Landor Volume 23 (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1901 Excerpt: ...and ruling families of modern states. Besides the contents of these five volumes, written and published between the years 1821 and 1829, and containing in all about eighty Conversations, Landor had before the latter date written some twenty more, which he intended for publication in a sixth. But from one reason and another this sixth volume never appeared, and the materials which should have composed it were for the most i only made public in the collected edition of Landor's gs issued in 1846. Counting these, and the increase i number of the original dialogues effected by divid I ing some of them into two, and adding those which he wrote afterwards at intervals until the year of his death, the total number of Imaginary Conversations left by Landor amounts to just short of a hundred and fifty. Those written in the eight years now under review include, therefore, about two-thirds of the whole. We have seen with what ardour and facility, and with what a miscellaneous selection of speakers and of topics, they were produced. Their range extends over the greater part of life, literature, and history. Landor himself, and his editors after him, devised in the sequel various modes of grouping and classifying them; but none of these classifications are satisfactory. Conversations of the Greeks and Romans form, indeed, one distinct historical division, but not a division on which it is desirable to insist. It has often been said of Landor.that he wrote of the Greeks more like a Greek, and of the Romans more like a Roman, than any other modern, and the saying in my judgment is true. But his treatment of other themes is not different in kind from his treatment of these, and he has not been better inspired by the romance and the example of antiquity than by the charm of...