SAMUEL, an English poet of refined taste and feeling, and for more than half a century greatly distinguished in London society, was born at Newington Green on the 30th of July 1763. He was descended from a Worcestershire family, his grandfather being Thomas Rogers, of the Hill, near Stourbridge. His father settled in London as a banker, and was head of the firm long carried on under the name of Rogers, Olding, & Co., Clement's Lane. By the maternal side the poet was connected with the English Nonconformists. His mother, Mary Radford, was the grand-daughter of Eleanor, daughter of Philip Henry, and sister of Matthew Henry—both eminent Nonconformist divines. The poet's mother, "a very handsome and very amiable woman," persuaded his father to withdraw from the Church of England, and become a member of the Presbyterian church at Newington, of which Dr Price was the pastor. Price, though described by his adversary Burke, as "a man much connected with literary caballers and intriguing philosophers, with political theologians and theological politicians," was eloquent, courteous, and polished in his manners; and to this dissenting connection the poet was indebted for his introduction to many of the eminent Whig politicians and men of rank whom he was afterwards proud to number among his friends. In mature life he did not care to rank with the dissenters; but he never abjured the association, and the last note in his poem of Italy tells us that his original MS. of the poem contained these lines:

"What though his ancestors, early or late, Were not ennobled by the breath of kings; Yet in his veins was running at his birth The blood of those most eminent of old For wisdom, virtue—those who could renounce The things of this world for their conscience sake, And die like blessed martyrs."

Mr Rogers was educated at the Newington Green academy, then taught by a Dr Burgh, author of a treatise on the Dignity of Human Nature. One of his school-fellows was Mr William Malthy, a modest and retired scholar, who succeeded Porson as librarian to the London Institution, and lived to the age of ninety, enjoying the friendship of the poet. The latter was fond of relating that one day he and Malthy, while walking up Fleet Street, resolved on visiting Johnson in Bolt Court, and introducing themselves to the great literary dictator; but when Rogers' hand was on the knocker of the door his heart failed him, and the young aspirants withdrew. Boswell, to whom many years afterwards Mr Rogers related the circumstance, said truly "Why did you not go boldly in? He would have received you with all kindness." And such, no doubt, would have been the result. Johnson never appeared to greater advantage than when giving advice and counselling his young and diffident admirers. The first ambition of Rogers was to be a preacher—a second Dr Price; but his father placed him in his own banking-house, preparatory to his being admitted as a partner. He read Gray and Goldsmith as he walked to and from the bank in Cornhill; yet when he ventured on authorship his first appearance was in prose. He contributed a series of essays, entitled the Scribbler, to that venerable repository of fugitive literature, the Gentleman's Magazine. This was in 1781, when Rogers was in his eighteenth year. The essays are in the usual formal didactic style of that period, and are neatly written. In 1786 he published his Ode to Superstition, with some other Poems, paying down a sum of L30 to the publisher to secure him from loss; and the precaution was not unneeded, as at the end of four years only about twenty copies of the work (Ls. 6d. each) were sold. The Monthly Review, however, recognised in the crude imitations of Gray and Dryden, "the hand of an able master," and Rogers confessed that this praise was the first stimulus to his ambition. In 1789 he visited Edinburgh (travelling on horseback), and was introduced to Adam Smith, Blair, Robertson, and Henry Mackenzie. He afterwards regretted that he had not rode on to Ellisland to visit Burns, but some of his Edinburgh friends, he said, dissuaded him from the journey. Part of 1790–91 he spent in Paris, and the year following his return witnessed his advent as a successful poet. His Pleasures of Memory appeared in 1792, at first anonymously, but the author becoming known, he was feted and applauded. "What pleasure I felt," he said, "on being told that Este (Parson Este) had said of me, 'A child of Goldsmith, Sir.'" Este was one of the royal chaplains, an author, and a proprietor of the Morning Post and World newspapers. He was an authority in fashionable circles, and his favourable award must have appeared fame. In this instance Mr Este was right. The Pleasures of Memory belong to the school of Goldsmith. The versification, the pensive vein of reflection, the concise, select imagery and description, show that the poet had carefully studied the Traveller and Deserted Village—superadding, however, a strain of subtle and refined thought, with historic and classic allusions which peculiarly mark the poetry of Rogers.

