To pass from Moore to Landor is like setting foot on firm ground after rocking on the waves. Landor's distinguishing characteristic is a manly decision; he stands high as an author, but higher still as a man. He is, unfortunately, so little read that one cannot presuppose acquaintance with any of his writings, or find any point of support in the memory or fancy of one's reader on which to base criticisms; and he is not easy to describe. His decision found its most remarkable expression in an estimate of himself which is startling to many. We come upon such verdicts as this: "What I write is not written upon a slate: and no finger, not of Time himself, who dips it in the clouds of years, can efface it"; and upon such answers to the reviewers of his _Imaginary Conversations_ as: "Let the sturdiest of them take the ten worst of them, and if he equals them in ten years I will give him a hot wheaten roll and a pint of brown stout for breakfast." Such pride would have made a smaller man ridiculous, but it does not harm Landor; it occasionally becomes him. It reminds us at times of the not unjustifiable, but uncontrollably arrogant feeling which Schopenhauer had of his own deserts, only that Landor's manner is always that of the refined aristocrat, whilst Schopenhauer, with his utter disregard of the laws of common politeness, is a thorough plebeian. And on rare occasions the peculiar temperament, with its grand passionateness and its even grander productivity, reminds us of a man whose name is too great to be lightly named, but who, though infinitely Landor's intellectual superior, would perhaps have acknowledged the intellectual kinship--the solitary, severe Michael Angelo. There was something severe in Landor's nature--the severity which goes along with firmness of character and absolute truthfulness to one's self and others. In his work there is a certain salutary harshness. The poem "Hyperbion," from the _Hellenics_, may be given as a good and very characteristic example of it.