ct was
suited to De Quincey's imagination. It was like one of his own opium
visions, and he handled it with a dignity and force which make the
history not altogether unworthy of comparison with Thucydides's great
chapter on the Sicilian Expedition.

An intimate friend of Southey was Walter Savage Landor, a man of kingly
nature, of a leonine presence, with a most stormy and unreasonable
temper, and yet with the courtliest graces of manner and with--said
Emerson--a "wonderful brain, despotic, violent, and inexhaustible." He
inherited wealth, and lived a great part of his life at Florence, where
he died, in 1864, in his ninetieth year. Dickens, who knew him at Bath,
in the latter part of his life, made a kindly caricature of him as
Lawrence Boythom, in _Bleak House_, whose "combination of superficial
ferocity and inherent tenderness," testifies Henry Crabb Robinson, in his
_Diary_, was true to the life. Landor is the most purely classical of
English writers. Not merely his themes {242} but his whole way of
thinking was pagan and antique. He composed, indifferently, in English
or Latin, preferring the latter, if any thing, in obedience to his
instinct for compression and exclusiveness. Thus portions of his
narrative poem, _Gebir_, 1798, were written originally in Latin, and he
added a Latin version, _Gebirius_, to the English edition. In like
manner his _Hellenics_, 1847, were mainly translations from his Latin
_Idyllia Heroica_, written years before. The Hellenic clearness and
repose which were absent from his life, Landor sought in his art. His
poems, in their restraint, their objectivity, their aloofness from modern
feeling, have something chill and artificial. The verse of poets like
Byron and Wordsworth is alive; the blood runs in it. But Landor's
polished, clean-cut _intaglios_ have been well described as "written in
marble." He was a master of fine and solid prose. His _Pericles and
Aspasia_ consists of a series of letters passing between the great
Athenian demagogue, the hetaira, Aspasia, her friend, Cleone of Miletus,
Anaxagorus, the philosopher, and Pericles's nephew, Alcibiades. In this
masterpiece the intellectual life of Athens, at its period of highest
refinement, is brought before the reader with singular vividness, and he
is made to breathe an atmosphere of high-bred grace, delicate wit, and
thoughtful sentiment, expressed in English "of Attic choice." The
_Imaginary Conversations_, 1824-1846