onoured years. Of all the painful story of the regrettable
circumstances which caused him to seek his last home in Florence it
would be mere impertinence in me to speak, after the lucid, and at the
same time delicately-touched, account of them which his biographer has
given.

I may say, however, that even after the many years of his absence from
Florence there still lingered a traditional remembrance of him--a sort
of Landor legend--which made all us Anglo-Florentines of those days
very sure, that however blamable his conduct (with reference to the
very partially understood story of the circumstances that caused
him to leave England) may have been in the eyes of lawyers or of
moralists, the motives and feelings that had actuated him must have
been generous and chivalrous. Had we been told that, finding a brick
wall in a place where he thought no wall should be, he had forthwith
proceeded to batter it down with his head, though it was not his wall
but another's, we should have recognised in the report the Landor of
the myths that remained among us concerning him. But that while in any
degree _compos mentis_ he had under whatever provocation acted in a
base, or cowardly, or mean, or underhand manner, was, we considered,
wholly impossible.

There were various legendary stories current in Florence in those
days of his doings in the olden time. Once--so said the tradition--he
knocked a man down in the street, was brought before the _delegato_,
as the police magistrate was called, and promptly fined one piastre,
value about four and sixpence; whereupon he threw a sequin (two
piastres) down upon the table and said that it was unnecessary to give
him any change, inasmuch as he purposed knocking the man down again as
soon as he left the court. We, _poteri_, as regarded the date of the
story, were all convinced that the true verdict in the matter was that
of the old Cornish jury, "Sarved un right."

Landor, as I remember him, was a handsome-looking old man, very much
more so, I think, than he could have been as a young man, to judge
by the portrait prefixed to Mr. Forster's volumes. He was a man
of somewhat leonine aspect as regards the general appearance and
expression of the head and face, which accorded well with the large
and massive build of the figure, and to which a superbly curling white
beard added not only picturesqueness, but a certain nobility.

Landor had been acquainted with the Garrows, and with my first wife