of almost homely heroism which comes to one with a direct thrill; in 'Beatrice Cenci' there is both pity and terror; a deep tenderness in the scene between Beatrice and Margarita, and, in the last scene, where the citizens, 'at a distance from the scaffold,' hear the groans of Beatrice under torture, and suffer indignant agonies with each groan, a profound and almost painful beauty, at times finding relief in such lines as these: 'She always did look pale, They tell me; all the saints, and all the good Of dawn-red hue even before that day? Was there a cheek the rose had rested on?' In some of the briefer scenes, those single conversations in which Landor could be so much more himself than in anything moving forward from scene to scene, there are lines that bite as well as shine; such lines as those of the drunken woman who has drowned her child: 'Febe. I sometimes wish 't were back again. То сгу? Febe. Ah! it does cry ere the first sea-mew cries; It is, after all, for their single lines, single speeches, separate indications of character (the boy Cæsarion in 'Antony and Octavius,' the girl Erminia in 'The Siege of Ancona,' a strain of nobility in the Consul, of honesty in Gallus, Inez de Castro at the moment of her death), that we remember these scenes. If we could wholly forget much of the rest, the 'rhetoric-roses,' not always 'supremely sweet,' though 'the jar is full,' the levity without humour, and, for the most part, without grace, the 'giggling' women (he respects the word, and finds it, in good Greek, in Theocritus), the placid arguing about emotions, his own loss of interest, it would seem, in some of these pages as he wrote them, we might make for ourselves in Landor what Browning in a friendly dedication calls him, 'a great dramatic poet,' and the master of a great and flawless dramatic style. There is another whole section of Landor's work, consisting of epigrams and small poems, more numerous, perhaps, than any English poet since Herrick has left us. Throughout his life he persistently versified trifles, as persistently as Wordsworth, but with a very different intention. Wordsworth tries to give them a place in life, so to speak, talking them, as anecdotes or as records of definite feelings; while Landor snatches at the feeling or the incident as something which may be cunningly embalmed in verse, with almost a funereal care. Among these poems which he thus wrote there are immortal successes, such as 'Dirce' or 'Rose Aylmer,' with many memorable epitaphs and epitomes, and some notable satires. By their side there is no inconsiderable number of petty trivialities, graceful nothings, jocose or sentimental trifles. With a far less instinctive sense of the capacities of his own language than Herrick, Landor refused to admit that what might make a poem in Latin could fail to be a poem in English. He won over many secrets from that close language; but the ultimate secrets of his own language he never discovered. Blake, Shelley, Keats, Coleridge, Wordsworth, among his contemporaries, could all do something that he could not do, something more native, more organically English, and therefore of a more absolute beauty as poetry. He reads Pindar for his 'proud complacency and scornful strength. If I could,' he says, 'resemble him in nothing else, I was resolved to be as compendious and as exclusive.' From Catullus he learned more, and his version of one of the lighter poems of Catullus has its place to-day, as if it were an original composition, among the mass of his collected lyrics, where it is not to be distinguished from the pieces surrounding it. Yet, if you will compare any of Landor's translations, good as they are, with the original Latin, you will see how much of the energy has been smoothed out, and you will realise that, though Catullus in Landor's English is very like Landor's English verse, there is something, of infinite importance, characteristic alike of Catullus and of poetry, which has remained behind, uncapturable. Is it that, in Coleridge's phrase, 'he does not possess imagination in its highest form'? Is it that, as I think, he was lacking in vital heat? No poet has ever been a bad prose-writer, whenever he has cared to drop from poetry into prose; but it is doubtful whether any poet has been quite so fine, accomplished, and persistent a prose-writer as Landor. 