ntroduced
are worthy of Bacon himself. What Cicero is made to say is exactly what
he would have said, 'if he could;' and the dialogue between Walton,
Cotton, and Oldways is, of course, as good as a passage from the
'Complete Angler.' In the same spirit we are told that the dialogues
were to be 'one-act dramas;' and we are informed how the great
philosophers, statesmen, poets, and artists of all ages did in fact pass
across the stage, each represented to the life, and each discoursing in
his most admirable style.

All this is easy to say, but unluckily represents what the
'Conversations' would have been had they been perfect. To say that they
are very far from perfect is only to say that they were the compositions
of a man; but Landor was also a man to whom his best friends would
hardly attribute a remarkable immunity from fault. The dialogue, it need
hardly be remarked, is one of the most difficult of all forms of
composition. One rule, however, would be generally admitted. Landor
defends his digressions on the ground that they always occur in real
conversations. If we 'adhere to one point,' he says (in Southey's
person), 'it is a disquisition, not a conversation.' And he adds, with
one of his wilful back-handed blows at Plato, that most writers of
dialogue plunge into abstruse questions, and 'collect a heap of
arguments to be blown away by the bloated whiff of some rhetorical
charlatan tricked out in a multiplicity of ribbons for the occasion.'
Possibly! but for all that, the perfect dialogue ought not, we should
say, to be really incoherent. It should include digressions, but the
digressions ought to return upon the main subject. The art consists in
preserving real unity in the midst of the superficial deviations
rendered easy by this form of composition. The facility of digression is
really a temptation, not a privilege. Anybody can write blank verse of a
kind, because it so easily slips into prose; and that is why good blank
verse is so rare. And so anybody can write a decent dialogue if you
allow him to ramble as we all do in actual talk. The finest
philosophical dialogues are those in which a complete logical framework
underlies the dramatic structure. They are a perfect fusion of logic and
imagination. Instead of harsh divisions and cross-divisions of the
subject, and a balance of abstract arguments, we have vivid portraits of
human beings, each embodying a different line of thought. But the logic
is still seen,