From “Biographical Sketches.”

WE may be called paradoxical ourselves if we say (but it is true) that never was anything more of a piece than the mind and life, the surroundings, the utterances, and the acts of this wonderfully sane yet thoroughly inconsistent being. His tall, broad, muscular, active frame was characteristic; and so was his head, with the strange elevation of the eyebrows, which expresses self-will as strongly in some cases as astonishment in others. Those eyebrows, mounting up till they comprehended a good portion of the forehead, have been observed in many more paradoxical persons than one. Then there was the retreating but broad forehead, showing the deficiency of reasoning and speculative power, with the preponderance of imagination, and a huge passion for destruction. The massive self-love and self-will carried up his head to something more than a dignified bearing—even to one of arrogance. His vivid and quick eye, and the thoughtful mouth, were fine, and his whole air was that of a man distinguished in his own eyes certainly, but also in those of others. Tradition reports that he was handsome in his youth. In age he was more. The first question about him usually was why, with his frame, and his courage, and his politics, and his social position, he was not in the army. One reply might be that he could neither obey nor co-operate; another was that his godfather, General Powell, wished it, and Landor therefore preferred something else. As for that something else—his father offered him £400 a year to study law, and reside in the Temple for that purpose, whereas he would give him only £150 if he would not; and of course he took the £150, and went as far as he well could from the Temple,—that is, to Swansea. Warwick was his native place. He was born in the best house in the city, where the fine old garden, with its noble elms and horse-chestnuts, might have influenced his imagination, so as to have something to do possibly with his subsequent abode in Italy. His mother was of the ancient family of Savage; and hereditary estates lay about him in Staffordshire and Warwickshire, which had been in the possession of the family for nearly seven centuries. These he sold to shift himself to Wales; and nowhere did his spirit of destructive waywardness break out more painfully than in the sale of those old estates, and his treatment of the new. He employed many scores of laborers on his Welsh estates, made roads and planted, and built a house which cost him £8,000. He set his heart upon game preserving (of all pursuits for a democratic republican), and had at times twenty keepers out upon the hills at night, watching his grouse; but, with twelve thousand acres of land, he never saw a grouse on his table. His tenants cheated him, he declared, and destroyed his plantations; and, though he got rid of them, he left, not only Wales but Great Britain, in wrath. Then the steward in charge of his house cheated him, when he not only got rid of the steward, but had his splendid new house pulled down—out of consideration, he declared, for his son’s future ease and convenience, in being rid of so vexatious a property. His flatterers called this an act of characteristic indignation. To others it appeared that his republican and self-governing doctrines came rather strangely from one who could not rule his own affairs and his own people; and who, finding his failure, could do nothing better than lay waste the whole scene.

  He had obtained some of his scholarship at Rugby, and somewhat more at Oxford,—where, however, his stay was short. Having fired a gun in the quadrangle of his college, he was rusticated; and, instead of returning, published a volume of poems, when he was only eighteen. While at Swansea he studied and wrote “Gebir.” On the invasion of Spain, he determined to be a soldier on his own account, raised a small troop at his own expense, and was the first Englishman who landed in aid of the Spaniards. He was rewarded for this aid, and for a gift of money, by the thanks of the Supreme Junta, and by the rank of Colonel on his return to England; but he sent back his commission and the record of thanks when Ferdinand set aside the Constitution. Among many good political acts, perhaps none was better than this. At thirty-six years of age he married a French lady of good family; and a few years after, in 1818, fixed his residence in Italy,—first in the Palazzo Medici, in Florence, and when obliged to leave it, in a charming villa two miles off. That Villa Gherardesca was built by Michael Angelo. Few British travelers in Italy fail to go and see Fiesole; and while Landor lived there, he was the prey of lion hunters,—as he vehemently complained on occasion of the feud between him and N. P. Willis, the American, who lost a MS. confided to him for his opinion. Such a subordination of the full, ripe scholar and discourser to the shallow, flippant sketcher by the wayside might seem to deserve such a result; but it did not tend to reconcile Landor to lion hunters. While in Italy, he sent to English newspapers, and especially to the Examiner, frequent comments on passing events in the political world, in the form of letters or of verse. He was collecting pictures all the while; and when he returned to England to pass the rest of his days, as he supposed, he left the bulk of his collection in his villa, for his son’s benefit, bringing only a few gems wherewith to adorn such a modest residence as he now intended to have in his own country. That residence was in St. James’s Square, Bath, where he became an octogenarian, living for awhile in peace and quiet—still commenting on men and measures through the Liberal papers, and putting forth, in his eightieth year, the little volume called “Last Fruit from an Old Tree.” The spectacle of a vigorous, vivid, undaunted old age, true to the aims and convictions of youth, is always a fine one; and it was warmly felt to be so in Landor’s case. His prejudices mattered less, when human affairs went on maturing themselves in spite of them; and many of his complaints were silenced in the best possible way,—by the reform of the abuses which he, with some unnecessary violence, denounced. He, for his part, talked less about killing kings; and his steady assertion of the claims of the humble fell in better with the spirit of the time, after years had inaugurated the works of peace. About many matters of political principle and practice he was right, while yet the majority of society were wrong; and it would be too much to require that he should be wholly right in doctrine and fact, or very angelic in his way of enforcing his convictions. Nature did not make him a logician, and if we were ever disappointed at not finding him one, the fault was our own. She made him brave, though wayward; an egotist in his method, but with the good of mankind for his aim. He was passionate and prejudiced, but usually in some great cause, and on the right side of it; though there was a deplorable exception to that general rule in the particular instance of defamation which broke up the repose and dignity of his latter days, and caused his self-exile from England for the remnant of his life. This brief notice of the painful fact is enough for truth and justice. As for the rest, he was of aristocratic birth, fortune, and education, with democracy for his political aim, and poverty and helplessness for his clients. All this would have made Walter Savage Landor a remarkable man in his generation, apart from his services to literature; but when we recall some of his works—such pictures as that of the English officer shot at the Pyramids—such criticisms as in his “Pentameron”—and discourses so elevating and so heart-moving as some which he has put into the mouths of heroes, sages, scholarly and noble women, and saintly and knightly men, we feel that our cumulative obligations to him are very great, and that his death is a prominent incident of the time.