LANDOR 1775-1864 WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR was born of a wealthy Warwickshire family early in 1775, and died in Italy in the year 1864. Of this life of ninety years, seventy were actively devoted to authorship. His first considerable work was the epic poem "Gebir," published in 1798, and he brought his labors to a close in 1863 by the publication of his "Heroic Idyls,” —a collection of classical dialogues. Walter Lavagesandor The poet Stedman says of Landor: "He was the pioneer of the late Eng lish school; and among recent poets, though far from being the greatest in achievement, was the most self-reliant, the most versatile, and one of the most imaginative. His style, thought, and versatility were Victorian rather than Georgian; they are now seen to belong to that school of which Tennyson is by eminence the representative. Radically a poet, he ranks among the best essayists of his time; and he shares this distinction in common with Milton, Coleridge, Emerson, and other poets, in various eras, who have been intellectual students and thinkers." - Landor's more important works are four dramatic pieces - the best known of which is his 66 Count Julian"-and his "Imaginary Conversations." Of these latter, two are of the highest order of literary merit, "The Citation and Examination of William Shakespeare Touching DeerStealing," and "Pericles and Aspasia." Of the "Citation of Shakespeare," Lamb declared that "only two men could have written it, — he who wrote it, and the man it was written on." Landor also produced very many short poems and lyrics of great beauty. Lowell has said of him that, "excepting Shakespeare, no other writer has furnished us with so many delicate aphorisms of human nature.” OLIVER CROMWELL AND WALTER NOBLE1 CROMWELL. What brings thee back from Staffordshire, friend Walter? NOBLE. I hope, General Cromwell, to persuade you that the death of Charles will be considered by all Europe as a most atrocious action. CROMWELL. Thou hast already persuaded me: what then? NOBLE. Surely, then, you will prevent it, for your authority is great. Even those who upon their consciences found him guilty would remit the penalty of blood, some from policy, some from mercy. I have conversed with Hutchinson, with Ludlow, your friend and mine, with Henry Nevile, and Walter Long: you wil oblige these worthy friends, and unite in your favor the suffrages of the truest and trustiest men living. There are many others, with whom I am in no habits of intercourse, who are known to entertain the same sentiments; and these also are among the country gentlemen, to whom our parliament owes the better part of its reputation. CROMWELL. You country gentlemen bring with you into the People's House a freshness and sweet savor which our citizens lack mightily. I would fain merit your esteem, heedless of those 1 from Landor's "Imaginary Conversations" 2 Charles I., afterwards beheaded i. e. the influence and support 1 pursy fellows from hulks and warehouses, with one ear lappeted by the pen behind it, and the other an heirloom, as Charles would have had it, in Laud's star-chamber. Oh, they are proud and bloody men! My heart melts; but, alas! my authority is null I am the servant of the Commonwealth. I will not, dare not, betray it. If Charles Stuart had threatened my death only, in the letter we ripped out of the saddle, I would have reproved him manfully and turned him adrift: but others are concerned; lives more precious than mine, worn as it is with fastings, prayers, long services, and preyed upon by a pouncing disease. The Lord hath led him into the toils laid for the innocent. Foolish man! he never could eschew evil counsel. NOBLE. In comparison with you, he is but as a pinnacle to a buttress. I acknowledge his weaknesses, and cannot wink upon his crimes but that which you visit as the heaviest of them, perhaps was not so, although the most disastrous to both parties, the bearing of arms against his people. He fought for what he considered his hereditary property; we do the same: should we be hanged for losing a lawsuit? CROMWELL. No, unless it is the second. Thou talkest finely and foolishly, Wat, for a man of thy calm discernment. If a rogue holds a pistol to my breast, do I ask him who he is? Do I care whether his doublet be of catskin or of dogskin? Fie upon such wicked sophisms! Marvelous, how the devil works upon good men's minds! Friend friend! hast thou lost thy recollection? On the third of June, 1628, an usher stood at the door of our Commons-house, to hinder any member from leaving it, under pain of being sent to the Tower. On the fifth of the same month, the Speaker said he had received the King's order 1 Cutting off the ears was one of the brutal punishments common in judi cial sentences of earlier times. This suggestion that the sparing of an ear constituted it a sort of "heirloom" of the tribunal, is thus seen to be a satirical pleasantry on the part of Cromwell. 