who denounced the powers of Europe for suffering the Duke d’Angouleme to assist his cousin Ferdinand in retaking the Trocadero, yet approves of French proceedings in Spain on a previous occasion.  Admiring reader! you shall hear Sir Oracle himself again:—­ “The laws and institutions introduced by the French into Spain were excellent, and the king” (Joseph Bonaparte!) “was liberal, affable, sensible, and humane.”  Poor Trelawney, the friend of Byron, is made to talk thus!  Both Trelawney and Odysseus the noble Greek, to whom he addresses himself, were more likely to participate in the “indignation of a high-minded Spaniard,” so vividly expressed by a high-minded Englishman in the following sonnet:—­

  “We can endure that he should waste our lands,
  Despoil our temples, and, by sword and flame,
  Return us to the dust from which we came;
  Such food a tyrant’s appetite demands: 
  And we can brook the thought, that by his hands
  Spain may be overpower’d, and he possess,
  For his delight, a solemn wilderness,
  Where all the brave lie dead.  But, when of bands
  That he will break for us he dares to speak,
  Of benefits, and of a future day
  When our enlighten’d minds shall bless his sway—­
  Then the strain’d heart of fortitude proves weak;
  Our groans, our blushes, our pale cheeks declare
  That he has power to inflict what we lack strength to bear.”]

North.—­Well, Mr. Landor, we have rambled over much ground; we have journeyed from Dan to Beersheba, and found all barren.  Let us return home.

Landor.—­Before we do so, let me observe, that among several noted Italians whom you have not glanced at, there is one whom I revere—­Alfieri.  He was the greatest man of his time in Europe, though not acknowleged or known to be so; [110] and he well knew his station as a writer and as a man.  Had he found in the world five equal to himself, he would have walked out of it not to be jostled. [111]

[Footnote 110:  Vol. ii. p. 241.]

[Footnote 111:  Vol. ii. p. 258.]

North.—­He would have been sillier, then, than the flatulent frog in the fable.  Yet Alfieri’s was, indeed, no ordinary mind, and he would have been a greater poet than he was, had he been a better man.  I admire his Bruto Primo as much as you do, and I am glad to hear you give your suffrage so heartily in favour of any one.

Landor.—­Sir, I admire the man as much as I do the poet.  It is not every one who can measure his height; I can.

North.—­Pop! there you go! you have got out of the bottle again, and are swelling and vapouring up to the clouds.  Do lower yourself to my humble stature, (I am six feet four in my slippers.) Alfieri reminds me of Byron.  What of him?