of its majestic and pathetic power, its exquisite and exalted loveliness.
A complete list of Landor’s writings, published or privately printed, in English, Latin and Italian, including pamphlets, fly-sheets and occasional newspaper correspondence on political or literary questions, it would be difficult to give anywhere and impossible to give here. From nineteen almost to ninety his intellectual and literary activity was indefatigably incessant; but, herein at least like Charles Lamb, whose cordial admiration he so cordially returned, he could not write a note of three lines which did not bear the mark of his “Roman hand” in its matchless and inimitable command of a style at once the most powerful and the purest of his age. The one charge which can ever seriously be brought and maintained against it is that of such occasional obscurity or difficulty as may arise from excessive strictness in condensation of phrase and expurgation of matter not always superfluous, and sometimes almost indispensable. His English prose and his Latin verse are perhaps more frequently and more gravely liable to this charge than either his English verse or his Latin prose. At times it is well-nigh impossible for an eye less keen and swift, a scholarship less exquisite and ready than his own, to catch the precise direction and follow the perfect course of his rapid thought and radiant utterance. This apparently studious pursuit and preference of the most terse and elliptic expression which could be found for anything he might have to say could not but occasionally make even so sovereign a master of two great languages appear “dark with excess of light”; but from no former master of either tongue in prose or verse was ever the quality of real obscurity, of loose and nebulous incertitude, more utterly alien or more naturally remote. There is nothing of cloud or fog about the path on which he leads us; but we feel now and then the want of a bridge or a handrail; we have to leap from point to point of narrative or argument without the usual help of a connecting plank. Even in his dramatic works, where least of all it should have been found, this lack of visible connexion or sequence in details of thought or action is too often a source of sensible perplexity. In his noble trilogy on the history of Giovanna queen of Naples it is sometimes actually difficult to realize on a first reading what has happened or is happening, or how, or why, or by what agency—a defect alone sufficient, but unhappily sufficient in itself, to explain the too general ignorance of a work so rich in subtle and noble treatment of character, so sure and strong in its grasp and rendering of “high actions and high passions,” so rich in humour and in pathos, so royally serene in its commanding power upon the tragic mainsprings of terror and of pity. As a poet, he may be said on the whole to stand midway between Byron and Shelley—about as far above the former as below the latter. If we except Catullus and Simonides, it might be hard to match and it would be impossible to overmatch the flawless and blameless yet living and breathing beauty of his most perfect elegies, epigrams or epitaphs. As truly as prettily was he likened by Leigh Hunt “to a stormy mountain pine which should produce lilies.” His passionate compassion, his bitter and burning pity for all wrongs endured in all the world, found only their natural and inevitable outlet in his lifelong defence or advocacy of tyrannicide as the last resource of baffled justice, the last discharge of heroic duty. His tender and ardent love of children, of animals and of flowers makes fragrant alike the pages of his writing and the records of his life. He was as surely the most gentle and generous as the most headstrong and hot-headed of heroes or of men. Nor ever was any man’s best work more thoroughly imbued and informed with evidence of his noblest qualities. His loyalty and liberality of heart were as inexhaustible as his bounty and beneficence of hand. Praise and encouragement, deserved or undeserved, came yet more readily to his lips than challenge or defiance. Reviled and ridiculed by Lord Byron, he retorted on the offender living less readily and less warmly than he lamented and extolled him dead. On the noble dramatic works of his brother Robert he lavished a magnificence of sympathetic praise which his utmost self-estimate would never have exacted for his own. Age and the lapse of time could neither heighten nor lessen the fulness of this rich and ready generosity. To the poets of his own and of the next generation he was not readier to do honour than to those of a later growth, and not seldom of deserts far lower and far lesser claims than theirs. That he was not unconscious of his own, and avowed it with the frank simplicity of nobler times, is not more evident or more certain than that in comparison with his friends and fellows he was liable rather to undervalue than to overrate himself. He was a classic, and no formalist; the wide range of his just and loyal admiration had room for a genius so far from classical as Blake’s. Nor in his own highest mood or method of creative as of critical work was he a classic only, in any narrow or exclusive sense of the term. On either side, immediately or hardly below his mighty masterpiece of Pericles and Aspasia, stand the two scarcely less beautiful and vivid studies of medieval Italy and Shakespearean England. The very finest flower of his immortal dialogues is probably to be found in the single volume comprising only “Imaginary Conversations of Greeks and Romans”; his utmost command of passion and pathos may be tested by its transcendent success in the distilled and concentrated tragedy of Tiberius and Vipsania, where for once he shows a quality more proper to romantic than classical imagination—the subtle and sublime and terrible power to enter the dark vestibule of distraction, to throw the whole force of his fancy, the whole fire of his spirit, into the “shadowing passion” (as Shakespeare calls it) of gradually imminent insanity. Yet, if this and all other studies from ancient history or legend could be subtracted from the volume of his work, enough would be left whereon to rest the foundation of a fame which time could not sensibly impair. (A. C. S.)
Bibliography.—See The Works and Life of Walter Savage Landor (8 vols., 1846), the life being the work of John Forster. Another edition of his works (1891–1893), edited by C. G. Crump, comprises Imaginary Conversations, Poems, Dialogues in Verse and Epigrams and The Longer Prose Works. His Letters and other Unpublished Writings were edited by Mr Stephen Wheeler (1897). There are many volumes of selections from his works, notably one (1882) for the “Golden Treasury” series, edited by Sidney Colvin, who also contributed the monograph on Landor (1881) in the “English Men of Letters” series. A bibliography of his works, many of which are very rare, is included in Sir Leslie Stephen’s article on Landor in the Dictionary of National Biography (vol. xxxii., 1892). (M. Br.)
LANDOUR, a hill station and sanatorium in India, in Dehra
Dun district of the United Provinces, adjoining Mussoorie.
Pop. (1901) 1720, rising to 3700 in the hot season. Since 1827
it has been a convalescent station for European troops, with
a school for their children.
LAND REGISTRATION, a legal process connected with the
transfer of landed property, comprising two forms—registration
of deeds and registration of title, which may be best described
as a species of machinery for assisting a purchaser or mortgagee
in his inquiries as to his vendor’s or mortgagor’s title previously
to completing his dealing, and for securing his own position
afterwards. The expediency of making inquiry into the vendor’s
title before completing a purchase of land (and the case of a
mortgage is precisely similar) is obvious. In the case of goods
possession may ordinarily be relied on as proof of full ownership;
in the case of land, the person in ostensible possession is very
seldom the owner, being usually only a tenant, paying rent to
someone else. Even the person to whom the rent is paid is
in many cases—probably, in England, in most cases—not the
full owner, but only a life owner, or a trustee, whose powers of
disposing of the property are of a strictly limited nature. Again,
goods are very seldom the subject of a mortgage, whereas land
has from time immemorial been the frequent subject of this
class of transaction. Evidently, therefore, some sort of inquiry
is necessary to enable a purchaser to obtain certainty that the
land for which he pays full price is not subject to an unknown
mortgage or charge which, if left undiscovered, might afterwards
deprive him of a large part or even the whole of its value. Again,
the probability of serious consequences to the purchaser ensuing
from a mistake as to title is infinitely greater in the case of land
than in the case of goods. Before the rightful owner can recover
