“Level the Alps one with another, and where is their sublimity? Raise up the Vale of Tempe to the downs above, and where are those sylvan creeks and harbors in which the imagination watches while the soul reposes, those recesses in which the gods partook of the weaknesses of mortals, and mortals the enjoyments of the gods.” The great learning of Landor and his vast information, taken in connection with his habits of self-indulgence (often of indolence), assure us that he must have had the rare talent, and the valuable one, of riddling books--that is, of skimming over them--with such wonderfully quick exercise of wit and judgment as to segregate the valuable from the valueless parts. ’Tis not a bad quality; nor is it necessarily (as many suppose) attended by superficiality. The superficial man does indeed skim things; but he pounces as squarely and surely upon the bad as upon the good; he works by mechanical process and progression--here a sentence and there a sentence; but the man who can race through a book well (as did Dr. Johnson and Landor), carries to the work--in his own genius for observation and quick discernment--a chemical mordant that bites and shows warning effervescence, and a signal to stay, only where there is something strong to bite. _Landor’s Domesticities._ Meanwhile, we have a sorry story to tell of Landor’s home belongings. There is a storm brewing in that beautiful villa of Fiesole. Children have been born to the house, and he pets them, fondles them--seems to love them absorbingly. Little notelets which pass when they are away, at Naples, at Rome, are full of pleasantest paternal banter and yearning. But those children have run wild and are as vagrant as the winds. The home compass has no fixed bearings and points all awry--the mother, never having sympathy with the work which had tasked Landor in those latter years, has, too, her own outside vanities and a persistent petulance, which breaks out into rasping speech when Jupiter flings his thunder-bolts. So Landor, in a strong rage of determination, breaks away: turns his back on wife and children--providing for them, however, generously--and goes to live again at Bath, in England.