on the idiosyncrasies of the time as viewed from the point of view of an outsider from another culture, they included such works as Lyttleton's Letters from a Persian in England, to his Friend at Ispahan (1735) and Oliver Goldsmith's Letters from a Citizen of the World to his Friends in the East (1760), themselves following previous French models. Landor's work, therefore, can be perceived as a prolongation and bringing to perfection of already established modes of contrasting ideas and personalities in a more immediate way than the formal essay. Interliterary mentions 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. Yet, if this and all other studies from ancient history or legend could be subtracted from the volume of his work, enough would be left whereon to rest the foundation of a fame which time could not sensibly impair." 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." 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.” 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." Bibliography Colvin, Sidney. Landor, Macmillan & Co. 1881. References External links Literature of England Dialogues