CHAPTER XIV.
According to the pathetic, and on the face of it accurately truthful, account of the close of his life in Mr.Forster's admirable and most graphic life of him, I never knew Landor.

For the more than octogenarian old man whom I knew at Florence was clearly not the Landor whom England had known and admired for so many and such honoured years.

Of all the painful story of the regrettable circumstances which caused him to seek his last home in Florence it would be mere impertinence in me to speak, after the lucid, and at the same time delicately-touched, account of them which his biographer has given.
I may say, however, that even after the many years of his absence from Florence there still lingered a traditional remembrance of him--a sort of Landor legend--which made all us Anglo-Florentines of those days very sure, that however blamable his conduct (with reference to the very partially understood story of the circumstances that caused him to leave England) may have been in the eyes of lawyers or of moralists, the motives and feelings that had actuated him must have been generous and chivalrous.

Had we been told that, finding a brick wall in a place where he thought no wall should be, he had forthwith proceeded to batter it down with his head, though it was not his wall but another's, we should have recognised in the report the Landor of the myths that remained among us concerning him.

But that while in any degree _compos mentis_ he had under whatever provocation acted in a base, or cowardly, or mean, or underhand manner, was, we considered, wholly impossible.
There were various legendary stories current in Florence in those days of his doings in the olden time.