The rule and the exceptions hold good with Landor unfailingly. He was an excellent scholar; his acquaintance with modern literatures, though much smaller and extremely arbitrary, was not positively small, and his taste, in some directions at least, was delicate and exquisite. But of judicial quality or qualities he had not one single trace, and, even putting them out of the question, his intelligence was streaked and flawed by strange veins of positive silliness. We need not dwell too much on his orthographical and other whims, which have been shared by some great ones—the judgments are the things. In the very first paragraph of his very first regular criticism we find the statement that the Poems of Bion and Moschus are not only “very different” from those of Theocritus but “very inferior.” Inferior in what? in bulk certainly: but in what else are the _Adonis_ and the _Bion_ itself inferior to anything Theocritean? A critic should have been warned by his own “different” not to rush on the “inferior,” which is so often fallaciously consequent. I shall not be accused of excessive Virgil-worship, but what criticism is there in the objection to _me ceperat annus_ as “scarcely Latin” (really! really! Mr Landor, you were not quite a Pollio!), and in the flat emendation of _mihi coeperat_; or in the contemptuous treatment of that exquisite piece containing ὁ θὴρ δ' ἔβαινε δειλῶς, φοβεῖτο γὰρ Κυθήρην, a phrase which, for simplicity, pictorial effect, and suggestion, is almost worthy of Sappho? Such a sentence as that of Politian’s poems, “one only has any merit,” is simply disabling: mere schoolboy prejudice has evidently blinded the speaker. Yet it occurs in his best critique, that on Catullus. [Sidenote: _The Conversations._] These set criticisms, however, are few, and Landor was evidently not at ease in them. The literary “Conversations,” it may be said, are the true test. And it is at least certain that these conversations supply not a few of those more excellent critical observations which have been acknowledged and saluted. Especially must we acknowledge and salute one[533] which, though of considerable length, must be made an exception to the rule of “not quoting.” Nowhere, in ancient or modern place, is the education of the critic outlined with greater firmness and accuracy; and those who, by this or that good fortune, have been put through some such a process, may congratulate themselves on having learnt no vulgar art in no vulgar way. [Sidenote: _Loculus aureolus._]