and yet may manage to fall in with
the spirit of our own times. The truth is, I fancy, that a simpler name
may be given to Landor's tastes, and that we may find them exemplified
nearer home. There is many a good country gentleman who rides well to
hounds, and is most heartily 'objective' in the sense of hating
metaphysics and elaborate allegory and unintelligible art, and
preferring a glass of wine and a talk with a charming young lady to
mystic communings with the world-spirit; and as for Landor's Hellenism,
that surely ought not to be an uncommon phenomenon in the region of
English public schools. It is an odd circumstance that we should be so
much puzzled by the very man who seems to realise precisely that ideal
of culture upon which our most popular system of education is apparently
moulded. Here at last is a man who is really simple-minded enough to
take the habit of writing Latin verses seriously; making it a
consolation in trouble as well as an elegant amusement. He hopes to rest
his fame upon it, and even by a marvellous _tour de force_ writes a
great deal of English poetry which for all the world reads exactly like
a first-rate copy of modern Greek Iambics. For once we have produced
just what the system ought constantly to produce, and yet we cannot make
him out.

The reason for our not producing more Landors is indeed pretty simple.
Men of real poetic genius are exceedingly rare at all times, and it is
still rarer to find such a man who remains a schoolboy all his life.
Landor is precisely a glorified and sublime edition of the model
sixth-form lad, only with an unusually strong infusion of schoolboy
perversion. Perverse lads, indeed, generally kick over the traces at an
earlier point: and refuse to learn anything. Boys who take kindly to the
classical system are generally good--that is to say, docile. They
develop into prosaic tutors and professors; or, when the cares of life
begin to press, they start their cargo of classical lumber and fill the
void with law or politics. Landor's peculiar temperament led him to kick
against authority, whilst he yet imbibed the spirit of the teaching
fully, and in some respects rather too fully. He was a rebel against the
outward form, and yet more faithful in spirit than most of the obedient
subjects.

The impatient and indomitable temper which made quiet or continuous
meditation impossible, and the accidental circumstances of his life,
left him in possession of qualitie