Mr. Landor is one of the foremost of that small class who make
good in the nineteenth-century the claims of pure literature. In
these busy days of avarice and ambition, when there is so little
disposition to profound thought, or to any but the most superficial
intellectual entertainments, a faithful scholar receiving from past
ages the treasures of wit, and enlarging them by his own love, is a
friend and consoler of mankind. When we pronounce the names of Homer
and Aeschylus, -- Horace, Ovid, and Plutarch, -- Erasmus, Scaliger,
and Montaigne, -- Ben Jonson and Isaak Walton, -- Dryden and Pope, --
we pass at once out of trivial associations, and enter into a region
of the purest pleasure accessible to human nature. We have quitted
all beneath the moon, and entered that crystal sphere in which
everything in the world of matter reappears, but transfigured and
immortal. Literature is the effort of man to indemnify himself for
the wrongs of his condition. The existence of the poorest
play-wright and the humblest scrivener is a good omen. A charm
attaches to the most inferior names which have in any manner got
themselves enrolled in the registers of the House of Fame, even as
porters and grooms in the courts, to Creech and Fenton, Theobald and
Dennis, Aubrey and Spence.
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