"A sharp dogmatic man," says Emerson, who met him when abroad, "with a great deal of knowledge, a great deal of worth and a great deal of pride, with a profound contempt for all that he does not understand, a master of elegant learning and capable of the utmost delicacy of sentiment, and yet prone to indulge a sort of ostentation of coarse imagery and language. He has capital enough to have furnished the brain of fifty stock authors, yet has written no good book. In these busy days of avarice and ambition, when there is so little disposition to profound thought, or to any but the most superficial intellectual entertainments, a faithful scholar, receiving from past ages the treasures of wit, and enlarging them by his own lore, is a friend and consoler of mankind. Whoever writes for the love of mirth and beauty, and not with ulterior ends, belongs to this sacred class, and among these, few men of the present age have a better claim to be numbered than Mr. Landor. Wherever genius and taste have existed, wherever freedom and justice are threatened (which he values as the element in which genius may work), his interest is here to be commanded. Nay, when we remember his rich and ample page, wherein we are always sure to find free and sustained thought, a keen and precise understanding, an affluent and ready memory familiar with all chosen books, an industrious observation in every department of life, an experience to which nothing has occurred in vain, honor for every just sentiment, and a scourge like that of the Furies for every oppressor, whether public or private, we feel how dignified is this perpetual censor in his cerule chair, and we wish to thank a benefactor of the reading world." No writer of our time in the difficult species of composition, the dialogue, has attained a success upon so high a plane as Landor in his Conversations, wherein he has treated almost every human interest, brought his characters together, like Plato's interlocutors, from different ages and of differing opinions, using these as representatives of the world's best literature. And besides these his masterpieces, his verses have the chaste and exquisite quality of the best Greek poetry.