Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 53, No. 330, April 1843Various
Science
Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 53, No. 330, April 1843
Various
England -- Periodicals; Scotland -- Periodicals
Many of your readers, ignorant or forgetful, may have asked,
"Who is Mr. Landor? We have never heard of any remarkable person of
that name, or bearing a similar one, except the two brothers Lander,
the explorers of the Niger." Mr. Walter Savage would answer,
"Not to know me argues yourself unknown." He was very angry with
Lord Byron for designating him as _a_ Mr. Landor. He thought it
should have been _the_. You ought to have forewarned such readers
that _the_ Mr. Landor, now _your_ Walter Savage, is the learned
author of an epic poem called _Gebir_, composed originally in
Egyptian hieroglyphics, then translated by him into Latin, and
thence done into English blank verse by the same hand. It is a work
of rare occurrence even in the English character, and is said to be
deeply abstruse. Some extracts from it have been buried in, or have
helped to bury, critical reviews. A copy of the Anglo-Gebir is,
however, extant in the British Museum, and is said to have so
puzzled the few philologists who have examined it, that they have
declared none but a sphinx, and that an Egyptian one, could unriddle
it. I would suggest that some Maga of the gypsies should be called
in to interpret. Our vagrant fortune-tellers are reputed to be of
Egyptian origin, and to hold converse among themselves in a very
strange and curious oriental tongue called _Gibberish_, which word,
no doubt, is a derivative from Gebir. Of the existence of the
mysterious epic, the public were made aware many years ago by the
first publication of Mr. Leigh Hunt's _Feast of the Poets_, where it
was mentioned in a note as a thing containing one good passage about
a shell, while in the text the author of _Gebir_ was called a gander,
and Mr. Southey rallied by Apollo for his simplicity in proposing
that the company should drink the gabbler's health. That pleasantry
has disappeared from Mr. Hunt's poem, though Mr. Landor has by no
means left off gabbling. Mr. Hunt is a kindly-natured man as well as
a wit, and no doubt perceived that he had been more prophetic than
he intended--Mr. Landor having, in addition to verses uncounted
unless on his own fingers, favoured the world with five thick octavo
volumes of dialogues. From the four first I have culled a few
specimens; the fifth I have not read. It is rumoured that a sixth is
in the press, with a dedication in the _issimo_ style, to Lord John
Russell, Mr. Landor's lantern having at last enabled him to detect
one honest man in the Imperial Parliament. Lord John, it seems, in
the House of Commons lately quoted something from him about a
Chinese mandarin's opinion of the English; and Mr. Landor is so
delighted that he intends to take the Russells under his protection
for ever, and not only them, but every thing within the range of
their interests. Not a cast horse, attached to a Woburn sand-cart,
shall henceforth crawl towards Bedford and Tavistock Squares, but
the grateful Walter shall swear he is a Bucephalus. You, Mr. North,
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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