Consolers of Genius by E.V. Lucas — Read

I have just added another famous dog to my list. It was a good list before, but it is now richer. It included Matthew Arnold's Geist and Max and Kaiser, George Meredith's Islet, Cowper's Beau, Newton's Diamond, Mrs. Browning's Flush, Mr. Lehmann's Rufus, all Dr. John Brown's many friends, Scott's deerhounds, Mortimer Collins's St. Bernards, Pope's spaniel. I remember only these as I write, but of course there are many others. And to this company enters now "Pomero."

Landor's "Pomero" came to him late in life -- in the early 'forties -- by which time the old man -- he was then nearing seventy but had twenty fairly stormy years left -- had settled again in England, his wife and family and most of his sympathies being far away in Italy. At Bath he then lived, making occasional visits to Gore House, and varying the composition of exquisite prose and tender felicitous verse with quarrels and tempests and tempests and reconciliations and tempests and lawsuits. Such then was the possessor of "Pomero" -- or, as he would probably have called himself, the proud possession of "Pomero" -- of whom such glimpses as I have had come to me in scraps of letters quoted by Forster in his Life of this noble, troubled, impossible, glorious creature.