rable." It is strange that a man apparently so well read as Mr.
Pycroft should have so unjustly interpreted Landor, when it needed but a
passing reference to the Conversations to disprove his statement. By
turning to the second dialogue between Southey and Landor, he might have
culled the following tribute to Chaucer: "I do not think Spenser equal
to Chaucer even in imagination, and he appears to me very inferior to
him in all other points, excepting harmony. Here the miscarriage is in
Chaucer's age, not in Chaucer, many of whose verses are highly
beautiful, but never (as in Spenser) one whole period. I love the
geniality of his temperature: no straining, no effort, no storm, no
fury. His vivid thoughts burst their way to us through the coarsest
integuments of language." In another book Landor says: "Since the time
of Chaucer there have been only two poets who at all resemble him; and
these two are widely dissimilar one from the other,--Burns and Keats.
The accuracy and truth with which Chaucer has described the manners of
common life, with the foreground and background, are also to be found in
Burns, who delights in broader strokes of external nature, but equally
appropriate. He has parts of genius which Chaucer has not in the same
degree,--the animated and pathetic. Keats, in his 'Endymion,' is richer
in imagery than either; and there are passages in which no poet has
arrived at the same excellence on the same ground. Time alone was
wanting to complete a poet, who already far surpassed all his
contemporaries in this country in the poet's most noble attributes."
Once more, in some beautiful lines to the fair and free soul of
poesy,--Keats,--Landor concludes with a verse that surely shows an
appreciation of Chaucer:--

"Ill may I speculate on scenes to come,
Yet would I dream to meet thee at our home
With Spenser's quiet, Chaucer's livelier ghost,
Cognate to thine,--not higher and less fair,--
And Madalene and Isabella there
Shall say, _Without thee half our loves were lost_."

When a man chooses an author as a companion, not for time but for
eternity, he gives the best possible proof of an esteem that no rash
assertion of critics can qualify.

"I have always deeply regretted that I never met Shelley," said Landor
to me. "It was my own fault, for I was in Pisa the winter he resided
there, and was told that Shelley desired to make my acquaintance. But I
refused to make his, as, at that time, I