with his children,
which suggests _King Lear_ and his daughters; on the other hand there is
his steady devotion to the classics and to the cultivation of the deep
wisdom of the ancients, which suggests Pindar and Cicero. In his works we
find the wild extravagance of _Gebir_, followed by the superb classic style
and charm of _Pericles and Aspasia_. Such was Landor, a man of high ideals,
perpetually at war with himself and the world.

LIFE. Lander's stormy life covers the whole period from Wordsworth's
childhood to the middle of the Victorian Era. He was the son of a
physician, and was born at Warwick, in 1775. From his mother he inherited a
fortune; but it was soon scattered by large expenditures and law quarrels;
and in his old age, refused help by his own children, only Browning's
generosity kept Landor from actual want. At Rugby, and at Oxford, his
extreme Republicanism brought him into constant trouble; and his fitting
out a band of volunteers to assist the Spaniards against Napoleon, in 1808,
allies him with Byron and his Quixotic followers. The resemblance to Byron
is even more strikingly shown in the poem _Gebir_, published in 1798, a
year made famous by the _Lyrical Ballads_ of Wordsworth and Coleridge.

A remarkable change in Lander's life is noticeable in 1821, when, at
forty-six years of age, after having lost his magnificent estate of
Llanthony Abbey, in Glamorganshire, and after a stormy experience in Como,
he settled down for a time at Fiesole near Florence. To this period of calm
after storm we owe the classical prose works for which he is famous. The
calm, like that at the center of a whirlwind, lasted but a short time, and
Landor, leaving his family in great anger, returned to Bath, where he lived
alone for more than twenty years. Then, in order to escape a libel suit,
the choleric old man fled back to Italy. He died at Florence, in 1864. The
spirit of his whole life may be inferred from the defiant farewell which he
flung to it:

I strove with none, for none was worth my strife;
Nature I loved, and next to Nature Art;
I warmed both hands before the fire of life;
It sinks, and I am ready to depart.

WORKS. Landor's reaction from Romanticism is all the more remarkable in
view of his early efforts, such as _Gebir_, a wildly romantic poem, which
rivals any work of Byron or Shelley in its extravagance. Notwithstanding
its occasional beautiful and suggestive lines, the work was not an