judgment has been quoted. Landor's behavior when Mrs Browning sent him Lytton's Lucile is typical: "Who could ever," he cried, "read a poem which began with But?" Yet later he added: "Why, God bless my soul, it's the finest thing I ever read in my life." Caroline Fox tells a tale of whimsical criticisms offered by Landor to Archdeacon Hare: "The only well-drawn figure in existence, is a female by Overbeck in his picture of 'Children Brought to Christ.' Milton wrote one good line, but he forgot it; Dante perhaps six, his description of Francesca; Carlyle's French Revolu tion, a wicked book, he had worn out one volume in tossing it on the floor at startling passages." "His old age," concludes Miss Fox, "is an amalgam of the grotesque and forlorn. And Carlyle, who loved conversation, declared that Landor talked him into a syncope!

All this thrown off in the midst of vollies of laughter! Coleridge's sing-song voice and Lamb's stutter are not so vivid in Victorian reminiscences as Landor's laughter. "He has," writes Tom Moore, "the laugh of a hearty country squire." "His laugh is in peals," says Leigh Hunt. "He seems to fetch every fresh one for a higher story." This laughter amazed Wordsworth and terrified Mrs. Browning: "The crushing throat peals of Mr. Landor's laughter! He laughs like an ogre he laughs as if laughter could kill, and he knew it, thinking of an enemy."

To this strange man, dwelling aloof on the hills above Florence among his books and pictures came, in humble worship, "the youngest singer to the oldest, "-Swinburne. Landor glanced up to see a fiery head bowed before him. Such frank homage was disconcerting, even to Landor. Yet he could hardly take offense, and a real friendship sprang up. Soon Landor was presenting Swinburne with a Corregio (he thought it was one!) and was shouting, in response to the young poet's demurral: "By God! You shall take it!"

That so eccentric a man should have interested is not

strange. The significant thing is that he became in literature a constructive force. In spite of insane literary verdicts, Landor's praise of new books was eagerly desired. He is, Southey said, "the only man living of whose praise I was ambitious, or whose censure would have humbled me." And Robert Browning wrote to Mrs. Browning: "Landor's praise is altogether a different gift; a gold vase from King Hiram." The very waywardness and intensity of Landor's conver sations seem to have been his strength. Miss Kate Field in her remarkable picture of Landor as a man says: "It was imposisble to be in Landor's society a half hour and not reap advantage. His great learning, varied information, extensive acquaintance with the world's celebrities, ready wit, and even readier repartee, rendered his conversation wonderfully entertaining." And Milnes, after paying tribute to Landor's writings, adds: "It was his conversation that left the most delightful and permanent impression; so affluent, animated, and coloured; so rich in knowledge and illustration; so gay and yet so weighty-such bitter irony and such lofty praise uttered with a voice fibrous in all its tones, whether gentle or fierce-it equalled, if not surpassed, all that has been related of the table talk of men eminent for social speech."

.

Note Mrs. Browning's crowning tribute: "Robert always said that he owed more as a writer to Landor than to any contemporary."

Today, certainly, much of Landor's conversation seems like rhodomontade, and his domineering a pose. We are mistaken; gravely so. Landor was sincere. He was quaintly heroic, and heroics were for him, natural. Southey wrote to John Rickman: "He is more than any of the gods of all my mythologies, for his very words are thunder and lightning, -such is the power and splendour with which they burst out: but all is perfectly natural, there is no trick about him, -no preaching, no parade, no playing off." (The words are Southey's, but I flatter myself on the italics; they represent the judgment of his friends,-almost to a man.)

So in the renewed study of Victorian literature it is well to notice the very special gifts of Walter Savage Landor, and to reflect on the special task which he performed. Such an appraisal must begin, it seems to me, with the realization that little can be expected of Landor's influence now or in the future. His work is finished. Soon his devotees may be counted on the fingers of one hand. In 1890 W. B. Clymer wrote of Landor's influence: "His chance in the struggle for existence rests on the likelihood of there being in future generations a few men with Emerson's unjaded taste for 'pure literature.'" Perhaps. "Pure learning" would be nearer the truth. Margaret Oliphant may speak of Count Julian as "worthy of the hand which showed us Hamlet and Othello." Steadman may compare Gebir to Keats' Hyperion. But Mrs. Mitford is nearer fact when she speaks, with curious juxtaposition, of "out-of-the-way writers like Colley Cibber, and W. S. Landor." The tendency is to think with Francis Thompson of "such minor men as Landor."

