamphlet "Poems from the Arabic and the Persian"; they are not translations but imitations of translations. His great admiration for Pindar similarly affected the volume of poetry which he issued in 1802, containing Chrysaor and The Phocaeans, two blank verse narrative poems, as it had already tinged the Miltonism of his Gebir with abruptness and obscurity; the volume also contained some of his love lyrics. In 1804 he read Herbert's translations from the Icelandic, and immediately he issued his Gunlaug, a narrative of the loves of the hero and Helga, in octosyllabic couplets. It is the least obscure of all his longer poems, and tells the story more in the manner of Scott, though it was published the year before the first of Scott's poems, The Lay of the Last Minstrel. After betrothal the hero goes off on a three years' war expedition; the father of the heroine forces her to marry Rafen the friend of Gunlaug on the very day of his return; the two fight a duel and in spite of the treachery of Rafen he is slain by the true-hearted warrior and lover. There is in this poem Landor's closest approach to the nature-school of poets; there is sympathetic insight into nature and the hero loves all living things; even the dormouse is dear to him, "tamest of hearts that beat on wilds", "docile the day it's caught ".

"All living things are ministers

To him, whose hand attunes the spheres
And guides a thousand worlds, and binds
(Work for ten godheads) female minds!"

15. But it was Gebir by which he seems to have desired to be known as a poet. For he wrote it with the greatest care, passages of it first in Latin and then in English; and in 1802 he revised it with as great care, and along with his brother added in a new edition of it elaborate notes; nay, he made a Latin translation of it in order to recommend it to the scholarly audience of London critics and parliament men. And before he first published it he had reduced it to half its size, striving after condensation of narrative. He had found the story in a collection of tales by Clara Reeve and was attracted by its Eastern atmosphere and the opportunity of painting a hero. Gebir, Moorish prince of Spain, makes war upon Charoba Queen of Egypt; but Dalica her nurse, a sorceress, advises her to go to him and get him to rebuild the city in Egypt once built by his ancestor ; the interview touches the hearts of both; his eyes "Showed if they had not, that they might have lov'd; For there was pity in them at that hour".

He went to consult his shepherd brother Tamar, and, finding that he had fallen in love with a nymph, pities him, and yet tells of his own love; he determines, therefore, to accept the challenge and rebuild the city. But when the army has worked six days at the restoration, all their work is undone again by some magic. Gebir, therefore, disguises himself as his brother Tamar and meeting the nymph defeats her in a wrestling bout; she tells him the rites by which he will be able to overcome the magic. He performs them; and at the conclusion a black abyss opens, and the spirit of his ancestor, Aroar, leads him down into the world below; he sees his ancestors afar; one of them, strange to say, in the likeness of George the Third, "a wretch" "with eyebrows white and slanting brow", and another in that of the beheaded king of France who, "bound down supine ", "shrinks yelling from sword there engine-hung", and a third in that of Charles the Second "who sold his people to a rival king", to "the harp's gay simpering air". His own father's spirit regrets that he had exacted a vow from him to

avenge him on Egypt. Aroar tells him of the punishment of those "who tortured law to silence or to speech as pleased themselves ", and those "who lov'd their country for the spoils it gave". Then the hero returns to earth. But Dalica knows all, and, thinking to protect her country from the foreigner, gets a poisoned robe from her sister, and, when the nuptials between her mistress and Gebir are being performed, presents him with it. He dies of the venom in the arms of Charoba. Tamar and his nymph are wedded and journey far along the Mediterranean.

16. There is no attempt made to render the story easy for the reader; the transitions are abrupt, the purpose of each episode or incident far from clear; he seems often to be emulating Pindar in his obscurity and his love of the poetry of sounding names; perhaps too, he is following Shakespeare in the concentrated energy of his later diction; for in the third book he says he "drank of Ayon”, “a dangerous draught that roused within the feverish thirst of song". In this book too he is thinking of Dante and his Inferno, as he describes Gebir's descent into Hades; he begins to long for the spirit of that

"matchless man,

Whom Nature led throughout her whole domain,
While he embodied breath'd ethereal air ".

Many of his references are most obscure and his neologisms are not always happy or even necessary; the "laminous length" of the pavement, "her scient hand", "with libant lip", "steps once warm with frequentation", "disregardful of the sympathics" are excrescences; so too are many of his forced classical constructions, his double epithets like "that fierce frightful man" and "extravagant enormous apertures", and his alliterative lines like "rose from a river rolling in its bed", and "Phlegethon formed a fiery firmament"; and some of his similes and metaphors are strained and unnatural, as "touching the very eye-ball of the heart". But there is genuine poetry throughout numberless passages and some of the phrases and lines reveal almost Shakespearean power of expression; humility "a tattered cloak that pride wears when deform'd"; Charoba was wretched up to royalty";