"His elegance is really wonderful," said Byron; "there is no such thing as a vulgar line in his book." It must be admitted, however, that there are several feeble lines in the poems, with a few half-formed pictures, and passages which recall the more vigorous and fervent inspiration of older masters. In 1793 the poet's father died—his mother he had early lost; and he withdrew in great measure from the banking-house, leaving the management to a younger brother. About the same time he removed from Newington Green to apartments in the Temple, which he furnished with great elegance. His taste in all matters relating to social life may be seen from his Epistle to a Friend, printed with a few other poems in 1798. In his rooms in the Temple the poet lived till about the year 1803, when he removed to a house in St James's Place, looking into the Green Park. This house—the celebrated No. 22 St James's Place—he had altered and nearly rebuilt according to his own taste, and there he entertained his friends of every class and country (Charles James Fox was his first dinner guest), and accumulated those treasures of art—pictures, books, autographs, gems, vases, and antiques of all descriptions, rich and rare, which, on his death, were dispersed after a sale of twenty-two days, producing upwards of L50,000. Mere wealth could not have amassed such a collection. It was the result of taste and knowledge, combined with the judicious expenditure of money at the right time, and constant vigilance in watching the proper opportunity. Some of those treasures, we are happy to add, have, by the liberality of their owner, found their way into the National Gallery and British Museum. The poet was never married. In 1812 Rogers published a collection of his poems, including in the volume a new piece, The Voyage of Columbus, professing to be translated from the original in the

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1 The poet's nephew, Mr Samuel Sharpe (author of the History of Egypt, &c.), has illustrated this part of the poet's history with some characteristic anecdotes. When walking one day through Hanover Square with Mr Luttrell, the witty conversationist, and author of Letters to Julie, and coming down upon St George's Church, Rogers remarked on the inconvenience of being thrust off the pavement and made to cross the street by the projecting portico. "Ah!" exclaimed Luttrell, "that comes of your dissenting principles." On another occasion, when Wordsworth and Rogers were walking through York Minster, the latter descended on the fitness of the great pile to awaken religious feelings in the mind, when Wordsworth stoutly and rather rudely denied that his companion could admire it equally with himself, because of his Presbyterian education! When the Dissenters' Chapel Bill was before the House of Commons, Mr Sharpe called upon Mr (now Lord) Macaulay to ask him to present a petition signed by the descendants of Philip Henry. "Has my friend Rogers signed it?" asked Macaulay, thus marking his knowledge of family history, and of the fact of Mr Rogers being a descendant of the ejected Nonconformist divine. Rogers' connection with the Presbyterians was something like that of Pope with the Roman Catholics. But he never forgot his early minister, Dr Price; and until within a fortnight of his death it always afforded him pleasure to hear his favourite servant or librarian, Edmund Payne, read one of Price's sermons. Castilian language. This poem is a series of fragmentary sketches, with supernatural machinery, neither very appropriate nor well executed, but containing some imagery and couplets of great picturesqueness and beauty. Mr Ward (afterwards Lord Dudley) reviewed the volume in the Quarterly Review, March 1813, in a style of studied yet veiled depreciation, which provoked the poet to retaliate in that inimitable epigram—

"Ward has no heart they say, but I deny it; He has a heart, and gets his speeches by it."

