WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR It was at the house of G. P. R. James that we first became acquainted—that mutual friend of whom Landor thus speaks in one of his earliest letters to me:— “You cannot overvalue James. There is not on God’s earth (I like this expression, vulgar or not) any better creature of His hand, any one more devoted to His high service—the office of improving us through our passions.” The close friendship between these two men was to me inexpressively touching, inasmuch as it would be almost impossible to conceive a more striking contrast than they presented in every respect. Mr James, although a man of romance and sentiment, and by nature of an ardent temperament, had a quiet and staid demeanour, self-disciplined and self-contained; whereas all those who peruse any records of Landor must be well aware that none of the above epithets can in any way be applicable to him—such records, for instance, as Forster’s Life, the admirable sketch given by Mr Lowell of his first and only visit to that remarkable man at Bath, or the almost miraculous likeness of his moral portraiture by Mr Sidney Colvin, which caused me to ask the biographer if Landor had ever visited him in dreams. The pet name which I and my sister had for him was the “gentle savage.” Gentle and loving he was to those he loved, especially to women, both young and old; so much so indeed, as sometimes to be blinded in his discrimination of their worth, and which was unfortunately proved in his declining years when he became the dupe for a time of two designing women. The story is a well-known and most distressing one, for, when his eyes were opened, he did indeed become “savage,” and poured out the vials of his wrath in such violent and uncompromising language as legally to entitle his persecutors to heavy damages. Gentle and pitiful he was to animals of all kinds, but dogs were his constant companions, and a large greyhound belonging to my sister was one of his special favourites. He told me once, quite in confidence, his discovery that dogs, whatever their nationality, understood Italian better than any other language; and in that soft tongue he always addressed a new canine acquaintance. In some letters written to me, which have been published in the _Century Magazine_, he thus speaks of “Pomero,” a dear little Pomeranian Spitz, and a great chum of my own when I used to go and pass a couple of days or so at Bath in a room hung with doubtful paintings of angels by Beato or Granacci, as he used laughingly to say, “an angel among angels”:[66]— Footnote 66: “Un Anguletto fra Anguli.”