Imaginary Conversations, Volume 6

THIS work is as remarkable an instance as we have lately met with of the strength and weakness of the human intellect. It displays considerable originality, learning, acuteness, terseness of style, and force of invective - but it 1s spoiled and rendered abortive throughout by an utter want of temper, of self-knowledge, and decorum. Mr Landor's mind is far from barren in feeling or in resources; but over the natural, and (What might be) the useful growth of these, there every where springs up a luxuriant crop of caprice, dogmatism, extravagance, intolerance, quaintness, and most ludicrous arrogance, - like the red and blue flowers in corn, that, however they may dazzle the passenger's eye, choke up the harvest, and mock the hopes of the husbandman. We are not ignorant of the school to which our author belongs; and could name other writers who, in the course of a laborious life, and in productions numerous and multiform - some recent and suited to the times, some long and luckily forgotten, - in odes, inscriptions, madrigals, epics, - in essays, histories and reviews, - have run into as many absurdities, and as many extremes: but never did we see, bound up in the same volume, close-packed, and pointed with all the significance of style, the same number of contradictions, staring one another in the face, and quarrelling for the precedence. Mr. Landor's book is a perfect 'institute and digest' of inconsistency: it is made up of mere antipathies in nature and in reasoning. It is a chef-d uvre of self-opinion and self-will, strangling whatever is otherwise sound and excellent in principle, de acing whatever is beautiful in style and matter.
- Edinburgh Review, or Critical Journal, Volume 6; Volume 40"