ribed by himself in his _Vision of Sudden Death_. But his
unworldliness and faculty of vision-seeing were not inconsistent with
the keenness of judgment and the justness and delicacy of perception
displayed in his _Biographical Sketches_ of Wordsworth, Coleridge, and
other contemporaries: in his critical papers on _Pope_, _Milton_,
_Lessing_, _Homer and the Homeridae_: his essay on _Style_; and his
_Brief Appraisal of the Greek Literature_. His curious scholarship is
seen in his articles on the _Toilet of a Hebrew Lady_, and the
_Casuistry of Roman Meals_; his ironical and somewhat elaborate humor in
his essay on _Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts_. Of his
narrative pieces the most remarkable is his _Revolt of the Tartars_,
describing the flight of a Kalmuck tribe of six hundred thousand souls
from Russia to the Chinese frontier: a great hegira or anabasis, which
extended for four thousand miles over desert steppes infested with foes,
occupied six months' time, and left nearly half of the tribe dead upon
the way. The subject was suited to De Quincey's imagination. It was like
one of his own opium visions, and he handled it with a dignity and force
which make the history not altogether unworthy of comparison with
Thucydides's great chapter on the Sicilian Expedition.

An intimate friend of Southey was Walter Savage Landor, a man of kingly
nature, of a leonine presence, with a most stormy and unreasonable
temper, and yet with the courtliest graces of manner, and with--said
Emerson--"a wonderful brain, despotic, violent, and inexhaustible." He
inherited wealth, and lived a great part of his life at Florence, where
he died in 1864, in his ninetieth year. Dickens, who knew him at Bath,
in the latter part of his life, made a kindly caricature of him as
Lawrence Boythorn, in _Bleak House_, whose "combination of superficial
ferocity and inherent tenderness," testifies Henry Crabb Robinson, in
his _Diary_, was true to the life. Landor is the most purely classical
of English writers. Not merely his themes, but his whole way of thinking
was pagan and antique. He composed indifferently in English or Latin,
preferring the latter, if any thing, in obedience to his instinct for
compression and exclusiveness. Thus, portions of his narrative poem,
_Gebir_, 1798, were written originally in Latin and he added a Latin
version, _Gebirius_, to the English edition. In like manner his
_Hellenics_, 1847, were mainly translations from his