LANDOR, WALTER SAVAGE

born Jan. 30, 1775, Warwick, Warwickshire, Eng. died Sept. 17, 1864, Florence, Italy English writer best remembered for Imaginary Conversations, prose dialogues between historical personages. Educated at Rugby School and at the University of Oxford, both of which he left after disagreement with school officials, Landor spent a lifetime quarreling with his father, neighbours, wife, and any authorities at hand who offended him. Paradoxically, though, he won the friendship of literary men from Robert Southey, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Charles Lamb among the Romantics to Charles Dickens and Robert Browning. A proficient classicist from boyhood, he wrote many of his English works originally in Latin. He wrote lyrics, plays, and heroic poems, but Imaginary Conversations, 2 vol. (1824; vol. 3, 1828; and thereafter sporadically to 1853), was his great work.