To Landor's superior acumen, also, we owe two readings of Shakespeare that have made intelligible what was previously "a contradictory inconceivable." Did it ever occur to dealers in familiar quotations that there was a deal of nonsense in the following lines as they are printed? "_Vaulting_ ambition that o'erleaps _itself_ And falls on the _other side_." "Other side of what?" exclaims Landor "It should be _its sell_. _Sell_ is _saddle_ in Spenser and elsewhere, from the Latin and Italian." Yet, in spite of correction, every Macbeth on the stage still maintains in stentorian tones that ambition o'erleaps _itself_, thereby demonstrating how useless it is to look for Shakespearian scholarship in so-called Shakespearian actors, who blindly and indolently accept theatrical tradition. Equally important is Landor's correction of the lines "And the _delighted_ spirit To bathe in fiery floods." "Truly this would be a very odd species of delight. But Shakespeare never wrote such nonsense; he wrote _belighted_ (whence our _blighted_), struck by lightning; a fit preparation for such bathing." The last stanza ever inscribed to Shakespeare by Landor was sent to me with the following preface: "An old man sends the last verses he has written, or probably he may ever write to ---- ----." "SHAKESPEARE IN ITALY. "Beyond our shores, beyond the Apennines, Shakespeare, from heaven came thy creative breath! 'Mid citron grove and overarching vines Thy genius wept at Desdemona's death: In the proud sire thou badest anger cease, And Juliet by her Romeo sleep in peace. Then rose thy voice above the stormy sea, And Ariel flew from Prospero to thee. "July 1, 1860." Dante was not one of Landor's favorites, although he was quite ready to allow the greatness of _il gran poeta_. He had no sympathy with what he said was very properly called a comedy. He would declare that about one sixth only of Dante was intelligible or pleasurable. Turning to Landor's writings, I find that in his younger days he was even less favorable to Dante. In the "Pen_te_meron" (the author spelling it so) he, in the garb of Petrarch, asserts that "at least sixteen parts in twenty of the _Inferno_ and _Purgatorio_ are detestable both in poetry and principle; the higher parts are excellent, indeed." Dante's powers of language, he allows, "are prodigious; and, in the solitary places where he exerts his force rightly, the stroke is irresistible. But how greatly to be pitied must he be who can find nothing in Paradise better than sterile theology! and what an object of sadness and consternation he who rises up from hell like a giant refreshed!" While allowing his wonderful originality, Landor goes so far as to call him "the great master of the disgusting"! Dante is not sympathetic.