hand, thus held out, was in a burning fever, and shook prodigiously.

"The morning broke with that dim, dubious light by which Giotto, Cimabue, and Ghirlandaio must have seen to paint their earliest works; and we parted to meet again and renew similar topics at night, the next night, and the night after that, till that night overspread Europe which saw no dawn. The same event, in truth, broke up our little congress that broke up the great one. But that was to meet again: our deliberations have never been resumed."

Leigh Hunt's An Earth upon Heaven seems to have been suggested by this charming essay of Hazlitt's. "Somebody, a little while ago," Hunt begins,

* This paper was written about 1820, but the event which it purports to describe occurred many years before.

"wrote an excellent article in the New Monthly Magazine on Persons one would wish to have known (sic). He should write another on 'Persons one could wish to have dined with.' There is Rabelais, and Horace, and the Mermaid roisterers, and Charles Cotton, and Andrew Marvell, and Sir Richard Steele, cum multis aliis; and for the colloquial, if not for the festive part, Swift, and Pope, and Dr. Johnson, and Burke, and Horne Tooke. What a pity one cannot dine with them all round! People are accused of having earthly notions of heaven. As it is difficult to have any other, we may be pardoned for thinking that we could spend a very pretty thousand years in dining and getting acquainted with all the good fellows on record; and having got used to them, we think we could go very well on, and be content to wait some other thousands for a higher beatitude. Oh, to

wear out one of the celestial lives of a triple century's duration, and exquisitely to grow old, in reciprocating dinners and teas with the immortals of old books! Will Fielding 'leave his card' in the next world? Will Berkeley (an angel in a wig and lawn sleeves) come to ask how Utopia gets on? Will Shakespeare (for the greater the man, the more the good-nature might be expected) know by intuition that one of his readers (knocked up with bliss) is dying to see him at the Angel and Turk's Head, and come lounging with his hands in his doublet-pockets accordingly?"

VI.

WITH AN OLD LION.

"And that deep-mouthed Beotian Savage Landor Has taken for a swan rogue Southey's gander." BYRON.

"It was a dream, ah! what is not a dream?" LANDOR.

WHILST at Como, Landor received a visit from Southey; and this visit must have been highly gratifying to both if what Landor put into Southey's mouth in the Imaginary Conversations was in any way near the truth. "Well do I remember," he makes Southey say, "our long conversation in the silent and solitary church of Sant' Aboudis (surely the coolest spot in Italy), and how

often I turned my head toward the open door, fearing lest some pious passer-by, or some more distant one in the wood above, pursuing the pathway that leads to the tower of Luitprand, should hear the roof echo with your laughter at the stories you had collected about the brotherhood and sisterhood of the place."

The hastiness of Landor's temper was known to his friends as well as to himself. Crabb Robinson speaks of him as a "leonine man, with a fierceness of tone well suited to his name, his decisions being confident, and on all subjects, whether of taste or life, unqualified, each standing for itself, not caring whether it was in harmony with what had gone before or would follow from the same oracular lips.* Robinson

*Landor's conduct in this direction was certainly a brilliant commentary on the words of Emerson: "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and