The little tale of Jacqueline, published in conjunction with Byron's Lara, in 1814, was Rogers' next work; and he made no other public appearance until 1819, when his poem of Human Life was published. This is the most truly poetical of all his works—as highly finished as the Pleasures of Memory, but with deeper feeling and profounder philosophy. His pictures of the different epochs or phases of life,—the noble aspirations of youth—the struggles of patriotism—the various passions, hopes and fears, joys and sorrows, that cleaver existence, until the last scene, when "earth recedes and heaven itself appears"—are touched with a moral beauty, pathos, and refinement of sentiment and expression, that none of his contemporaries have equalled. That the poem is not more popular arises from its delicacy and excessive refinement. It wants the energy of strong passion and the interest of a narrative or consecutive series of incidents; but, as has been said of the kindred poetry of Gray, "when we give its beauties re-perusal and attention, they kindle and multiply to the view." There is greater variety in his next work Italy, but less genuine poetry. The first part of Italy was published anonymously in 1822, and other parts followed at intervals; the whole work, he said, not being completed in less than sixteen years. The Pleasures of Memory occupied him for nine years, and Human Life nearly the same space of time. He used to say, "The time when I consider that I wrote with the least difficulty was about the period of the death of Fox." Then I felt myself equal to anything, and it was then I wrote such lines as these:

"The clouds that rise to quench the orb of day Reflect its splendour, and dissolve away.

I never wrote better." Yet this image is directly borrowed from Pope (Essay on Criticism, v. 466-473), and much finer lines, original and drawn from nature, will be found both in Memory and in Human Life. The blank verse of Italy is easy and unconstrained, at times sliding into the ordinary language of good conversation, and some charming episodes and anecdotes are introduced along with those descriptions that specially interest the classic student and virtuoso. The poem might appropriately be bound up with Forsyth's Remarks on the Arts and Antiquities of Italy, the two works forming a storehouse of fine thoughts and observations and well-digested knowledge, symmetrized and adjusted by consummate taste. The prose of Rogers' notes is as exquisite as his verse, and was written with equal care and fastidiousness. He wrote slowly and corrected elaborately, from a desire, he said, to make his compositions so simple that a child might understand them. There are instances in which he wrote his lines over thirty and even forty different ways in order to get rid of all big words.

"My best lines," he would remark, "are monosyllabic: small bricks make the stoutest walls." In quoting from other authors, in notes to his poems, he took the same liberty of rejection and condensation; passages from Mrs Inchbald, and even from Burke, having been subjected to this process, and not always to their advantage. An author of greater power and more robust intellect, animated by the fire of genius, would, of course have discarded such rules and restraints, and flung himself boldly into his subject, but with Rogers, as with Akenside, taste was the predominating faculty, and in both it was united to the perception and enjoyment, though without enthusiasm, of the good and the beautiful in art and nature. "True taste," he says, "is an excellent economist. She confines her choice to few objects, and delights in producing great effects by small means; whilst false taste is for ever sighing after the new and the rare; and reminds us, in her works, of the scholar of Apelles, who, not being able to paint his Helen beautiful, determined to make her fine." Byron considered that Rogers' highly-cultivated taste and his sensibility must have often rendered him discontented and miserable. He notices, in his diary, his friend's silence, his severity, the perfect arrangements of his house; not a gem, a coin, a book thrown aside on his chimney-piece, his sofa, or table, that did not bespeak an almost fastidious elegance in the possessor. "But this very delicacy," adds the noble poet, "must be the misery of his existence. Oh, the jarrings his disposition must have encountered through life!" Now Rogers spent much of his time in reading and composition, in the society of the witty, the beautiful, the accomplished, and the learned; he was rich and benevolent, and surrounded by all the luxuries and attractions he most prized. Such a man so occupied and in such "blessed conditions" of fortune and fame, joined to a philosophical and somewhat epicurean frame of mind, could not be long or frequently unhappy. We would rather say that he enjoyed as many hours and days of solid happiness and comfort as are allotted to mankind, and infinitely more than most of his gifted contemporaries (Wordsworth excepted) could ever realize. His sources of enjoyment were more various, and his capacity to appreciate them higher than those of most men; and from some of the worst ills of life—its sordid cares and anxieties—he was wholly exempt. Late in his prosperous career a cloud seemed to come over his fortune. His banking-house was robbed of a large sum, and the loss was likely to be disastrous. The greater part of the stolen money was, however, recovered; and the generosity with which his friends came forward with offers of assistance—"one nobleman placing L10,000, a second L30,000, and a third (a merchant prince) L100,000 at his disposal"—must have afforded him the most exquisite gratification. The severity which Byron charges against his old friend was not imaginary. He did not, indeed, like Byron himself, "label his friends all round," but he often gave them cause for uneasiness and alarm by his habit of fault-finding and saying bitter things couched in calm and measured language. His caustic observations and quiet, stinging sarcasm were feared—his pointed sayings were repeated—and he was thus formidable as well as popular in society. Such personal sallies

