Mal. Perhaps so. I know it bored me enough when I was young. But to go back to Landor. My friend X. had many amusing and some pathetic reminiscences of him. He told me, among other things, that Landor was very fond of epigrams, and often vented in this form his particular spite against persons who offended him. One day, he said, he came to him with an odd smile, holding out a paper, saying, "Read that; it is on my wife. Ha! ha!" It ran thus, if I remember rightly

"Out of his paradise an angel once drove Adam; .

From mine a devil drove me-thank you, madam."

Bel. A pleasant compliment to one's wife.

Mal. That is just what I said, but he answered "Oh, but perhaps she deserved it; at all events, from his point of view, for, in fact, she did drive him out of his paradise at Fiesole. It was a painful story. Landor had published at Bath a bitter lampoon on a lady, who brought an action against him for libel; and he was cast in it, and sentenced to pay £1000 damages. Being quite a child as far as regards business matters and practical knowledge of the world, he thought that he could avoid the payment of this sum. by making over all his property of every kind to his wife and children. So he took this step, had all the necessary papers drawn up, and signed, sealed, and delivered, and off he went to his family, who were living at his villa at Fiesole. Here he arrived and spent some months, not, I fear, making himself particularly agreeable, and forgetting that the villa was no longer his, since he had conveyed it to his wife, when, one hot summer day toward noon,

his wife and children turned him out of doors, with some 15 pauls in his pocket, on the burning highway, and told him to be off, and never to come back. He was then past eighty; and he wandered down to Florence, a broken-down, poor, houseless old man. There straying aimlessly about the hot streets, exhausted and ill, he had the fortune to meet Mr Robert Browning, who was to him a good angel, and who took him under his protection, and did everything he could to make him comfortable and happy. Shortly after this Browning brought him to me at Siena, and a more pitiable sight I never saw. It was the case of old Lear over again; and when he descended from his carriage, with his sparse white hair streaming out, and tottered into my house, dazed in intellect with all he had suffered, I felt as if he were really Lear come back again. In a short time, however, he recovered his spirits and vigour, and was, during all the time he stayed with me, a most interesting and courteous guest. Some time I will tell you more about all this, but it is not the time now. His memory was nearly as strong as ever, and his conversation original, clever, and sometimes very bitter. He told many a good story, and gave many a sharp slash at others. To me and mine he was ever most kind and gentle."

Bel. It is a terrible story, as you say. He was a remarkable man, but born out of his century. Literary and cultivated men will always value his writings, but they will never be popular.

Mal. I do not know that popularity is any true test of merit.

Bel. Perhaps not,-immediate popularity certainly not. It is astonishing how many reputations

that flash up like rockets come down to carth mere sticks. Reeds

grow fast, and oaks slowly. An

author who catches the taste of the day does not often catch the taste of the century. Landor was happy, too, in selecting the form of Imaginary Conversations' between distinguished men of different ages and opinions. None other would have so well suited his mind, and brought into such perfect play his wide knowledge

of men and books. His mind had a tendency, after a time, to run off any one direct track of thought into paradox and contradiction; and the form he selected gave scope to this peculiarity, without weakening the force of his views. These 'Imaginary Conversations' abound with noble arguments and thoughts, worthy of the characters of those into whose mouth they are put, and I read them with great pleasure as well as profit.

Mal. His poems are generally cold and classical both in subject and style, and want the fire of passion and imagination. But some of the smaller ones are most happy in their turns of thought and expression,--as this, for instance :

"I strove with none, for none were worth the strife;

Nature I loved, and after Nature Art.

Life:

It fades, and I am ready to depart."

Bel. He always grudged the shell Wordsworth stole, he said, from him.

Mal. It is curious to compare these two passages, as showing the difference between the two minds. Do you remember them Pray recall them to me if you Bel. Landor's are in his poem of "Gebir," and run, if 1 recollect right, thus:

do.

neither is indebted to the other.

Bel. Landor had no question on the subject, and he thought Wordsworth ought to have given him credit for it. It is difficult to believe that Wordsworth had not read "Gebir," and with care.

Mal. Landor did not easily forget nor forgive. Ho always owed Wordsworth a little grudge for something or other that he had said or done; and though he praised some of his poems highly,

in his memory, his intellect was master of it all.

Bel. There are very few of whom that could be said. Think of carrying one's library in one's mind, as you say, and having no need to refer to books.

Mal. There was one person on record who literally did that, and he was Charmidas the Greek, who, according to Pliny, was able to relate by heart the contents of any book in his library. But for my own part, with all due deference to Pliny, I don't believe it.

Bel. Ay! but remember that libraries were not then what they are now. There were comparatively few books to remember.

