Landor.—­Perhaps not, Mr. North.  Will you cease your fooling, and allow me to proceed?  “I,” the author of Gebir, “never lamented when I believed it lost.”  The MS. was mislaid at my grandmother’s, and lay undiscovered for four years.  “I saw it neglected; and never complained.  Southey and Forster have since given it a place whence men of lower stature are in vain on tiptoe to take it down.  It would have been honester and more decorous if the writer of certain verses had mentioned from what bar he took his wine.” [118] Now keep your ears open, Mr. North; I will read my verses first, and then Wordsworth’s.  Here they are.  I always carry a copy of them both in my pocket.  Listen!

[Footnote 118:  Mr. Landor’s printed complaint, verbatim, from his “Satire on Satirists.”]

North.—­List, oh list!  I am all attention, Mr. Landor.

Landor (reads.)—­

  “But I have sinuous shells of pearly hue
  Within, and they that lustre have imbibed
  In the sun’s palace-porch, where, when unyoked,
  His chariot-wheel stands midway in the wave.”

  “Shake one, and it awakens—­then apply
  Its polish’d lip to your attentive ear,
  And it remembers its august abodes,
  And murmurs as the ocean murmurs there.”

These are lines for you, sir!  They are mine.  What do you think of them?

North.—­I think very well of them; they remind one of Coleridge’s “Eolian Harp.”  They are very pretty lines, Mr. Landor.  I have written some worse myself.

Landor—­So has Wordsworth.  Attend to the echo in the Excursion.

                  “I have seen
  A curious child, who dwelt upon a tract
  Of inland ground, applying to his ear
  The convolutions of a smooth-lipp’d shell,
  To which, in silence hush’d, his very soul
  Listen’d intensely, and his countenance soon
  Brighten’d with joy; for, murmuring from within,
  Were heard sonorous cadences, whereby,
  To his belief, the monitor express’d
  Mysterious union with its native sea.”

North.—­There is certainly much resemblance between the two passages; and, so far as you have recited Wordsworth’s, his is not superior to yours; which very likely, too, suggested it; though that is by no means a sure deduction, for the thought itself is as common as the sea-shell you describe, and, in all probability, at least as old as the Deluge.

Landor.—­“It is but justice to add, that this passage has been the most admired of any in Mr. Wordsworth’s great poem.” [119]

[Footnote 119:  From Mr. Landor, verbatim.]