Of his narrative pieces the most remarkable is his _Revolt of the Tartars_, describing the flight of a Kalmuck tribe of six hundred thousand souls from Russia to the Chinese frontier: a great hegira or anabasis, which extended for four thousand miles over desert steppes infested with foes, occupied six months' time, and left nearly half of the tribe dead upon the way. The subject was suited to De Quincey's imagination. It was like one of his own opium visions, and he handled it with a dignity and force which make the history not altogether unworthy of comparison with Thucydides's great chapter on the Sicilian Expedition. An intimate friend of Southey was Walter Savage Landor, a man of kingly nature, of a leonine presence, with a most stormy and unreasonable temper, and yet with the courtliest graces of manner, and with--said Emerson--"a wonderful brain, despotic, violent, and inexhaustible." He inherited wealth, and lived a great part of his life at Florence, where he died in 1864, in his ninetieth year. Dickens, who knew him at Bath, in the latter part of his life, made a kindly caricature of him as Lawrence Boythorn, in _Bleak House_, whose "combination of superficial ferocity and inherent tenderness," testifies Henry Crabb Robinson, in his _Diary_, was true to the life. Landor is the most purely classical of English writers. Not merely his themes, but his whole way of thinking was pagan and antique. He composed indifferently in English or Latin, preferring the latter, if any thing, in obedience to his instinct for compression and exclusiveness. Thus, portions of his narrative poem, _Gebir_, 1798, were written originally in Latin and he added a Latin version, _Gebirius_, to the English edition. In like manner his _Hellenics_, 1847, were mainly translations from his Latin _Idyllia Heroica_, written years before. The Hellenic clearness and repose which were absent from his life, Landor sought in his art. His poems, in their restraint, their objectivity, their aloofness from modern feeling, have something chill and artificial. The verse of poets like Byron and Wordsworth is alive; the blood runs in it. But Landor's polished, clean-cut _intaglios_ have been well described as "written in marble." He was a master of fine and solid prose. His _Pericles and Aspasia_ consists of a series of letters passing between the great Athenian demagogue; the hetaira, Aspasia; her friend, Cleone of Miletus; Anaxagorus, the philosopher, and Pericles's nephew, Alcibiades. In this masterpiece, the intellectual life of Athens, at its period of highest refinement, is brought before the reader with singular vividness, and he is made to breathe an atmosphere of high-bred grace, delicate wit, and thoughtful sentiment, expressed in English "of Attic choice." The _Imaginary Conversations_, 1824-1846, were Platonic dialogues between a great variety of historical characters; between, for example, Dante and