diction by the most venerated of living English scholars.

'Landor undoubtedly possessed a command of the Latin language which enabled him to use it for every purpose, and to adapt it to every theme, from the fables of Greek mythology to the incidents and characters of his own day. It is not easy to convey a notion either of the merits or of the faults of his Latin poetry to those who cannot judge of it for themselves. Its character cannot be illustrated by a comparison with any other Latin poetry, ancient or modern. Its style is not that of either the golden or the silver, or of any earlier or later age of Latinity. It is the style of Landor, and it is marked with the stamp not only of his intellect, but of his personal idiosyncrasy. This is the cause of that obscurity which must be felt, even by scholars, to mar to some extent the enjoyment of his Latin poetry. He was perfectly able to write in a style transparent as that of Ovid. But such was not his pleasure. He despised popularity; he disdained imitation; he abhorred all that savoured of mannerism, conventionality, and commonplace. He aimed at independence, originality; at the quality for which Mr. Matthew Arnold has endeavoured to naturalise, in English

literature, the French word distinction; and thus it happened that when he might have clothed his thoughts in clear, simple, and natural language, he preferred forms of expression in which the stone is often too hard for common readers to get at the kernel. Nevertheless there are in these poems passages of exquisite tenderness and pathos, and others which display an extraordinary power of word-painting. No doubt the author's poetical faculty is more largely developed in the longer compositions; but the shorter are more deeply impressed with the signature of the man; not, indeed, always in the most winning aspect, or the gentlest mood of inspiration. Now and then harmlessly playful, but much oftener instinct with the bitterest sarcasm; keen and poisoned shafts, levelled sometimes at the objects of his political animosity, sometimes at persons from whom he believed himself to have suffered a private wrong. If it may be said that he set any model before himself, it must have been Catullus. But neither the Idyllia Heroica, nor Gebirus, nor Ulysses in Argiripa, approach the Atys or the Epithalamium. The Hendecasyllabi recall not unfrequently the poet of Sermio.'

I have engraved the portrait by Mr. Robert

Faulkner, preferring it to the frontispieces in Mr.
Forster's volumes. The first, indeed, is interesting,
as indicating in the boy the unboyish contempla-
tion and premature self-absorption that developed
itself so fatally to his happiness; but there is no
trace of the sweetness and humour of the mouth
which redeemed the anti-social character of the
upper features. The second is as unsatisfactory as
engravings not of, but from, paintings usually are,
and Mr. Boxall's work is seen at a great disad-
vantage. Mr. Landor died in September 1864,
aged eighty-nine, in his favourite Florence, but
not upon
that famous Hill to which his name has
given one more illustration. His family still re-
side in the Villa of his love, which many a future
pilgrim of letters will visit with reverence and grat-
itude.

$

V.

THE BERRYS.

THE question of the man-about-town: 'Who are those Miss Berrys who have been running all over Europe ever since the time of Louis Quatorze?' has been fully answered in the three portly volumes compiled from the diaries, letters, and memoranda left by Miss Mary Berry to the care of the late Sir Frankland Lewis, to be used by him for biographical and literary purposes, as he might think fit. He died without any such publication, and they came into the hands of Sir George Cornewall Lewis, the scholar, critic, and statesman, whose loss friends and country have deeply deplored. His well-instructed and accomplished widow, Lady Theresa Lewis, undertook the vicarious work, and within a few weeks of its appearance she too passed away, soon followed by her brother Lord Clarendon, leaving Mr. Charles Villiers at the present time the only living representative of a numerous generation of an historic and intellectual race.

This record of busy death stands strangely side by side with the one long life, of which Lady Theresa's book is the narrative, a life that nearly lasted its century, and which included within its observation as memorable a period of our world's history as the sun's light has ever shone upon. There is something in these occasional long spaces of individual existence which seems to make them especially favourable vehicles for biographical narrative; the one figure standing by the protracted course of the stream of time concentrates round itself the images and interests of the past, and acquires an integral value which at any one moment of its being it would hardly have seemed to have possessed: it becomes identified with even more than its own experiences, and is judged not so much by what it was as by what it might have been.

Memoirs therefore such as these do not require the justification of any rare superiority of talent or character, and will be read with pleasure by many on whom the personage whose name they bear leaves little or no impression. There are others, on the contrary, who might desire a more distinct representation of Miss Berry's personality; but they may remember that Biography is no easier than Life; and that, while every one has attempted