than to see me.
Was not that friendly? They are both dead now, and I am doomed to live
on. When Lady Blessington died, I was asked to write a Latin epitaph for
her tomb, which I did; but some officious person thought to improve the
Latin before it was engraved, and ruined it."

This friendship was fully reciprocated by Lady Blessington, who, in her
letters to Landor, refers no less than three times to those "calm nights
on the terrace of the Casa Pelosi." "I send you," she writes, "the
engraving, and have only to wish that it may sometimes remind you of the
original.... Five fleeting years have gone by since our delicious
evenings on the lovely Arno,--evenings never to be forgotten, and the
recollections of which ought to cement the friendships then formed."
Again, in her books of travel,--the "Idler in France" and "Idler in
Italy,"--Lady Blessington pays the very highest tribute to Landor's
heart, as well as intellect, and declares his real conversations to be
quite as delightful as his imaginary ones. She who will live long in
history as the friend of great men now lies "beneath the chestnut shade
of Saint Germain"; and Landor, with the indignation of one who loved
her, has turned to D'Orsay, asking

"Who was it squandered all her wealth,
And swept away the bloom of health?"

Although a Latinist, Landor did not approve of making those who have
passed away doubly dead to a majority of the living by Latin eulogy. In
an interesting conversation he gives the following opinion: "Although I
have written at various times a great number of such inscriptions"
(Latin), "as parts of literature, yet I think nothing is so absurd, if
you only inscribe them on a tomb. Why should extremely few persons, the
least capable, perhaps, of sympathy, be invited to sympathize, while
thousands are excluded from it by the iron grate of a dead language?
Those who read a Latin inscription are the most likely to know already
the character of the defunct, and no new feelings are to be excited in
them; but the language of the country tells the ignorant who he was that
lies under the turf before them; and, if he was a stranger, it
naturalizes him among them; it gives him friends and relations; it
brings to him and detains about him some who may imitate, many who will
lament him. We have no right to deprive any one of a tender sentiment,
by talking in an unknown tongue to him, when his heart would listen and
answer to his own; we have no ri