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It always has a certain quality of exquisiteness, but this quality is and could not but be unequally displayed in the short poems and the long. The latter can hardly attain, with entirely competent and impartial judges, more than a success of esteem. Sometimes it is great; more usually it intends greatness. The Hellenics are mainly dialogues in verse with a Greek subject.
The little treatise of Xenophon on Domestic Economy contains more historical information than all the seven books of his Hellenics. The same may be said of the Satires of Horace, of the Letters of Cicero, of the novels of Le Sage, of the memoirs of Marmontel. Many others might be mentioned; but these sufficiently illustrate my meaning.
But, when I began the History, I was enchanted, and thought more highly of him than ever. I went back to the Annals, and liked them even better than the History. All at once the explanation of this occurred to me. While I was reading the Annals I was reading Thucydides. When I began the History, I began the Hellenics.
And Father O'Grady spoke of the miles and miles of docks. 'The great murky Thames, he said, 'wearies, but it is very wonderful. Ah, Landor's "Hellenics" in the original Latin: how did that book come here? 'A question I've often asked myself, Father Oliver returned. 'A most intellectual volume it is to find in the house of an Irish priest.
Other works were The Examination of W. Shakespeare touching Deer-stealing , Pericles and Aspasia , Pentameron , Hellenics , and Poemata et Inscriptiones . He quarrelled finally with his wife in 1835, and returned to England, which, however, he had to leave in 1858 on account of an action for libel arising out of a book, Dry Sticks Fagoted.
In like manner his Hellenics, 1847, were mainly translations from his Latin Idyllia Heroica, written years before. The Hellenic clearness and repose which were absent from his life, Landor sought in his art. His poems, in their restraint, their objectivity, their aloofness from modern feeling, have something chill and artificial.
In the latter volume, The Hellenics, which included some translations of his earlier Latin poems, called Idyllia Heroica, one has only to read "The Hamadryad," and compare it with the lyrics of the first volume, in order to realize the astonishing literary vigor of a man who published two volumes, a half century apart, without any appreciable diminution of poetical feeling.
I have ordered the following books to be sent you from London, to the care of Mr. Madison. Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon's Hellenics, Anabasis, and Memorabilia, Cicero's works, Baretti's Spanish and English Dictionary, Martin's Philosophical Grammar, and Martin's Philosophia Britannica. I will send you the following from hence.
There was a tall bookcase, the top shelves devoted to Sweet's "Anglo-Saxon Reader," Lanson's "Histoire de la litterature Francaise," and other textbooks that she was reading for her examination in October, the lower a ragged regiment of novels and verse "The Three Musketeers," "Typhoon," "Many Inventions," Landor's "Hellenics," "with fondest love from Laura," "Une Vie" and "Fort comme la Mort" in yellow and initialled "Y.B." There were also a big table strewn with papers and books, and a chintz covered box-ottoman into which Isabel bundled all those rubbishing treasures that people who love their past can never make up their weak minds to throw away.
In Greek I read the Iliad and Odyssey through; one or two plays of Sophocles, Euripides, and Aristophanes, though by these I profited little; all Thucydides; the Hellenics of Xenophon; a great part of Demosthenes, Aeschines, and Lysias; Theocritus; Anacreon; part of the Anthology; a little of Dionysius; several books of Polybius; and lastly Aristotle's Rhetoric, which, as the first expressly scientific treatise on any moral or psychological subject which I had read, and containing many of the best observations of the ancients on human nature and life, my father made me study with peculiar care, and throw the matter of it into synoptic tables.
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