All this is easy to say, but unluckily represents what the 'Conversations' would have been had they been perfect. To say that they are very far from perfect is only to say that they were the compositions of a man; but Landor was also a man to whom his best friends would hardly attribute a remarkable immunity from fault. The dialogue, it need hardly be remarked, is one of the most difficult of all forms of composition. One rule, however, would be generally admitted. Landor defends his digressions on the ground that they always occur in real conversations. If we 'adhere to one point,' he says (in Southey's person), 'it is a disquisition, not a conversation.' And he adds, with one of his wilful back-handed blows at Plato, that most writers of dialogue plunge into abstruse questions, and 'collect a heap of arguments to be blown away by the bloated whiff of some rhetorical charlatan tricked out in a multiplicity of ribbons for the occasion.' Possibly! but for all that, the perfect dialogue ought not, we should say, to be really incoherent. It should include digressions, but the digressions ought to return upon the main subject. The art consists in preserving real unity in the midst of the superficial deviations rendered easy by this form of composition. The facility of digression is really a temptation, not a privilege. Anybody can write blank verse of a kind, because it so easily slips into prose; and that is why good blank verse is so rare. And so anybody can write a decent dialogue if you allow him to ramble as we all do in actual talk. The finest philosophical dialogues are those in which a complete logical framework underlies the dramatic structure. They are a perfect fusion of logic and imagination. Instead of harsh divisions and cross-divisions of the subject, and a balance of abstract arguments, we have vivid portraits of human beings, each embodying a different line of thought. But the logic is still seen, though the more carefully hidden the more exquisite the skill of the artist. And the purely artistic dialogue which describes passion or the emotions arising from a given situation should in the same way set forth a single idea, and preserve a dramatic unity of conception at least as rigidly as a full-grown play. So far as Landor used his facilities as an excuse for rambling, instead of so skilfully subordinating them to the main purpose as to reproduce new variations on the central theme, he is clearly in error, or is at least aiming at a lower kind of excellence. And this, it may be said at once, seems to be the most radical defect in point of composition of Landor's 'Conversations.' They have the fault which his real talk is said to have exemplified. We are told that his temperament 'disqualified him for anything like sustained reasoning, and he instinctively backed away from discussion or argument.' Many of the written dialogues are a prolonged series of explosions; when one expects a continuous development of a