THERE is perhaps no writer of the present age, taken in the whole, more likely to survive and make acquaintance with another, than Mr. Landor. This is often the reward of those writings which, on their first appearance, have neither been much depreciated nor much extolled; for the right balance is as apt to be lost by a sudden jerk upward, as by a stone thrown in. Mr. Landor has avoided both extremes. Wisdom may have feared him as something dangerous; but Folly has avoided him as something incomprehensible. He has been left to take his solitary way; and has omitted no privilege of singularity that belonged to it. With one hand resting near the heart of Southey, he has clenched and thrust the other into the face of every god of Southey's idolatry. A writer of the extremest liberal opinions, he has desired not to be confounded 'with the Coxes and Foxes of the age.' A declared Republican, VOL. VIII. No. II. 46 though the representative of an ancient family, he has rebuked 'the drunken democracy of Mr. William Pitt. But of this wayward spirit, we are bound to add, there has been much less of late than of old. The violent and capricious will has not so often run before, and committed, the masculine intellect. The phrases just now quoted, are not even preserved in this edition. And other evidence is here, of abated bitterness, of enlarged and manly tenderness, and of wisdom as generous and cordial as it is lofty and pure. In these volumes are collected, for the first time, the entire works of this remarkable writer. Here are his poems, both English and Latin, with many large and striking additions, (we may instance the series of Hellenics;) his Tragedies, his Dramatic Fragments, and a new five-act Play on the Siege of Ancona, (all which he modestly classes under the general title of Acts and Scenes, describing them as Imaginary Conversations in Metre;) and his Examination of Shakespeare; his Pentameron; and his Pericles and Aspasia;-bearing, every one of them, the marks of thorough revision, and enriched, especially the Pericles, with innumerable new passages quite worthy of the old. Of these last-named out a sense of the beauty and wisdom with which they had affected the writer's soul; nor do we feel surer of the destiny of any existing works with future generations. What remains to be named of the Collection, are those famous Dialogues with which Mr. Landor's name is most extensively associated. books it is not our present intention to Greek in the form, as well as in much of speak; but we cannot pass them in even the matter of his reasoning,) are those in this recital, without remarking that in them, the celebrated Cortegiano of Raffaelle's more perhaps, than in any other of his friend, Castiglione; in which Bembo and writings, (and eminently in the exquisite others are the speakers. There is a good Pentameron, where Petrarch and Boccaccio old English translation, with the title of converse; and in the Shakespeare Exami- the Court-Gentleman. nation, where the great poet speaks as the When this Journal formerly spoke of the author of Hamlet and Othello might have Imaginary Conversations, it was pointed spoken;) Mr. Landor's genius has thorough-out how exquisite the discrimination of ly subjected itself to those of his characters. character was in many cases, and how Every word they utter in these books, issues strange and wilful the indifference to it in It is twenty-two years since the Imaginary Conversations were noticed in this Journal. They consisted then of thirty-six Dialogues, and were comprised in two volumes. In the course of the five following years, the volumes increased to five, and the Dialogues to eighty-two. In number, without naming their enlargement and increase in other respects, the latter now amount to a hundred and twenty-five, and occupy nearly a volume and a half of this general edition; which, we may remark, is beautifully, clearly, and not too minutely printed, in the form of double columns. Certainly no other book of Conversations, with which we are acquainted, can be said in all respects to compare with them. We do not speak merely of the 'Dialogues' between Theron and Aspasia, Hylos and Philonous, and other ideal personages;-in which writers, great and small, the Berkeleys and We others: How imperfect the dramatic appreciation of the intellect of the speakers, and of the literary tone of the age, for example, in such Dialogues as those of Hume and Home;-how perfect in such as Elizabeth and Burleigh, Ascham and Jane Grey, Henry and Anne Boleyn, Burnet and Hardcastle; and in all those of the Men and Women of Antiquity. We might again take up and pursue this contrast. might show how subtle and exact the art which sets before us the colloquy of Marvel and Parker, of the Emperor of China and his Minister, of Rochefoucault and La Fontaine, of Melancthon and Calvin, of Steele and Addison, of Lucian and Timotheus; and of other and grander Voices from the graves of Greece and Romewhile we condemned, for mere wilful singularity and want of keeping, the hearty, instead of dry tone of his Washington; the odd retinence of his Abbé Delille, who, being the most talkative Frenchman on record, lets the Englishman have almost all the talk to himself; the mere self-ventriloquizing of his Franklins, Southeys, Romillys, Sheridans, Talleyrands, and even his Galileos and Miltons; -his