Such verse does not invite a large following, nor did the man. Pugnacious, tyrannic, loud-mouthed, setting the world’s and the Church’s rubrics at defiance; yet weighing language to the last jot and tittle of its significance, and--odd-whiles--putting little tendernesses of thought and far-reaching poetic aspirations into such cinctures of polished verse--so jewelled, so compact, so classic, so fine--that their music will last and be admired as long, I think, as English speech lasts. Apart from all this man wrote, there is a strange, half-tragic interest in his life, which will warrant me in telling you more of him than I have told of many whose books are more prized by you. He was the son of a Dr. Landor, of Warwick, in middle England, who by reason of two adroit marriages was a man of fortune, and so secured eventually a very full purse to the poet, who if he had depended only on the sale of his literary wares, would have starved. Language was always young Landor’s hobby; and he came, by dint of good schooling, to such dexterity in the use of Latin, as to write it in verse or prose with nearly the same ease as English. He loved out-of-door pursuits in boyhood and all his life; was greatly accomplished, his biographer says, in fishing--especially with a cast-net; and of the prey that sometimes came into such net there is this frolicsome record: “In youth ’twas there I used to scare A whirring bird, or scampering hare, And leave my book within a nook Where alders lean above the brook, To walk beyond the third mill-pond And meet a maiden fair and fond Expecting me beneath a tree Of shade for two, but not for three. Ah, my old Yew, far out of view, Why must I bid you both adieu?”[47] At Oxford he was a marked man for his cleverness and for his audacities; these last brought him to grief there, and going home upon his rustication, he quarrelled with his father. Thereafter we find him in London, where he publishes his first little booklet of poems (1795); only twenty then; counted a fierce radical; detesting old George III. with his whole heart; admiring the rebel George Washington and declaring it; loving the French, too, with their liberty and fraternity song, until it was silenced by the cannonading of Napoleon; thenceforward, he counts that people a nation of “monkeys, fit only to be chained.”