managed to quarrel with his neighbours and his tenants, until the
accumulating consequences to his purse forced him to go to Italy. On the
road thither he began the first of many quarrels with his wife, which
ultimately developed into a chronic quarrel and drove him back to
England. From England he was finally dislodged by another quarrel which
drove him back to Italy. Intermediate quarrels of minor importance are
intercalated between those which provoked decisive crises. The
lightheartedness which provoked all these difficulties is not more
remarkable than the ease with which he threw them off his mind. Blown
hither and thither by his own gusts of passion, he always seems to fall
on his feet, and forgets his trouble as a schoolboy forgets yesterday's
flogging. On the first transitory separation from his wife, he made
himself quite happy by writing Latin verses; and he always seems to have
found sufficient consolation in such literary occupation for vexations
which would have driven some people out of their mind. He would not, he
writes, encounter the rudeness of a certain lawyer to save all his
property; but he adds, 'I have chastised him in my Latin poetry now in
the press.' Such a mode of chastisement seems to have been as completely
satisfactory to Landor as it doubtless was to the lawyer.

His quarrels do not alienate us, for it is evident that they did not
proceed from any malignant passion. If his temper was ungovernable, his
passions were not odious, or, in any low sense, selfish. In many, if not
all, of his quarrels he seems to have had at least a very strong show of
right on his side, and to have put himself in the wrong by an excessive
insistence upon his own dignity. He was one of those ingenious people
who always contrive to be punctilious in the wrong place. It is amusing
to observe how Scott generally bestows upon his heroes so keen a sense
of honour that he can hardly save them from running their heads against
stone walls; whilst to their followers he gives an abundance of shrewd
sense which fully appreciates Falstaff's theory of honour. Scott himself
managed to combine the two qualities; but poor Landor seems to have had
Hotspur's readiness to quarrel on the tenth part of a hair without the
redeeming touch of common-sense. In a slightly different social sphere,
he must, one would fancy, have been the mark of a dozen bullets before
he had grown up to manhood; it is not quite clear how, even as it was,
h