Give me wild boar, the buck’s broad haunch give me,
And wine that time has mellowed, even as time
Mellows the warrior hermit in his cell.”[46]
Such verse does not invite a large following, nor did the man. Pugnacious, tyrannic, loud-mouthed, setting the world’s and the Church’s rubrics at defiance; yet weighing language to the last jot and tittle of its significance, and—odd-whiles—putting little tendernesses of thought and far-reaching poetic aspirations into such cinctures of polished verse—so jewelled, so compact, so classic, so fine—that their music will last and be admired as long, I think, as English speech lasts. Apart from all this man wrote, there is a strange, half-tragic interest in his life, which will warrant me in telling you more of him than I have told of many whose books are more prized by you.
He was the son of a Dr. Landor, of Warwick, in middle England, who by reason of two adroit marriages was a man of fortune, and so secured eventually a very full purse to the poet, who if he had depended only on the sale of his literary wares, would have starved. Language was always young Landor’s hobby; and he came, by dint of good schooling, to such dexterity in the use of Latin, as to write it in verse or prose with nearly the same ease as English. He loved out-of-door pursuits in boyhood and all his life; was greatly accomplished, his biographer says, in fishing—especially with a cast-net; and of the prey that sometimes came into such net there is this frolicsome record:
“In youth ’twas there I used to scare
A whirring bird, or scampering hare,
And leave my book within a nook
Where alders lean above the brook,
To walk beyond the third mill-pond