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1 Edinburgh Review, July 1856. The essay on Rogers in the Review is by Mr Hayward, Q.C., and has since been included in two volumes of Essays published by its accomplished author.

2 In Stafford House is a large painting by Murillo of "Abraham entertaining the Angels." The angelic personages of the great artist have nothing very heavenly in their aspect or appearance; and Rogers, on looking at the picture, said, "I do not wonder at Abraham entertaining the angels unawares." This may give some idea of his studied sarcastic brevity of criticism; but in such things the sooner of the saying is nearly as important as the matter. Some of Rogers' wits will be found in Moore's Journals. The following, still better, are from the same source:—"When he was telling of his own marriage in his usual tone, he was reminded that the friends of the bridegroom were very much pleased at it; Rogers replied, 'He is a fortunate man, then, for his friends are pleased and his enemies delighted.'" When a late member for a western county and his wife were stopped by banditti in Italy, Rogers used to say, "The banditti wanted to carry off P—— into the mountains; but she flung her arms round his neck, and rather than take her with them, they let him go." Rogers was unceasingly at war with the late Lady D. One day at dinner she called across the table, "Now, Mr Rogers, I am sure you are talking about me." "Lady D," was the retort, "I pass my life in defending you." were common among the wits of his youth, or had descended from the days of Chesterfield and Selwyn; and though in Rogers' case there were undoubtedly flaws of temper as well as the desire to shine and win his way by severity, his habitual politeness and active benevolence operated as powerful checks on the unamiable propensity.

Of his income of £4000 or £5000 a year, at least £1500 (according to Thomas Campbell), were spent in relieving distress, or helping onwards modest merit and struggling talent. He cheered the death-bed of Sheridan by his generosity; and in all emergencies his literary friends, including Moore and Campbell, found him a frank and liberal assistant. Instances of this kind are recorded in various memoirs and diaries, but as the poet's friend Mr Dyce has said, "Of his many acts of kindness and charity to the wholly obscure there is no memorial—at least on earth." We may therefore set the life-long kind actions against the occasional bitter words, and in their light and warmth the temporary blot will soon vanish. Whatever were Rogers' defects or infirmities, he made no effort to conceal them. No man ever lived more in society or was more communicative in conversation. His breakfast and dinner parties were famous; he held literary levees almost daily; and his classic mansion was thrown open not only to friends, but to strangers, who eagerly sought introduction to the patriarch poet and patron of literature and art. Anecdote and criticism were the favourite topics of the host. He loved to read and expatiate on choice passages in old authors, or characteristic features in the productions of great artists; and though latterly he expected the deference of being allowed to dictate or introduce the topic of conversation, all were invited to mingle in it. Mr Hayward has felicitously sketched the interior of this Tusculum of St James's Place:

