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MEMOIR OF LETITIA ELIZABETH LANDON.
BY A CORRESPONDENT.
(With a Portrait.)
In a delicious little history, which is rendered more delicious by the assumption forced upon us, that it is the real history of her own childhood,[1] Miss Landon frankly informs us that she was "not a pretty child." Now this candour will not appear at all surprising, if we reflect that the lady, when making the confession, perfectly well knew what all the world is aware of—to wit, the change that invariably takes place between childhood and maturity, whereby the pretty become plain and the plain pretty—on the principle which fate or fortune so frequently illustrates in daily life, of "win first, lose last." It might be superfluous to warn those who knew her of her want of prettiness in childhood; but, as far as the public are concerned, it was a wise acknowledgment, for they have been indulged with very few opportunities of seeing a portrait of their poetical favourite. The truth is, she has been writing incessantly since she first began to write; and sitting for one's picture is very like sitting still and doing nothing—which by no means suits her genius and temperament.
Miss Landon is the first and greatest, if not the only example, of the achievement of an enduring and universal fame, in the character of an Initialist. All literary England was ringing with her music and her praises before her name had transpired at all. Stanzas had been inserted, and books published, ere then, without a name; and great was the renown which at that very time Sir Walter Scott was anonymously winning; but nobody had successfully initialized, until L. E. L. arose—nobody had dreamt of spelling fame in three letters that expressed no meaning at all. Yet they became known almost at once. How immediately they fixed themselves in the memory, and how deeply they took root!—even while their unnamed owner was but a mere contributor to a literary journal, without the questionable distinction of having produced a single volume of verses. It was as impossible, after a very little while, to mistake the initials L. E. L. for any other three letters in the alphabet, as to confound the name of Byron with that of Campbell, or Moore's with Wordsworth's. The Improvisatrice had not finished her first song, when public feeling perhaps, rather than public opinion, ushered the youthful singer into the presence of the chosen poets of the time, assured by the very truth of the emotions which her strains awakened, that the development of her fine faculty would establish the claim to a seat among the elect; and thenceforth, the magic three, the "L.S.D." of the world of matter of fact, have not been better known than the "L. E. L." of the world of poetry.
The youthful dreamers of that day, who, startled by the rapidity as well as the richness of the song, and charmed by the linked sweetness that was not merely long-drawn-out, but seemed to have no end, were
- ↑ See the lately published volume called "Traits and Trials"
