Shall foreign plagues infest this teeming land, And more than sea-born monsters plough the main? Here the dire locusts' horrid swarms prevail; Here the blue asps with livid poison swell; Here the dry dipsa writhes his sinuous mail; Can we not here secure from envy dwell? When the grim lion urged his cruel chase, When the stern panther sought his midnight prey; What fate reserved me for this Christian race?

After our people had conquered a home, the leaders took the lion's share, of course.

The despots are scheming to muzzle the English lion.

He lived during the reign of Richard Coeur de Lion, and, when the king went on his third crusade, in the year 1192, Lionel Lee raised a company of gentlemen, and marched with him to the Holy Land.

For neither tawny fox nor roaring lion may change his native temper.

And how often ye were first at Delphi or in the Pastures of the Lion, though with full many do I match your crowd of honours, yet can I no more surely tell than the tale of pebbles on the sea-shore.

Besides Zeid another important personage entered Mahomet's household, Ali, son of Abu Talib, and future convert and pride of Islam, "the lion of the Faith."

Hamza, "the lion of God," and a son of Abd-al-Muttalib in his old age, was accosted by a slave girl as he passed on his way through the city

I noticed, as I walked beneath the cypresses, the grave of Arthur Hugh Clough, the poet of "Dipsychus," who died here in Florence on November 13th, 1861; of Walter Savage Landor, that old lion (born January 30th, 1775; died September 17th, 1864), of whom I shall say much more in a later chapter; of his son Arnold, who was born in 1818 and died in 1871; and of Mrs. Holman Hunt, who died in 1866.

CHAPTER XXIV English Poets in Florence Casa GuidiThe BrowningsGiotto's missing spireJames Russell LowellLander's early lifeFra Bartolommeo before RaphaelThe Tuscan gardenerThe "Villa Landor" to-dayStorms on the hillsidePastoral poetryItalian memories in EnglandThe final outburstLast days in FlorenceThe old lion's beguilementsThe famous epitaph.

Landor gave his son Arnold the villa, settling a sum on his wife for the other children's maintenance, and himself returned to Bath, where he added to his friends Sir William Napier (who first found a resemblance to a lion in Landor's features), John Forster, who afterwards wrote his life, and Charles Dickens, who named a child after him and touched off his merrier turbulent side most charmingly as Leonard Boythom in "Bleak House".

In his last year he received a visit from a young English poet and enthusiast for poetry, one Algernon Charles Swinburne, who arrived in time to have a little glowing talk with the old lion and thus obtain inspiration for some fine memorial stanzas.

Well, says the Poet, 'Tis nobler like a lion to invade When appetite directs, and seize my prey, Than to wait tamely, like a begging dog,

As this man's vanity had made him imagine, that no woman could be proof against love, when his address was honourable; no wonder that he struggled, like a lion held in toils, against a passion that he thought not returned.

To these the sailors gave the name of Saluezze; and they named the mountain Sierra Leona, or the Lion Mountain, on account of the continual roaring of thunder on its summit, which is always enveloped in clouds.

It is said, that, "on the election of Pope Leo X., in 1440, the following satirical acrostic appeared, to mark the date MCCCCXL:'Multi caeci cardinales creaverunt caecum decimum (X) Leonem: 'Many blind cardinals have created a tenth blind Lion.'"

No jackal was ever more faithful to his lion, no pilot-fish to his shark, than the fog to its berg.

His splendid physique and his prowess in friendly encounter, revealed the lion that was in him.

"I'd rather rub the moustache of the lion in the zoo than touch that black devil!" Bart at that moment led in the cowpony and Calder started to remove the saddle.

She has the pride of Lucifer and the courage of a lion.

Massive fragments of walls and columns are still to be seen, and in a hollow a lion in dark grey granite, of such a size that at some distance I took it for an elephant.

Consider but for a moment that the cat which crouches by our fireside is of the same tribe with "the lordly lion," whose roar is terrific as an earthquake, and the tiger who often stays but to suck the blood of his victims: that the faithful dog, "who knows us personally, watches for us, and warns us of danger," is but a descendant from the wolf, who prowls through the wintry waste with almost untameable ferocity.

A lion's head, in bold relief, forms an appropriate key-stone embellishment to the arch.

The upper end is occupied by four roomy dens, with a lordly black-maned lion and a lioness, from Northern Africa; above them are a fine lioness and a leopard from Ceylon: these we take to have been among the recent arrivals from the Tower Menagerie.

Hence hands of snow in palms of russet lie; The form of Hercules affects the sylph's And breasts that case the lion's fear-proof heart, Find their lov'd lodge in arms where tremors dwell!