id not take them;
but she has taken none here; hers are all from Florence. I have the
best water, the best air, and the best oil in the world. They speak
highly of the wine too; but here I doubt. In fact, I hate wine,
unless hock or claret....

"Italy is a fine climate, but Swansea better. That however is the
only spot in Great Britain where we have warmth without wet. Still,
Italy is the country I would live in.... In two [years] I hope to
have a hundred good peaches every day at table during two months:
at present I have had as many bad ones. My land is said to produce
the best figs in Tuscany; I have usually six or seven bushels of them."

I have walked through Lander's little paradise--now called the Villa
Landor and reached by the narrow rugged road to the right just below
the village of S. Domenico. Its cypresses, planted, as I imagine,
by Lander's own hand, are stately as minarets and its lawn is as
green and soft as that of an Oxford college. The orchard, in April,
was a mass of blossom. Thrushes sang in the evergreens and the first
swallow of the year darted through the cypresses just as we reached
the gates. It is truly a poet's house and garden.

In 1833 a French neighbour accused Landor of robbing him of water by
stopping an underground stream, and Landor naturally challenged him to
a duel. The meeting was avoided through the tact of Lander's second,
the English consul at Florence, and the two men became friends. At his
villa Landor wrote much of his best prose--the "Pentameron," "Pericles
and Aspasia" and the "Trial of Shakespeare for Deer-stealing "--and he
was in the main happy, having so much planting and harvesting to do,
his children to play with, and now and then a visitor. In the main
too he managed very well with the country people, but one day was
amused to overhear a conversation over the hedge between two passing
contadini. "All the English are mad," said one, "but as for this
one...!" There was a story of Landor current in Florence in those
days which depicted him, furious with a spoiled dish, throwing his
cook out of the window, and then, realizing where he would fall,
exclaiming in an agony, "Good God, I forgot the violets!"

Such was Landor's impossible way on occasion that he succeeded in
getting himself exiled from Tuscany; but the Grand Duke was called in
as pacificator, and, though the order of expulsion was not rescinded,
it was not carried out.

In 1835 Landor wrote some verses to