has not a grain, and of suspiciousness, many grains. Wilson will run
many risks, and I, for one, would rather not run them. What do you say
to dashing down a plate on the floor when you don't like what's on it?
And the contadini at whose house he is lodging now have been already
accused of opening desks. Still upon that occasion (though there
was talk of the probability of Mr. Landor's "throat being cut in his
sleep"--) as on other occasions, Robert succeeded in soothing him--and
the poor old lion is very quiet on the whole, roaring softly, to beguile
the time, in Latin alcaics against his wife and Louis Napoleon. He
laughs carnivorously when I tell him that one of these days he will have
to write an ode in honour of the Emperor, to please me.'


Mrs. Browning writes, somewhat later, from Rome:


'. . . We left Mr. Landor in great comfort. I went to see his apartment
before it was furnished. Rooms small, but with a look-out into a little
garden, quiet and cheerful, and he doesn't mind a situation rather out
of the way. He pays four pounds ten (English) the month. Wilson has
thirty pounds a year for taking care of him--which sounds a good deal,
but it is a difficult position. He has excellent, generous, affectionate
impulses--but the impulses of the tiger, every now and then. Nothing
coheres in him--either in his opinions, or, I fear, his affections. It
isn't age--he is precisely the man of his youth, I must believe. Still,
his genius gives him the right of gratitude on all artists at least, and
I must say that my Robert has generously paid the debt. Robert always
said that he owed more as a writer to Landor than to any contemporary.
At present Landor is very fond of him--but I am quite prepared for his
turning against us as he has turned against Forster, who has been so