go out. Even then Landor was
cleverer, and, provided he was properly approached, more interesting
than many younger men of genius. I shall ever esteem it one of the great
privileges of my life that I was permitted to know him well, and call
him friend. These papers are given to the public with the hope that they
may be of more than ordinary interest to the intelligent reader, and
that they may delineate Landor in more truthful colors than those in
which he has heretofore been painted. In repeating conversations, I have
endeavored to stand in the background, where I very properly belong. For
the inevitable egotism of the personal pronoun, I hope to be pardoned by
all charitable souls. That Landor, the octogenarian, has not been
photographed by a more competent person, is certainly not my fault.
Having had the good fortune to enjoy opportunities beyond my deserts, I
should have shown a great want of appreciation had I not availed myself
of them. If, in referring to Landor, I avoid the prefix "Mr.," it is
because I feel, with Lady Blessington, that "there are some people, and
he is of those, whom one cannot designate as 'Mr.' I should as soon
think of adding the word to his name, as, in talking of some of the
great writers of old, to prefix it to theirs."

It was a modest house in a modest street that Landor inhabited during
the last six years of his life. Tourists can have no recollection of the
_Via Nunziatina_, directly back of the "Carmine" in the old part of
Florence; but there is no loving lounger about those picturesque streets
that does not remember how, strolling up the _Via dei Seragli_, one
encounters the old shrine to the Madonna, which marks the entrance to
that street made historical henceforth for having sheltered a great
English writer. There, half-way down the _via_, in that little two-story
_casa_, No. 2671, dwelt Walter Savage Landor, with his English
housekeeper and _cameriera_. Sitting-room, bed-room, and dining-room
opened into each other; and in the former he was always found, in a
large arm-chair, surrounded by paintings; for he declared he could not
live without them. His snowy hair and beard of patriarchal proportions,
clear, keen, gray eyes, and grand head made the old poet greatly
resemble Michel Angelo's world-renowned masterpiece of "Moses"; nor was
the formation of Landor's forehead unlike that of Shakespeare. "If, as
you declare," said he, jokingly, one day, "I look like that meekest of
men