I was happy in my venture and struck a vein of reminiscence of a very
poignant kind. Browning told us that he did not know Landor very well,
but that he saw him in the last years of his life under circumstances of
a terribly pathetic kind. Landor played almost exactly the part of King
Lear--though from a different reason--and got almost exactly King Lear's
reward. Landor, it will be remembered, was originally a rich man. It
will also be remembered that he was possessed of a very arbitrary and
turbulent nature and quarrelled with many members of his family, and
especially with his own children. However, they lived in a villa at
Fiesole for some time, in a kind of turbulent domesticity. Landor, on
leaving England, had unwisely given away his property to his children,
thinking that he could rely upon them to be kind to him. But he had not
trained them in the ways of kindness. He had been hot, brutal, and
tyrannical to them when he had the power. When they got it they were
equally brutal to him. At last his daughter determined to bear the old
man's ill-temper--ill-temper, apparently, approaching to madness--no
longer. He was told by Miss Landor that if he could not control himself
better she would not tolerate him any longer in the villa, and would, in
fact, turn him out of doors. He disobeyed her injunctions, or, as she
probably put it, failed to keep his promise of better behaviour, and
then, incredible as it sounds from anyone who had ever read _Lear_,
she actually barred the doors of what had once been his home against the
unhappy old man and drove him out to wander whither he could. If she did
not physically put him out of doors, she put humiliations so unendurable
upon him that, like Lear, he left the house in an agony of broken-
heartedness and despair. The once-proud poet had very few friends in
Florence, little or no money, and literally nowhere to go. The result
was that he wandered, half-distracted, like Lear, bewailing the wound at
his heart which a daughter's hand had given. Somehow, like an old,
stray, and starving dog, he wandered to the Brownings' house. There,
needless to say, he found rest for the body and comfort for the soul.
Mrs. Browning did everything she could for Landor--took him in, fed
him, put him to bed, and strove to quiet and soften his fierce and
pitiful and outraged heart. Browning went on to tell how as soon as the
old man was a little composed, he drove up to Fiesole to see Miss
Landor--thinking that perhaps, after all, it was only a family quarrel
which could be tactfully adjusted. That supposition proved entirely
mistaken.