"Minor" he is now, but minor in his own day he was not. It is difficult to state in a few words the exact character of Landor's influence among his contemporaries. Certainly its essence lay in his austere idealism. In an age in which poets were introspective, Landor was objective. When others were expressing moods of unrest, reflecting the confused thought of the century, Landor was calmly imitating Pindar. When others were exhibiting the pageants of their bleeding hearts, Landor was concerned in his poetry, with subtle and delicate emotional values,-most of them Greek in origin. Landor never relinquished the ideal that poetry should be restrained, intellectual, and architectonic. Such maintenance had its effect. It is not too much to presume that Landor had an ennobling influence upon a few poets whom he definitely inspired. "Consider," says Steadman, "the names of those who, having met him and known his works, perceive in him something great and worshipful."

POE AND EMERSON

BY L. W. PAYNE, JR.

Two books in the "How to Know Authors' series1 came out simultaneously during the past spring: Poe, How to Know Him, by C. Alphonso Smith; and Emerson, How to Know Him, by Samuel McChord Crothers. The appearance of the two volumes suggests a comparison of the two authors and the treatment of them by their two eminent critics. Though Poe and Emerson were almost entirely contemporaneous in their fame and in their best productions, little attention has been paid to their interrelations further than to note their personal antipathy and their utterly different literary aims and qualities. As a convenient approach, then, to a brief comparison of the two authors, we may examine at some length the two volumes before us.

Professor Smith's book on Poe is characteristic of its author-brilliant, convincing, enthusiastic, admirably organized, charmingly written; but selective, omissive, smacking of the advocate and the apologist, and at times extravagant and somewhat sensational, over-confident and injudicious in its appraisements, and one-sided in its altogether favorable presentation of the erratic character and the peculiar genius of Poe. In his preface Professor Smith says that Poe is popularly regarded as a manufacturer of cold creeps and a maker of shivers, a wizened, self-centered exotic, un-American and semi-insane, who, between sprees or in them, wrote his autobiography in 'The Raven' and a few haunting detective stories"; and that this new book on Poe is "an attempt to substitute for the travesty the real Poe, to suggest at least the diversity of his interests, his futuremindedness, his sanity, and his humanity."

'Published by the Bobbs-Merrill Company of Indianapolis.

As a skilful lawyer would introduce his witnesses and marshal his evidence to convince a jury, Professor Smith proceeds to introduce foreign opinions to prove that Poe is not merely a writer of cheap thrillers, but a world-author of profound influence in Russia, Germany, Italy, Spain, LatinAmerica, France, England, and the islands of the seas. He denies the assertion made by a writer in The Edinburgh Review of January, 1910, that Poe is the only American writer to whom the title of "world-author" may with any propriety be applied, and including Franklin, Cooper, Emerson, Longfellow, and Mark Twain along with Poe as authors to whom the title may be given, suggests that Walt Whitman, Joel Chandler Harris, William James in a narrower sense, and O. Henry are fast becoming world-authors. After this generous concession the skilful critic concludes with a general summary of Poe's work, which not only gives Poe the preeminence among the so-called American world-authors, but at the same times gives the gist of all that Professor Smith has to say of his favored author: "But is it none the less true that the title belongs preeminently to Poe. His appeal as poet and story-teller, the universality of his themes, the purity of his style, his studied avoidance of slang and localism, his wealth of sheer intellect and his equal dowry of constructive imagination, together with his almost uncanny feeling for form and color, for the fitting melody and the enhancing background, these put him in a class alone, and these have give him a recognition in foreign lands not equalled by any other American writer."

The proof of the point in the number of translations, imitations, critical comments, allusions and quotations, acknowledged and unconscious influence in the various European literatures is overwhelming; but the result of the critic's method is to give an exaggerated conception of the universality of Poe's fame. The unwary reader is led to believe that Poe is beyond all comparison the greatest of American writers simply because he has had a world-wide Vogue.