2 a secret court of criminal jurisdiction, acting without a jury 3 piercing, like talons baneful, pernicious; an obsolete meaning, used again on the next page in "wicked temptation to interrupt any who should utter a word against his ministers. In the following year, we might have justly hanged him for the crime of forgery, seeing that on the twenty-first of January he commanded his printer, Norton, to falsify the text of his own Declaration, in which he had acknowledged our rights, and had been paid handsomely for the acknowledgment. I sorely fear the month of January is marked in the Calendar by the finger of the Almighty, for the heavy chastisement of this misdeed. We must take heed unto our ways, and never again be led into the wicked temptation of trusting the false and the reprobate. Equity might demand from the traitor more than his worthless and pernicious life. Equity might retaliate on him what Eliot and other most innocent and most virtuous men have suffered : pestilential imprisonment, lingering, painful, incurable disease, fetters and thumbscrews, racks and mutilations. Should the guiltless have suffered these things rather than the guilty? — the defender of his home and property rather than the robber who broke into them? If the extinction of a spark prevents worse things than the conflagration of twenty cities, if it prevents the expansion of principles endemically noxious1 through incalculable ages, such as slavish endurance and all unmanly propensities, I would never take by the collar him who resolutely setteth his foot thereon. Whether a grain of dust be blown away in the morning, in the noon, or in the evening, what matter? But it imports very seriously whether it be blown in the eyes and darken the sight of a nation. This is the difference between him who dies in the solitude of his chamber, and him whom halberds, by God's ordinance, may surround upon the scaffold. NOBLE. From so cruel an infliction let me hope our unfortunate king may be exempted. He was always more to be dreaded by his friends than by his enemies, and now by neither. CROMWELL. God forbid that Englishman should be feared by Englishman but to be daunted by the weakest, to bend before the worst I tell thee, Walter Noble, if Moses and the Prophets 1 endemically noxious; i. e. injurious to a whole nation commanded me to this villainy, I would draw back and mount my horse. NOBLE. I wish that our history, already too dark with blood, should contain, as far as we are concerned in it, some unpolluted pages. : CROMWELL. 'T were better, much better. Never shall I be called, I promise thee, an unnecessary shedder of blood. Remember, my good prudent friend, of what materials our sectaries1 are composed what hostility against all eminence, what rancor against all glory. Not only kingly power offends them, but every other; and they talk of putting to the sword, as if it were the quietest, gentlest, and most ordinary thing in the world. The knaves 2 even dictate from their stools and benches to men in armor, bruised and bleeding for them; and with schooldames' scourges in their fists do they give counsel to those who protect them from the cart and halter. In the name of the Lord, I must spit outright (or worse) upon these crackling, bouncing firebrands, before I can make them tractable. NOBLE. I lament their blindness; but follies wear out the faster by being hard run upon. This fermenting sourness will presently turn vapid, and people will cast it out. I am not surprised that you are discontented and angry at what thwarts your better nature. But come, Cromwell, overlook them, despise them, and erect to yourself a glorious name by sparing a mortal enemy. CROMWELL. A glorious name, by God's blessing, I will erect; and all our fellow-laborers shall rejoice at it but I see better than they do the blow descending on them, and my arm better than theirs can ward it off. Noble, thy heart overflows with kindness for Charles Stuart: if he were at liberty to-morrow by thy intercession, he would sign thy death-warrant the day after, for serving the Commonwealth. A generation of vipers ! there is nothing upright or grateful in them. 1 dissenters; in this case the religious leaders among the Puritans 2 used half playfully and half in irritation 8 St. Matthew xxiii. 33. Macaulay, in his essay upon the Puritans, speaks of" the Scriptural phrases which they introduced on every occasion." |