One hardly needs to be told that a man with this opinion of French classic poetry was a despiser of Pope, an enthusiastic admirer of Milton, and a pronounced supporter of the reform of English poetry demanded by Wordsworth. Most of the Conversations upon literary topics are written for the purpose of eulogising Wordsworth and Southey, and reproaching the reading public for its want of appreciation of such fine poetry as theirs.[3] Keats and Shelley are also warmly praised; and Landor expresses regret that he had not made the personal acquaintance of either, and, in particular, that a false report concerning Shelley's behaviour to his first wife had kept him from calling upon that poet at Pisa. He writes of Shelley that he "united, in just degrees, the ardour of the poet with the patience and forbearance of the philosopher," and that "his generosity and charity went far beyond those of any man at present in existence." But no sooner is Byron mentioned than Landor expresses himself exactly like a poet of the Lake School. The man who believed that the two fingers which held his pen had more power than the two Houses of Parliament (see conclusion of the Conversation between Landor and Marchese Pallavicini) could never forget Byron's satire of his _Gebir_. And the remarkable friendship existing, in spite of all their political and religious differences, between him and Southey, made it equally impossible for him to forget the blows which Byron had struck at his admirer. Byron's egotism and excitable restlessness were, undoubtedly, antipathetic to Landor, but it was the treatment of Southey which influenced him most, and blinded him to many of the great poet's best qualities. The connection with Southey is, on the whole, little creditable to Landor, and Forster's long _Life of Landor_ is rendered the more unreadable by the disproportionate space allotted in it to letters from and to such an uninteresting personage as Southey. In Landor's eyes Southey had the great, and certainly rare, merit of being one of the two persons who had read and bought the poem _Gebir_ when it came out. De Quincey, who was the other, tells that in his youth he was hooted in the streets of Oxford as the one reader of that poem in the University. So we can understand how Southey, who not only bought and read, but praised it, and who, moreover, wrote a favourable review of Landor's dull _Count Julian_ in the _Quarterly_, must have seemed to the self-satisfied author a man of the rarest intellectual penetration.