The article on Landor was a deferred one. It was to have been written for the June number of the _Massachusetts Quarterly Review_, but did not appear till December. His child’s sickness and work on the “Biglow Papers” drove other things out of his head. Indeed, as he wrote rapidly when he was moved to write at all, so he was afflicted with obstinate inertia when ideas did not come spontaneously. “I am again a delinquent,” he wrote to Gay, 25 November, 1848,--“and this time I am ashamed to say, out of pure laziness and having nothing to write about. But my next article I intend to write on Tuesday, so that you will be sure of it in time. Do forgive me this once more, and forgive also (if you can) the stupidity of my contribution. I feel like a squeezed turnip on which the experiment of extracting blood has been tried. I am haunted, like Barnaby Rudge’s father, with the sound of a _Bell_, not having sent anything yet to that horrible annual.[85] Upon my word I am almost crazy with it. I have not an idea in my head, and believe firmly that I never shall have one again. And I obtained a reprieve ending a week ago last Friday!” But if he groaned thus over writing for publication, he was lavish of criticism and what might be called material for literature, when writing to his friends. The letters which Mr. Norton prints, dated in this period, abound in felicitous comment on men and incidents, and even a postscript will sometimes ramble on into the dimensions almost of a separate letter. After indulging in a long epistle to Mr. Briggs, dated 12 May, 1848, he suddenly remembers that he means to send some poems of his wife’s for a collection which Griswold was making of the writings of the female poets of America; and after some lively comments on her contemporaries, he takes note of articles recently written by Briggs, and falls into a strain which he has disclosed elsewhere in somewhat similar terms: “You are wrong and N. P. W. is right (as I think) in the main, in what he says about American Society. There is as striking a want of external as of internal culture among our men. We ought to have produced the finest race of _gentlemen_ in the world. But Europeans have laughed us into a nation of snobs. We are ashamed of our institutions. Our literature aims to convince Europe that America is as conservative and respectable as herself. I have often remarked that educated Americans have the least dignified bearing of any cultivated people. They all stoop in the shoulders, intellectually as well as physically. A nation of freemen, we alone of all others have the gait of slaves. The great power of the English aristocracy lies in their polish. That impresses the great middle class, who have a sort of dim conception of its value. A man gains in _power_ as he gains in ease. It is a great advantage to him to be cultivated in all parts of his nature. Among scholars, R. W. E. has as fine a manner, as much poise, as I ever saw.