to _Colburn's New Monthly_ for the year 1822 or
thereabouts will be rewarded (or otherwise) by coming across a
'Dialogue of the Dead' in prose, and there may be other such fugitive
lucubrations. But so far as the English literature of the past is
concerned, 'dialogues of the dead' were written by only two persons
worthy of celebration--Walter Savage Landor and George, Lord Lyttelton,
the author of 'Letters from a Persian in England to his friend in
Ispahan.' Landor's 'Imaginary Conversations' are among those numerous
works which everybody is supposed to have read, and, having read them,
to admire. And unfortunate indeed would be he who could not recognise
and appreciate the varied beauty and charm of these prose masterpieces.
Here Menelaus and Helen, AEsop and Rhodope, Tiberius and Vipsania,
Leofric and Godiva, Roger Ascham and Jane Grey, and a hundred other
heroes and heroines of the past, converse not only with dramatic
appropriateness, but with rhetorical force--with amplitude of thought
and spontaneity of image. By the side of such a wonderful flower-show
(as one of our poets said of a selection from a brother poet's lyrics),
Lyttelton's trim parterre shows, no doubt, but dimly; nevertheless, to
that accomplished nobleman there is due something more than the small
credit of having been Landor's predecessor in this form of English
composition. Of that form Lyttelton says, in the preface to his
'Dialogues,' that

'It sets before us the history of all times and all nations,
presents to the choice of a writer all characters of remarkable
persons which may be best opposed to, or compared with, each other;
and is, perhaps, one of the most agreeable methods that can be
employed of conveying to the mind any critical, moral, or political
observations.'

Lyttelton brings together in his work such people as Plato and Fenelon,
Lucian and Rabelais, Addison and Swift, Boileau and Pope; and, if he
scarcely has the power to make these masters talk as we know they wrote,
still he puts into their mouths much which it might be worth the while
of the modern reader to assimilate.

Early in the eighteenth century there appeared a little _brochure_
called 'English Lucian,' but it proved to be nothing more edifying than
a few 'modern dialogues' between a vintner and his wife, between 'a
reformer of manners,' his wife and a captain of the guards, and between
a Master of Arts and 'a lady's woman.' Of the hu