Letters of Walter Savage Landor, Private and Public

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER I 1838?1839 On January 30, 1838, Walter Savage Landor entered upon his sixty-fourth year. Three years earlier, he had hastily left his wife and children and his pleasant villa at Fiesole, to find a solitary and a late repose in England. After paying visits to various friends, he took a lodging for...
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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER I 1838?1839 On January 30, 1838, Walter Savage Landor entered upon his sixty-fourth year. Three years earlier, he had hastily left his wife and children and his pleasant villa at Fiesole, to find a solitary and a late repose in England. After paying visits to various friends, he took a lodging for himself in St James's Square, Bath. We read in his correspondence of frequent excursions to London, Warwick, Llanbedr, and elsewhere; and the earliest letter here printed was written from Gore House, Kensington, the residence of his old friend, the Countess of Blessington. Long afterwards, Mr Augustus Hare relates, Landor would talk of his visits to Gore House, of Count D'Orsay and Lady Blessington, with Disraeli sitting silently watching their conversation as if it were a display of fireworks. But his headquarters were fixed at Bath for twenty years to come. His daily life there is described in a letter to his sister (1845): ?I walk out in all weathers six miles a day at least; and I generally, unless I am engaged in the evening, read from seven till twelve or one. I sleep twenty minutes after dinner, and nearly four hours at night, or rather in the morning. I rise at nine, breakfast at ten, and -. dne'-af five. All the winter I have had some .-beautiful sweet daphnes and hyacinths in my window. Toward the end of 1838 he was writing historical plays. Andrea of Hungary and Giovanna of Naples were published in one volume early in the following year. The Book of Beauty for 1839 (published about October 1838) contained two dramatic scenes. In September 1838 he wrote and published a long letter to Daniel O'Connell, in which he advocated a reconstruction of the Irish Church and the planting of Irish colonies in Canada and Australia. In 1839 he was writing lett...