being then an army agent. As a girl she exhibited great quickness in acquiring knowledge, and began very early to write verses. Mr. Jerdan, the editor of the Literary Gazette, being a neighbour of her father's, was requested to look at her poetry, when he not only gave a favourable opinion, but published some of her effusions in his journal. In her eighteenth year she published a poetical volume, which included "The Fate of Adelaide," a Swiss romantic tale indicative of poetical talent, and full of promise for the future. Immediately afterwards she began, in the Literary Gazette, a series of "Poetical Sketches," subscribed by her initials only. The vivacity and delicate fancy of these verses soon made L. E. L. an object of public interest, an interest which a thin veil of mystery thrown around the person of the amiable author did not diminish. In 1824 appeared "The Improvisatrice, and other Poems," which met with a triumphant reception. Her great facility in verse-writing, and her constant indulgence in the habit, produced the defects which are the natural result of haste and immature reflection. Another characteristic of her poetry, the gloomy spirit in which the thoughts and incidents are conceived, was not the expression of her natural temper, but a trick of the artist, caught probably from the reigning Byronism of the day. "The Troubadour," "The Golden Violet," "The Venetian Bracelet," followed in due order, and maintained the writer's popularity. She also published three novels, "Ethel Churchill," "Francisca Carrara," and "Romance and Reality." From 1831 to 1837 she edited Fisher's Scrap Book with much credit. In June, 1838, she was married to Mr. Maclean, Governor of Cape Coast Castle, where, having lived happily with her husband for twelve brief months, she died on the 15th of October, 1839, from an overdose of prussic acid, a medicament she was accustomed to take for the relief of neuralgic pains. Her life and literary remains were published in two volumes by her friend, Mr. Laman Blanchard, in 1841.—R. H.
LANDOR, Walter Savage, a versatile and gifted author, the eldest son of a wealthy gentleman by a rich heiress, Elizabeth Savage of Tachbrook, was born on the 30th of January, 1775, at his father's seat, Ipsley Court, Warwickshire. He was educated at Rugby and Trinity college, Oxford, and became an accomplished classical scholar. In 1795, when he was only twenty, he published a small volume of poems. Among his earlier works were his tragedy of "Count Julian"—which introduced him to Southey, with whom he formed a life-long friendship—and the stately though frigid poem of "Gebir," from which Wordsworth borrowed the famous description of a seashell, making it, however, his own, by the beautiful comparison with which the passage closes. Among Mr. Landor's earlier visits to the continent was one paid to Paris during the peace of Amiens, when he saw Napoleon made first consul for life. The peculiarity of Mr. Landor's temper, more or less apparent in all his writings, was conspicuously and whimsically displayed not long after he succeeded to the family estates. Irritated at the conduct of some of his tenants, he sold off estates which had been in his family for centuries, and almost bade farewell to England. His youth had fallen in the time of the French revolution, and his democratic fervour had been nurtured by his study of the classics, when in 1808 the insurrection in Spain against the rule of the French broke out. Hatred of French despotism, and sympathy with the Spaniards, led Mr. Landor to throw himself heart and soul into the movement. He joined Blake with a body of troops which he had raised with his own funds; he made large gifts of money to aid the cause; and received the thanks of the junta and a colonel's commission in the Spanish army. But when in 1814 Ferdinand, restored to his kingdom, dissolved the cortes and abolished the constitution of 1812, Mr. Landor threw up his commission, declaring in the letter which announced his resignation, that "though willing to aid the Spanish people in the assertion of their liberties against the antagonist of Europe, he would have nothing to do with a perjurer and a traitor." He had married in 1811; and after the battle of Waterloo, having for some time previously resided at Tours, he took up his abode at Florence, where, rarely visiting England, he remained for more than thirty years. Society, the education of his children (of whom three were born to him), and last not least, literature, occupied him. Since 1803, when there appeared his own Latin version of "Gebir," he had published little or nothing, until in 1820 his mastery of Latin versification, and his familiarity with the modern Latin poets, were evinced in a volume entitled "Idyllia heroica, accedit