LANDOR, WALTER SAVAGE English writer, eldest son of Walter Landor and his wife Elizabeth Savage, was born at Warwick on Jan. 3o, 1775. He was sent to Rugby school, but was removed at the headmaster's request and studied privately with Mr. Langley, vicar of Ashbourne. In 1793 he en tered Trinity College, Oxford. He adopted republican principles and in 1794 fired a gun at the windows of a Tory for whom he had an aversion. He was rusticated till the end of the term, and, although the authorities were willing to condone the offence, he refused to return. The affair led to a quarrel with his father in which Landor expressed his intention of leaving home for ever. He was, however, reconciled with his family through the efforts of his friend Dorothea Lyttelton. He entered no profession, but his father allowed him £150 a year, and he was free to live at home or not as he pleased.
In 1795 appeared in a small volume, divided into three books, The Poems of Walter Savage Landor, and, in pamphlet form of nineteen pages, an anonymous Moral Epistle, respectfully dedi cated to Earl Stanhope. In 1798 appeared his first great work, Gebir. In 180o he issued but suppressed Poetry by the Author of "Gebir," with a postscript to that poem. The second edition of Gebir appeared in 1803, with a text corrected of grave errors and improved by magnificent additions. About the same time the whole poem was also published in a Latin form, which must always dispute the palm of precedence with the English version.
His father's death in 1805 put him in possession of an inde pendent fortune. In 1808, Landor, then aged thirty-three, left. England for Spain to serve against Napoleon at the head of a regi ment supported at his sole expense. After some three months' campaigning came the affair of Cintra and its disasters; "his troop," in the words of his biographer, "dispersed or melted away, and he came back to England in as great a hurry as he had left it," but bringing with him the material in his memory for the sub limest poem published in our language between the last master piece of Milton and the first masterpiece of Shelley—one equally worthy to stand unchallenged beside either for poetic perfection as well as moral majesty—the lofty tragedy of Count Julian, which appeared in 1812, without the name of its author. The style of Count Julian, if somewhat deficient in dramatic ease and the fluency of natural dialogue, has such might and purity and majesty of speech as elsewhere we find only in Milton so long and so steadily sustained.
In May 1811 Landor had suddenly married Miss Julia Thuillier, with whose looks he had fallen in love at first sight in a ball room at Bath; and in June they settled for a while at Llanthony Abbey in Monmouthshire, from whence he was worried in three years' time by the combined vexation of neighbours and tenants, lawyers and lords-lieutenant ; not before much toil and money had been nobly wasted on attempts to improve the sterility of the land, to relieve the wretchedness and raise the condition of the peasantry. He left England for France at first, but after a
brief residence at Tours took up his abode for three years at Como; "and three more wandering years he passed," says his biographer, "between Pisa and Pistoja, before he pitched his tent in Florence in 1821." In 1835 he had an unfortunate difference with his wife which ended in a complete separation.
In 1824 appeared the first series of his Imaginary Conversations, in 1826 "the second edition, corrected and enlarged"; a supple mentary third volume was added in 1828; and in 1829 the second series was given to the world. Not until 1846 was a fresh instal ment added, in the second volume of his collected and selected works. During the interval he had published his three other most famous and greatest books in prose : The Citation and Examina tion of William Shakespeare (1834 ) , Pericles and Aspasia (1836) , The Pentameron (1837). To the last of these was originally ap pended The Pentalogia, containing five of the very finest among his shorter studies in dramatic poetry. In 1847 he published his most important Latin work, Poemata et inscriptiones, comprising, with large additions, the main contents of two former volumes of idyllic, satiric, elegiac and lyric verse; and in the same golden year of his poetic life appeared the very crown and flower of its manifold labours, the Hellenics of Walter Savage Landor, enlarged and completed. Twelve years later this book was re issued, with additions of more or less value, with alterations gen erally to be regretted, and with omissions invariably to be de plored. In 1853 he put forth The Last Fruit off an Old Tree, con taining fresh conversations, critical and controversial essays, mis cellaneous epigrams, lyrics and occasional poems of various kind and merit, closing with Five Scenes on the martyrdom of Beatrice Cenci, unsurpassed even by their author himself for noble and heroic pathos, for subtle and genial, tragic and profound, ardent and compassionate insight into character, with consummate mas tery of dramatic and spiritual truth. In 1856 he published Antony and Octavius—Scenes for the Study, twelve consecutive poems in dialogue which alone would suffice to place him high among the few great masters of historic drama.