with its garden and all its lemontrees, had been paid for out of Landor's money. Some of the Florentine courts of justice still, perhaps, possess records of the suits brought against Florentine citizens by this impracticable Englishman. The last time he appeared, whether as prosecutor or defendant, in the Syndic's court, he stooped to hoist up a heavy bag which he had brought with him, and which he placed on the table before him, coolly observing that, as he knew every man in Florence had his price, here was money to secure judgment on his side. The court, feeling itself this time outraged beyond endurance, pronounced sentence of banishment against him, and he left Florence never to return. Before he was exiled, Landor had lived in rooms above those occupied by his friends the Brownings. They used to send his dinner up to him every day, and, to a man of his vehement temperament, dinner was a very important event. He would stand watch in hand when the hour was approaching, and if the dinner was a moment behind time, he would seize the dish and hurl its contents out of the window. Mr. Browning's son, who was then very young, well remembers seeing a leg of mutton pass the window of his father's room on one of these occasions. An expensive and troublesome inmate, no doubt; but what good times the three poets must have had in those long evenings when dinner was forgotten, and there was nothing left to do but talk! How they must have enjoyed each other's scholarship!" I like to think of the pleasure afforded the old lion in his last years by two apparent trifles-the society of a young American lady, Miss Kate Field, to whom he taught Latin; and the visit of Swinburne, one of his most ardent admirers, who made a pilgrimage to Florence on purpose to see the old man's face before he died. VII. BEHIND THE SCENES. "To say that this taste of ours is a petty taste, the taste of valets, is simply to inveigh against one of the instincts of our nature, the instinct whichto quote the words of Moore-' leads us to contemplate with pleasure a great mind in its undress;' and, perhaps, I may add, to inveigh against one of the strongest charms of history and biography, against the charm without which all history and all biography_are little more than an old almanack."-CHARLES PEBODY. OCCASIONALLY a poem or work of prose has been the result of some stray hint dropped at a meeting of friends; in other cases, again, the central idea has been the subject of great talk and much beating out before it assumed the importance : necessary to prompt its extension into a work of art. "The account Wordsworth gives of the origin of the Ancient Mariner is that in the autumn of 1797 he, with his sister and Coleridge, started from Alfoxden to visit Linton and the Valley of Stones, and their united funds being very small, they agreed to defray the expenses of the tour by writing a poem, to be sent to the New Monthly Magazine. Accordingly, as they proceeded along the Quantock Hills, by Watchet, the poem of the Ancient Mariner was planned. It was founded, as Mr. Coleridge said, on a dream narrated by a friend of his. Much the greater part of the story was Coleridge's invention, but parts were suggested by Wordsworth; for example, that some crime was to be committed which should bring upon the old navigator,' as Coleridge delighted to |