a • Waved to the winds were those long locks of gold, Which in a thousand burnish'd ringlets flow'd, And the sweet light, beyond all measure, glow'd, To me (if true or false, I know not) she 1: Me, in whose breast the amorous lure abode, But of angelic nature, and her tongue Had other utterance than of human sounds ; I saw her-Now, perhaps, not so–But wounds (To be completed in the Next Number.) . Art. II. Imaginary Conversations of Literary Men and Statesmen. By Walter Savage Landor, Esq. 2 vols. 8vo. pp. xvi, 764. Price 11. 4s. London, 1824. 1F F singularity of opinion and an adventurous spirit of para dox be just measures of literary merit, Mr. Landor is entitled to a very high reputation; for we scarcely recollect having seen a production more thickly studded over with disputable assertions, or more intersected with intellectual problems and historical doubts. With spells of no mean potency, the Author evokes old and forgotten questions from the grave, in which the universal consent and traditionary acquiescence of mankind had left them to repose; and raises new ones, where the common sense of the world, which is by no means a fallacious oracle, has never yet discovered an ambiguity. For ourselves, we are inclined to treat the case of Mr. Landor in respect of these symptoms, rather as a disorder of the intellect, than of the heart ;-as engendered less by the overstrained love of truth, which so often sends us in quest of specious fallacies, than by an inordinate self-love, whose omnivorous appetite finds a repast in all that sickers and offends a healthier palate. The pursuit of truth makes even its aberrations respectable ; but the writers of this sect, pursue her only seemingly and in show. They are hypocrites to her genuine worship; they mutter her name, while they are in reality sacrificing to their own vanity. To this polluted source, must be referred the pertinacity with which Mr. Landor flies in the face of facts resting upon the indisputable faith of historians, and the concurrent testimony of tradition. Monsters, at whose name humanity instinctively trembles, who, while they lived, were the scourges of their insulted species, and have since been canonized to everlasting infamy, are, at the touch of his spear, transformed into the benefactors and ornaments of mankind. To call into doubt the historical verdict which has so long been passed upon Tiberius, is a most wanton freak of scepticism. The víces of that emperor have been indeed depictured by the glowing pencil of Tacitus; but even Tacitus could give only faint and inadequate sketches of the gloomy, unfathomable recesses of a mind alike darkened by dissimulation and hardened by cruelty. According to Mr. Landor, this amiable prince retired to the Isle of Capreæ, not, as is vulgarly supposed, to veil his hideous sensualities from the reproachful gaze of Rome, but-to indulge amid its solitudes, a tender melancholy for the loss of his wife! Much injured Nero! A stroke of Mr. Landor's pen sets every thing right, redeems that imperial buffoon from the calumnies of Tacitus and Suetonius, and converts one of the worst tyrants of antiquity into 'a most virtuous and beneficent prince.' Nor are these outrageous propositions stated as mere historic doubts, like the deformity of Richard the Third, or the adventures of Bosworthfield, but passingly and parenthetically, as if they were unde. niable facts, which the Author thinks it beneath him to prove. We are not at any time disposed to shew much forbearance even to sportive violations of truth; yet, had they been hazarded as mere trials of intellectual gladiatorship, we might have endured them. But he who calls into unjust suspicion the fixed memorials of history, violates in so far forth, the sanctity of that important oracle, and annuls the force of its most instructive lessons. If it be done in jest, it is a ' poison• ing in jest,' -a savage jocularity,-a horse-play raillery, which the sober part of the community, parents, husbands, teachers, would do well to discountenance. Upon questions of a literary nature, Mr. Landor is perhaps entitled to more latitude. But here gain, he riots without modesty or self-control. Never did a more furious iconoclast break into the temple of fame, or more capriciously pull down from their niches the most consecrated reputations. These perversions of literary taste, however, may be endured, or left to the natural penalty they entail; for he who accuses all the world of bad judgement, is sure to convict only himself. Yet, though we are far, very far from blindly idolizing French literature in general, and French poetry much less --we confess to a little failure of patience, when we observed the best tragedy of the French theatre, the Zaïre of Voltaire pronounced to be a wretched imitation of Shakspeare ;' for, whenever we have perused this play, we have been disposed to exclaim of Voltaire as a tragic writer, . Si sic omnia dirisset.' It was here, that he seems to have given the full reins to his imagination, and to have been borne by a genuine poetical inspiration far above the conventional barriers of his national drama. The Zaïre does not, perhaps, display the finished versification and the artful but mellifluous softness of Racine, nor the scrupulous exactness of his plot, nor the gentle and easy gradation of his sentiment; nor does it reach the lofty imagination and the stern grandeur of Corneille. But it has something surpassing these ; – the warm, rapid utterance of the heart, a tone faithful to nature, a winning, resistless beauty of thought and of expression. Nor do we join in Mr. Landor's most contemptuous censures of Boileau. No poetry could endure the bed of torture on which he has pinched and squeezed that unfortunate satirist. But there is a want of common equity in making him liable to rebuke or ridicule, for the vices and absurdities of French versification. Boileau took the French verse as he found it; and the untuneable instrument on which he had to play, ought not, in fairness, to be a reproach to the poet. Mr. Landor, indeed, overflows with spleen against every thing that is French ;-French government, French literature, and French staircases. Such undistinguishing antipathies are great deformities in moral and philosophical discourse. They are symptoms of a mind that has surveyed mankind from a narrow horizon, and is little versed in the great and extended code of our nature. We wish, however, that we had not more serious ground of quarrel with the style and spirit of the “ Imaginary Conversations.” Profane language is one of the surest indications