Selections from the writings of Walter Savage Landor

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Preface

The first edition of John Forster's Life of Landor was published by Chapman and Hall, in two volumes, in 1869; in 1876, abridged, it formed the first volume of Forster's eight-volume edition of The Works a7id Life of Walter Savage Laiidor ; in 1895 the second edition was reprinted. In this biography is stored almost all the information of any consequence relating to Landor; and Forster's is the standard text of the collected writings. The ample material in the biography is not especially well put together, nor is the appraisal always closely accurate. To a special student of the subject, however, the book is invaluable. Mr. Sidney Colvin's Landor {English Men of Letters) gives as full an account as any one but a special student cares for. In his volume of Selections {Golden Treasury Series) he attains, by rare skill in choice and arrangement, and by means of a really luminous preface and notes, that high point of critical merit which entitles him to the commendation bestowed by Landor on one who praises an author " becomingly." Mr. Charles G. Crump's comparatively recent varioriun edition of the writings, with instructive critical notes, is based on Forster. In 1897 appeared Letters and Other Unpublished Writings of Walter Savage Landor, edited by Mr. Stephen Wheeler. The new material is not particularly important ; but the editor's work is done with such good taste and judgment that the book cannot fail to interest an admirer of Landor. It has a well-made bibliography. The Scott Library contains,

VI PREFACE.

in convenient form, a good assortment of Imaginary Conversations, the Fentameron, and Pericles and Aspasia. The fullest American reprint of the prose is that published by Roberts Brothers.

Mr. Swinburne's article on Landor in the Encyclopedia Britannica, so strangely stimulating a blend of dithyramb and discernmejit as no other mortal could ever have produ^edTTsTo'lDe read with mental reservations and qualifications. His Song for the Centenary of Walter Savage Landor is an encomium, in detail, of pretty much everything Landor wrote. In sharp contrast to Mr. Swinburne's apotheosis is Mr. Leslie Stephen's searching, and in some degree destructive, analysis {Hours in a Library^. Irritating though the sarcastically depreciatory manner of the essay may be to youthful enthusiasm, yet the estimate is in the main so sound that mature and dispassionate reflection overlooks the lack of sympathy. It is by odds the cleverest thing in print on Landor. The article in the Dictionary of National Biography, also by Mr. Leslie Stephen, states the facts concisely, and concludes with an admirably just summing up of Landor as man and writer.

Among occasional contributions to the subject are Mrs. Browning's (then Miss Barrett) essay in Home's New Spirit of the Age (1844); Miss Kate Field's three articles in the Atlantic Monthly (1866) ; Mrs. Linton's article in Eraser's Magazine (July, 1870); Lord Houghton's Monograph (1873); Mr. Horace E. Scudder's characterisation {Men and Letters) -^ Professor Dowden's essay {Studies in Literature) ; Professor G. E. Woodberry's {Studies in Letters and Life) ; Mr. Aubrey de Vere's {Essays, chiefly on Poetry) ; M. Gabriel Sarrazin's {Poetes modernes de V Angleterre) ; and two articles by J. R. Lowell {Massachusetts Quarterly, 1848; Century Magazine, 1888). Mr. E. W. Evans's academic Study of Landor is systematic and thorough. Landor is treated at some

PREFACE. Vll

length in Mrs. Oliphant's Victorian Age of English Literature and in Mr. Stedman's Victorian Poets ; and a few pages are given to him in Professor Saintsbury's book on the English literature of this century.

This small volume of selections, differing in plan both from Mr. Hillard's and from Mr. Colvin's, contains some of the dramatic and some of the discursive Conversations, a considerable part of the last Day of the Pentameron, a small number of letters from Pericles and Aspasia, and a few of the best short poems. It has been difficult to find among the dramatic Conversations good ones not already included by Mr. Colvin ; among the non-dramatic it has been easy, for he usually makes but short extracts from them. Only one of these last is here given entire ; from others are made excerpts long enough to serve as samples of the trend and manner of the discussion. The letters taken from Pe?'icles and Aspasia, as well as the poems which follow them, though totally inadequate to give an idea of the full value of the classes of work they represent, are, at all events, characteristic. The order in which the selections are placed is determined by considerations of congruity and contrast, not chronology.

