ition; and much exposition, in various
forms, of the practical philosophy which every man imbibes according to
his faculties in his passage through the world. It would be undesirable
to discuss seriously his political or religious notions. To say the
truth, they are not really worth discussing, for they are little more
than vehement explosions of unreasoning prejudice. I do not know whether
Landor would have approved the famous aspiration about strangling the
last of kings with the entrails of the last priest, but some such
sentiment seems to sum up all that he really has to say. His doctrine
so far coincides with that of Diderot and other revolutionists, though
he has no sympathy with their social aspirations. His utterances,
however, remind us too much--in substance, though not in form--of the
rhetoric of debating societies. They are as factitious as the
old-fashioned appeals to the memory of Brutus. They would doubtless make
a sensation at the Union. Diogenes tells us that 'all nations, all
cities, all communities, should combine in one great hunt, like that of
the Scythians at the approach of winter, and follow it' (the kingly
power, to wit) 'up, unrelentingly to its perdition. The diadem should
designate the victim; all who wear it, all who offer it, all who bow to
it, should perish.' Demosthenes, in less direct language, announces the
same plan to Eubulides as the one truth, far more important than any
other, and 'more conducive to whatever is desirable to the well-educated
and free.' We laugh, not because the phrase is overstrained, or intended
to have a merely dramatic truth, for Landor puts similar sentiments into
the mouths of all his favourite speakers, but simply because we feel it
to be a mere form of swearing. The language would have been less
elegant, but the meaning just the same, if he had rapped out a good
mouth-filling oath whenever he heard the name of king. When, in
reference to some such utterances, Carlyle said that 'Landor's principle
is mere rebellion,' Landor was much nettled, and declared himself to be
in favour of authority. He despised American republicanism and regarded
Venice as the pattern State. He sympathised in this, as in much else,
with the theorists of Milton's time, and would have been approved by
Harrington or Algernon Sidney; but, for all that, Carlyle seems pretty
well to have hit the mark. Such republicanism is in reality nothing
more than the political expression of intense prid