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Walter Savage Landor is known equally for his verse and his prose--his best known poetry being short epigrammatic verses such as Rose Aylmer and certain love poems to a friend he called Ianthe. Among his best known prose publications were various volumes of Imaginary conversations.
Argumentative as a young man, a brilliant classicist who published numerous works in Latin, all his life Landor attacked injustice wherever he saw it. Although he was sometimes thought to be extremely quarrelsome, several modern writers including Peter Ackroyd (in his 1990 biography of Charles Dickens) and Jean Field (in her biography of Landor, 2000) have realised that his aggressive talk was cover for an extremely sensitive, sentimental and generous character, who was exceptionally loyal to his friends.
Landor is also well-known as a letter writer, his public letters to newspapers as well as his witty letters to friends being expressed in clear and memorable prose. The letters in this selection cover topics as varied as capital punishment, the proposed new National Gallery (Landor suggested it should be sited in Kensington Palace), Shakespeare's house (with condemnation of those who wrote graffiti on the walls), child labour, the established church, and the inequalities of clergy stipends therein:
There are portions of the British empire, where three hundred clergymen, professing, and indefatigably teaching, the same faith as the Archbishop of Canterbury and Bishop of London, do not share among them with equal abilities, equal virtues, so large a sum of money as these two prelates.
(additional information supplied by Jean Field, Secretary, The Landor Society of Warwick).
The full text of Selected letters can be read online or downloaded free of charge. It is in XHTML format, like this page. Please note the file size is 176kb and it may take some time to open-up if you choose to read it online. Downloading for reading later may be the preferred option and this can be typically achieved by calling up an option box. If you have a mouse and it is configured for left click to select, right clicking the link may give you this option
Page created 31 January 2003 and last
updated 31 January 2003
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