ugh it was appreciated by good wits like
Southey and De Quincey. After various private adventures he came into
his property and volunteered in the service of Spain, where he failed,
as usual, from impracticableness. In 1811, recklessly as always, he
married a very young girl of whom he knew next to nothing, and the
marriage proved anything but a happy one. The rest of his long life was
divided into three residences: first with his family at Florence; then,
when he had quarrelled with his wife, at Bath; and lastly (when he had
been obliged to quit Bath and England owing to an outrageous lampoon on
one lady, which he had written, as he conceived, in chivalrous defence
of another) at Florence again. Here he died in September 1864, aged very
nearly ninety.

Landor's poetical productions, which are numerous, are spread over the
greater part of his life; his prose, by which he is chiefly known, dates
in the main from the last forty years of it, the best being written
between 1820 and 1840. The greater part of this prose takes the form of
"Imaginary Conversations"--sometimes published under separate general
headings, sometimes under the common title--between characters of all
ages, from the classical times to Landor's. Their bulk is very great;
their perfection of style at the best extraordinary, and on the whole
remarkably uniform; their value, when considerations of matter are added
to that of form, exceedingly unequal. For in them Landor not only
allowed the fullest play to the ungovernable temper and the childish
crotchets already mentioned, but availed himself of his opportunities
(for, though he endeavoured to maintain a pretence of dramatic
treatment, his work is nearly as personal as that of Byron) to deliver
his sentiments on a vast number of subjects, sometimes without too much
knowledge, and constantly with a plentiful lack of judgment. In
politics, in satiric treatment, and especially in satiric treatment of
politics, he is very nearly valueless. But his intense familiarity with
and appreciation of classical subjects gave to almost all his dealings
with them a value which, for parallel reasons, is also possessed by
those touching Italy. And throughout this enormous collection of work
(which in the compactest edition fills five large octavo volumes in
small print), whensoever the author forgets his crotchets and his rages,
when he touches on the great and human things, his utterance reaches the
very highest water-ma