of coarse manners. More splendid graces of composition than any which Mr. Landor has at command, would not half expiate them. We ask, whether the following sentence, which occurs in the dialogue between Louis the Fourteenth and Father La Chaise, his confessor, and which is put into the mouth of the latter, is a becoming mode of discoursiog concerning that Being whose name we are forbidden to desecrate, but whose name cannot but be desecrated, when it is connected with low, and vulgar, and unhallowed associations ? They' (speaking of heretics) · hardly treat God Almighty like a gentleman, grudge him a clean napkin at his own table, and spend less * upon him than upon a Christmas dinner.' (Vol. II. p. 120.) Similar instances might be adduced, but we desist from so ungrateful a duty. Indelicacy of expression also is but a meagre substitute for wit. The book opened at random might supply us with various offences of this description. We point only to the dialogue between Middleton and Magliabeschi, and to a few vulgar expressions uttered by Oliver Cromwell in his conversation with Walter Noble, which, how characteristic soever of the plain and uncircuitous phrase of the Protector, have long since been banished from social life, and are never seen in any printed books that are suffered to lie on a drawingroom table. Besides all this, a spirit of gloomy, discontented republicanism is perpetually struggling for vent in every page of the work. Mr. Landor is the indefatigable reviler of thrones and dignities. All eminence, every thing, in a word, that breaks the flat level of social equality, is sure to excite a contemptuous or peevish remark. These are unamiable sentiments, and disfigure a literary production, (which, generally speaking, is written with much elegance,) like the frowns and wrinkles of discontent lurking amid the charms of the female countenance. In truth, they are some of the worst modifications of a selfish vanity. The hatred of all that overtops ourselves, is rarely found in company with ingenuous or noble feelings. The heart that has systematically trained itself to hate the high, is not one whit the more sensitive to the sufferings and supplications of the low. In Mr. Landor's book, whatever happens to be the theme of the dialogue, the growl of his thorough-base is rarely intermitted. Kings, emperors, Eng. lish diplomatists are perpetually assailed by an ambushed and unsuspected warfare, though the subject of disquisition may not have the slightest connexion with any thing which he lays to their charge. These are serious blemishes in a work which, in various parts, evinces considerable talent. We might pass over the affected orthography which pervades it; and although it has alternately provoked our smile, and exhausted our patience, we are disposed to let him adjust his own quarrel with Dyche and the grave authorities of our tongue, against whom he rises in such wanton rebellion. The same idle attempt was made by Middleton, by Mitford, and by Ritson ; but none have enlisted under their standard, and their senseless innovations have disfigured only their own pages. We gladly pass on to the more agreeable office of pointing out passages which do more credit to the good-sense and ingenuity of the Author ; premising that Mr. Landor, like many other respectable persons who are more agreeable companions abroad than at home, becomes more pleasing the further he gets from his own times and from the political and religious abuses with which, in his apprehension at least, they are teeming. We have travelled with him pleasantly enough through some of the disquisitions, in which the wise and good of past ages hold a share, and in which we have not been offended with the querulousness and the sarcasın with regard to which we have just used some slight freedom of remonstrance. But even this commendation must not go unqualified. For instance, while we cordially allow that the dialogue between Roger Ascham and Lady Jane Grey is exquisitely wrought, and that it displays no ordinary beauties both of sentiment and language, --we cannot with equal readiness admit, that he has identified himself with the spirit, or transfused into his pages the diction of antiquity with the felicity for which more than one of our contemporary Journalists have given him credit. The conversation between Cicero and his brother Quinctus, for instance, bears no resemo blance to the manner of the great orator, or to that which we should attribute to one who had pursued the same studies, and must have been deeply tinctured with his style and sentiment. How widely remote from the unrestrained flow of language, the easy correctness, the graceful and swelling redundance of Tully in his public and philosophical discourses, and even in his epistles, where, to use his own phrase, he made use of a lighter and less forensic diction—' leviore quodam sono usus, et qui impetum orationis non habet,'-are the antithetical sentences contained in the following passage selected from that dialogue ! Quinctus had been comparing Cæsar with Sertorius, observing that, having acted upon a more splendid theatre, he might, perhaps, appear at a distance a still greater character. To this Marcus replies : • He will seem so to those only, who place temperance and prudence, fidelity and patriotism, aside from the component parts of greatness. Cesar, of all men, knew best when to trust fortune : Ser. torius never trusted her at all, nor marched a step along a path he had not explored. The best of Romans slew the one, the worst the other: the death of Cesar was that which the wise and virtuous would most deprecate for themselves and their children; that of Ser. torius what they would most desire. And since, Quinctus, we have seen the ruin of our country, and her enemies are intent on ours, let us be grateful that the last years of life have neither been useless nor inglorious, and that it is likely to close, not under the condemnation of such citizens as Cato and Brutus, but as Lepidus and Antonius. It is with more sorrow than asperity that I reflect on Caius Cesar. O! had his heart been unambitious as his style, had he been as prompt to succour his country as to enslave her, how great, how incomparably great were he! Then perhaps at this hour, o Quinctus, and in this villa, we should have enjoyed his humorous and erudite discourse; for no man ever tempered so seasonably and so justly the materials of conversation. How graceful was he ! how unguarded! His whole character was uncovered; as we represent the bodies of heroes and of gods. Him I shall see again; and, while |