"There, surrounded by the choicest treasures of art, and in a light reflected from Guidos and Titians, have sat and mingled in familiar converse the most eminent poets, actors, artists, critics, travellers, historians, warriors, orators, and statesmen of two generations. Under that roof celebrities of all sorts, matured or budding, and however contrasted in genius or pursuits, met as on the table-land where (according to D'Alembert) Archimedes and Homer may stand on a perfect footing of equality. The man of mind was introduced to the man of action, and modest merit, which had yet its laurels to win, was first brought acquainted with the patron who was to push its fortunes, or with the hero whose name sounded like a trumpet-note. It was in that dining-room that Erskine told the story of his first brief, and Grattan that of his last duel; that the 'Iron Duke' described Waterloo as a 'battle of giants;' that Chantrey, placing his hand on a mahogany pedestal, said, 'Mr Rogers, do you recollect a workman at five shillings a day who came in at that door to receive your orders for this work?' I was that workman.' It was there, too, that Byron's intimacy with Moore commenced over the famous mess of potatoes and vinegar; that Madame de Staël, after a triumphant argument with Mackintosh, was (as recorded by Byron) "well ironed by Sheridan;" that Sydney Smith, at dinner with Walter Scott, Campbell, Moore, Wordsworth, and Washington Irving, declared that he and Irving, if the only prose writers, were not the only prosers in the company. It was through that window, opening to the floor, and leading through the garden to the park, that the host started with Sheridan's gifted grand-daughter (Mrs Norton) on 'The Winter's Walk,' which she has so gracefully and feelingly commemorated. It was in the library above that Wordsworth, holding up the original contract for the copyright of *Paradise Lost* (1300 copies for L5), proved to his own entire satisfaction that solid fame was in an inverse ratio to popularity; whilst Coleridge, with his finger upon the parchment deed by which Dryden agreed for the translation of the *Æneid*, expatiated on the advantages which would have accrued to literature if 'glorious John' had selected the *Iliad* and left Virgil to Pope."

These ever-shifting and brilliant scenes have now "gone glittering through the dream of things that were;" and of all the actors, one only, the fair poetess, remains. But in thus dispensing his refined and lettered hospitality, in assembling parties who might otherwise have never met, in healing differences, and bringing forward talent struggling into notice, Mr Rogers performed one of the noblest duties of a citizen, worthy, for the sake of example, of imperishable record. It is to be regretted that no Boswell was present at these gatherings. The host himself took occasional notes of the opinions and remarks of some of the more illustrious of his friends; and his recollections of Fox, Grattan, Porson, Horne Tooke, Erskine, and the Duke of Wellington, have been published by his nephew, Mr Williams Sharpe; but the collection is small, desultory, and imperfect,—a not unpleasant table-book, but a feeble illustration of the intellectual powers or moral qualities of the great men commemorated.

The illustrated editions of his *Italy* and *Poems* formed Mr Rogers' last public work. He called in the genius of Turner and Stothard, and the talent of the best engravers, expending on the two volumes, besides his own ceaseless care and taste, a sum of about L15,000; but the undertaking proved remunerative, and the books are still unsurpassed among our illustrated publications. In 1850, on the death of Wordsworth, the post of laureate was offered to Rogers, and pressed on his acceptance by Prince Albert; but he was then eighty-seven, fit only for the Court of Death, though happily not surrounded by any of "the gloomy attendants of his reign." He declined the appointment, and it was worthily bestowed on Mr Tennyson. A few weeks afterwards, in June 1850, the aged poet met with an accident, a fall in the street, which ever afterwards confined him to his chair. As he had all his life been a great walker, and was remarkable for the amount of exercise he could accomplish in one day,—visiting distant friends, dining out, or receiving company, attending the opera, and finishing off at a hall,—the want of locomotion was a sad privation. But books, friends, and pictures were still left: he could take his daily drive, or he could be wheeled out to the garden or park to witness the sunsets which he so much admired; and the orb of day never declined more gently, or shaded more imperceptibly into final obsuration, than this Nestor of poets journeyed downwards to the grave. He died on the 18th of December 1855, being then in his ninety-third year, and was buried at Hornsey. (n.e.—s.)