Landor.—You Tories affect to be so squeamish. Epicurus goes on to show Canning's ignorance of English.
North.—Epicurus! Why not William Cobbett?
Landor.—The Athenian philosopher introduces the trial of George the Fourth's wife, and describes her as a drunken old woman, the companion of soldiers and sailors, and lower and viler men. One whose eyes, as much as can be seen of them, are streaky fat floating in semi-liquid rheum.
North.—And this is the language of Epicurus to his female pupils! He was ever such a beast.
Landor.—You are delicate. He goes on to allude to Canning's having called her the pride, the life, the ornament of society, (you know he did so call her in the House of Commons, according to the newspaper reports; it is true he was speaking of what she had been many years previously; before her departure from England.) [92] Epicurus says triumphantly that the words, if used at all, should have been placed thus—the ornament, pride, and life; for hardly a Boeotian bullock-driver would have wedged in life between pride and ornament.
[Footnote 92: Vol. iv. p. 194, 195.—Pericles and Sophocles also prattle about Queen Caroline! vol. 2, p. 106, 107.—In another place the judgment and style of Johnson being under sentence, the Doctor's judgment is "alike in all things," that is, "unsound and incorrect;" and as to style, "a sentence of Johnson is like a pair of breeches, an article of dress, divided into two parts, equal in length, breadth, and substance, with a protuberance before and behind." The contour of Mr. Landor's figure can hardly be so graceful as that of the Pythian Apollo, if his dress-breeches are made in this fashion, and "his Florentine tailor never fails to fit him."—See vol. i. p. 296, and p. 185, note.]
North.—What dignified and important criticism! and how appropriate from the lips of Epicurus! But why were you, Mr. Landor, so rancorous against that miserable Queen Caroline? You have half choked Sir Robert Wilson, one of her champions, and the marshal of her coffin's royal progress through London, with a reeking panegyric in your dedication to him [93] of a volume of your Talks.
[Footnote 93: Vol. iii.]
Landor.—I mistook Wilson for an uncompromising Radical. As to his and Canning's nobled Queen, I confess I owed her a grudge for disrespect to me at Como long before.
North.—How? Were you personally acquainted with her?