The slight biographical outline follows Mr. Colvin, my indebtedness to whom at every turn in the preparation of this book is obvious. The omission to mention in it Landor's idiosyncrasies of spelling is because the) are matter rather of curiosity than of serious literary interest. They are discussed in full, along with various linguistic matters, in Conversations between Johnson and Home Tooke and between Landor and Archdeacon Hare.

The notes, furnishing little of the information supplied by dictionaries of biography and mythology, not minutely analysing, touching only incidentally on technical details of style, chiefly strive, by cursory suggestion of matters more

Vlll PREFACE.

or less pertinent, to invite the reader to meet in a friendly spirit this somewhat uncompromising writer, whose acquaintance is so well worth making.

I take pleasure in thanking several friends for valuable aid, and the editor of Scribner's Magazine for his courtesy in consenting to the repetition, in the Introduction, of a few paragraphs from a previous article of my own.

CONTENTS. .

PAGE

Introduction xiii

IMAGINARY CONVERSATIONS.

I. Achilles and Helena 3

II. iESOP AND RhODOPE 9

III. Tiberius and Vipsania 19

IV. Metellus and Marius 23

V. Marcellus and Hannibal . . . . .28

VI. Henry VIII. and Anne Boleyn .... 33

VII. Roger Ascham and Lady Jane Grey ... 41

VIII. Princess Mary and Princess Elizabeth . . 44

IX. Essex and Spenser 54

X. Leofric and Godiva 59

XI. The Lady Lisle and Elizabeth Gaunt . . 65

XII. The Empress Catharine AND Princess Dashkof . 69

XIII. John of Gaunt and Joanna of Kent ... 77

XIV. Tancredi and Constantia 82

XV. The Maid of Orleans and Agnes Sorel . . 87

XVI. BOSSUET AND THE DuCHESS DE FONTANGES . . 96

XVII. Dante and Beatrice 104

XVIII. Beniowski and Aphanasia . . . . . 113

XIX. Leonora di Este and Father Panigarola . .118

X CONTENTS.

PAGE

XX. Admiral Blake and Humphrey Blake . . 120

XXI. Rhadamistus and Zenobia .... 124

XXII. Epicurus, Leontion, and Ternissa . . . 129

XXni. Walton, Cotton, and Oldways . . . 13B

XXIV. William Penn and Lord Peterborough . -155

XXV. Epictetus and Seneca 167

XXVI. LUCULLUS AND C^SAR I72

XXVII. The Apologue of Critobulus .... i8o

THE PENTAMERON.

XXVIII. Fifth Day's Interview 183

PERICLES AND ASPASIA.

XXIX. Selected Letters 200

POEMS.

Hellenics.

XXX. The Hamadryad 215

XXXI. AcoN and Rhodope ; or, Inconstancy . . 224

XXXII. The Death of Artemidora 228

Miscellaneous.

XXXIII. The Wrestling Match (from Gebir) . . . 229

XXXIV. To Ianthe

1. "It often comes into my head" . . 232

2. "Ianthe! you are call'd". . . 232

3. "Your pleasures spring" . . • 233

4. "Well I remember" ..... 233 XXXV. Rose Aylmer 233

XXXVI. A FiESOLAN Idyl 234

XXXVII. Upon a Sweet-Briar 236

XXXVIII. The Maid's Lament

CONTENTS. XI

PAGE 237

XXXIX. To Robert Browning 238

XL. To THE Sister of Elia . . . , . 238

XLI. On Dirce 239

XLII. " I will not love ! " 239

239 240 240

Old Age and Death.

.XLIII. "How many voices"

XLIV. "The place where soon" ...

XLV. To Age

XLVI. On his Seventy-fifth Birthday ... 241

XLVII. On his Eightieth Birthday .... 241

XLVIII. "Death stands above me" . . . . 241

Introduction

Walter Savage Landor was born at Warwick, on January 30, 1775. His father, Dr. Landor, a practising physician at Warwick, reputed to have been a ''poHshed, sociable, agreeable, somewhat choleric gentleman, more accomplished and better educated, as his profession required, than most of those with whom he associated, but otherwise dining, coursing, telling his story and drinking his bottle without particular distinction among the rest," had married two heiresses. Of the seven children by the second wife, Elizabeth Savage, a member of a Warwickshire family, Walter was the eldest. By entail he became heir, at birth, to two estates belonging to his mother's family — Ipsley Court and Tachbrook in Warwickshire ; to a share in the reversionary interest in a third — Hughenden Manor in Buckinghamshire;^ and to the family property of his father in Staffordshire. "No one, it should seem," says his latest biographer, "ever entered life under happier conditions. To the gifts of breeding and of fortune there were added at his birth the gifts of genius and of strength. But there had been evil god-mothers beside the cradle as well as good, and in the composition of this powerful nature pride, anger, and pre-

