Such was Landor’s impossible way on occasion that he succeeded in getting himself exiled from Tuscany; but the Grand Duke was called in as pacificator, and, though the order of expulsion was not rescinded, it was not carried out.

In 1835 Landor wrote some verses to his friend Ablett, who had lent him the money to buy the villa, professing himself wholly happy—­

    Thou knowest how, and why, are dear to me
    My citron groves of Fiesole,
    My chirping Affrico, my beechwood nook,
    My Naiads, with feet only in the brook,
    Which runs away and giggles in their faces;
    Yet there they sit, nor sigh for other places—­

but later in the year came a serious break.  Landor’s relations with Mrs. Landor, never of such a nature as to give any sense of security, had grown steadily worse as he became more explosive, and they now reached such a point that he flung out of the house one day and did not return for many years, completing the action by a poem in which he took a final (as he thought) farewell of Italy:—­

    I leave thee, beauteous Italy!  No more
    From the high terraces, at even-tide,
    To look supine into thy depths of sky,
    The golden moon between the cliff and me,
    Or thy dark spires of fretted cypresses
    Bordering the channel of the milky way. 
    Fiesole and Valdarno must be dreams,
    Hereafter, and my own lost Affrico
    Murmur to me but the poet’s song.

Landor gave his son Arnold the villa, settling a sum on his wife for the other children’s maintenance, and himself returned to Bath, where he added to his friends Sir William Napier (who first found a resemblance to a lion in Landor’s features), John Forster, who afterwards wrote his life, and Charles Dickens, who named a child after him and touched off his merrier turbulent side most charmingly as Leonard Boythom in “Bleak House”.  But his most constant companion was a Pomeranian dog; in dogs indeed he found comfort all his life, right to the end.

Landor’s love of his villa and estate finds expression again and again in his verse written at this time.  The most charming of all these charming poems—­the perfection of the light verse of a serious poet—­is the letter from England to his youngest boy, speculating on his Italian pursuits.  I begin at the passage describing the villa’s cat:—­

          Does Cincirillo follow thee about,
    Inverting one swart foot suspensively,
    And wagging his dread jaw at every chirp
    Of bird above him on the olive-branch? 
    Frighten him then away! ’twas he who slew
    Our pigeons, our white pigeons peacock-tailed,
    That feared not you and me—­alas, nor him! 
    I flattened his striped sides along my knee,
    And reasoned with him on his bloody mind,
    Till he looked blandly, and half-closed his eyes
    To ponder on my lecture in the shade.