much tried by his unmanageable temper, then allowed him 150 pounds a
year to live with as he pleased, away from home.  He lived in South
Wales--at Swansea, Tenby, or elsewhere--and he sometimes went home
to Warwick for short visits.  In South Wales he gave himself to full
communion with the poets and with Nature, and he fastened with
particular enthusiasm upon Milton.  Lord Aylmer, who lived near
Tenby, was among his friends.  Rose Aylmer, whose name he has made
through death imperishable, by linking it with a few lines of
perfect music, {1} lent Landor "The Progress of Romance," a book
published in 1785, by Clara Reeve, in which he found the description
of an Arabian tale that suggested to him his poem of "Gebir." 

Landor began "Gebir" in Latin, then turned it into English, and then
vigorously condensed what he had written.  The poem was first
published at Warwick as a sixpenny pamphlet in the year 1798, when
Landor's age was twenty-three.  Robert Southey was among the few who
bought it, and he first made known its power.  In the best sense of
the phrase, "Gebir" was written in classical English, not with a
search for pompous words of classical origin to give false dignity
to style, but with strict endeavour to form terse English lines of