1 Subsequently the country seat of another man of literary fame, Benjamin Disraeli, who in 1848 purchased the place, and on the refusal by his executors of the offer of a public funeral and Westminster Abbey was, in accordance with his express directions, buried there beside Lady Beaconsfield in 1881.

XIV INTR on UC TION.

cipitancy had been too largely mixed, to the prejudice of a noble intellect and tender heart, and to the disturbance of all his relations with his fellow-men."

Landor went, at ten, to Rugby, and, during the six years he stayed there, was equally reckless in riding and in defiance of authority ; regardless of bounds ; proficient in his studies — " all except arithmetic " ; deep in Latin and English literature, and skilful in turning verses in Latin and English ; fond of reading at night, and of wandering by day beside streams. Illustrative of his readiness in Latin — of which he once said, in extreme old age, *' I am sometimes at a loss for an English word, never for a Latin " — is a story told by Charles Reade's father, who was at Rugby at the same time. Dr. James, the master, found him eating an apple in school, and told him to bring it to his desk. As Landor was turning to go back to his seat, the doctor said, " Now, if you want that again, you had better make me a short line on the occasion " ; whereupon, after thinking a moment, Landor replied :

"What do you mean by esuriens doctor 2'' said the master. " The gormandizing doctor." " Take it, sir," said the doctor, delighted with his pupil. Another story is that once, when there were seven boys at Rugby named Hill, he got a half-holiday for the school by writing a copy of verses in which he compared Rugby to Rome because it was built on seven hills. " I don't ask you who wrote this," said the doctor, " for there is only one of you with the brains to do it." But Landor and the master were not always on amicable terms, and one day they differed over a Latin quantity. Landor is said to have been right about the quantity, but he conducted himself in so insubordinate a way that his removal was requested.

INTRODUCTION. XV

After two years with a tutor, he went, in 1793, to Trinity College, Oxford. Southey was then at Balliol. Though they did not know each other, they both made themselves conspicuous by avowing their republican sentiments in such practices as appearing in public with their hair unpowdered, and Landor by still more extreme insults to orthodox English opinion. "His Jacobinism," says Southey, "would have made me seek his acquaintance, but for his madness." An absurd freak led to his rustication. He quarreled with his father, whose politics were the reverse of his own, and, finding it impossible to live at home, established himself, in 1794, in lodgings in London. Here he published, in 1795, a small volume of poems, of which one was an ode To Washington.

Next he went to South Wales, where, he says, he lived "chiefly among woods," and appears to have been in the best spirits, though " not exchanging twelve sentences with men." With women, however, he may be supposed to have exchanged more, for he wrote poetry about two — lone, whose prose name was Jones, and lanthe, which means Jane. The latter was an Irish lady, Sophia Jane Swift, who afterwards became Countess de Molande, and always remained Landor's friend.^ Gebir^ in English and in Latin, suggested by a so-

1 Mr. Colvin gives the following summary of the subsequent life of lanthe :

" To this lady Landor's somewhat roving affections during his life at Bath (about 1 800-1 806) were principally devoted, and he held her in great honour and affection ever after. Her first husband, a collateral descendant of the Dean of St. Patrick's, died in 18 12, and she soon afterwards married M. de Molande, a French Emigre of high family. After the Restoration, Madame de Molande, who had children by both marriages, went to live with her second husband in Paris. Being left once more a widow, she spent two years (1829-31) with her children in Florence, and passed the remainder of her life between England and France, dying in Paris [Versailles] in 18 51."

In Mr. Wheeler's recently published book are further details about her and her daughters, as well as about lone.

