Count Julian | Page 4

and his second name, Savage, was the family
name of his mother, who owned two estates in Warwickshire-- Ipsley

Court and Tachbrook--and had a reversionary interest in Hughenden
Manor, Buckinghamshire. To this property, worth 80,000 pounds, her
eldest son was heir. That eldest son was born a poet, had a generous
nature, and an ardent impetuous temper. The temper, with its obstinate
claim of independence, was too much for the head master of Rugby,
who found in Landor the best writer of Latin verse among his boys, but
one ready to fight him over difference of opinion about a Latin quantity.
In 1793 Landor went to Trinity College, Oxford. He had been got rid of
at Rugby as unmanageable. After two years at Oxford, he was
rusticated; thereupon he gave up his chambers, and refused to return.
Landor's father, who had been much tried by his unmanageable temper,
then allowed him 150 pounds a year to live with as he pleased, away
from home. He lived in South Wales--at Swansea, Tenby, or
elsewhere--and he sometimes went home to Warwick for short visits. In
South Wales he gave himself to full communion with the poets and
with Nature, and he fastened with particular enthusiasm upon Milton.
Lord Aylmer, who lived near Tenby, was among his friends. Rose
Aylmer, whose name he has made through death imperishable, by
linking it with a few lines of perfect music, {1} lent Landor "The
Progress of Romance," a book published in 1785, by Clara Reeve, in
which he found the description of an Arabian tale that suggested to him
his poem of "Gebir."
Landor began "Gebir" in Latin, then turned it into English, and then
vigorously condensed what he had written. The poem was first
published at Warwick as a sixpenny pamphlet in the year 1798, when
Landor's age was twenty-three. Robert Southey was among the few
who bought it, and he first made known its power. In the best sense of
the phrase, "Gebir" was written in classical English, not with a search
for pompous words of classical origin to give false dignity to style, but
with strict endeavour to form terse English lines of apt words well
compacted. Many passages appear to have been half thought out in
Greek or Latin, some, as that on the sea-shell (on page 19), were first
written in Latin, and Landor re-issued "Gebir" with a translation into
Latin three or four years after its first appearance.
"Gebir" was written nine years after the outbreak of the French
Revolution, and at a time when the victories of Napoleon were in many
minds associated with the hopes of man. In the first edition of the poem

there were, in the nuptial voyage of Tamar, prophetic visions of the
triumph of his race, in march of the French Republic from the Garonne
to the Rhine -
"How grand a prospect opens! Alps o'er Alps Tower, to survey the
triumphs that proceed. Here, while Garumna dances in the gloom Of
larches, mid her naiads, or reclined Leans on a broom-clad bank to
watch the sports Of some far-distant chamois silken haired, The chaste
Pyrene, drying up her tears, Finds, with your children, refuge: yonder,
Rhine Lays his imperial sceptre at your feet."
The hope of the purer spirits in the years of revolution, expressed by
Wordsworth's
"War shall cease, Did ye not hear, that conquest is abjured?"
was in the first design of "Gebir," and in those early years of hope
Landor joined to the vision of the future for the sons of Tamar that,
"Captivity led captive, war o'erthrown, They shall o'er Europe, shall
o'er earth extend Empire that seas alone and skies confine, And glory
that shall strike the crystal stars."
Landor was led by the failure of immediate expectation to revise his
poem and omit from the third and the sixth books about one hundred
and fifty lines, while adding fifty to heal over the wounds made by
excision. As the poem stands, it is a rebuke of tyrannous ambition in
the tale of Gebir, prince of Boetic Spain, from whom Gibraltar took its
name. Gebir, bound by a vow to his dying father in the name of
ancestral feud to invade Egypt, prepares invasion, but yields in Egypt
to the touch of love, seeks to rebuild the ruins of the past, and learns
what are the fruits of ambition. This he learns in the purgatory of
conquerors, where he sees the figures of the Stuarts, of William the
Deliverer, and of George the Third, "with eyebrows white and slanting
brow," intentionally confused with Louis XVI. to avoid a charge of
treason. But the strength of Landor's sympathy with the French
Revolution and of his contempt for George III. was more evident in the
first form of the poem. Parallel