"
The hope of the purer spirits in the years of revolution, expressed
by Wordsworth's
"War shall cease,
Did ye not hear, that conquest is abjured?"
was in the first design of "Gebir," and in those early years of hope
Landor joined to the vision of the future for the sons of Tamar
that,
"Captivity led captive, war o'erthrown,
They shall o'er Europe, shall o'er earth extend
Empire that seas alone and skies confine,
And glory that shall strike the crystal stars."
Landor was led by the failure of immediate expectation to revise his
poem and omit from the third and the sixth books about one hundred
and fifty lines, while adding fifty to heal over the wounds made by
excision. As the poem stands, it is a rebuke of tyrannous ambition
in the tale of Gebir, prince of Boetic Spain, from whom Gibraltar
took its name. Gebir, bound by a vow to his dying father in the
name of ancestral feud to invade Egypt, prepares invasion, but
yields in Egypt to the touch of love, seeks to rebuild the ruins of
the past, and learns what are the fruits of ambition. This he
learns in the purgatory of conquerors, where he sees the figures of
the Stuarts, of William the Deliverer, and of George the Third,
"with eyebrows white and slanting brow," intentionally confused with
Louis XVI. to avoid a charge of treason. But the strength of
Landor's sympathy with the French Revolution and of his contempt for
George III.
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