XVI INTRODUCTION.

called Arabian story of Clara Reeve's, was the poetic fruit of Landor's out-of-door life in Wales. Ignored by the many, it has been admired by a few for a century. Southey found in it "miraculous beauties." The first edition of the English version appeared in 1798, the year of the Lyrical Ballads and of Lamb's Rosamii7id Gray. The date marks not inaccurately a point in the ideal divisional line between eighteenth-century and nineteenth-century English literature. The blank verse of Gebir is one sign of the growing reaction from the correct couplets of the preceding age. The question which has been suggested whether The Ancient Mariner^ Tintern Abbey, or Gebir was " really the weightiest portent of the new day " seems, however, too remotely eccentric for special consideration here.

After contributing political articles to the Courier for a while, Landor made a visit to Paris, where he conceived a hatred of all things French. " As to the cause of liberty," he writes in 1802, "this cursed nation has ruined it forever." He includes the language in his dislike, though he was fond of a number of French writers. Ronsard, he says, " would have been a great poet if he had not been a Frenchman."

In 1805, on the death of his father, he succeeded, at thirty, to the family estates. He was in need of money, for, what with wandering from place to place, everywhere buying such expensive things as horses and pictures, and living generally on a scale which the limited sale of his unpopular writings could far from maintain, he had for some time been spending more than his allowance.

His life at Bath during the next few years was as near to dissipation as Landor's ever came. Though careless in dress and awkward in dancing, he was, as was natural, a favourite in society. He continued to buy horses and pictures, and to keep up an establishment beyond even his ample means. Personally of abstemious habits, he was yet sociable

INTRODUCTION. xvu

and impressionable. As the owner of large landed properties, he was a conspicuous figure in so small a place. Of his doings at Bath several stories are told on which it is needless to dwell. His friends were anxious that he should marry ; and in his letters and his verses there are indications of dissatisfaction with the sort of life he had adopted, of a craving for something more congenial to his refined tastes than he found in the rather empty days and nights of a rich but aimless young man of fashion.

"This conventional existence" — to quote from Lord Houghton — "was interrupted by a resolve to join the British army in Spain in 1808." He actually equipped and commanded a thousand volunteers in the uprising against Napoleon's attempt to convert Spain and Portugal into dependencies of France. For this service, which lasted some three months, the honorary rank of colonel in the Spanish army was conferred on him — a title which he afterward relinquished. His experience in Spain gave the impulse for Count /ulia/r, his principal drama in verse, of which De Quincey, by a strange vagary, ranked the character of the hero with Milton's Satan and with the Prometheus of ^schylus.

Not less characteristic than his espousal of the Spanish cause was his scheme of restoring the border priory of Llanthony, in Wales, and there establishing himself as the benefactor and reformer of the neighbourhood. He sold one of his estates to buy the property, instituted gigantic operations to make it accessible and habitable, went to live there with his wife (a young beauty whom he fell in love with at first sight at a ball at Bath and married out-of-hand in the course of a few months), got into trouble with every one he had dealings with, and finally was forced to turn about and leave England, after having wasted seventy thousand pounds in the fruitless enterprise.

XVlll INTR on UC TION.

" It is small reproach to any woman," says Lord Houghton, " that she did not possess a suiBcient union of charm, tact, and intelligence to suit Landor as a wife. He demanded beauty in woman just as imperatively as honesty in man, yet was hardly submissive to its influence." Mrs. Landor, on the other hand, had, as another critic puts it, " none of the gifts of the domestic artist ; she was not of those fine spirits who study to create, out of the circumstances and characters with which they have to deal, the best attainable ideal of a home ; but a commonplace provincial beauty enough, although lively and agreeable in her way." She and the lion were ill mated. He married her for her wonderful golden hair, and because she was penniless and without accomplishments. Her reasons for marrying him were probably no better. At any rate, he was not the man to bear being twitted by her with their difference in age of sixteen years. Accordingly, one night, unable to stay with her any longer, he walked across the island of Jersey, where they were living, and embarked for France.^

1 It was a year after Landor's luckless marriage that the first husband of lanthe died. Mrs. Lynn Linton, whose article {Fraser''s Magazine, luly, 1870) on Landor's latter years is of peculiar interest, represents him as sighing that he had not waited that year before marrying. What, one wonders, would have been his fate if he had waited t He certainly would not have married as he did. But would he have married lanthe .? It is not unhkely that he would, for, Mrs. Linton goes on to say, " of all his four great loves, lanthe was the one to which his memory turned most constantly and most fondly. After he had told me the whole story, she, then an old woman, came to Bath with her grandchildren ; and we used to go regularly every day to pay her a visit. She was sweet and gentle, evidently very proud of her old lover's affection, very fond of him, and somewhat afraid. And his behaviour to her was perfect. He was at his best when with her. Tender, respectful, playful, with his old-world courtesy which sat so well on him, it was easy to understand why she had loved him so passionately in the fresh far-away past, and why she loved him still in

