That it is not necessary to agree with a man in order to admire him is a root of literary, as of social, judgment. This is a truism; all of who call themselves free men assent to it; few trouble to safeguard and fewer to exemplify it. Not in totalitarian countries alone are grubs nibbling at this necessary root. That Landor's works are not popular is neither surprising nor disgusting; the world would not be the world if they were. He did not write to that end nor expect to achieve it. The last word in this matter was his own: "I shall dine late; but the dining-room will be well-lighted , the guests few and select"; and it would be at once a failure in understanding, and contrary to his own taste, to complain that to-day no communal kitchen is crowded to salute him. But there are many highly conscientious people who would now consider his independence as having been anti-social even in his own day and as containing nothing that could be admirable in ours. This raises the question of what independence is and of how a just independence varies from age to age. How does it differ from arrogance or exclusiveness? What it reserves we know, but what does it give?

There is a solid reason in our own lives to ask these questions, and it is pleasant to ask them in the context of Landor. On the morning which followed his seventy-fifth birthday—that is to say, on the morning of January 31st, 1850—he came downstairs bearing in his hand a copy of verses, composed presumably before breakfast, or on the night of his birthday itself, which for the very reason that they are so familiar. It would be an affectation not to quote:

In fact, he was not to depart for nearly fifteen years, and among us, who have the questionable habit of centenaries, it may seem a little odd to write of Landor now. But what is one to do with "the old Pagan"? Wait twenty years for the centenary of his death or thirty for the bicentenary of his birth? He broke all the chronological rules, and one can only gasp at the incredible truth that, in his tenure of this earth, he missed Goldsmith at one extreme and Kipling at the other by a few months only. Already near the end of his schooling at Knowle, he was about to go to Rugby when Dr. Johnson died; he was of an age with Lamb and twenty years older than Keats; and yet Swinburne, as a young man, did him homage, Browning was his friend as Southey and Wordsworth had been, and, before he died in Italy, Bridges and Andrew Lang were out of their 'teens and Hardy was twenty-four. Nor was it his life only that spanned the centuries; he wrote from first to last. Other men's lamps may be put out long before they go to sleep; his burned unfailingly, his first volume appearing three years before the Nile and his last within three of Sadowa.

It is not easy to dismiss such a man as a creature of his age whose experience is inapplicable to ours. Of what age—the age of Byron or of Browning? Of Rousseau or Kossuth? Of Pericles or the Bard of Sirmio? To the vast range of his life he added a prodigious reading, a habit of writing Latin better than all but he and a few others could write English, a fiery temper which led him to trouble, a gentleness which sustained him in it, a perilous gift of enthusiasm, a keen critical sense to balance it sometimes, and, to unbalance it again, a preference for Southey before Wordsworth and Shelley. No one is likely to hold up his career as a model of practical wisdom. Though he had leonine and majestic patience at long range from the tiresome mice of this world, he had no patience at short; and the same man who could calmly admit that a little more recognition might have pleased him because "there is something of summer even in the hum of insects" could allow himself to be jostled in the law-courts by his tenants at Llanthony and driven into exile and ruin by two jealous ladies of Bath. Nevertheless, through all his conflicting wisdoms and follies, he preserved what his contemporaries recognized as noble independence. Southey died with his name on his lips; much younger men—Dickens, Forster, Browning, and many others—were eager to serve him; even Byron, who had some provocations to speak sharply, said nothing worse of him in "Don Juan" than

—and wrote privately to Lady Blessington (whom indeed he knew to be Landor's friend) that "he really is a man whose brilliant talents and profound erudition I cannot help admiring as much as I respect his character". This from Byron, of whom Landor was to say that "whenever he wrote a bad poem he supported his sinking fame by some signal act of profligacy" but that "there are things in him strong as poison and original as sin", was something; and it is this respect for Landor's character which has come down to us, though he blotted most of the maxims in the copy-book, or—what ought to have been worse—jumbled them up. There was evidently something in him, besides his genius, which made him not only a loved, but a valued, member of society.