_North_.--So, I perceive, you say in this new dialogue; and such a mode of attempting to turn your back on yourself, to borrow a phrase from your friend Lord Castlereagh's rhetoric, will be pronounced, even by those who do not care a bawbee about the debate, as not only ludicrous, but pitiably shabby. Keep your seat, Mr. Landor, and keep your temper for once in your life. Let us examine into this pretended mistake in your former dialogue about _Laodamia_. Well, as you are up, do me the favour, sir, to mount the ladder, and take down from yon top shelf the first volume of your _Conversations_. Up in the corner, on the left hand, next the ceiling. You see I have given you a high place. _Landor_.--Here is the book, Mr. North; it is covered with dust and cobwebs. _North_.--The fate of classics, Mr. Landor. They are above the reach of the housemaid, except when she brings the Turk's Head to bear upon them. Now, let us turn to the list of _errata_ in this first volume. We are directed to turn to page 52, line 4, and for _sugar-bakers_, read _sugar-bakers' wives_. I turn to the page, and find the error corrected by yourself; as are all the press errors in these volumes, which were presented by you to a friend. I bought the whole set for an old song at a sale. You see that the omitted word _wives_ is carefully supplied by yourself, in your own handwriting, Mr. Landor. On the same page, only five lines below this correction, is the identical passage that you would now transfer from Porson to Southey. Why did you not affix Porson's name to the passage then, when you were so vigilantly perfecting the very page? Why does no such correction appear even in the printed list of _errata_? Let us read the passage. "A current of rich and bright thoughts runs throughout the poem. [114] Pindar himself would not, on that subject, have braced one into more nerve and freshness, nor Euripides have inspired into it more tenderness and passion." [Footnote 114: Vol. i. p. 52.] _Landor_.--Mr. North, I repeat that that sentence should have been printed as Southey's, not Porson's. _North_.--Yet it is quite consistent with a preceding sentence which you can by no ingenuity of after-thought withdraw from Porson; for the whole context forbids the possibility of its transition. What does Porson there testify of the _Laodamia_? That it is "_a composition such as Sophocles might have exulted to own_!"--and a part of one of its stanzas "_might have been heard with shouts of rapture in the Elysium the poet describes_." [115]