Homes and Haunts of the Most Eminent British Poets, Vol. 2 (of 2)Howitt, William
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Homes and Haunts of the Most Eminent British Poets, Vol. 2 (of 2)
Howitt, William
Literary landmarks -- Great Britain; Poets, English -- Homes and haunts
"All men with human feelings love their country.
Not the high-born or wealthy man alone,
Who looks upon his children, each one led
By its gay handmaid from the high alcove,
And hears them once a-day; not only he
Who hath forgotten, when his guest inquires
The name of some far village all his own;
Whose rivers bound the province, and whose hills
Touch the lost clouds upon the level sky:
No; better men still better love their country.
'Tis the old mansion of their earliest friends,
The chapel of their first and best devotions.
When violence or perfidy invades,
Or when unworthy lords hold wassail there,
And wiser heads are drooping round its moats,
At last they fix their steady and stiff eye,
There, there alone, stand while the trumpet blows,
And view the hostile flames above its towers
Spire, with a bitter and severe delight."
There is not less truth than satire in this:--
"In all law-courts that I have ever entered
The least effrontery, the least dishonesty,
Has lain among the prosecuted thieves."--P. 557.
I shall have occasion to quote a few more verses when speaking of Mr.
Landor's life. His Imaginary Conversations is the work on which his
fame, a worthy and well earned fame, will rest. From his great
experience of men of various nations, and his familiar acquaintance
with both ancient and modern literature, he has been enabled to
introduce the greatest variety of characters and topics, and to make
the dialogues a perfect treasury of the broadest and most elevated
axioms of practical wisdom. As I have observed, his station and
personal interests have not been able to blind him to the claims
of universal justice. He attacks all follies and all selfish
conventionalisms with an unsparing scorn, which, in a poor man, would
have been attributed to envy; but in his case, can not be otherwise
regarded than as the honest convictions of a clear-seeing and just
mind. In all his writings he insensibly slides into the dramatic form;
even in his Pentameron, not less than in his Citation and Examination
of William Shakspeare. His Pericles and Aspasia is in the form of
letters, a form but one remove from conversation; in fact,
conversation on paper. He must raise up the prominent characters of
all ages, and, bringing the most antagonistic together, set them to
argue some great or curious topic suited to their minds and pursuits.
Through all these the author's own sentiments diffuse themselves, and
become the soul of the book. Whoever converse, we are made to feel
that virtue, generosity, self-sacrifice, and a warm sense of the wants
and the true claims of the multitude, animate the soul of the author,
and maintain a perpetual warfare against their opposite qualities, and
the world's acquiescence in them. Mr. Landor, no doubt, like his
fellows, does not despise the advantages which fortune has conferred
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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