It is scarcely more than a curiosity. Landor's political petulance about Fox and Pitt, and especially Canning, is all very dead now. The only things readable in the book are the literary discussions to which Fox's love of books gives excuse; so that a book which set out to discuss Fox finds its most interesting business in discussing Homer, Virgil and Lucretius, the Greek tragedians and Pindar, many of the Italian and most of the English poets. But many of these opinions occur elsewhere in his writings, for instance his dislike of Spenser and admiration of Dryden; the most interesting, that I do not remember coming upon before, are his remark, which he illustrates, that it is not Virgil but Lucretius who best translates Homer, and his confession-all the stranger as coming from a man who always hated France and the French--that he does not believe that a comic writer ever existed who could have been the rival of Molière; for if, as he adds, "Menander was only the equivalent of two Terences (as he thought Caesar had said) he certainly was not the man.” But these are islands in a sea of rather tiresome and ignorant politics; for, if Landor knew any politics at all, it was those of Athens and Rome and Italy, not of England, and, least of all, of the England of his own day.

Other recent works are 'The Early Poems of Walter Savage Landor,' a study of Landor's debt to Milton by Mr. William Bradley, written as a thesis to be sent in for a German degree; and an interesting book by Mr. Brooks Henderson on Swinburne and Landor published in 1918. This is, however, of greater interest to Swinburnians than to Landorians,

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and it is sometimes fanciful in finding the influence of Landor in feelings and opinions which Swinburne might have got from many other sources, or have himself originated. But it does work out Swinburne's debts and resemblances to Landor in all sorts of details, and especially with reference to the nature and manner of his passion for liberty, and to what seems to be his confession in Thalassius,' that it was by Landor and Landor's ideal of heroic will that he had been delivered from the base pleasures and delirious surrenders of sensuality. Mr. Henderson also makes an interesting point in showing how Swinburne resembled Landor, and differed from his other two heroes, Hugo and Mazzini, in being an aristocratic and individualist Republican, not a Democrat of any kind.

But none of these books, not even the first, amount to important discoveries, either biographical or critical. Landor as we have him to-day is the Landor our fathers had fifty years ago. Nothing new about him has been given to us. Nothing that can be called a discovery has been made. I doubt if there is any to make. His classical spirit lived always in the daylight and proclaimed itself for what it was. Certainly I have no discovery to submit to you this afternoon, unless indeed to one or two of you-and here you must permit me what is a strange impertinence to address to the Royal Society of Literature— the discovery of Landor himself. Of course I do not suggest that there is anyone in such an audience as this who has read no Landor. But I am bold enough to wonder whether, even in this room, there may not be one or two to whom he is not very much more

than a name. With the general public he is not even that. I remember my indignation, some thirty years ago I suppose it was, when Landor's grandson became for a brief period a newspaper figure on account of his travels, and his admirers in the Press talked of him as "Landor," as if that word had not already a meaning which it can never lose. Here, of course, in the Royal Society of Literature, there is no fear of such confusion. We in this room know who it is to whom we refer when we talk about Landor.

Still, the fact that it is long since you had a paper about Landor encourages me in my venture, because it seems to me to confirm my impression that he is the most neglected of English classics. Certainly I cannot think of any writer who approaches him in his singular union of richness and variety of matter with perfection of form and who yet is so little read. So far as my experience goes, I should imagine that not one-tenth of the comparatively few who know him at all have carried their acquaintance with him beyond Sir Sidney Colvin's 'Golden Treasury' volume-one of the very best books in that admirable collection, but inevitably, of course, a very inadequate substitute for the vast abundance of the whole work of Landor, especially the many volumes of the Imaginary Conversations." And their abundance is such an important part of their greatness that no selection can possibly give a fair impression of them. It amounts to something of which the word universality can, I think, be used without unpardonable exaggeration. It is, of course, the same sort of universality as that of Cicero, to whom he was so devoted; not the universality of experience of which indeed

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Cicero had much more than he-but that which comes of very wide reading. Within those limits it is extraordinary. I will take the liberty of quoting on this subject a few sentences of my own which occur in the Introduction to a ' Day-Book of Landor,' which I compiled for the Oxford Press a year or two

ago:

"Like Cicero, whom he is never tired of praising, he had all the universality that can come of reading. And, while the world behind Cicero was one of only three or four centuries, and of only two peoples, the world in which Landor moves with such stately ease includes twenty-five centuries, and almost every nation and order of men which has played an important part in them. The classical world, the mediaeval and the modern, all meet in his pages: Greek and Persian, Roman and Carthaginian, Christian and pagan, monks and Mahomedans, Frenchmen and Germans, Englishmen and Italians, scholars and theologians, statesmen and soldiers, poets and critics, painters and Popes. Here is God's plenty indeed. There is nothing quite like it anywhere else; not even the vast embrace of Gibbon includes so much. It would be a pardonable exaggeration to say that there is nothing in the whole history of man which does not find a place somewhere in the Imaginary Conversations' of Landor."

How is it that a man with this prodigal wealth of material, and with a mastery of form which no competent judge has ever doubted, has so few readers to-day? Of course he is primarily a writer of prose, and writers of prose always have very great difficulty in outliving their own generation, or, at best, the I doubt if there are a dozen English prose writers born before Landor who can fairly be said to have many readers to-day. And an odd and irrelevant fact strikes me-nearly half of their names

next.

begin with B. But with Landor it is not a question of many readers. He appears to have scarcely any. Why? Primarily, I think, because his temper and whole cast of mind is one alien and distasteful to the prevailing intellectual and emotional fashions. Landor had in him a great deal of what to-day makes Milton unpopular, and he had not the genius by which Milton compels, first a reluctant attention, and then, in those who are fit to listen to him, wonder and admiration and delight. Like Milton, Landor was an aristocratic republican, with a constant scorn, always lofty and sometimes angry, of fools and knaves. Our age, on the other hand, between Rousseau in his way and Walt Whitman in his, has been taught to consider fools and knaves the equals or betters of wise men and saints. Like Milton, Landor hated tyrants, whether political or ecclesiastical, believed passionately in liberty, and knew that equality was merely a flattering lie. The world of to-day has got to re-learn the lesson of liberty, and see equality as it is, and not through the coloured spectacles of emotional sympathy. Again Landor, like Milton, was no mystic; and to-day we are all mystics, if not of religion, then of philosophy or politics. We either hate reason because it is a discipline (for we resent all kinds of discipline), or we have become impatient of it because we have discovered that it cannot do all that the eighteenth century and, indeed, a good deal of the nineteenth -supposed it could. So again, in matters of literature, Landor was soaked in all the great literatures of the world, and he knew that literature was an art with a continuous history, with laws and limitations, like