well-educated language, where no such advantage the Harveys, have recommended their re- could possibly have been heard of; and his spective systems of Metaphysics or Divini- high reasoning powers, where nothing of ty;-but of Dialogues attributed to real the kind existed. In one of the many adpeople, such as those by Langhorne, Lyt- ditions to the old Dialogues which we obtelton, and Hurd. Of these, Langhorne's serve in this Collection, there is indeed an little book, in which Charles the Second answer attempted on the latter point. Mr. and his Wits are speakers, is perhaps the Landor intimates that no one would care clined to look at them; and he implies that if this is a blemish in his book, it is one his book would be worse without. liveliest and most in character. Lyttelton is also amusing, and not uncharacteristic. Hurd, though occasionally warmed by recollections of poetry and romance, is on the whole politely cold. If we went abroad to pursue the comparison, we should say, passing Fénélon, Paschal, and Fontenelle, that perhaps the best Dialogues for character, written up to the time of Mr. Landor, since the time of their great European inventor, Plato, (for the Indians were before the for his statesmen and kingly interlocutors of the inferior class, if he were to show them as they show theinselves, -encrusted with all the dirtiness they contract in public life, in the debility of ignorance, in the distortion of prejudice, or in the trickery of partisanship. He reasons that, principles and ideas being his objects, they must not only be reflected from high and low, but must also be exhibited where people can see them best, and are most in We doubt this. We have great faith for what is exact and true in every thing, and would for the most part leave it to tell for what it simply is. And we suspect the secret of these perverse departures from obvious character, to lie no deeper than Mr. Landor's substitution of his own caprice and pleasure for all other considerations. It is very clear to us in such cases, that it is Mr. Landor himself who is too plainly visible throughout, whomsoever he makes the organ of his opinions; and with all our hearty admiration of him, we must own that in the special instances adverted to, we are obstructed and thrown back by an amount of this personal wilfulness, far from becoming such an arbiter and universalist as we otherwise gladly recognize in him. His opinions are then greatly too much at the command of his predilections; -sometimes of his momentary humors. He has capricious enmities, and unreasonable likings. You see assent and dissent occasioned by wonted fires, and again shoot up into much to think that the introduction must lie over for a little while, the Doctor remarked, in his heavy solid way, 'Why, sir, I can wait! So can Mr. Landor. mere regard for one speaker and dislike ing or the afternoon of the present day. for another. He runs into violent hyper- When the young gentleman who fancied boles both of praise and blame; is a great his acquaintance and patronage would be a deal too fond, for a demonstrative critic, comfort to Doctor Johnson, grieved very of sweeping preferences of this and that, to 'all' that 'ever' was written in 'any' age or country; is apt to have more images than arguments, owing to the same exuberance of fancy; sometimes allows his robust animal spirits to swell to insolence, or to degenerate into coarseness; is often too prolix in his jokes and stories; and (to get rid as fast as we can of these objections on limited points) is too much tempted, by the nicety and exactness of his scholarship, to substitute verbal criticism for spiritual; and to tire his readers with accumulated objections to people whom the world have long ceased to make gods of. 'Are you certain that in their inferences they are all quite sound?"-is one of the new questions, in one of the old Dialogues. 'Indeed,' is Mr. Landor's candid and sufficient answer, 'I do not know perfectly that they are; but they will give such exercise in discussing them, as always tends to make other men's healthier.' Nothing can more truly indicate what is probably, after all, their greatest charm. Mr. Landor's genius has a wonderfully suggestive quality. Even where he most offends But, these drawbacks stated, how little in reality they affect the great bulk of against taste or judgment, he rarely fails these Conversations. What a weighty book to stimulate thought and reflection. Parathey make! How rich in scholarship; doxes, in him simply wilful and preposterhow correct, concise, and pure in style; ous, will often be found to contain very prohow full of imagination, wit, and humor; found truths for us. We may assent or we how well informed, how bold in speculation, may oppose, but we must think when in how various in interest, how universal in sympathy! In these hundred and twentyfive Dialogues, making allowance for every shortcoming or excess, the most familiar and the most august shapes of the Past are reanimated with vigor, grace, and beauty. Its long dead ashes rekindle suddenly their company with him; and we shall always find ourselves the wealthier for what thought germinates within us. How much the more when, in his higher and nobler compositions, we see Suggestion drop its richest fruit in perfected and consummate Truths; and when every thought and feeling are |