yourself, in your own handwriting, Mr. Landor.  On the same page, only five lines below this correction, is the identical passage that you would now transfer from Porson to Southey.  Why did you not affix Porson’s name to the passage then, when you were so vigilantly perfecting the very page?  Why does no such correction appear even in the printed list of errata?  Let us read the passage.  “A current of rich and bright thoughts runs throughout the poem. [114] Pindar himself would not, on that subject, have braced one into more nerve and freshness, nor Euripides have inspired into it more tenderness and passion.”

[Footnote 114:  Vol. i. p. 52.]

Landor.—­Mr. North, I repeat that that sentence should have been printed as Southey’s, not Porson’s.

North.—­Yet it is quite consistent with a preceding sentence which you can by no ingenuity of after-thought withdraw from Porson; for the whole context forbids the possibility of its transition.  What does Porson there testify of the Laodamia?  That it is “a composition such as Sophocles might have exulted to own!”—­and a part of one of its stanzas “might have been heard with shouts of rapture in the Elysium the poet describes.” [115]

[Footnote 115:  Vol. i. p. 51.  Few persons will think that Mr. Landor’s drift, which is obvious enough, could be favoured if these passages could be all shuffled over to Mr. Southey.  It would be unwise and inconsistent in Mr. Landor of all men to intimate that Southey’s judgment in poetry was inferior to Porson’s; for Southey has been so singular as to laud some of Mr. Landor’s, and Mr. Landor has been so grateful as to proclaim Southey the sole critic of modern times who has shown “a delicate perception in poetry.”  It is rash, too, in him to insinuate that Southey’s opinion could be influenced by his friendship; for he, the most amiable of men, was nevertheless a friend of Mr. Lander also.  But the only object of this argument is to show how mal-adroitly Mr. Landor plays at thimblerig.  He lets us see him shift the pea.  As for the praise and censure contained in his dialogues, we have no doubt that any one concerned willingly makes him a present of both.  It is but returning bad money to Diogenes.  It is all Mr. Landor’s; and, lest there should be any doubt about the matter, he has taken care to tell us that he has not inserted in his dialogues a single sentence written by, or recorded of, the persons who are supposed to hold them.—­See Vol. i. p. 96, end of note.]

These expressions are at least as fervid as those which you would reclaim from Porson, now that, like a pettifogging practitioner, you want to retain him as counsel against the most illustrious of Southey’s friends—­the individual of whom in this same dialogue you cause Southey to ask, “What man ever existed who spent a more retired, a more inoffensive, a more virtuous life, than Wordsworth, or who has adorned it with nobler studies?”—­and what does Porson answer?  “I believe so; I have always heard it; and those who attack him with virulence or with levity are men of no morality and no reflection.” [116] Thus you print Wordsworth’s praise in rubric, and fix it on the walls, and then knock your head against them.  You must have a hard skull, Mr. Landor.