Mal. Were there? I know this is the common notion, but it is, I think, a very mistaken one. Their libraries, on the contrary, were very large, not so large as ours, of course, but large enough to make such a statement as Pliny's almost incredible, if taken literally. However, there have been stupendous memories enough in ancient and modern times to stagger belief, -such as those of Theodectes and Hortensius and Cineas, of whom Cicero speaks; and in our later days, Pascal, who, it is said, never forgot anything he had seen, heard, or thought; and Avicenna, who repeated by rote. the entire Koran when he was ten years old; and Francis Suarez, who, Strada tells us, had the whole of St Augustine in his memory— enough, one would think, to destroy all his mental power of digestion; and Justus Lipsius, who on one occasion offered to repeat all the History of Tacitus without a mistake on forfeit of his life; and in our own days, Jedediah Buxton and Zerah Colburn among others, who had such a prodigious power and rapidity of calculating in their minds. Colburn, it is said, could

tell the number of seconds in 58 years almost before the question could be repeated.

Bel. The story is told that Jedediah Buxton was once taken to the theatre to see Garrick, and that he was observed to pay an unremitted attention to the great actor throughout the play. When he went out, his friend, who accompanied him, asked him how he had been impressed by the acting, and Jedediah answered by stating the number of words and syllables that Garrick had spoken. His mind had been interested solely in this enumeration.

Mal. I daresay it was a purely mechanical operation of mind with him, and I rather think that with all these great memories it is the same. As I have not a good memory, I wish to decry it, out of pure envy. I wish I could say that great men never have great memories. Unfortunately, it is not true. The names of Pascal, Avicenna, Scaliger, who committed to memory the whole of the Iliad and Odyssey in three weeks, old Dr Thomas Fuller, whose memory was equally remarkable, to say nothing of Cyrus, Hortensius, Mithridates, are so terribly against me that I give up such a proposition; and I have serious thoughts myself, despite its disgusting ingredients, of resorting to the learned Grataroli of Bergamo's recipe for improving my own memory.

Bel. What is that?

Mal. He gives several, but one above all others as efficacious and comforting to the memory. It is this: to make a mixture of moles' fat, calcined human hair, cumin, and bears' grease, and swallow a pill of them of about the size of a hazel-nut at bedtime.

Bel. You haven't any bears' grease with you, have you? That might be effective rubbed on the

head, and I think that Atkinson should know the fact. It would serve as a wonderful advertisement. Mal. I don't remember that Grataroli advises that exactly, but he does advise those who have weak memories to shave the head and rub it with fresh butter, and to pour castor-oil into the ears; so I should suppose that bears' grease on the head would also be efficacious. Bacon, the author of Shakespeare (or was Shakespeare the author of Bacon ?-one is about as probable as the other), also says that the roasted brains of hares and hens taken in wine have an admirable effect on the memory; and that there are certain nuts and flowers, as well as spices, that stimulate the memory, is plain, for Charles of Burgundy derived such advantage from a certain mixture of these made for him by a learned doctor of his Court that he paid him 10,000 florins for it.

Bel. There seems to be no nonsense too great to be believed in by even great men.

Mal. A smelling-bottle is said to be a good reviver of the memory, or anything that stimulates the brain, such as cardamom, cubebs, or anacardina. Yet it is a curious fact that even those who habitually get intoxicated do not remember better than other persons, as a rule.

Bel. I suppose with most persons names and numbers fade more readily from the memory than anything else; and I have even known persons who could not, on the instant, recall their own names, much less those of their friends.

Mal. Royal memories always surprise me. It seems to be a special gift with royal personages never to forget faces and names. I wish I knew their secret.

Bel. They cultivate this kind of memory assiduously; and this is

the secret. From their very youth its importance is enforced upon them, and they carefully train themselves to remember these facts. Besides, undoubtedly such faculties, after being developed continuously, become hereditary, and are transmitted from generation to generation.

It is

Mul. Perhaps; and yet in my own case this is not true. My father had a very remarkable memory, and mine is, to say the least, a very treacherous one; at all events, I don't remember in the same way, nor do I remember the same kind of things. really too bad that one cannot inherit the accumulated learning stored up by one's parents, as well as their goods and chattels. It can be of comparatively little use to them in a future life, whatever that may be, and it seems terrible to see it vanish with the breath.

Bel. One of the most remarkable memories of modern days seems to have been that of M. de Lacépède, the well-known writer on Natural History, who, if we may trust the account given by the Count de Ségur in his 'Mémoires,' composed and corrected his works from beginning to end without writing them down. This, says the Count de Ségur, M. de Lacépède himself told him was his habit even to an advanced age, and then ensued this conversation: "Ah! probably verses?" "No; prose." "What!" I rejoined jocularly; "your work 'Sur l'Homme,' for example?" "Precisely; and to prove it to you, I will, if you have time to listen to me, repeat the whole of my first volume! and not only the original copy, but all the alterations, all the corrections. I have at this moment all the erasures in my mind's eye, and yet I have not yet written a word;