t Landor, as upon other topics, we are distracted
between the respect due to his strong feeling for the excellent in
literature, and the undeniable facts that his criticisms have a very
blunt edge, and that his eulogies are apt to be indiscriminate.

Southey and Wordsworth had a simple method of explaining the neglect of
a great author. According to them, contemporary neglect affords a
negative presumption in favour of permanent reputation. No lofty poet
has honour in his own generation. Southey's conviction that his
ponderous epics would make the fortune of his children is a pleasant
instance of self-delusion. But the theory is generally admitted in
regard to Wordsworth; and Landor accepted and defended it with
characteristic vigour. 'I have published,' he says in the conversation
with Hare, 'five volumes of "Imaginary Conversations:" cut the worst of
them through the middle, and there will remain in the decimal fraction
enough to satisfy my appetite for fame. I shall dine late; but the
dining-room will be well lighted, the guests few and select.' He recurs
frequently to the doctrine. 'Be patient!' he says, in another character.
'From the higher heavens of poetry it is long before the radiance of the
brightest star can reach the world below. We hear that one man finds out
one beauty, another man finds out another, placing his observatory and
instruments on the poet's grave. The worms must have eaten us before we
rightly know what we are. It is only when we are skeletons that we are
boxed and ticketed and prized and shown. Be it so! I shall not be tired
of waiting.' Conscious, as he says in his own person, that in 2,000
years there have not been five volumes of prose (the work of one author)
equal to his 'Conversations,' he could indeed afford to wait: if
conscious of earthly things, he must be waiting still.

This superlative self-esteem strikes one, to say the truth, as part of
Landor's abiding boyishness. It is only in schoolboy themes that we are
still inclined to talk about the devouring love of fame. Grown-up men
look rightly with some contempt upon such aspirations. What work a man
does is really done in, or at least through, his own generation; and the
posthumous fame which poets affect to value means, for the most part,
being known by name to a few antiquarians, schoolmasters, or secluded
students. When the poet, to adopt Landor's metaphor, has become a
luminous star, his superiority to those which have grown d