INTR OD UC TION. XIX

The incidents of the next few years may be mentioned very briefly. Landor went to Tours, where, a few months later, his wife rejoined him. Here began, in 1814, his acquaintance with Francis Hare,^ who became and remained his fast friend. From Tours Mr. and Mrs. Landor went to Como, where their first boy was born. Here, as always, he kept up a constant correspondence with Southey, and sent him many valuable books which, once read, had served their purpose. He was continually buying and giving away good books and, in his later years, bad pictures. He had a visit from Southey, who was much entertained by his droll stories, and by his echoing laughter as he told them in the cool church of Sant' Abondio. Driven from Como by a quarrel, he went to Pisa. Characteristically, though Shelley was there at the same time, Landor avoided meeting him.

In 182 1 he removed to Florence, where he lived for five years in the Palazzo Medici, and for three in the Villa Castiglione, a short distance out of Florence, devoting himself mainly during the whole period to the writing of the Imaginary Conversations. The first two volumes, containing thirty-six Conversations, were published first in 1824, by Taylor and Hessey, who were just about that time giving up the publication of the London Magazine, in which the Opium Eater and the Essays of Elia had appeared two or

the worn and withered present. All children were specially dear to Landor ; bat of all, her grandchildren were the dearest."

1 Elder brother of the authors of Guesses at Truth. His son, Mr. A. J. C. Hare, author of Walks in Ro77ie, etc., gives, in The Story of My Life, a number of personal reminiscences of Landor. In a letter written a few months before Landor's death, after speaking of his broken health, Mr. Hare tells how he used still to like to "say over the old names, — ' Francis, Augustus, Julius, i miei tre imperatori. I have never known any family I loved so much as yours. I loved Francis most, then Julius, then Augustus. But I loved them all. Francis was the best friend I ever had.'"

XX INTR OD UC TION.

three years before. The number of Conversations written and published between 182 1 and 1829 is about eighty; the whole number produced before Landor's death, not quite one hundred and fifty.

During the Plorentine period Landor led, despite certain annoying difficulties incident to the publishing of his books, a pretty tranquil and satisfactory life. He was doing, in agreeable surroundings, the work he most enjoyed; his increasing reputation as a literary figure attracted to him many of the men best worth knowing; he had several dear friends ; his wife appears to have been less vexatious than usual ; and in his children he took unbounded delight.

At Fiesole, where he next lived for some years in a villa bought with money advanced by a friend, he continued to romp with his children, to tend his flowers, to make companions of his numerous pets, to write poetry, to revise, enlarge, and add to his Conversations. Several of his poems, especially A Fiesolan Idyl, suggest the beauty of the place and the charm of his life there. In 1832, while on a short visit to England, he saw Crabb Robinson, Flaxman, Lamb, Coleridge, Julius Hare, Southey, and Wordsworth. It was at Fiesole, whither he returned in 1833, that he composed the Citation and Exa7nination of William Shakespeare, Pericles and Aspasia, and, in part, the Pentame7'on, which relate respectively, as their names show, to the three great periods of Elizabethan England, classic Greece, and Italy on the verge of the Renaissance. The last two, of which the subjects were especially congenial to him, and the best of the Conversations establish his title to high rank as a writer of prose.

Before the appearance of the Pentameron, Landor and his wife had again separated, this time definitively, by mutual consent. For two years he drifted from place to place in Italy and England. At length, in 1837, he took up his

INTRODUCTION. XXI

abode at Bath, there to live for twenty years, writing diligently, frequently going up to London to meet the fashionable literary people whom Lady Blessington and Count D'Orsay entertained at Gore House, taking daily walks with his bright-eyed, yellow-tailed Pomeranian dog,^ gradually towards the latter years losing his mental strength, until finally, in 1858, he was forced to escape by flight the consequences of a suit for libel in which his tempestuous quixotism had involved him. The story of the squabble at Bath is somewhat piteous, though also, as told by Forster, unintentionally amusing. Landor, eighty-four years old, running away from the entanglements of an imprudent intimacy with a young girl, was discovered by Dickens at Forster's house in London, where he had taken refuge for the night while Forster was giving a dinner party. Dickens, who had left the table to go to cheer the old man, came back laughing, and saying that he " found him very jovial, and that his whole conversation was upon the characters of Catullus, Tibullus, and other Latin poets." ^

