and fifty lines, while adding fifty to heal over the wounds made by
excision. As the poem stands, it is a rebuke of tyrannous ambition
in the tale of Gebir, prince of Boetic Spain, from whom Gibraltar
took its name. Gebir, bound by a vow to his dying father in the
name of ancestral feud to invade Egypt, prepares invasion, but
yields in Egypt to the touch of love, seeks to rebuild the ruins of
the past, and learns what are the fruits of ambition. This he
learns in the purgatory of conquerors, where he sees the figures of
the Stuarts, of William the Deliverer, and of George the Third,
"with eyebrows white and slanting brow," intentionally confused with
Louis XVI. to avoid a charge of treason. But the strength of
Landor's sympathy with the French Revolution and of his contempt for
George III. was more evident in the first form of the poem.
Parallel with the quenching in Gebir of the conqueror's ambition,
and with the ruin of his life and its new hope by the destroying
powers that our misunderstandings of the better life bring into
play, runs that part of the poem which shows Tamar, his brother,
preparing to dwell with the sea nymph, the ideal, far away from all
the struggle of mankind.

Recognition of the great beauty of Lander's "Gebir" came first from
Southey in "The Critical Review." Southey found that the poem grew
upon him, and became afterwards Landor's lifelong friend. When
Shelley was at Oxford in 1811, there were times when he would read
nothing but "Gebir." His friend Hogg says that when he went to
Shelley's rooms one morning to tell him something of importance, he
could not draw his attention away from "Gebir." Hogg impatiently
threw the book out of window. It was brought back by a servant, and
Shelley immediately fastened upon it again.