quæstiuncula cur poetæ Latini recentiores minus leguntur." It was in the years 1826-27 that were published in London the first and second series of his greatest work, the "Imaginary Conversations." They won their way slowly, but from the first there were judges who could discern their rare merits of matter and manner; their wide range of minute literary and biographical knowledge, ancient and modern; and the noble polish of their style, if a little marred by occasional eccentricities of phrase, and even of orthography. A republication of "Gebir," "Count Julian," with other poems, followed in 1831. In 1834 appeared the "Citatum et Examination of William Shakspeare," in which Mr. Landor did not hesitate to make the great dramatist an interlocutor. The "Satire on Satirists" is but an ephemeral production of Mr. Landor's muse, nor was there much promise of permanence in his "Letters of a Conservative, in which are shown the only means of saving what is left of the English church," published the same year. To 1836 belongs "Pericles and Aspasia," in the form of letters, one of the most serene and beautiful of Mr. Landor's books. In 1837 was published the "Pentameron, or interviews of Messer Giovanni Bocaccio and Messer Francese Petrarca," in which the two great Italians discourse familiarly on things in general, and the poetry of Dante in particular. For some time after this Mr. Landor was comparatively silent. About 1846 he came to England, residing chiefly at Bath, and in that year he published in two volumes a collective edition of his works. To the Examiner, which had been among the earliest journals to commend his writings, he had already contributed, and he now contributed to it more copiously than ever short and pithy articles on topics of the day. To other newspapers and journals he also occasionally contributed; one of his characteristics being that he always signed his name to his papers in the periodical press. Of his later works the most important are his "Hellenics enlarged and improved;" "The last Fruit off an old Tree," 1843, dialogues and disquisitions; and "Dry Sticks Faggoted," 1858, a collection of short poems of every kind, from the idyllic to the satirical. The Italian revolution naturally enlisted Mr. Landor's keenest sympathies, and in his ardour he went the length of advocating and instigating (in the case of the late king of Naples) something very like tyrannicide. Mr. Emerson the American philosopher, an enthusiastic admirer of Mr. Landor's writings, has recorded in the English Traits his personal impressions of a visit paid at Florence in 1833 to the author of the "Imaginary Conversations." There is in the Boston Dial a little-known and anonymous article entitled "Walter Savage Landor," which is, we believe, by Mr. Emerson, and from it we extract the following pithy estimate of Mr. Landor as an author and a man:—"He has capital enough to have furnished the brain of fifty stock authors, yet has written no good book. A sharp, dogmatic man, with a great deal of knowledge, a great deal of worth, and a great deal of pride, with a profound contempt for all that he does not understand; a master of all elegant learning, and capable of the utmost delicacy of sentiment, and yet prone to indulge in a sort of ostentation of coarse imagery and language." "Now for twenty years," Mr. Emerson adds, "we have still found the ' Imaginary Conversations' a sure resource in solitude, and it seems to us as original in its form as in its matter. Nay, when we remember his rich and ample page wherein we are always sure to find free and sustained thought, a keen and precise understanding, an affluent and ready memory familiar with all chosen books, an industrious observation in every department of life, an experience to which nothing has occurred in vain, honour for every great and generous sentiment, and a scourge like that of the Furies for every oppressor, whether public or private—we feel how dignified is this perpetual censor in his curule chair, and we wish to thank a benefactor of the reading world." Mr. Landor once more went to Italy, in consequence of events over which his admirers would wish to throw a veil, and died at Florence on the 17th September, 1864.—F. E.
LANDSBOROUGH, David, D.D., a Scottish naturalist, died at Saltcoats, Ayrshire, of cholera, on 12th September, 1854. While he pursued ardently his calling as a clergyman, he also devoted attention to natural science, more especially to seaweeds, conchology, and palæontology. He made extensive collections of algæ, which were beautifully preserved, and either given in exchange, or sold for the benefit of his church and school. He published excursions to Arran, Ailsa Craig, and the Cumbraes; a "Popular History of British Seaweeds" and of "British
