[11][12] This is further suggested by the fact that two decades before the commencement of Imaginary Conversations, Landor had unsuccessfully submitted a dialogue between William Grenville and Edmund Burke to The Morning Chronicle.
In fact, a new translation of the Greek work by William Tooke had appeared in 1820 and Landor was later to include a sceptical Lucian in debate with the dogmatic Christian Timotheus in his own Conversations.
Revived in the Renaissance, it served as the model for Giovanni Boccaccio, in whose De casibus virorum illustrium (The Downfall of the Famous), members of the 1st century Roman imperial clan quarrel over whose behaviour among them had been the most infamous.
Algernon Charles Swinburne concluded his essay on the author in the 1882 volume of the Encyclopaedia Britannica with the opinion that "the very finest flower of his dialogues is probably to be found in the single volume Imaginary Conversations of Greeks and Romans; his command of passion and pathos may be tested by its success in the distilled and concentrated tragedy of Tiberius and Vipsania, where for once he shows a quality more proper to romantic than classical imagination: the subtle and sublime and terrible power to enter the dark vestibule of distraction, to throw the whole force of his fancy, the whole fire of his spirit, into the shadowing passion (as Shakespeare calls it) of gradually imminent insanity.
"[25] In section 92 of "The Gay Science" (1882), Friedrich Nietzsche declared that "I look only on Giacomo Leopardi, Prosper Merimée, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walter Savage Landor, the author of Imaginary Conversations, as worthy to be called masters of prose.
"[26] In chapter 2 of Howards End (1910), Margaret Schlegel runs to comfort her brother Tibby, who is ill in bed with hay fever: "The only thing that made life worth living was the thought of Walter Savage Landor, from whose Imaginary Conversations she had promised to read at frequent intervals during that day.”[27] In Rudyard Kipling's account of "An English School" (1923), he mentions one boy who found in the library "a book called Imaginary Conversations which he did not understand, but it seemed to be a good thing to imitate.