Walter Savage Landor is now seventy-six years of age. He writes no more great works, but he is hardly less industrious than a penny-a-liner in writing upon all sorts of subjects for the journals. We find his communications almost every week in The Examiner, The News, The Leader, Leigh Hunt's Journal, and other periodicals. Sometimes he rises to his earlier eloquence, and we hear the voice that was loudest and sweetest in the "Imaginary Conversations;" but for the most part his newspaper pieces are feeble and splenetic, unworthy of him. One of his latest composures has relation to Lord Lyndhurst, by whose speech against the revolutionary aliens in England had been excited the ire of the old poet. "In your paper of this day, April 12," he writes to the editor of The Examiner, "I find repeated an expression of Lord Lyndhurst's, which I am certain will be offensive to many of your readers. General Klapka, a man illustrious for his military knowledge, and for his application of it to the defence of his country and her laws, is contemptuously called one Klapka. The most obscure and the most despicable (and those only) are thus designated. Surely to have been called by the acclamations of a whole people to defend the most important of its fortresses is quite as exalted a distinction as to be appointed a Lord Chamberlain or a Lord Chancellor by the favor of one minister, and liable to be dismissed the next morning by another. With all proper respect for the cleverness of Lord Lyndhurst, I must entreat your assistance in discovering one sentence he ever wrote, or spoke, denoting the man of lofty genius or capacious mind. Memorable things he certainly has said—such as calling by the name of aliens a third part of our fellow-subjects in these islands, and by the prefix of a certain to the name of Klapka. It is strange that sound law should not always be sound sense; strange that the great seal of equity should make so faint and indistinct an impression. Klapka will be commemorated and renowned in history as one beloved by the people, venerated by the nobility; whose voice was listened to attentively by the magistrate, enthusiastically by the soldier. The fame of Lord Lyndhurst is ephemeral, confined to the Court of Chancery and the House of Peers; dozens have shared it in each, and have gone to dinner and oblivion. Those, and those alone, are great men whose works or words are destined to be the heirlooms of many generations. God places them where time passes them without erasing their footsteps. Kings can never make them. They, if minded so, could more easily make kings. England hath installed one Chancellor who might have been consummately great, had there only been in his composition the two simple elements of generosity and honesty. Bacon did not hate freedom, or the friends of freedom; and, although he cautiously kept clear of so dangerous a vicinity, he never came voluntarily forth, invoking the vindictive spirit of a dead law to eliminate them in the hour of adversity from their sanctuary."
The Rev. Moses Margoliouth, who was once a Jew, and who last year published a narrative of a journey to Palestine, under the title of "A Visit to the Land of My Fathers," has just given to the world, in three octavos, a History of the Jews in Great Britain. The book is insufferably tame and feeble; the author is of the class called in England "religious flunkies:" a mastiff to the poor and a spaniel to the proud. His first book was disgusting for its feebleness and servility, and this is scarcely better, notwithstanding the richness of its materials and the curious interest of its subject. A good History of the Jews in England will be a work worth reading.
The Ecclesiastical History Society have published in London Strype's Memorials of Cranmer, Heylyn's History of the Reformation, and Field's Treatise of the Church. Strype and Heylyn are more familiar than Field, whose work is a sort of supplement to Hooker's Polity. Field resembled his illustrious master and friend in judgment, temper, and learning. In his own day his reputation was great. James I. regretted, when he heard of his death, that he had not done more for him; Hall, in reference to his own deanery of Worcester, which had been sought for Field, speaks of that "better-deserving divine," who "was well satisfied with greater hopes;" and Fuller, with his accustomed humor of thoughtfulness, bestows his salutation on "that learned divine whose memory smelleth like a field that the Lord hath blessed."
The Life of Wordsworth, by Dr. Christopher Wordsworth, has appeared in London, and with some additions by Professor Henry Reed, of Philadelphia, will soon be issued by Ticknor, Reed & Fields, of Boston. From what the critics write of it we suspect it is a poor affair. The Leader says that, "all things considered, it is perhaps the worst biographical attempt" it "ever waded through." The Examiner and other leading papers admit its dulness as a biography, and its worthlessness in criticism, but claim for it a certain value as a collection of facts respecting the histories of Wordsworth's different poems. The work indeed professes to be no more than a biographical commentary on the poet's writings. It does not even affect to be critical, or to offer any labored exposition of the principles on which Wordsworth's poems were composed. The author describes his illustrious relative as having had no desire that any such disquisition should be written. "He wished that his poems should stand by themselves, and plead their own cause before the tribunal of posterity." Strictly, then, the volumes are so exclusively subordinate and ministerial to the poetry they illustrate, that apart from the latter they possess hardly any interest. By enthusiasts for the poems they will be eagerly read, but to any other class of readers we cannot see that they present attraction. Dr. Wordsworth's part in them, though small, is not particularly well done; and the poet's part almost exclusively consists of personal memoranda connected with his poems dictated in later life, and seldom by any chance refers to any thing but himself.
Nevertheless there are in the volumes many delightful and characteristic details, much genuine and beautiful criticism (chiefly in the poet's letters), and occasional passages of fine sentiment and pure philosophy. Here is Wordsworth's own description of one of his latest visits to London, and of his appearance at court, in a letter to an American correspondent:
"My absence from home lately was not of more than three weeks. I took the journey to London solely to pay my respects to the Queen, upon my appointment to the laureateship upon the decease of my friend Mr. Southey. The weather was very cold, and I caught an inflammation in one of my eyes, which rendered my stay in the south very uncomfortable. I nevertheless did, in respect to the object of my journey, all that was required. The reception given me by the Queen at her ball was most gracious. Mrs. Everett, the wife of your minister, among many others, was a witness to it, without knowing who I was. It moved her to the shedding of tears. This effect was in part produced, I suppose, by American habits of feeling, as pertaining to a republican government. To see a gray-haired man of seventy-five years of age, kneeling down in a large assembly to kiss the hand of a young woman, is a sight for which institutions essentially democratic do not prepare a spectator of either sex, and must naturally place the opinions upon which a republic is founded, and the sentiments which support it, in strong contrast with a government based and upheld as ours is. I am not, therefore, surprised that Mrs. Everett was moved, as she herself described to persons of my acquaintance, among others to Mr. Rogers the poet. By the by, of this gentleman, now I believe in his eighty-third year, I saw more than of any other person except my host, Mr. Moxon, while I was in London. He is singularly fresh and strong for his years, and his mental faculties (with the exception of his memory a little) not at all impaired. It is remarkable that he and the Rev. W. Bowles were both distinguished as poets when I was a schoolboy, and they have survived almost all their eminent contemporaries, several of whom came into notice long after them. Since they became known, Burns, Cowper, Mason the author of 'Caractacus' and friend of Gray, have died. Thomas Warton, Laureate, then Byron, Shelley, Keats, and a good deal later Scott, Coleridge, Crabbe, Southey, Lamb, the Ettrick Shepherd, Cary the translator of Dante, Crowe the author of 'Lewesdon Hill,' and others of more or less distinction, have disappeared. And now of English poets advanced in life, I cannot recall any but James Montgomery, Thomas Moore, and myself, who are living, except the octogenarian with whom I began. I saw Tennyson, when I was in London, several times. He is decidedly the first of our living poets, and I hope will live to give the world still better things. You will be pleased to hear that he expressed in the strongest terms his gratitude to my writings. To this I was far from indifferent, though persuaded that he is not much in sympathy with what I should myself most value in my attempts, viz., the spirituality with which I have endeavored to invest the material universe, and the moral relations under which I have wished to exhibit its most ordinary appearances."