lent out on occasions requiring greater comforts than the poor and too often thriftless women of agricultural villages can afford.  Private charity is all-reaching:  the “hall” is the dispensary and the general ark of refuge for all county ills, moral, physical and pecuniary, and its help is never thought degrading, like that of the “parish.”  Most families pay a doctor and a nurse by the year to attend the poor free of expense, and an order from the doctor for jellies, soup or wine, as well as for the ordinary sorts of medicine, is always sure of being filled from the ample stores of the “housekeeper’s room.”  If the city poor were half as well provided for as are the agricultural poor by their “lords of the manor,” there would be far less destitution.  Some affect to sneer at a system which savors of what they call “feudalism,” and which, they wisely suggest, encourages pauperism, but warm-hearted and charitable people will probably disagree with these searchers after new methods, and will be glad to find in the ready sympathy of English landowners for their poor neighbors a ray of the old-fashioned unquestioning charity which distinguished biblical times.

B.M.

* * * * *

LANDORIANA.

I wish to supplement the “Recollections of Landor,” published in a former number of the Magazine, by an anecdote and two or three characteristic letters which by accident escaped me when I was writing on the subject before.  Here is the story:  Schlegel and Niebuhr had been for some time on unpleasant terms.  The historical skepticism of the latter was altogether distasteful to Schlegel; and he was wont to deny Niebuhr’s claim to the title of historian.  Well, Landor was dining at Bonn, and among the company immediately opposite to him at table was Schlegel.  Hardly had the soup been despatched before Landor, with that stentorian voice of his which always filled every corner of every room he spoke in, began:  “Are not you the man, Mr. Schlegel, who has recently discovered, at the end of two hundred and fifty years, that Shakespeare is a poet?  Well, perhaps if you live two hundred and fifty years longer, you may discover that Niebuhr is an historian.”  “Schlegel did not like it,” added Landor when telling the story himself—­very much as who should say, “I knocked him down with an unexpected blow of my fist, and he did not like it!”

And now for my letters.  Here is one dated “Florence, June, 1861,” written to my wife when he was past eighty and within a year or two of his death.  The latter portion of the letter is especially interesting, and will be none the less so to those who may be disposed to dispute the correctness of the judgments expressed in it.