me so.

Arethusa;" told him how much it had interested me, and how particularly I had been struck with the family likeness to himself in it. He assented; said it was family likeness, not imitation, and added: "Yes, when it came out many people, even some of my friends, thought it was mine, and told My answer always was, 'I wish to God I could have written it!'" He spoke of it with unfeigned enthusiasm, though then, I believe, he was not on speaking terms with his brother. Whenever, indeed, his talk turned, as it often would, to the books or men he liked, it rose to a passionate appreciation of them. Even upon indifferent matters he commonly spoke with heat, as if he had been contradicted, or hoped he might be. There was no prophesying his weather by reading the barometer of his face. Though the index might point never so steadily to Fair, the storm might burst at any moment. His quiet was that of the cyclone's pivot, a conspiracy of whirlwind. Of Wordsworth he spoke with a certain alienated respect, and made many abatements, not as if jealous, but somewhat in the mood of that Athenian who helped ostracize Aristides. Of what he said I recollect only something which he has since said in print, but with less point. Its felicity stamped it on my memory. "I once said to Mr. Wordsworth, One may mix as much poetry with prose as one likes, it will exhilarate the whole; but the moment one mixes a drop of prose with poetry, it precipitates the whole.' He never forgave me!" Then followed that ringing and reduplicated laugh of his, so like the joyous bark of a dog when he

starts for a ramble with his master. Of course he did not fail to mention that exquisite sea-shell which Wordsworth had conveyed from Gebir to ornament his own mantelpiece.

After lunch, he led us into a room the whole available wall-space of which was hung with pictures, nearly all early Italian. As I was already a lover of Botticelli, I think I may trust the judgment I then inwardly pronounced upon them, that they were nearly all aggressively bad. They were small, so that the offence of each was trifling, but in the aggregate they were hard to bear. I waited doggedly to hear him begin his celebration of them, dumfounded between my moral obligation to be as truthful as I dishonestly could and my social duty not to give offence to my host. However, I was soon partially relieved. The picture he wished to show was the head of a man, an ancestor, he told me, whose style of hair and falling collar were of the second quarter of the seventeenth century. Turning sharply on me, he asked: "Does it remind you of anybody?" Of course this was a simple riddle; so, after a diplomatic pause of deliberation, I replied, cheerfully enough: "I think I see a likeness to you in it." There was an appreciable amount of fib in this, but I trust it may be pardoned me as under duress. "Right!" he exploded, with the condensed emphasis of a rifle. "Does it remind you of anybody else?" For an instant I thought my retribution had overtaken me, but in a flash of inspiration I asked myself, “Whom would Landor like best to resemble?" The answer was easy, and I gave it forthwith: "I think I see a

likeness to Milton." "Right again!" he cried triumphantly. "It does look like me, and it does look like Milton. That is the portrait of my ancestor, Walter Noble, Speaker of one of Charles First's parliaments. I was showing this portrait one day to a friend, when he said to me, 'Landor, how can you pride yourself on your descent from this sturdy old cavalier-you who would have cut off Charles's head with the worst of 'em?' 'I cut off his head? Never!' 'You wouldn't? I'm astonished to hear you say that. What would you have done with him?' 'What would I have done? Why, hanged him, like any other malefactor!"" This he trumpeted with such a blare of victory as almost made his progenitor rattle on the wall where he hung. Whether the portrait was that of an ancestor, or whether he had bought it as one suitable for his story, I cannot say. If an ancestor, it could only have been Michael (not Walter) Noble, Member of Parliament (not Speaker) during the Civil War, and siding with the Commons against the King. Landor had confounded him with Sir Arnold Savage (a Speaker in Henry Seventh's time), whom he had adopted as an ancestor, though there was no probable, certainly no provable, community of blood between them. This makes the anecdote only the more characteristic as an illustration of the freaks of his innocently fantastic and creative memory. I could almost wish my own had the same happy faculty, when I see how little it has preserved of my conversation, so largely monologue on his part, with a man so memorable.

WALTON.1

1889.

BIOGRAPHY in these communicative days has become so voluminous that it might seem calculated rather for the ninefold vitality of another domestic animal than for the less lavish allotment of man. Only such renewed leases of life could justify the writing or suffice for the reading of these too often supererogatory confidences. Only a man like the great Julius, who new-moulded the world and stamped his effigy on the coinage of political thought still current, has a right to so much of our curiosity as we are now expected to put at the service of an average general or bishop. "Nothing human is foreign to me" was said long ago, chiefly by the Latin Grammar, and has been received as the pit and gallery receive a moral sentiment which does not inconvenience themselves, but which they think likely to give the boxes an uneasy qualm. But biography has found out a process by which what is human may be so thrust upon us as to become inhuman, and one is often tempted to wish that a great deal of it might not only be made foreign to

1 This paper was originally printed as an introduction to an edition of Walton's Angler, edited by Mr. John Bartlett, and published in 1889 by Messrs. Little, Brown & Co., through whose cour tesy it is included in this collection.

us, but firmly kept so. Plutarch, a man of the most many-sided moral and intellectual interests, had a truer sense of proportion, and tempers his amiable discursiveness with an eye to his neighbor's dial. And in his case the very names of his heroes are mostly so trumpet-like as both to waken attention and to warrant it, ushering in the bearers of them like that flourish on the Elizabethan stage which told that a king was coming. How should Brown or Smith or any other dingy monosyllable of Saxon indistinction compete for conjuration with Pelopidas or Timoleon? Even within living memory Napoleon had a prodigious purchase in his name alone, and prettily confirmed the theory of Mr. Shandy.

The modern biographer has become so indiscriminate, so unconscious of the relative importance of a single life to the Universe, so careless of the just limits whether of human interest or endurance, so communistic in assuming that all men are entitled to an equal share of what little time there is left in the world, that many a worthy, whom a paragraph from the right pen might have immortalized, is suffocated in the trackless swamps of two octavos. Meditating over these grievances with the near prospect of a biography to write, I am inclined to apply what was said of States to men also, and call him happiest who has left fewest materials for history. It is at least doubtful whether gossip gain body by bottling. In these chattering days when nobody who really is nobody can stir forth without the volunteer accompaniment of a