o a lady in Bologna, although he is said to have offended
Italians generally by his strict morality.

Skipping a hundred and eighty years we find Shelley in Florence,
in 1819, and it was here that his son was born, receiving the names
Percy Florence. Here he wrote, as I have said, his "Ode to the West
Wind" and that grimly comic work "Peter Bell the Third".

But next the Brownings it is Walter Savage Landor of whom I always
think as the greatest English Florentine. Florence became his second
home when he was middle-aged and strong; and then again, when he was
a very old man, shipwrecked by his impulsive and impossible temper,
it became his last haven. It was Browning who found him his final
resting-place--a floor of rooms not far from where we now stand,
in the Via Nunziatina.

Florence is so intimately associated with Landor, and Landor was
so happy in Florence, that a brief outline of his life seems to
be imperative. Born in 1775, the heir to considerable estates,
the boy soon developed that whirlwind headstrong impatience which
was to make him as notorious as his exquisite genius has made him
famous. He was sent to Rugby, but disapproving of the headmaster's
judgment of his Latin verses, he produced such a lampoon upon him,
also in Latin, as made removal or expulsion a necessity. At Oxford
his Latin and Greek verses were still his delight, but he took
also to politics, was called a mad Jacobin, and, in order to prove
his sanity and show his disapproval of a person obnoxious to him,
fired a gun at his shutters and was sent down for a year. He never
returned. After a period of strained relations with his father
and hot repudiations of all the plans for his future which were
made for him--such as entering the militia, reading law, and so
forth--he retired to Wales on a small allowance and wrote "Gebir"
which came out in 1798, when its author was twenty-three. In 1808
Landor threw in his lot with the Spaniards against the French, saw
some fighting and opened his purse for the victims of the war; but
the usual personal quarrel intervened. Returning to England he bought
Llanthony Abbey, stocked it with Spanish sheep, planted extensively,
and was to be the squire of squires; and at the same time seeing a
pretty penniless girl at a ball in Bath, he made a bet he would marry
her, and won it. As a squire he became quickly involved with neighbours
(an inevitable proceeding with him) and also with a Bishop concerning
the res