Sisyphus) push laboriously before them as breast-pins.” He finds fault with Thoreau for some of his verse, but regards with admiration his prose. “The style is compact, and the language has an antique purity like wine grown colorless with age.” Lowell expressed the same admiration for Thoreau’s style when he wrote again about him a dozen years later, after re-reading his books, but his point of view had by that time changed, and he was more concerned to look into Thoreau’s philosophy of life. The article on Landor, written at this time, was quite exclusively an examination of the genius of a writer for whom he had long had a great admiration; and inasmuch as he had himself tried the form of conversation, it is worth while to note the excellent judgment he passes on Landor’s art. “Of his ‘Imaginary Conversations’ we may generally say that they would be better defined as dialogues between the imaginations of the persons introduced than between the persons themselves. There is a something in all men and women who deserve the much-abused title of _individuals_, which we call their character, something finer than the man or woman, and yet which _is_ the man or woman nevertheless. We feel it in whatever they say or do, but it is better than their speech or deed, and can be conceived of apart from these. It is his own conceptions of the characters of different personages that Landor brings in as interlocutors. Between Shakespeare’s historical and ideal personages we perceive no difference in point of reality. They are alike historical to us. We allow him to substitute his Richard for the Richard of history, and we suspect that those are few who doubt whether Caliban ever existed. Whatever Hamlet and Cæsar say we feel to be theirs, though we know it to be Shakespeare’s. Whatever Landor puts into the mouth of Pericles and Michael Angelo and Tell, we know to be his, though we can conceive that it might have been theirs. Don Quixote would never have attacked any puppets of his. The hand which jerked the wires, and the mouth which uttered the speeches would have been too clearly visible.” Here again it is interesting to take up the reminiscences of Landor and of his own early acquaintance with his writings, which he printed in 1888, when introducing a group of Landor’s letters; for the comparison shows that though his enthusiasm for this writer had somewhat abated with years, the general tone of his judgment was the same.