From the Edinburgh Review. LANDOR'S COLLECTED WRITINGS. though the representative of an ancient family, he has rebuked the drunken democracy of Mr. William Pitt.' But of this The Collected Writings of WALTER SAV-wayward spirit, we are bound to add, there AGE LANDOR. With many additions. has been much less of late than of old. Two volumes, large 8vo. London: The violent and capricious will has not so 1846. 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 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 When this Journal formerly spoke of the Imaginary Conversations, it was pointed 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 author of Hamlet and Othello might have spoken ;) Mr. Landor's genius has thorough-out how exquisite the discrimination of ly subjected itself to those of his characters. Every word they utter in these books, issues 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. 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. character was in many cases, and how strange and wilful the indifference to it in 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. We 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 Rome— while 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, Certainly no other book of Conversations, being the most talkative Frenchman on rewith which we are acquainted, can be said in cord, lets the Englishman have almost all all respects to compare with them. We do the talk to himself; the mere self-ventrilonot speak merely of the 'Dialogues' between quizing of his Franklins, Southeys, RoTheron and Aspasia, Hyls and Philonous, millys, Sheridans, Talleyrands, and even and other ideal personages;-in which his Galileos and Miltons;-his well-eduwriters, great and small, the Berkeleys and cated 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 liveliest and most in character. Lyttelton for his statesmen and kingly interlocutors is also amusing, and not uncharacteristic. of the inferior class, if he were to show Hurd, though occasionally warmed by re- them as they show themselves,-encrusted collections of poetry and romance, is on with all the dirtiness they contract in pubthe whole politely cold. If we went abroad lic life, in the debility of ignorance, in the to pursue the comparison, we should say, distortion of prejudice, or in the trickery passing Fénélon, Paschal, and Fontenelle, of partisanship. He reasons that, princithat perhaps the best Dialogues for charac-ples and ideas being his objects, they must ter, written up to the time of Mr. Landor, not only be reflected from high and low, since the time of their great European inven- but must also be exhibited where peotor, Plato, (for the Indians were before the ple can see them best, and are most in 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. ( wonted fires, and again shoot up into warmth and brightness. 'Large utterances,' musical and varied voices, 'thoughts We doubt this. We have great faith that breathe' for the world's advancement, for what is exact and true in every thing, words that burn' against the world's opand would for the most part leave it to tell pression, sound on throughout these lofty for what it simply is. And we suspect the and earnest pages. We are in the high secret of these perverse departures from and goodly company of Wits and Men of obvious character, to lie no deeper than Letters; of Churchmen, Lawyers, and Mr. Landor's substitution of his own caprice Statesmen; of Party men, Soldiers, and and pleasure for all other considerations. Kings; of the most tender, delicate, and It is very clear to us in such cases, that it noble Women; and of Figures that seem is Mr. Landor himself who is too plainly this instant to have left for us the Agora or visible throughout, whomsoever he makes the Schools of Athens,-the Forum or the the organ of his opinions; and with all our Senate of Rome. At one moment we hearty admiration of him, we must own have politicians discussing the deepest questhat in the special instances adverted to, tions of state; at another, philosophers still we are obstructed and thrown back by an more largely philosophizing;-poets talkamount of this personal wilfulness, far from ing of poetry, men of the world of worldly becoming such an arbiter and universalist matters, Italian and French of their reas we otherwise gladly recognize in him. spective Literatures and Manners. WhethHis opinions are then greatly too much at er such a book obtains its meed now or the command of his predilections;-some- hereafter, will be the least part of the writer's times of his momentary humors. He has ca- concern whether it is to be read in the pricious enmities, and unreasonable likings. present age or the next, may occupy his You see assent and dissent occasioned by thought no more than whether in the mornmere 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, 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 saine 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. But, these drawbacks stated, how little in reality they affect the great bulk of these Conversations. What a weighty book they make! How rich in scholarship; how correct, concise, and pure in style; how full of imagination, wit, and humor; how well informed, how bold in speculation, 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 comfort to Doctor Johnson, grieved very 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. '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 against taste or judgment, he rarely_fails to stimulate thought and reflection. Paradoxes, in him simply wilful and preposterous, will often be found to contain very profound truths for us. We may assent or we may oppose, but we must think when in 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 |