Walter Savage Landor is one of those authors who--like Thomas Hardy, George Meredith, or Rudyard Kipling--is equally known as a prose writer and a poet. He started as a poet and later experimented with verse drama, but, though he continued his efforts in those genres throughout an unusually long and varied career, it was only in middle life that he was to discover the medium through which he finally won a measure of fame: the prose dialogues to which he gave the name Imaginary Conversations.

The format for these Conversations, which number more than 150 (and for the other prose works which developed it), derived from the classical tradition of the dialogue. It has been suggested that their concrete settings are associated with the philosophical dialogue introduced by Plato, that the blending of conversation and didacticism recalls the dialogues of Xenophon (and later Galileo), and that the practice of...