Nor, above all, will there anywhere be found a more
pervading passion for liberty, a fiercer hatred of the base, a wider
sympathy with the wronged and the oppressed, or help more ready at
all times for those who fight at odds and disadvantage against the
powerful and the fortunate, than in the writings of Walter Savage
Landor."--Last page of second volume.
The impression was strong upon the present writer's mind, as on Mr.
Forster's, during years of close friendship with the subject of this
biography, that his animosities were chiefly referable to the
singular inability in him to dissociate other people's ways of
thinking from his own. He had, to the last, a ludicrous grievance
(both Mr. Forster and the writer have often amused themselves with
it) against a good-natured nobleman, doubtless perfectly unconscious
of having ever given him offence. The offence was, that on the
occasion of some dinner party in another nobleman's house, many
years before, this innocent lord (then a commoner) had passed in to
dinner, through some door, before him, as he himself was about to
pass in through that same door with a lady on his arm. Now, Landor
was a gentleman of most scrupulous politeness, and in his carriage
of himself towards ladies there was a certain mixture of stateliness
and deference, belonging to quite another time, and, as Mr.
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