Another great Florentine by adoption, =Walter Savage Landor (1775-1864)=, came to live near the Brownings. His rugged nature must have been not a little soothed by the gentle little woman with "a soul of fire enclosed in a shell of pearl." Landor was educated at Rugby, at Ashbourne, and at Trinity College, Oxford. From Rugby he was removed to avoid expulsion, and at Oxford he was rusticated. All this was the outcome of an excitable temperament, which led in later life to domestic complications, and to exile from his family in Florence. It found no reflection in his many beautiful works. As a poet, however, Landor holds no considerable rank, although here placed among them. "Gebir" was published in 1798 and "Count Julian" in 1812. Both these lengthy poems have received the rapturous praise of authoritative critics, De Quincey even declaring that Count Julian was a creation worthy to rank beside the Prometheus of Æschylus and Milton's Satan. Southey insisted indeed that Landor had written verses "of which he would rather have been the author than of any produced in our time." But Landor's poems, although obtainable in his collected works, and published in selections, command no audience to-day. With his prose the case is otherwise. There is little in the six volumes of "Imaginary Conversations," or in the two volumes of "Longer Prose Works," that does not merit attention alike for style and matter. "Give me," he says in one of his prefaces, "ten accomplished men for readers and I am content." Landor has all accomplished men for readers now. And all are at one with the critic who said that, "excepting Shakspere, no other writer has furnished us with so many delicate aphorisms of human nature." Mr Swinburne's expression of veneration is well known. "I came as one whose thoughts half linger, Half run before; The youngest to the oldest singer That England bore. I found him whom I shall not find Till all grief end; In holiest age our mightiest mind, Father and friend."