Perhaps there is no one conversation in which so many popular fallacies and customs are so ruthlessly dealt with, as in that between the Emperor of China and his servant Tsing-Zi, who has been in England. His description of the Quakers is most characteristic. Tsing-Zi is astonished at the anti-Christian pugnacity of those calling themselves Christians. They make wars to make their children's fortune, and the preachers of the peaceful gospel are ready, if they disagree in a doctrine, to fight like a pair of cockerels across a staff on a market-man's shoulder. One scanty sect is different. "These never work in the fields or manufactories; but buy up corn when it is cheap, sell it again when it is dear, and are more thankful to God for a famine than others are for plenteousness. Painting and sculpture they condemn; they never dance, they never sing; music is as hateful to them as discord. They always look cool in hot weather, and warm in cold. Few of them are ugly, fewer handsome, none graceful. I do not remember to have seen a person of dark complexion, or hair quite black, or very curly, in their confraternity. None of them are singularly pale, none red, none of diminutive stature, none remarkably tall. They have no priests among them, and constantly refuse to make oblations to the priests royal."--Vol. ii. p. 119. But there is, in fact, scarcely any great question of religion, morals, government, or the social condition, on which in these conversations the boldest opinions are not expressed in the most unshrinking style. Landor strips away all the finery in which follies, vices, and imposture are disguised for selfish ends, with a strong and unceremonious hand. He lifts up the veil of worldly policy, and showing us the hideous objects behind, says, "Behold your gods, O Israel!" His doctrines are such as would, less than ages ago, have consigned him to a pitiless persecution; they are such as, perhaps, in less than half another century, through the means of popular education, will be the common property of the common mind. The works of Savage Landor, both prose and poetry, place him among the very first men of his age. They are masterly, discriminating, and full of a genuine, English robustness. "They are energy and imagination that make the great poet," he has said in conversation. If he does not equal some of our poets in intensity of imagination, there are few of them who can compete with him in energy; and what is peculiarly fortunate, the instinct by which he cleaves to the real, and spurns the meretricious with contempt, makes him eminently safe for a teacher. You can find no glittering, plausible, destructive monstrosity, whether in the shape of man or notion, which Landor, like too many of our writers, has taken the perverse fancy to deify. His opinion of Bonaparte is a striking example of this. Hazlitt, acute and discriminating as he often was, placed this selfish and brutal butcher on a pedestal for adoration.