WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR was born at Warwick, England, January 30th, 1775. He lived to be eighty-five years old, and, according to his passionate admirer, Algernon Charles Swinburne, “in the course of this long life he won for himself such a double crown of glory in verse and in prose as had been won by no other Englishman but Milton.” That Landor was a man of the most highly developed intellect is unquestionable, and but for a most singular contradiction he might have been the greatest force in the literature of the nineteenth century. An extreme Republican in his politics, he was in all his literary sympathies an intellectual aristocrat of the severest and most exclusive type. By his politics he alienated the class to which he belonged by virtue of the habits of his mind, and by the haughtiness of his intellectual superiority he excluded from his circle the masses with whom he sympathized. What he stood for in the poetry of the nineteenth century was illustrated when, after publishing his poem of “Gebir” in a first edition in English, he corrected it in a second English edition, and then translated it into Latin, in order to satisfy his own sense of harmony. According to Mr. Swinburne, the Latin version “has a might and melody of line, and a power and perfection of language,” by virtue of which “it must always dispute the palm of precedence with the English version.” We may well believe it, and regret the more on account of it that Landor’s genius was not led by the necessary study of the past to a fuller recognition of the demands of the present and the future. Of his prose writings, his “Pericles and Aspasia,” published in 1836, best exhibits the fullness of his knowledge of classical subjects, while his “Imaginary Conversations” (1821–48) more nearly approximates the level of modern taste. His tragedy of “Count Julian,” which appeared in 1812, is generally considered the best of his poems, and his admirers sometimes class it with Milton’s “Samson Agonistes.” Landor’s career was erratic. He was expelled from Oxford for firing a gun at the window of a peculiarly obnoxious Tory. In 1808 he served as a volunteer against Napoleon in Spain, and in 1811 married Miss Julia Thuillier, a banker’s daughter, with whom he “fell in love at first sight” and from whom he finally separated. Much of his life was spent in Italy, where he died September 17th, 1864.