e, or, if you prefer
the word, self-respect. It is the sentiment of personal dignity, which
could not bear the thought that he, Landor, should have to bow the knee
to a fool like George III.; or that Milton should have been regarded as
the inferior of such a sneak as Charles I. But the same feeling would
have been just as much shocked by the claim of a demagogue to override
high-spirited gentlemen. Mobs were every whit as vile as kings. He might
have stood for Shakespeare's Coriolanus, if Coriolanus had not an
unfortunate want of taste in his language. Landor, indeed, being never
much troubled as to consistency, is fond of dilating on the absurdity of
any kind of hereditary rank; but he sympathises, to his last fibre, with
the spirit fostered by the existence of an aristocratic caste, and
producible, so far as our experience has gone, in no other way. He is
generous enough to hate all oppression in every form, and therefore to
hate the oppression exercised by a noble as heartily as oppression
exercised by a king. He is a big boy ready to fight anyone who bullies
his fag; but with no doubts as to the merits of fagging. But then he
never chooses to look at the awkward consequences of his opinion. When
talking of politics, an aristocracy full of virtue and talent, ruling on
generous principles a people sufficiently educated to obey its natural
leaders, is the ideal which is vaguely before his mind. To ask how it is
to be produced without hereditary rank, or to be prevented from
degenerating into a tyrannical oligarchy, or to be reconciled at all
with modern principles, is simply to be impertinent. He answers all such
questions by putting himself in imagination into the attitude of a
Pericles or Demosthenes or Milton, fulminating against tyrants and
keeping the mob in its place by the ascendency of genius. To recommend
Venice as a model is simply to say that you have nothing but contempt
for all politics. It is as if a lad should be asked whether he preferred
to join a cavalry or an infantry regiment, and should reply that he
would only serve under Leonidas.

His religious principles are in the same way little more than the
assertion that he will not be fettered in mind or body by any priest on
earth. The priest is to him what he was to the deists and materialists
of the eighteenth century--a juggling impostor who uses superstition as
an instrument for creeping into the confidence of women and cowards, and
burning brave men