I remember him asking me after my mother at one of the latest of these visits.  I told him that she was fairly well, was not suffering, but that she was becoming very deaf.  “Dead, is she?” he cried, for he had heard me imperfectly, “I wish I was!  I can’t sleep,” he added, “but I very soon shall, soundly too, and all the twenty-four hours round.”  I used often to find him reading one of the novels of his old friend G.P.R.  James, and he hardly ever failed to remark that he was a “woonderful” writer; for so he pronounced the word, which was rather a favourite one with him.

It was a singular thing that Landor always dropped his aspirates.  He was, I think, the only man in his position in life whom I ever heard do so.  That a man who was not only by birth a gentleman, but was by genius and culture—­and such culture!—­very much more, should do this, seemed to me an incomprehensible thing.  I do not think he ever introduced the aspirate where it was not needed, but he habitually spoke of ’and, ’ead, and ’ouse.

Even very near the close, when he seemed past caring for anything, the old volcanic fire still lived beneath its ashes, and any word which touched even gently any of his favourite and habitual modes of thought was sure to bring forth a reply uttered with a vivacity of manner quite startling from a man who the moment before had seemed scarcely alive to what you were saying to him.  To what extent this old volcanic fire still burned may be estimated from a story which was then current in Florence.  The circumstances were related to me in a manner that seemed to me to render it impossible to doubt the truth of them.  But I did not see the incident in question, and therefore cannot assert that it took place.  The attendance provided for him by the kindly care of Mr. Browning, as narrated by Mr. Forster, was most assiduous and exact, as I had many opportunities of observing.  But one day when he had finished his dinner, thinking that the servant did not come to remove the things so promptly as she ought to have done, he took the four corners of the table-cloth (so goes the story), and thus enveloping everything that was on the table, threw the whole out of the window.

I received many notes from Landor, for the most part on trifling occasions, and possessing little interest.  They were interesting, however, to the race of autograph collectors, and they have all been coaxed out of me at different times, save one.  I have, however, in my possession several letters from him to my father-in-law, Mr. Garrow, many passages in which are so characteristic that I am sure my readers will thank me for giving them, as I am about to do.  The one letter of his that remains to me is, as the reader will see, not altogether without value as a trait of character.  The young lady spoken of in it is the same from whose papers in the Atlantic Monthly, entitled “Last Days of Walter Savage Landor,” Mr. Forster has gleaned, as he says, one or two additional glimpses of him in his last Florence home.  The letter is without date, and runs as follows:—­