BOOKS.
SAMUEL ROGERS.* THE modern reader may have almost forgotten that at the beginning of this century Rogers was a popular poet, living upon the fame of his verses. His position in literary society was secured, in the first place, by the smooth couplets of The Pleasures of Memory, and afterwards by good taste and a judicious and generous use of a large income. Everybody who was anybody, from Fox and Sheridan to Sir Henry Taylor and Lord Tennyson, knew Rogers, who to a sincere love of poetry added a love quite as steadfast for good literary society. He studied conversation as an art, and thought that more was to be gained from talk than from books. He was not a man of high imagination or of large intellect ; his range of acquisi- tion was singularly limited ; but he had a just appreciation of knowledge, and his wit was as keen as the scimitar with which Saladin astonished Richard Coeur de Lion.
Mr. Clayden's Early Life of Rogers, reviewed last year in our columns, was somewhat meagre of interest. As a young man, with more ambition than genius, Rogers, apart from the friends he made, was not a striking figure; but as the host of an aristocracy of intellect in St. James's Place, where poets, statesmen, and wits met round his table, Rogers holds a distinguished position ; and the biographer's account of the poet from the age of forty, when he settled in London, until his death half-a-century later, abounds in amusing gossip and literary recollections.
His great desire, it is said, was to be regarded as a poet, and from many of his contemporaries he received the praise that was dearest to him. Byron's absurd estimate of Rogers's poetical position is too well known to be quoted; but the sale of The Pleasures of Memory shows that many readers of that day would not have regarded any eulogy of the poem as extrava- gant. How laboriously the poet toiled over his verses will be seen in these chapters. He had been at work for a dozen years upon his Columbus before he put it into type. Then began a careful work of revision; "line after line, stanza after stanza, were discussed in letters to Richard Sharp;" and when at length the poem was published, Rogers was accused in the Quarterly of having written with haste. That was a fault of which he was never guilty. For six years he had his poem Human Life on hand; for years, too, he laboured over Italy, and when it proved a commercial failure, Rogers made a bonfire of the unsold copies, revised the poem once more, and employing the greatest artists of the day, produced an illustrated edition at the cost of more than £7,000. The book in this splendid form was welcomed with enthusiasm, and with its sister-volume of Poems is now valued as much, if not more, than ever by the bibliophile. As a prop to rather mediocre verse, the assistance of artist and engraver proved invaluable.
Rogers's life in one sense was not eventful; but in another sense it was full of contrasts and variety. No private English- man probably ever lived for so long a period in such constant intercourse with the brightest wits and the largest intellects of his age. He had listened to the talk of Sheridan in his early days, and later on to the genial bons-mots of Sydney Smith ; he was the friend of Fox and Grattan, of Brougham and Wellington; he knew Mackenzie and Madame D'Arblay, Scott, Dickens, and Thackeray ; he knew Robertson the historian, and asked Macaulay to his breakfasts ; he might have known Cowper, and he did know and appreciate Sir Henry Taylor ; he had listened to Sir Joshua Reynolds, and was on the friendliest terms with Mr. Ruskin. Then he was intimate with nearly all contemporary poets, from Crabbe and Bowles to Lord Tennyson. He lived through the greatest political revolutions of modern times, and he witnessed a revolution in poetry which, to a man of Rogers's proclivities, must have been still more striking.
