Publisher's Synopsis
From the Introduction to the first volume:
"The birth of Walter Savage Landor falls at a date when the men who had given the eighteenth century its glory were just giving way to their successors. In 1784 Johnson died. Landor was then nine years old. Within a few years before that date both Gray and Goldsmith had died, and Wordsworth, Scott, Southey, and Lamb had been born. The next ten years saw the births of both Byron and Shelley, and almost those of Keats and Carlyle. The Bastille fell when Landor was a school boy at Rugby, and Cowper, the last survivor of the great poets of the eighteenth century, died in Landor's twenty-fifth year. The reader who desires a minute account of the long life which began at such an epoch must look for it in the works of Mr. Forster and Mr. Colvin. All that the present essay intends is to describe the life of the author so far as it throws light upon that part of his works which is here presented.
"It was not until rather late in Landor's life that the first volume of Imaginary Conversations appeared. But from that time until the very end he was continually rewriting those he had written, and writing new ones. He had indeed written earlier in life, but most of those earlier writings had been in verse. The first of them was published when he was twenty years old. He had just left Oxford, partly because the authorities of Trinity College had objected to his firing a shot gun through the windows of a man with whom he had a momentary quarrel, and partly because he was too proud to take the path of apology and repentance which might have enabled him to return. But, in spite of its date and the place of its production, the book is not like other books written in like circumstances. It is fiercer and terser than such books usually are. It is also wittier...".