'Poetry,' he tells us, in one of his most famous passages, 'was always my amusement, prose my study and business. I have published five volumes of "Imaginary Conversations": cut the worst of them thro' the middle, and there will remain in this decimal fraction quite enough to satisfy my appetite for fame. I shall dine late; but the dining-room will be well lighted, the guests few and select.' Without his prose Landor is indeed but half, if he is half, himself. His verse at its best has an austere nobility, a delicate sensitiveness, the qualities of marble or of onyx. But there is much also which is no more than a graceful trifling, the verse of a courtly gentleman, who, as he grows older, takes more and more assiduous pains in the shaping and polishing of compliments. It is at its best when it is most personal, and no one has written more nobly of himself, more calmly, with a more lofty tenderness for humanity seen in one's small, private looking-glass. But the whole man never comes alive into the verse, body and soul, but only as a stately presence. He has put more of himself into his prose, and it is in the prose mainly that we must seek the individual features of his soul and temperament. Every phrase comes to us with the composure and solemnity of verse, but with an easier carriage under restraint. And now he is talking, with what for him is an eagerness and straightforwardness in saying what he has to say, the 'beautiful thoughts' never 'disdainful of - JAMES SMITH AND HORATIO SMITH 189 sonorous epithets.' And you discover that he has much more to say than the verse has quite fully hinted at: a whole new hemisphere of the mind becomes visible, completing the sphere. And in all his prose, though only in part of his verse, he has the qualities which he attributes to Pindar: 'rejection of what is light and minute, disdain of what is trivial, and selection of those blocks from the quarry which will bear strong strokes of the hammer and retain all the marks of the chisel.' He wrote far more prose than verse, concentrating his maturest years upon the writing of prose. Was it, then, that his genius was essentially a prose genius, and that it was only when he turned to prose that, in the fullest sense, he found himself? I do not think it can be said that the few finest things in Landor's verse are excelled by the best of the many fine things in his prose; but the level is higher. His genius was essentially that of the poet, and it is to this quality that he owes the greater among the excellences of his prose. In the expression of his genius he was ambidextrous, but neither in prose nor in verse was he able to create life in his own image. No one in prose or in verse has written more finely about things; but he writes about them, he does not write them. JAMES SMITH (1775-1839) AND HORATIO SMITH (1779-1849) 1 JAMES and HORATIO SMITH were collaborators in one of the most perfect collections of parodies that exist, the 'Rejected Addresses,' published in 1812, in answer to a public appeal from the manager of Drury Lane Theatre for 'an Address to be spoken upon the opening of the Theatre,' after its rebuilding. The volume contained twenty-one parodies 1 (1) Rejected Addresses, 1812. (2) Horace in London, 1813. (3) Amarynthus, the Nympholept (by Horace), 1821. (4) Gaieties and Gravities, 2 vols., 1825. (5) Memoirs, Letters, and Comic Miscellanies, in Prose and Verse, of the late James Smith, edited by his br other Horace Smith, 2 vols., 1840. (6) Poetical Works of Horace, 2 vols., 1846. of living poets, done with equal skill, wit, and ingenuity by the two brothers. The success was immediate, and, for such a book, enormous, and very little of its savour has gone out of it after a century. Some of the parodies which must have been among the most amusing at a time when the Hon. William Spencer was commonly confused with an older poet of similar name, can scarcely appeal to us as they did to those familiar with the verses parodied. But the Wordsworth, the Coleridge, the Scott ('I certainly must have written this myself' said 'that fine-tempered man' to one of the authors), the Southey, all these remain a perpetual delight, unsurpassed by any later parodist. The words of Shelley, used of one, might well be applied to both, who, if they laughed inordinately, laughed without 'a sting in the tail of the honey.' Here is Shelley's summing up in verse: 'Wit and sense, Virtue and human knowledge; all that might Are all combined in Horace Smith.' And in talk he defined him as one who 'writes poetry and pastoral drama, and yet knows how to make money, and does make it, and is still generous.' The pastoral drama meant ‘Amarynthus, the Nympholept,' which he published anonymously in 1821, in a little book containing, among some sonnets, one to Shelley, 'bold herald of announcements high.' The play overflows with fancy: and 'For now the clouds, in tufts of fleecy hue, Wander, like flocks of sheep, through fields of blue, Sits smiling on them as a shepherdess'; 'The Spring time gushes For us as in the lusty grass and bushes,' says or sings Amarynthus, who for some reason hears rills or streams in the strange and six-times repeated act of 'gug |