interested me"…to engage them in imaginary conversation. 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. However, such dialogues had been an established European genre with Classical precedents for some two centuries before he came to write his. Even as he wrote them, his friend Robert Southey was working on his own Colloquies (1829), a coincidence on which Landor remarked during the course of their correspondence. As a keen Classicist, Landor would have been aware of the prior example of Lucian's Dialogues of the Dead and its revived influence on European literature. 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. Recognising the debt, Henry Duff Traill later included a dialogue between Plato and Landor himself (who had no great opinion of the philosopher) in his The New Lucian (1884). Lucian's work had been a cheerful and satirical deformation of Socratic dialogue, imagined as taking place among the inhabitants and personnel of the Greek Hades. 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. Later in France, Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle composed New Dialogues of the Dead (Nouveaux dialogues des morts, 1683) in which the exchange of ideas between a range of Classical and later personalities illustrate their relativity over time in a more concentrated Socratic form than Lucian's. He was followed by François Fénelon, whose Dialogues des Morts (1712) included a consideration of political themes as well. In their wake, dialogues of the dead spead as a genre across Europe. In England there appeared a set of contemporary dialogues titled English Lucian in 1703, well before English translations of Fontenelle and Fénelon and George Lyttelton's elegant imitation of them in his own Dialogues of the Dead (1760). But by the time of the Asian contributions among the "Miscellaneous Conversations" in Landor's work, other models had offered themselves. In the case of the eight sections of "The Emperor of China and Tsing-ti", with their humorous comments