dering 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
of Lawrence Boythorn. The very laugh that made the whole house vibrate,
the roundness and fulness of voice, the fury of superlatives, are all
given in Dickens's best manner, and no one who has ever seen Landor for
half an hour could possibly mistake Boythorn for anybody else. Talking
the matter over once with Dickens, he said, "Landor always took that
presentation of himself in hearty good-humor, and seemed rather proud of
the picture." This is Dickens's portrait: "He was not only a very
handsome old gentleman, upright and stalwart, with a massive gray head,
a fine composure of face when silent, a figure that might have become
corpulent but for his being so continually in earnest that he gave it no
rest, and a chin that might have subsided into a double chin but for the
vehement emphasis in which it was constantly required to assist; but he
was such a true gentleman in his manner, so chivalrously polite, his
face was lighted by a smile of so much sweetness and tenderness, and it
seemed so plain that he had nothing to hide, that really I could not
help looking at him with equal pleasure, whether he smilingly conversed
with Ada and me, or was led by Mr. Jarndyce into some great volley of
superlatives, or threw up his head like a bloodhound, and gave out that
tremendous Ha! ha! ha!"

Landor's energetic gravity, when he was proposing some colossal
impossibility, the observant novelist would na