Landor treats his solitary Jewish character with courtesy. “You are the only man in Florence with whom I would willingly exchange a salutation,” says Alfieri at the opening of the conversation. Salomon expresses himself as highly flattered. The actual dialogue is not one of Landor’s best, unless it be for its recognition of the sterling quality of the English middle-class. “It is among those who stand between the peerage and the people that there exists a greater mass of virtue and of wisdom than in the rest of Europe.” The historical Alfieri found himself out of sympathy both with kings and with the French Revolution which destroyed kingship. It was a happy touch of Landor’s, therefore, to put into Alfieri’s mouth the praise of the class which stood between royalty and the masses. But _Alfieri and Salomon_ is hardly a successful work of art. It has neither the romantic beauty of Landor’s _Aesop and Rhodope_, nor the dramatic interest of his _Hannibal and Marcellus_. Naturally, however, it has some good epigrams. “A poet can never be an atheist,” says Landor’s Alfieri. He calls on God to confound the fools who always eulogize the least praiseworthy of princes because, he complains, “the rascals have ruined my physiognomy; I wear an habitual sneer upon my face.” How many a genius has been made similarly disagreeable because he could not suffer fools gladly! Very true again is Alfieri’s paradox that the gravest people are the wittiest. “Few men have been graver than Pascal, few have been wittier.” Had Landor’s Florentine Salomon been a real Jew, he could have capped Alfieri’s citation of Pascal by referring to many a Jewish instance, among them Abraham Ibn Ezra. On the contrary, Salomon disputes the truth of Alfieri’s statement. Landor is fond of national generalizations. “Not a single man of genius hath ever appeared in the whole extent of Austria,” he makes Salomon say; while Alfieri asserts that “the Spaniards have no palate, the Italians no scent, the French no ear.” Fortunately it did not occur to Landor to sum up the Jews in an epigram. He retained, however, the eighteenth century tolerance, and might have been lenient. The only thing he thoroughly detested was priest-craft, fanaticism. His Salomon confesses that “theology is without attraction” for him, and the saying came from Landor’s heart.