Latin _Idyllia
Heroica_, written years before. The Hellenic clearness and repose which
were absent from his life, Landor sought in his art. His poems, in their
restraint, their objectivity, their aloofness from modern feeling, have
something chill and artificial. The verse of poets like Byron and
Wordsworth is alive; the blood runs in it. But Landor's polished,
clean-cut _intaglios_ have been well described as "written in marble."
He was a master of fine and solid prose. His _Pericles and Aspasia_
consists of a series of letters passing between the great Athenian
demagogue; the hetaira, Aspasia; her friend, Cleone of Miletus;
Anaxagorus, the philosopher, and Pericles's nephew, Alcibiades. In this
masterpiece, the intellectual life of Athens, at its period of highest
refinement, is brought before the reader with singular vividness, and he
is made to breathe an atmosphere of high-bred grace, delicate wit, and
thoughtful sentiment, expressed in English "of Attic choice." The
_Imaginary Conversations_, 1824-1846, were Platonic dialogues between a
great variety of historical characters; between, for example, Dante and
Beatrice, Washington and Franklin, Queen Elizabeth and Cecil, Xenophon
and Cyrus the Younger, Bonaparte and the president of the Senate.
Landor's writings have never been popular; they address an aristocracy
of scholars; and Byron--whom Landor disliked and considered
vulgar--sneered at him as a writer who "cultivated much private renown
in the shape of Latin verses." He said of himself that he "never
contended with a contemporary, but walked alone on the far Eastern
uplands, meditating and remembering."

A school-mate of Coleridge at Christ's Hospital, and his friend and
correspondent through life, was Charles Lamb, one of the most charming
of English essayists. He was a bachelor, who lived alone with his sister
Mary, a lovable and intellectual woman, but subject to recurring
attacks of madness. Lamb was "a notched and cropped scrivener, a votary
of the desk;" a clerk, that is, in the employ of the East India Company.
He was of antiquarian tastes, an ardent playgoer, a lover of whist and
of the London streets; and these tastes are reflected in his _Essays of
Elia_, contributed to the _London Magazine_ and reprinted in book form
in 1823. From his mousing among the Elizabethan dramatists and such old
humorists as Burton and Fuller, his own style imbibed a peculiar
quaintness and pungency. His _Specimens of Engli