As a poet, Walter Savage Landor has enjoyed a permanent minority reputation for the classicism of his epigrams and idyls. He was a seriously emulative classicist and wrote a significant proportion of his poetry in Latin, which was also the original language of some of the long and short poems that he published in English. Indeed, he was deterred from making it his chief medium only by the example of John Milton and the advice of Robert Southey and William Wordsworth, and as an old man he remarked, "I am sometimes at a loss for an English word, for a Latin never." Though the "Latin savour" (Arthur Symons's phrase) and the formal skills of his works have always attracted the particular attention of fellow poets, so that Wordsworth, for instance, wrote to Landor that he would rather have been the author of his verses "than of any produced...