the author of _Imaginary
Conversations_, composed during his years of retirement at Florence.
In these _Conversations_ we hear the great men and women of the past
who converse as Landor imagined they might have talked. Landor's prose
style is admired, because of its simplicity and classic purity. After
the publication of the first two volumes of this work Landor was
visited as a man of genius by Englishmen and Americans. One day Hogg,
the friend of Shelley, was announced while Hare, a well-known
Englishman, was sitting in the room. Landor said, as he considered the
names of his two visitors, that he felt like La Fontaine with all the
better company of the beasts about him. Hazlitt was one of his
frequent visitors. One of their reported conversations is about
Wordsworth. Upon Landor's saying that he had never seen the famous
Lake poet, Hazlitt asked, "But you have seen a horse, I suppose?" and
on receiving an affirmative answer, continued, "Well, sir, if you have
seen a horse, I mean his head, sir, you may say you have seen
Wordsworth, sir."

Emerson was desirous of seeing Landor. One of the motives that led him
to take his first trip abroad was the desire to see five distinguished
men. These men were Coleridge, Wordsworth, Landor, DeQuincey, and
Carlyle. "On the 15th May," writes Emerson in his _English Traits_,
"I dined with Mr. Landor. I found him noble and courteous, living in
a cloud of pictures at his Villa Gherardesca, a fine house commanding
a beautiful landscape. I had inferred from his books, or magnified
from some anecdotes, an impression of Achillean wrath,--an untamable
petulance. I do not know whether the imputation were just or not, but
certainly on this May day his courtesy veiled that haughty mind and he
was the most patient and gentle of hosts."

Landor used to say somewhat loftily, "I do not remember that
resentment has ever made me commit an injustice." And in this
connection he related to a friend an incident of his early married
life, when he was living at Como, where he had for his next-door
neighbor the Princess of Wales. Landor and his royal neighbor had a
quarrel arising from trespassing by the domestics of the Princess.
"The insolence of her domestics," said Landor, "was only equaled by
the intolerable discourtesy of her Royal Highness when she was
appealed to in the matter."

Some years later when the Milan Commission was carrying on its
"delicate investigation" concerning the character of