classical of English writers.  Not merely his themes, but his whole way of thinking was pagan and antique.  He composed indifferently in English or Latin, preferring the latter, if any thing, in obedience to his instinct for compression and exclusiveness.  Thus, portions of his narrative poem, Gebir, 1798, were written originally in Latin and he added a Latin version, Gebirius, to the English edition.  In like manner his Hellenics, 1847, were mainly translations from his Latin Idyllia Heroica, written years before.  The Hellenic clearness and repose which were absent from his life, Landor sought in his art.  His poems, in their restraint, their objectivity, their aloofness from modern feeling, have something chill and artificial.  The verse of poets like Byron and Wordsworth is alive; the blood runs in it.  But Landor’s polished, clean-cut intaglios have been well described as “written in marble.”  He was a master of fine and solid prose.  His Pericles and Aspasia consists of a series of letters passing between the great Athenian demagogue; the hetaira, Aspasia; her friend, Cleone of Miletus; Anaxagorus, the philosopher, and Pericles’s nephew, Alcibiades.  In this masterpiece, the intellectual life of Athens, at its period of highest refinement, is brought before the reader with singular vividness, and he is made to breathe an atmosphere of high-bred grace, delicate wit, and thoughtful sentiment, expressed in English “of Attic choice.”  The Imaginary Conversations, 1824-1846, were Platonic dialogues between a great variety of historical characters; between, for example, Dante and Beatrice, Washington and Franklin, Queen Elizabeth and Cecil, Xenophon and Cyrus the Younger, Bonaparte and the president of the Senate.  Landor’s writings have never been popular; they address an aristocracy of scholars; and Byron—­whom Landor disliked and considered vulgar—­sneered at him as a writer who “cultivated much private renown in the shape of Latin verses.”  He said of himself that he “never contended with a contemporary, but walked alone on the far Eastern uplands, meditating and remembering.”

A school-mate of Coleridge at Christ’s Hospital, and his friend and correspondent through life, was Charles Lamb, one of the most charming of English essayists.  He was a bachelor, who lived alone with his sister Mary, a lovable and intellectual woman, but subject to recurring attacks of madness.  Lamb was “a notched and cropped scrivener, a votary of the desk;” a clerk, that is, in the employ of the East India Company.  He was of antiquarian tastes, an ardent playgoer, a lover of whist and of the London streets; and these tastes are reflected in his Essays of Elia, contributed to the London Magazine and reprinted in book form in 1823.  From his mousing among the Elizabethan dramatists and such old humorists as Burton and Fuller, his own style imbibed a peculiar quaintness and pungency.  His Specimens of English Dramatic Poets, 1808,