[Footnote 92:  Vol. iv. p. 194, 195.—­Pericles and Sophocles also prattle about Queen Caroline! vol. 2, p. 106, 107.—­In another place the judgment and style of Johnson being under sentence, the Doctor’s judgment is “alike in all things,” that is, “unsound and incorrect;” and as to style, “a sentence of Johnson is like a pair of breeches, an article of dress, divided into two parts, equal in length, breadth, and substance, with a protuberance before and behind.”  The contour of Mr. Landor’s figure can hardly be so graceful as that of the Pythian Apollo, if his dress-breeches are made in this fashion, and “his Florentine tailor never fails to fit him.”—­See vol. i. p. 296, and p. 185, note.]

North.—­What dignified and important criticism! and how appropriate from the lips of Epicurus!  But why were you, Mr. Landor, so rancorous against that miserable Queen Caroline?  You have half choked Sir Robert Wilson, one of her champions, and the marshal of her coffin’s royal progress through London, with a reeking panegyric in your dedication to him [93] of a volume of your Talks.

[Footnote 93:  Vol. iii.]

Landor.—­I mistook Wilson for an uncompromising Radical.  As to his and Canning’s nobled Queen, I confess I owed her a grudge for disrespect to me at Como long before.

North.—­How?  Were you personally acquainted with her?

Landor.—­Not at all:  She was not aware that there was such a man as Walter Savage Landor upon earth, or she would have taken care that I should not be stopt by her porter at the lodge-gate, when I took a fancy to pry into the beauties of her pleasure-ground.

North.—­Then her disrespect to you was not only by deputy, but even without her cognisance?

Landor.—­Just so.

North.—­And that was the offence for which you assailed her with such a violent invective after her death?

Landor.—­Oh no! it might possibly have sharpened it a little; but I felt it my duty, as a censor of morals, to mark my reprobation of her having grown fat and wrinkled in her old age.  It was necessary for me to correct the flattering picture drawn of her by that caitiff Canning.  You know the contempt of Demosthenes for Canning.

North.—­Demosthenes, too!

Landor.—­Yes, in my dialogue between him and Eubulides, he delineates Canning as a clumsy and vulgar man.

North.—­Every one knows that he was a man of remarkably fine person and pleasing manners.

Landor.—­Never mind that—­A vulgar and clumsy man, a market-place demagogue, lifted on a honey-barrel by grocers and slave-merchants, with a dense crowd around him, who listen in rapture because his jargon is unintelligible. [94] Demosthenes, you know, was a Liverpool electioneering agent, so he knew all about Canning and his tricks, and his abstraction of L.14,000 sterling from the public treasury to defray the expenses of his shameful flight to Lesbos, that is Lisbon.[95]