from which only the ancient hexameter and our blank verse are exempt.

Spenser may be justly said to excel Ariosto in originality of invention, in force and variety of character, in strength and vividness of conception, in depth of reflection, in fertility of imagination, and above all, in that exclusively poetical cast of feeling which discerns in everything what common minds do not perceive. In the construction and arrangement of their fable neither deserves much praise; but the siege of Paris gives the Orlando Furioso, spite of its perpetual shiftings of the scene, rather more unity in the reader's apprehension than belongs to the Faerie Queene. Spenser is, no doubt, decidedly inferior in ease and liveliness of narration, as well as clearness and felicity of language. But upon thus comparing the two poets, we have little reason to blush for our countryman. Yet the fame of Ariosto is spread through Europe, while Spenser is almost unknown out of England; and even in this age, when much of our literature is so widely diffused, I have not observed proofs of much acquaintance with him on the Continent.

The language of Spenser, like that of Shakespeare, is an instrument manufactured for the sake of the work it was to perform. No other poet had written like either, though both have had their imitators. It is rather apparently obsolete by his partiality to certain disused forms, such as the y before the participle, than from any close resemblance to the diction of Chaucer or Lydgate. The enfeebling expletives do and did, though certainly very common in our early writers, had never been employed with such an unfortunate predilection as by Spenser. Their everlasting recurrence is among the great blemishes of his style. His versification is in many passages beautifully harmonious; but he has frequently permitted himself, whether for the sake of variety or from some other cause, to baulk the ear in the conclusion of a stanza.

(From Literature of Europe.)

THE GREATEST OF SHAKESPEARE'S TRAGEDIES

IF originality of invention did not so much stamp almost every play of Shakespeare that to name one as the most original seems

a disparagement to others, we might say, that this great prerogative of genius was exercised above all in Lear. It diverges more from the model of regular tragedy than Macbeth or Othello, and even more than Hamlet; but the fable is better constructed than in the last of these, and it displays full as much of the almost superhuman inspiration of the poet as the other two. Lear himself is, perhaps, the most wonderful of dramatic conceptions, ideal to satisfy the most romantic imagination, yet idealised from the reality of nature. Shakespeare, in preparing us for the most intense sympathy with this old man, first abases him to the ground; it is not Edipus, against whose respected age the gods themselves have conspired; it is not Orestes, noble-minded and affectionate, whose crime has been virtue; it is a headstrong, feeble, and selfish being, whom, in the first act of the tragedy, nothing seems capable of redeeming in our eyes; nothing but what follows, intense woe, unnatural wrong. Then comes on that splendid madness, not absurdly sudden, as in some tragedies, but in which the strings that keep his reasoning power together give way one after the other in the frenzy of rage and grief. Then it is that we find what in life may sometimes be seen, the intellectual energies grow stronger in calamity, and especially under wrong. An awful eloquence belongs to unmerited suffering. Thoughts burst out, more profound than Lear in his prosperous hour could ever have conceived; inconsequent, for such is the condition of madness, but in themselves fragments of coherent truth, the reason of an unreasonable mind.

(From the Same.)

LANDOR

[Walter Savage Landor, the son of a Warwick physician, was born in 1775. At Rugby, where he was partly educated, the ungovernable temper that brought so much misery into his life displayed itself from the first, and at the headmaster's request he was removed. A private tutor prepared him for the University, and at eighteen he entered Trinity College, Oxford, but was rusticated in 1794. The rustication led to a quarrel with his father, and he left home for London, where during a short residence he published his first volume of Poems (1795). After a reconciliation with his father Landor retired on an allowance to South Wales, where he wrote Gebir, published in 1798. On his father's death in 1805 he settled in Bath, and in 1808 went on an expedition to Spain to assist in driving out the French armies of occupation. After his return he purchased the estate of Llanthony in Wales, and in 1811 married a Miss Thuiller. In the same year he published Count Julian. In 1814 came the first of a series of quarrels with his wife, and Landor crossed to France alone. A reconciliation was brought about in the following year, and until 1835 the Landors lived in Italy, where their eldest son was born in 1817. During these years spent at Como, Pisa, Florence, and Fiesole were written the Imaginary Conversations (vols. 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5), and in 1834 the Citation and Examination of William Shakespeare. A second serious quarrel with his wife took place in 1835, and Landor returned to England. Pericles and Aspasia was published in 1836, and the Pentameron in 1837. From 1838 until 1857 he resided at Bath, and published a new series of the Imaginary Conversations in 1846; the Hellenics and a collection of Latin poems (Pamata et Inscriptiones) in 1847. In 1853 appeared Imaginary Conversations of Greeks and Romans and the Last Fruit off an Old Tree. Landor's conduct at Bath involved him in grave difficulties arising out of quarrels and scandals, which culminated in a law-suit on the publication of Dry Sticks fagoted by W. S. Landor. While the suit was pending he left England for the last time, and judgment, with a thousand pounds' costs, was given against him in his absence. Finding life with his family at his Villa Gherardesca in Fiesole impossible, on the advice of Robert Browning and other friends, he took rooms for himself in Florence, where in 1863 he published Heroic Idyls, his last work. Landor died at Florence in 1864.]

LANDOR is the great solitary of English literature.

So strangely

were the elements mixed in him, that, with many of the qualities that endear men to their fellows, to keep on terms with society

was too severe a tax upon his temper. Nor are the friends of the author much more numerous than were those of the man. He was content to keep his way apart in life, and content too that the path he trod as a writer should be little travelled. "I shall dine late," he said, "but the dining-room will be well lighted, the guests few and select." They are few and select, and Landor, who was not a man of his time, will never be the people's man. At an epoch, when the cold fires of the classic ritual of eighteenth-century literature began to pale before the passion and colour and mystery of the mediaval revival, with singular indifference to contemporary fashion he began to speak English with a purer classic accent than had yet been heard in the modern world. And the modern world, with its complex interests, its haste and excitement and widening horizons, could not stay to appreciate the unemphasised attraction of themes of mere abstract intellectual moment, however finely articulated the thought, or linger to admire austere beauty of style or the quiet justice of a perfect phrase. And Landor had no stirring message for his time, no revelation, like Wordsworth's, of neglected or undiscovered truth; nor did he write, as did Byron, to make public confession of the sins and disappointments of his life. Not so much because of the classic severity of his form, as because his attitude, his way of thought belong to the pre-Christian world, because he lacks the spirituality, the ethical fervour and elevation that the modern world demands, is he likely to remain a solitary. His own favourites among the greater writers of the past were not those in whom our later age still finds succour for its spiritual needs. Cicero and Ovid and Plutarch were his close intellectual companions and allies; but for Plato and Dante he had no real affection, and Milton he worshipped not as a Puritan, nor for the Hebraic spirit of his theology, but because he was a hater of tyranny and an artist in the great style. His aloofness from the problems that trouble us, the serene distinction with which he sits apart, this and the fact that his ethical code is the code of the fine gentleman who is also a scholar and philosopher, rather than the Christian, give Landor unique place and audience among the writers of the century. And though where he shines, he shines with a brilliance splendid and unborrowed; though at times the heroic, at times the tender strain of his eloquence wins its way to the heart; one cannot accept him as a guide to life or feel that in his company the human mind takes any step in advance.