the 'greater and lesser oases' in a vast desert. And he would pare one
of these fine passages to the quick, whilst the other provokes the
remark ('we must whisper it') that Dante is 'the great master of the
disgusting.' He seems really to prefer Boccaccio and Ovid, to say
nothing of Homer and Virgil. Plato is denounced still more unsparingly.
From Aristotle and Diogenes down to Lord Chatham, assailants are set on
to worry him, and tear to pieces his gorgeous robes with just an
occasional perfunctory apology. Even Lady Jane Grey is deprived of her
favourite. She consents on Ascham's petition to lay aside books, but she
excepts Cicero, Epictetus, Plutarch, and Polybius: the 'others I do
resign;' they are good for the arbour and garden walk, but not for the
fireside or pillow. This is surely to wrong the poor soul; but Landor is
intolerant in his enthusiasm for his philosophical favourites. Epicurus
is the teacher whom he really delights to honour, and Cicero is forced
to confess in his last hours that he has nearly come over to the camp of
his old adversary.

It is easy to interpret the meaning of these prejudices. Landor hates
and despises the romantic and the mystic. He has not the least feeling
for the art which owes its powers to suggestions of the infinite, or to
symbols forced into grotesqueness by the effort to express that for
which no thought can be adequate. He refuses to bother himself with
allegory or dreamy speculation, and, unlike Sir T. Browne, hates to lose
himself in an 'O Altitudo!' He cares nothing for Dante's inner thoughts,
and sees only a hideous chamber of horrors in the 'Inferno.' Plato is a
mere compiler of idle sophistries, and contemptible to the common-sense
and worldly wisdom of Locke and Bacon. In the same spirit he despised
Wordsworth's philosophising as heartily as Jeffrey, and, though he tried
to be just, could really see nothing in him except the writer of good
rustic idylls, and of one good piece of paganism, the 'Laodamia.'[29]
From such a point of view he ranks him below Burns, Scott, and Cowper,
and makes poor Southey consent--Southey who ranked Wordsworth with
Milton!

These tendencies are generally summed up by speaking of Landor's
objectivity and Hellenism. I have no particular objection to those words
except that they seem rather vague and to leave our problem untouched. A
man may be as 'objective' as you please in a sense, and as thoroughly
imbued with the spirit of Greek art,