[Footnote 120:  This strange rhapsody is verily Mr. Landor’s.  It is extracted from his “Satire on the Satirists.”]

North.—­So you are not only a match for AEschylus and Sophocles, but on a par with “almighty Homer when he is far above Olympus and Jove.”  Oh! ho! ho!  As you have long since recorded that modest opinion of yourself in print, and not been lodged in Bedlam for it, I will not now take upon myself to send for a straight-waistcoat.

Landor.—­Is this the treatment I receive fron the Editor of Blackwood’s Magazine, in return for my condescension in offering him my assistance?  Give me back my manuscript, sir.  I was indeed a fool to come hither.  I see how it is.  You Scotchmen are all alike.  We consider no part of God’s creation so cringing, so insatiable, so ungrateful as the Scotch:  nevertheless, we see them hang together by the claws, like bats; and they bite and scratch you to the bone if you attempt to put an Englishman in the midst of them. [121] But you shall answer for this usage, Mr. North:  you shall suffer for it.  These two fingers have more power than all your malice, sir, even if you had the two Houses of Parliament to back you.  A pen!  You shall live for it. [122]

[Footnote 121:  Imaginary Conversations, vol. iv, p. 283.]

[Footnote 122:  Ibid. vol. i. p. 126.]

North.—­Fair and softly, Mr. Landor; I have not rejected your article yet.  I am going to be generous.  Notwithstanding all your abuse of Blackwood and his countrymen, I consent to exhibit you to the world as a Contributor to Blackwood’s Magazine, and, in the teeth of all your recorded admiration of Wordsworth, I will allow you to prove yourself towards him a more formidable critic than Wakley, and a candidate for immortality with Lauder.  Do you rue?

Landor.—­Not at all.  I have past the Rubicon.

North.—­Is that a pun?  It is worthy of Plato.  Mr. Landor, you have been a friend of Wordsworth.  But, as he says—­

“What is friendship?  Do not trust her,
Nor the vows which she has made;
Diamonds dart their brightest lustre
From the palsy-shaken head.”

Landor.—­I have never professed friendship for him.

North.—­You have professed something more, then.  Let me read a short poem to you, or at least a portion of it.  It is an “Ode to Wordsworth.”

“O WORDSWORTH! 
That other men should work for me
In the rich mines of poesy,
Pleases me better than the toil
Of smoothing, under harden’d hand,
With attic emery and oil,
The shining point for wisdom’s wand,
Like those THOU temperest ’mid the rills
Descending from thy native hills. 
He who would build his fame up high,
The rule and plummet must apply,
Nor say—­I’ll do what I have plann’d,
Before he try if loam or sand
Be still remaining in the place
Delved for each polish’d pillar’s base.
With skilful eye and fit device
THOU raisest every edifice: 
Whether in shelter’d vale it stand,
Or overlook the Dardan strand,
Amid those cypresses that mourn
Laodamia’s love forlorn.”