to a daguerreotypist for a picture, and Mrs. Jameson, who was very fond of the poet, had arranged the camera for that occasion.  Landor was holding the picture in his hand, declaring that it had never been surpassed as a specimen of that particular art.  The grand-looking author of “Pericles and Aspasia” was standing in the middle of the room when we entered, and his voice sounded like an explosion of first-class artillery.  Seeing Procter enter, he immediately began to address him compliments in high-sounding Latin.  Poor modest Procter pretended to stop his ears that he might not listen to Landor’s eulogistic phrases.  Kenyon came to the rescue by declaring the breakfast had been waiting half an hour.  When we arrived at the table Landor asked Procter to join him on an expedition into Spain which he was then contemplating.  “No,” said Procter, “for I cannot even ‘walk Spanish’ and having never crossed the Channel, I do not intend to begin now.”

“Never crossed the Channel!” roared Landor,—­“never saw Napoleon Bonaparte!” He then began to tell us how the young Corsican looked when he first saw him, saying that he had the olive complexion and roundness of face of a Greek girl; that the consul’s voice was deep and melodious, but untruthful in tone.  While we were eating breakfast he went on to describe his Italian travels in early youth, telling us that he once saw Shelley and Byron meet in the doorway of a hotel in Pisa.  Landor had lived in Italy many years, for he detested the climate of his native country, and used to say “one could only live comfortably in England who was rich enough to have a solar system of his own.”

The Prince of Carpi said of Erasmus he was so thin-skinned that a fly would draw blood from him.  The author of the “Imaginary Conversations” had the same infirmity.  A very little thing would disturb him for hours, and his friends were never sure of his equanimity.  I was present once when a blundering friend trod unwittingly on his favorite prejudice, and Landor went off instanter like a blaspheming torpedo.  There were three things in the world which received no quarter at his hands, and when in the slightest degree he scented hypocrisy, pharisaism, or tyranny, straightway he became furious, and laid about him like a mad giant.

Procter told me that when Landor got into a passion, his rage was sometimes uncontrollable.  The fiery spirit knew his weakness, but his anger quite overmastered him in spite of himself.  “Keep your temper, Landor,” somebody said to him one day when he was raging.  “That is just what I don’t wish to keep,” he cried; “I wish to be rid of such an infamous, ungovernable thing.  I don’t wish to keep my temper.”  Whoever wishes to get a good look at Landor will not seek for it alone in John Forster’s interesting life of the old man, admirable as it is, but will turn to Dickens’s “Bleak House” for side glances at the great author.  In that vivid story Dickens has made his friend Landor sit for the portrait