And sweet, reluctant, amorous delay,"

he says: "I would rather have written these two lines than all the
poetry that has been written since Milton's time in all the regions of
the earth." In 1861 Landor sent me the last lines he ever wrote,
addressed to the English Homer, entitled

"MILTON IN ITALY.

"O Milton! couldst thou rise again, and see
The land thou lovedst in an earlier day!
See, springing from her tomb, fair Italy
(Fairer than ever) cast her shroud away,--
That tightly-fastened, triply-folded shroud!
Around her, shameful sight! crowd upon crowd,
Nations in agony lie speechless down,
And Europe trembles at a despot's frown."

The despot is, of course, Louis Napoleon, for Landor would never allow
that the French Emperor comprehended his epoch, and that Italian
regeneration was in any way due to the co-operation of France. In his
allegorical poem of "The gardener and the Mole," the gardener at the
conclusion of the argument chops off the mole's head, such being the
fate to which the poet destined Napoleon. No reference, however, is made
to "that rascal" in the lines to Milton inserted in the "Heroic Idyls,"
and as the printed version was, doubtless, Landor's own preference, it
is but just to insert it here:--

"O Milton! couldst thou rise again and see
The land thou lovedst in _thy_ earlier day
See springing from her tomb fair Italy
(Fairer than ever) cast her shroud away,
That tightly-fastened, triply-folded shroud,
_Torn by her children off their mother's face!_
_O couldst thou see her now, more justly proud_
_Than of an earlier and a stronger race!"_

There certainly is more unity of idea in the printed copy, but so faulty
is it in punctuation--or at least for the want of it--that one is
warranted in believing the substitution of _thy_ for _an_, in the second
line, to be an _erratum_. Though Milton visited Italy in his youth,
there is no evidence to prove that he did not love it in old age. In its
present form the line loses in sense. Nothing annoyed Landor more than
to have his manuscript "corrected," and no one's temper was ever more
tried than his in this respect; for, having an orthography peculiar to
himself, which he maintained was according to the genius of the
language, and which printers would persist in translating into the
vulgate, Landor grew to be morbidly sensitive concerning revision. It
was the more intolerable to