rom the underlying thought, and an over-anxiety to avoid mere smartness
which sometimes leads to real vagueness, he expects too much from his
readers, or perhaps despises them too much. He will not condescend to
explanation if you do not catch his drift at half a word. He is so
desirous to round off his transitions gracefully, that he obliterates
the necessary indications of the main divisions of the subject. When
criticising Milton or Dante, he can hardly keep his hand off the finest
passages in his desire to pare away superfluities. Treating himself in
the same fashion, he leaves none of those little signs which, like the
typographical hand prefixed to a notice, are extremely convenient,
though strictly superfluous. It is doubtless unpleasant to have the hard
framework of logical divisions showing too distinctly in an argument, or
to have a too elaborate statement of dates and places and external
relations in a romance. But such aids to the memory may be removed too
freely. The building may be injured in taking away the scaffolding.
Faults of this kind, however, will not explain Landor's failure to get a
real hold upon a large body of readers. Writers of far greater obscurity
and much more repellent blemishes of style to set against much lower
merits, have gained a far wider popularity. The want of sympathy between
so eminent a literary artist and his time must rest upon some deeper
divergence of sentiment. Landor's writings present the same kind of
problem as his life. We are told, and we can see for ourselves, that he
was a man of many very high and many very amiable qualities. He was full
of chivalrous feeling; capable of the most flowing and delicate
courtesy; easily stirred to righteous indignation against every kind of
tyranny and bigotry; capable, too, of a tenderness pleasantly contrasted
with his outbursts of passing wrath; passionately fond of children, and
a true lover of dogs. But with all this, he could never live long at
peace with anybody. He was the most impracticable of men, and every
turning-point in his career was decided by some vehement quarrel. He had
to leave school in consequence of a quarrel, trifling in itself, but
aggravated by 'a fierce defiance of all authority and a refusal to ask
forgiveness.' He got into a preposterous scrape at Oxford, and forced
the authorities to rusticate him. This branched out into a quarrel with
his father. When he set up as a country gentleman at Llanthony Abbey, he