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.

"Do not be alarmed," he writes, "at a letter which 'like a wounded
snake drags its slow