e avoided duels, unless because he regarded the practice as a Christian
barbarism to which the ancients had never condescended.

His position and surroundings tended to aggravate his incoherencies of
statement. Like his own Peterborough, he was a man of aristocratic
feeling, with a hearty contempt for aristocrats. The expectation that he
would one day join the ranks of the country gentlemen unsettled him as a
scholar; and when he became a landed proprietor he despised his fellow
'barbarians' with a true scholar's contempt. He was not forced into the
ordinary professional groove, and yet did not fully imbibe the
prejudices of the class who can afford to be idle, and the natural
result is an odd mixture of conflicting prejudices. He is classical in
taste and cosmopolitan in life, and yet he always retains a certain
John-Bull element. His preference of Shakespeare to Racine is associated
with, if not partly prompted by, a mere English antipathy to foreigners.
He never becomes Italianised so far as to lose his contempt for men
whose ideas of sport rank larks with the orthodox partridge. He abuses
Castlereagh and poor George III. to his heart's content, and so far
flies in the face of British prejudice; but it is by no means as a
sympathiser with foreign innovations. His republicanism is strongly
dashed with old-fashioned conservatism, and he is proud of a doubtful
descent from old worthies of the true English type. Through all his
would-be paganism we feel that at bottom he is after all a true-born
and wrong-headed Englishman. He never, like Shelley, pushed his quarrel
with the old order to the extreme, but remained in a solitary cave of
Adullam. 'There can be no great genius,' says Penn to Peterborough,
'where there is not profound and continued reasoning.' The remark is too
good for Penn; and yet it would be dangerous in Landor's own mouth; for
certainly the defect which most strikes us, both in his life and his
writings, is just the inconsistency which leaves most people as the
reasoning powers develop. His work was marred by the unreasonableness of
a nature so impetuous and so absorbed by any momentary gust of passion
that he could never bring his thoughts or his plans to a focus, or
conform them to a general scheme. His prejudices master him both in
speculation and practice. He cannot fairly rise above them, or govern
them by reference to general principles or the permanent interests of
his life. In the vulgar phrase, h