The first of these lines contains both a confession and a justification of what appeared to be his arrogance--that which small minds found it so difficult to understand or to pardon. The second tells what was the chief subject of his earnest study, and what, supplementing it, came next in order. The third line is an expression of the noble philosophy which supported and nourished his spirit under so much misunderstanding and opposition; and the last shows him prepared, with the quiet dignity which harmonised with his character, to fold his mantle round him and depart when his time came.[2] Leontion continues the Conversation. "The old," she says, "are all against you, for the name of pleasure is an affront to them: they know no other kind of it than that which has flowered and seeded, and of which the withered stems have indeed a rueful look. What we call dry they call sound; nothing must retain any juice in it: their pleasure is in chewing what is hard, not in tasting what is savoury." Landor, who had to submit to reproaches for the licentiousness of his writings even from Byron (see preface to _A Vision of Judgment_), evidently derives his philosophy, as John Stuart Mill did his system of morality, from Epicurus, the pagan. The Conversation passes lightly from one subject to another; now it turns on Ternissa's blushes at the remembrance of the statues of satyrs and fauns in the bath chamber, now on Leontion's feminine objections to Aristotle and Theophrastus. It concludes in a genuinely Greek, Epicurean, erotic manner; Epicurus and Ternissa act the scene between Peleus and Thetis, which ends with a kiss.