In 1858 appeared a metrical miscellany bearing the title of Dry Sticks Fagoted by W. S. Landor, and containing among other things graver and lighter certain epigrammatic and satirical at tacks which reinvolved him in the troubles of an action for libel; and in July of the same year he returned for the last six years of his life to Italy, which he had left for England in 1835. W . Lan dor's Remarks . . . 1859, of which a copy was owned by Swin burne, but of which no example in its issued state is now obtain able, was said by Swinburne to have been a complete vindication. He was advised to make over his property to his family, on whom he was now dependent. They appear to have refused to make him an allowance unless he returned to Fiesole. By the exertions of Robert Browning an allowance was secured. Browning settled him first at Siena and then at Florence, where in 1864 he was visited by Swinburne and received the dedication of Atalanta in Calydon. Embittered and distracted by domestic dissensions, if brightened and relieved by the affection and veneration of friends and strangers, this final period of his troubled and splendid career came at last to a quiet end on Sept. 17, 1864. In the preceding year he had published a last volume of Heroic Idyls, with Addi tional Poems, English and Latin,—the better part of them well worthy to be indeed the "last fruit" of a genius which after a life of eighty-eight years had lost nothing of its majestic and pathetic power, its exquisite and exalted loveliness.
A complete list of Landor's writings, published or privately printed, in English, Latin and Italian, has been provided by T. J. Wise and S. Wheeler, 1919, and The Complete Works, edited by T. Earle Welby, began to be published in 1927. The one charge which can ever seriously be brought and maintained against his style is that of such occasional obscurity or difficulty as may arise from excessive strictness in condensation of phrase and expurga tion of matter not always superfluous, and sometimes almost in dispensable. His English prose and his Latin verse are perhaps
more frequently and more gravely liable to this charge than either his English verse or his Latin prose. But from no former master of either tongue in prose or verse was ever the quality of real ob scurity, of loose and nebulous incertitude, more utterly alien or more naturally remote. There is nothing of cloud or fog about the path on which he leads us; but we feel now and then the want of a bridge or a handrail ; we have to leap from point to point of nar rative or argument without the usual help of a connecting plank.
BIBLIOGRAPHY.—See The Works and Life of Walter Savage Landor (8 vols., 1876), the life being the work of John Forster, inaccurate and incomplete. Another edition of his works (1891-93), edited by C. G. Crump, is also incomplete. The first full and critical edition is that edited by T. Earle Welby. His Letters and other Unpublished Writings were edited by Stephen Wheeler (1897). There are many volumes of selections from his works, notably one (1882) for the "Golden Treas ury" series, edited by Sidney Colvin, who also contributed the mono graph on Landor (1881) in the "English Men of Letters" series. Some minor writings, including Letters of a Canadian, 1862, are lost ; of his Commentary on Memoirs of Chas. Jas. Fox (1812 ; ed. by S. Wheeler, 1907), Lord Crewe's is the only copy known. A critical biography by T. Earle Welby is in preparation. Robert Browning's Some Records of Walter Savage Landor was privately printed in 1919. Articles by Lord Houghton, Mrs. Lynn Linton, Sir Leslie Stephen (Dictionary of National Biography), and Arthur Symons (The Romantic Movement in English Poetry), 1909, should be consulted.