It was in Florence that Landor wrote the greater part of those _Imaginary Conversations_ which have given him his chief fame; but which, very possibly, may be outlived in the popular mind by the wonderful finish and the Saxon force which belong to many of his verselets.
The conversations are just what their name implies--the talk of learned, or distinguished men, on such topics as they were supposed to be most familiar with; all _imagined_, and set forth by the brain of Landor, who took a strange delight in thus playing with the souls of other men and making them the puppets of his will. One meets in his pages Roger Ascham and Lady Jane Grey, Milton and Andrew Marvel, and Achilles and Helena; then we are transported from Mount Ida to the scene of a homely colloquy between Washington and Franklin--about monarchy and Republicanism. Again we have Leofric and Godiva telling their old story with a touching dramatic interest; and can listen--if we will--to long and dullish dispute between Dr. Johnson and Horne Tooke, about Language and its Laws; from this--in which Landor was always much interested--we slip to the Philo-Russianism of a talk between Peter the Great and Alexis. There are seven great volumes of it all--which must belong to all considerable libraries, private or other, and which are apt to keep very fresh and uncut. Of course there is no logical continuity--no full exposition of a creed, or a faith, or a philosophy. It is a great, wide, eloquent, homely jumble; one bounces from rock to rock, or from puddle to puddle (for there are puddles) at the will of this great giant driver of the chariot of imaginary talk.[49] There are beauties of expression that fascinate one; there are sentences so big with meaning as to bring you to sudden pause; there are wearisome chapters about the balance of French verselets, in which he sets up the poor Abbé Delille on rhetorical stilts--only to pelt him down; there are page-long blotches of crude humor, and irrelevant muddy tales, that you wish were out. As sample of his manner, I give one or two passages at random. Speaking of Boileau, he says:--
“In Boileau there is really more of diffuseness than of brevity [he loves thus to slap a popular belief straight in the face]; few observe this, because [Boileau] abounds in short sentences; and few are aware that sentences may be very short, and the writer very prolix; as half a dozen stones rising out of a brook give the passenger more trouble than a plank across it.” [He abounds in short, pert similes of this sort which seem almost to carry an argument in them.]