It was at Bath that Andrea of Hungary^ Giovanna of Naples^ and Fra Rupert were written, a trilogy which, by reason of the author's inability to conceive of the necessity

1 No notice of Landor should omit mention of his dogs, Parigi, Pomero, and Giallo, his constant companions, with whom he never quarreled. Pomero's death is commemorated in a letter to Miss Boyle published by Mr. Lowell in the Centtiry (February, 1888). In Mr. Colvin's Landor (p. 212) are some pretty lines to Giallo, Pomero's successor.

2 It may be well to mention, in connection with the whole scandal, Mrs. Linton's indignant denial of the truth of the version commonly received. " Of one thing," she says, " I am sure, that his affection for ' Erminie ' was not the feeling his enemies have made it out to be. In his madness he wrote some bad things enough about the matter ; but he never wilfully said a word that could shock the most sensitive girl ; and I am as certain as of my own existence that he never showed any feeling whatsoever of the kind I mean."

XXU INTRODUCTION.

of plot to a play, it is exceedingly difficult to understand. The character of Giovanna is in accordance with his own pleasure, not with Sismondi's history. There are scenes in which she lives, but they are not so knit together as to present a clear idea of the character as a whole. Another play, the Siege of Anco/ia, soon followed. Interesting and scholarly criticisms on Theocritus, Catullus, and Petrarch belong to the same period. And a few years afterward came the Hellenics^ for the genuinely Greek tone of which some critics vouch. They are undoubtedly the crowning literary performance of Landor's later life.

Still he kept on wTiting to the end. As late as 1863 he published a volume, and even after that he wTote dialogues in prose and in verse. There is little to tell of the closing years. Penniless and mentally enfeebled, he received great kindness from Browning, and lived for a time at Siena with W. W. Story. Afterward he went again to live in Florence, whither, in 1864, Mr. Swinburne, aged twenty-seven,

" — came as one whose thoughts half Hnger, Half run before, The youngest to the oldest smger That England bore."

It was not very long after this visit that, on Sept. 17, 1864, the " unsubduable old Roman " was at last subdued.

During three-quarters of a life of almost ninety years, extending from before the Battle of Lexington to within a few months of Lee's surrender, Landor might have said with Walt Whitman, " I understand the large hearts of heroes," for his companions were mainly the illustrious men and women of the past. From the point of view of literary production, his life falls into three periods, thus marked off by Mr. Colvin :

INTRODUCTION. xxiii

1795-1821, Foeius, Gclnr, Count Julian, Idyllia Heroica. 182 1 -1 83 7, Imaginary Conversations, Examination of

Shakespeare, Pericles and Aspasia, Fentarn-

e?'on. 1837-1863, miscellaneous prose and verse. In this

period the Hellenics are foremost in

importance and beauty.

Since it is as a writer of prose that he is chiefly memorable, the general remarks which follow will deal for the most part with the work produced during the sixteen years immediately preceding the accession of Queen Victoria.

Forster, whose profusion of enthusiasm somewhat weakens his indispensable work in behalf of Landor, thus describes the literary character of the plan of the Conversations : "All the leading shapes of the past, the most familiar and the most august, were to be called up again. Modes of thinking the most various, and events the most distant, were proposed for his theme. Beside the fires of the present, the ashes of the past were to be rekindled and to shoot again into warmth and brightness. The scene was to be shifting as life, but continuous as time. Down it were to pass successions of statesmen, lawyers, and churchmen ; wits and men of letters ; party men, soldiers, and kings ; the most tender, delicate, and noble women ; figures fresh from the schools of Athens and the courts of Rome ; philosophers philosophising, and politicians discussing questions of state ; poets talking of poetry, men of the world of matters worldly, and English, Italians, and French of their respective literatures and manners. . . . The requisites for it were such as no other existing writer possessed in the same degree as he did. Nothing had been indifferent to him that affected humanity. Poetry and history had delivered up to him their treasures, and the secrets of antiquity were his."