will be a second mortification; she will hate to see us; but come and heap embers; we deserve it, I for what I have done, and she for being my sister. Do come early in the day, by sunlight that you may see my Milton.... Your penitent C. Lamb.” At Bristol, in 1808, Southey met for the first time the man of all others whom he most desired to see, the only man living, he says, “of whose praise I was ambitious, of whose censure would have humbled me.” This was Walter Savage Landor. _Madoc_, on which Southey had build his hope of renown as a poet, had been published, and had been coldly received; _Kehama_, which had been begun consequently now stood still. Their author could indeed, as he told Sir George Beaumont, be contented with posthumous fame, but it was impossible to be contented with posthumous bread and cheese. “St. Cecilia herself could not have played the organ if there had been nobody to blow the bellows for her.” At this moment, when he turned sadly and bravely from poetry to more profitable work, he first looked on Landor. “I never saw any one more unlike myself,” he writes, “in every prominent part of human character, nor any one who so cordially and instinctively agreed with me on so many of the most important subjects. I have often said before we met, that I would walk forty miles to see him, and having seen him, I would gladly walk fourscore to see him again. He talked of _Thalaba_, and I told him of the series of mythological poems which I had planned, ... and also told him for what reason they had been laid aside; in plain English, that I could not afford to write them. Landor’s reply was, ‘Go on with them, and I will pay for printing them, as many as you will write, and as many copies as you please.’” The princely offer stung Southey, as he says, to the very core; not that he thought of accepting that offer, but the generous words were themselves a deed, and claimed a return. He rose earlier each morning to carry on his _Kehama_, without abstracting time from better-paid task-work; it advanced, and duly as each section of this poem, and subsequently of his _Roderick_, came to be written, it was transcribed for the friend whose sympathy and admiration were a golden reward. To be praised by one’s peers is indeed happiness. Landor, liberal of applause, was keen in suggestion and exact in censure. Both friends were men of ardent feelings, though one had tamed himself, while the other never could be tamed; both often gave their feelings a vehement utterance. On many matters they thought, in the main, alike—on the grand style in human conduct, on the principles of the poetic art, on Spanish affairs, on Catholicism. The secret of Landor’s high-poised dignity in verse had been discovered by Southey; he, like Landor, aimed at a classical purity of diction; he, like Landor, loved, as a shaper of imaginative forms, to embody in an act, or an incident, the virtue of some eminent moment of human passion, and to give it fixity