In addition to his acid wit, Rogers must have had good qualities of intellect and heart, for he made friends and kept • Rogsra and his Contonporaria. ar P. W. Clayden, 2 vols. London; Smith, Elder, and Co, them. Some of the chief men of the day cherished an affection for him. Moore's friendship was warm and unbroken. So also was that of Wordsworth, who, in one of the numerous letters from Rydal Mount printed for the first time by Mr. Clayden, says : " Be assured, my dear Friend, that in pleasure and pain, and joy and sorrow, you are often and often in my thoughts ;" and again he writes : " Whatever may be shaken or altered, be you assured of my unchangeable attachment." Words like these, coming from a man naturally reserved and undemonstrative, carry no small weight with them. Sydney Smith, too, one of Rogers's " earliest and most attached friends," was always proud of his friendship. Scott, although less intimate, " really liked him ;" and Fox, in the poet's early years, like Mr. Ruskin in his latest, showed how highly he esteemed him. Macaulay, writing of Holland House in 1831, said that Rogers was the oracle of that circle ; and Lady Holland, a woman whom her guests were sometimes sorely tempted to offend, was his friend for forty years. In the poet's old age, Dickens writes to him in the heartiest, kindliest way, and when about to publish Master Humphrey's Clock, asked permission to dedicate the book to him. "I will not tell you," he said, " how many strong and cordial feelings move me to this inquiry, for I am unwilling to parade even before you the sincere and affectionate regard which I seek to gratify." Like Dickens, Rogers had a great partiality for Broadstairs, and there the two men seem often to have met. Writing from the United States, the novelist says :—" The peace and quiet of Broadstairs never seemed so great as now. I could hug Mrs. Collins, the Bather, as though she were a very Venus." And Mr. Clayden observes that "Dickens's high spirits, his genial humour, his kindness, and the chivalrous respect with which he treated a man so much older than him- self, were exceedingly pleasant to the old poet, and there could scarcely be a greater contrast than the two men ' out on those airy walks ' at Broadstairs, where Dickens most desired to live in his memory."
There are letters also from Mr. Ruskin written with youth- ful enthusiasm and sincere appreciation. Macaulay had once told his sister, that to be asked to breakfast in St. James's Place was " as great a compliment as could be paid to a Duke ;" and Mr. Ruskin speaks of his first visit to the poet " as a sacred Elausinian initiation and Delphic pilgrimage." In one of his letters to him, he says :—" I cannot tell you how much pleasure you gave yesterday yet to such extravagance men's thoughts can reach, I do not think I can be quite happy unless you permit me to express my sense of your kindness under my father's roof Will you not come some afternoon and stay and dine with us ? I do think it would give you pleasure to see how happy my father would be, and to feel, for I am sure you would feel, how truly and entirely we both honour you with the best part of our hearts, such as it is."
Every eminent American was sure to dine or breakfast with Rogers, and more than one wrote to the poet or about him in the friendliest terms. Ticknor observes that his sound judgment, his excellent common-sense, and " sincere, gentle kindness, coming quietly as it does from the venerableness of his age, render him one of the most delightful men a stranger can see in London." On another occasion, Ticknor said, " From what I have heard since, I suppose Rogers is not always so kind and charitable as I found him ;" and this note leads to the following observations from Mr. Clayden upon the disagreeable side of the poet's character :— " Rogers had cultivated the habit of making caustic remarks till it had become a second nature. Sir Henry Taylor tells us that his wit was in higher repute than any in his time except that of Sydney Smith, but while Sydney's was genial and good-humoured, that of Rogers was sarcastic and bitter. Rogers knew this, and sometimes apologised for it. ` They tell me I say ill-natured things,' he observed to Sir Henry Taylor, in his slow, quiet, deliberate way. ' I have a very weak voice ; if I did not say ill- natured things, no one would hear what I said.' There is pro- found truth in the observation. It is not needful to assume that he had deliberately adopted this principle and persistently acted on it ; he had simply discovered that acid remarks were listened to and remembered, when jokes were unnoticed or forgotten. When men came away after an evening with Sydney Smith, they only remembered how greatly they had enjoyed themselves and how infinitely amusing he was: after contact with Rogers, one or two sharp sayings were deeply implanted in their memories, very often indeed to rankle there. This is the sufficient explanation of the different statements that are made about him. He had no tolerance for vulgarity or pretence, and vulgar and pretentious people who forced themselves upon him often went away with a
wound. Others treasured up their recollections of discomfiture and visited them on his memory after he was dead."
