se in my
opinion that is ill said in prose which can be said more plainly. Not
so in poetry: if it were, much of Pindar and Aeschylus, and no little
of Dante, would be censurable.

_Landor._ Acknowledge that he whose poetry I am holding in my hand is
free from every false ornament in his prose, unless a few bosses of
latinity may be called so; and I am ready to admit the full claims of
your favourite South. Acknowledge that, heading all the forces of our
language, he was the great antagonist of every great monster which
infested our country; and he disdained to trim his lion-skin with
lace. No other English writer has equalled Raleigh, Hooker, and
Milton, in the loftier parts of their works.

_Southey._ But Hooker and Milton, you allow, are sometimes pedantic.
In Hooker there is nothing so elevated as there is in Raleigh.

_Landor._ Neither he, however, nor any modern, nor any ancient, has
attained to that summit on which the sacred ark of Milton strikes and
rests. Reflections, such as we indulged in on the borders of the
Larius, come over me here again. Perhaps from the very sod where you
are sitting, the poet in his youth sate looking at the Sabrina he was
soon to celebrate. There is pleasure in the sight of a glebe which
never has been broken; but it delights me particularly in those places
where great men have been before. I do not mean warriors: for
extremely few among the most remarkable of them will a considerate man
call great: but poets and philosophers and philanthropists, the
ornaments of society, the charmers of solitude, the warders of
civilization, the watchmen at the gate which Tyranny would batter
down, and the healers of those wounds which she left festering in the
field. And now, to reduce this demon into its proper toad-shape again,
and to lose sight of it, open your _Paradise Lost_.

* * * * *

THE EMPEROR OF CHINA AND TSING-TI

On the morrow I was received at the folding-doors by Pru-Tsi, and
ushered by him into the presence of his majesty the Emperor, who was
graciously pleased to inform me that he had rendered thanks to
Almighty God for enlightening his mind, and for placing his empire far
beyond the influence of the persecutor and fanatic. 'But,' continued
his majesty, 'this story of the sorcerer's man quite confounds me.
Little as the progress is which the Europeans seem to have made in the
path of humanity, yet the English, we know, are less cruel t