His best known works were the prose Imaginary Conversations, and the poem "Rose Aylmer," but the critical acclaim he received from contemporary poets and reviewers was not matched by public popularity.

Fate dealt with him unfairly when he tried to put into practice his bold and generous ideas to improve the lot of man, or when he was mistaken at one time for an agent of the Prince of Wales and at another for a tramp.

[4] He collected a coterie of friends who went to great lengths to help him, and writing for the Encyclopædia Britannica Swinburne comments that "his loyalty and liberality of heart were as inexhaustible as his bounty and beneficence of hand", adding that "praise and encouragement, deserved or undeserved, came more readily to his lips than challenge or defiance".

Landor's powerful sense of humour, expressed in his tremendous and famous laughs no doubt contributed to and yet helped assuage the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.

Although Landor subsequently disowned these "'prentice works", Swinburne wrote: "No poet at the age of twenty ever had more vigour of style and fluency of verse; nor perhaps has any ever shown such masterly command of epigram and satire, made vivid and vital by the purest enthusiasm and most generous indignation.

Sidney Colvin wrote "For loftiness of thought and language together, there are passages in Gebir that will bear comparison with Milton" and "nowhere in the works of Wordsworth or Coleridge do we find anything resembling Landor's peculiar qualities of haughty splendour and massive concentration".

"Siquid forte iocosius cuivis in mentem veniat, id, vernacule, puderet, non-enim tantummodo in luce agitur sed etiam in publico.

About the same time Landor published the whole poem in Latin, which did little to increase readership but appealed to Parr and was considered by Swinburne to be comparable with the English version in might and melody of line, and for power and perfection of language.

He landed at Corunna, introduced himself to the British envoy, offered 10,000 reals for the relief of Venturada, and set out to join the army of General Joaquín Blake y Joyes.

Southey undertook to arrange publication and eventually got it published by Murray in 1812, after an initial refusal by Longmans which led Landor to burn another tragedy "Ferranti and Giulio".

[8] Thomas de Quincey later wrote of the work Mr Landor is probably the one man in Europe that has adequately conceived the situation, the stern self-dependency and monumental misery of Count Julian.Swinburne described it as: the sublimest poem published in our language, between the last masterpiece of Milton (Samson Agonistes) and the first masterpiece of Shelley (Prometheus Unbound), one equally worthy to stand unchallenged beside either for poetic perfection as well as moral majesty.

[8] He had drafted a book-length Commentary on the Memoires of Mr. Charles Fox which presents the radical Whig leader in a positive light and includes a dedication to American president James Madison and strong criticism of the Tory government and Canning, but left it unpublished for fear of prosecution.

Even here he had troubles, for at the time Caroline of Brunswick, wife of the Prince Regent was living there and Landor was suspected of being an agent involved in watching her in case of divorce proceedings.

The theft of some silver led to altercations with the police, whose interviews with tradesmen ended up defining him as a "dangerous man", and the eventual upshot was that the Grand Duke banished him from Florence.

He had an income of about £600 per annum from properties in England, but when he left Italy he made over £400 of the share to his wife, and transferred the villa and farms at Fiesole to his son Arnold absolutely.

It is in the form of an Imaginary Conversation and describes the development of Aspasia's romance with Pericles, who died in the Peloponnesian War, told in a series of letters to a friend Cleone.

[8] Although this had no financial success it was much admired by his friends including Kenyon, Julius Hare, Crabb Robinson, Elizabeth Barrett Browning who said "some of the pages are too delicious to turn over", and Leigh Hunt who reckoned it Landor's masterpiece.

Landor received a visit from his son Arnold in 1842 and in that year wrote a long essay on Catullus for Forster, who was editor of "Foreign Quarterly Review"; he followed it up with The Idylls of Theocritus.

Heic jacet, Qui ubique et semper jacebat Familiae pessimae homo pessimus Georgius Britanniae Rex ejus nominis IV Arca ut decet ampla et opipare ornata est Continet enim omnes Nerones.

Landor's follow-up letter of abuse to the barrister is magnificent: highlighting the man's "insulting language ... violent demeanour" and "coarseness and vehemence"; casting doubt on Jerwood's education (particularly in Latin); observing "Barristers in general carry a change of tongue about them, altho (sic) some of them do not put on a clean one so often as we could wish"; and lecturing him on the proprieties and "decency" involved in interacting not only with gentlemen- Landor firmly establishing himself amongst them- but with "even the lowest of men".

R. H. Super, in his Walter Savage Landor- A Biography (1954) observes that "the very survival of this letter shows that Jerwood, when he received it, at least knew with whom he had to deal... it warms the heart to see that Landor's sharpest thrust was the suggestion that his man could not read Latin".

He also published "The Last Fruit off an Old Tree," containing fresh conversations, critical and controversial essays, miscellaneous epigrams, lyrics and occasional poems of various kind and merit, closing with Five Scenes on the Martyrdom of Beatrice Cenci.

Swinburne described these as "unsurpassed even by their author himself for noble and heroic pathos, for subtle and genial, tragic and profound, ardent and compassionate insight into character, with consummate mastery of dramatic and spiritual truth.

At the end of 1854 his beloved sister Elizabeth died and he wrote a touching memorial: Sharp crocus wakes the froward year; In their old haunts birds reappear; From yonder elm, yet black with rain, The cushat looks deep down for grain Thrown on the gravel-walk; here comes The redbreast to the sill for crumbs.

Then in 1858 he produced a miscellaneous collection called "Dry Sticks Fagoted by W. S. Landor," which contained among other things some epigrammatic and satirical attacks which led to further libel actions.

Swinburne wrote in the ninth edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica (replicated in the eleventh edition)[5] and later published in his Miscellanies of 1886 an appreciation which included the following passage[22] (here broken into paragraphs for easier reading): From nineteen almost to ninety his intellectual and literary activity was indefatigably incessant; but, herein at least like Charles Lamb, whose cordial admiration he so cordially returned, he could not write a note of three lines which did not bear the mark of his Roman hand in its matchless and inimitable command of a style at once the most powerful and the purest of his age.

At times it is well-nigh impossible for an eye less keen and swift, a scholarship less exquisite and ready than his own, to catch the precise direction and follow the perfect course of his rapid thought and radiant utterance.

In his noble trilogy on the history of Giovanna queen of Naples it is sometimes actually difficult to realize on a first reading what has happened or is happening, or how, or why, or by what agency a defect alone sufficient, but unhappily sufficient in itself, to explain the too general ignorance of a work so rich in subtle and noble treatment of character, so sure and strong in its grasp and rendering of high actions and high passions, so rich in humour and in pathos, so royally serene in its commanding power upon the tragic mainsprings of terror and of pity.

On either side, immediately or hardly below his mighty masterpiece of Pericles and Aspasia, stand the two scarcely less beautiful and vivid studies of medieval Italy and Shakespeare in England.Landor's "I Strove with None" is widely mentioned and discussed.

In his book of poems The Drunken Driver Has the Right of Way, Academy Award-winning writer/director/producer Ethan Coen facetiously describes himself as "an expert on the poetry of Walter Savage Landor and many other subjects which he travels the world to lecture upon, unsolicited".