There is truth, no doubt, in these remarks ; but it must be added that there are men now living who are not and never
could have been vulgar or pretentious, whose recollections of Rogers are very far from agreeable. The best defence of him is that if he made uncharitable remarks, he was always ready to do charitable acts, and to do them in the kindest way; and it is said that he was " just as fond of reporting pleasant things to his friends as he was of saying sharp things."
But as the evil that men do lives after them, so it has come to pass that Rogers's " sharp things " are better remembered than his generous deeds, or than the poetry upon which he based his reputation. Mr. Clayden records many of his sayings, but, unfortunately for the reader of contemporary literature, they have no novelty. Indeed, it may, we think, be said with truth, that the most interesting portion of these volumes con- sists of quotations from works already known to the public. There are few men or women who made their mark in litera- ture fifty or sixty years ago, who had not something to say of Rogers ; and the best stories about him have been told by Moore, Hayward, Crabb Robinson, Fanny Kemble, and others, so that Mr. Clayden, coming more than thirty years after the poet's death, is at a disadvantage. The biographer is not, however, to be blamed for making use of old materials. It is enough that he has used them to good purpose, and formed out of them a harmonious narrative.
Taste seems to have been Rogers's predominant quality. His dinners were some of the best in London, and to his breakfast-parties "even Princes asked for invitations ;" but there were no signs of extravagance or ostentation ; he always knew how to bring people together who could enjoy each other's society, and each object of beauty in his house satisfied the eye not merely from its own excellence, but because it harmonised with everything around it. Mrs. Jameson wrote, with feminine extravagance, that the " glorious and precious things " he had around him made of his house " a temple and a sanctuary ;" and Mrs. Norton said of him after he was dead, " His god was harmony,' by which she probably only meant to say a sharp thing of one who had said some sharp things to her and done many kind things for her." As a host, no one knew better how to lead the conversa- tion, and his own talk, in Charles Sumner's opinion, was unique. " The world or report," he wrote to a friend, " has not given him credit enough for his great and peculiar powers in this line. He is terse, epigrammatic, dry, infinitely to the point, full of wisdom, of sarcasm and cold humour. He says the most ill-natured things and does the best." And he possessed, which is always a rare gift, a catholic appreciation of poetry that enabled him to enjoy Dryden and Pope, and also to estimate justly the superlative genius of Wordsworth. He was, indeed, liberal enough to extend his sympathy to the poems of Lord Thurlow, which Moore made fun of in the Edinburgh Review ; and Thurlow, in return, praised the " Epistle to a Friend" as " a poem which in its peculiar kind has no equal in all antiquity."
A number of these pretty compliments were paid to Rogers by men of more literary weight than Thurlow. Mackintosh considered that he had won a place among the classical poets of his country ; Wordsworth, tempted for once to flatter, apologised for mentioning Campbell's name with his ; and Blanco White said that he could read Italy when too ill or too sorrowful to read the work of any other poet save Shake- speare. In extreme old age—he was then eighty-seven— Rogers, on the death of Wordsworth, was offered the Laureateship, and though he wisely declined to accept the honour, it was none the less grateful to his feelings. A friendly letter written by Prince Albert made the offer still more agreeable. At first, as the poet said in reply, he was tempted to accept it ; but he adds :—" When I came to myself, and reflected that nothing remained of me but my shadow—a shadow so soon to depart—my heart gave way, and after long deliberation and many conflicts within me, I am come, but with great reluctance, to the resolution that I must decline the offer." It is pleasant to read that every circumstance connected with the proposal gave the old man pleasure. " In making the offer promptly by the hand of the Prince Consort, her Majesty gave emphasis to a choice which seemed in his old age to remind him how his youthful wish to be known and recognised as ' the poet Rogers' had been fulfilled." There was not much question, when he had declined the honour, as to the poet who was most worthy to wear the laurel laid down by " him who uttered nothing base." When the day comes—and long may it be averted !—to choose a successor to Lord Tenny- son, the difficulty of choice will probably be far greater. With a final word of praise for the manner in which Mr. Clayden has achieved his task, we must close these enter- taining volumes. When a second edition is called for, it will be well to revise the index, which at present is very incomplete.
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