ROGET 



ROHAN 



753 



brought out at a cost of 15,000 (2 vols. 1830-34), 

 with 114 illustrations by Turner and Stothard. 



Meanwhile he had left the old home on Newing- 

 ton Green, and in 1803 (in which year, with 5000 

 a year, he withdrew from the bank as a sleeping 

 partner) had given up the chambers in the Temple, 

 and settled down finally to bachelor life in his 

 exquisite house, 22 St James's Place, looking into 

 the Green Park. He had had his affairs of the 

 heart, had proposed, indeed, to a daughter of Banks 

 the sculptor. She refused him, and left him free 

 to cultivate his muse and caustic wit, to raise 

 breakfast-giving to a fine art, to make little tours 

 at home and on the Continent, and to gather an 

 art-collection which sold at his death for 50,000. 

 With Rogers one cannot help harping upon money, 

 for he was rich as no poet perhaps before or after 

 him. At li'a-t he made a good use of his riches, 

 for he was quietly generous to Moore and Camp- 

 bell, and others, unknown ones, whom it was no 

 such credit to have aided. But with the kindest 

 heart he had the unkindest tongue. ' I have a 

 very weak voice,' he explained once to Sir Henry 

 Taylor ; ' if I did not say ill-natured things no one 

 would hear me.' With which, however, Camp- 

 bell's saying should be coupled : ' Borrow five 

 hundred pounds of Rogers, and he will never say a 

 word against you till you want to repay him.' 

 Anyhow it has come to pass that ' melodious 

 Rogers," whom Byron ranked above Wordsworth 

 ana Coleridge, as we too might rank him if only his 

 works had perished, is better remembered to-day 

 by a few or those ill-natured things (e.g. by Ins 

 witty couplet upon Ward ; see EPIGRAM) than by 

 his poetry, which, chaste though it be, and elegant 

 and cultured, with 'no such thing as a vulgar line 

 in it,' is dead and mummified. It is no more a 

 pleasure of memory, but unread, not even for- 

 gotten. One is reconciled somewhat to such 

 oblivion by remembering how, when in his old age 

 Fanny Kemble used to go and sit with Rogers, she 

 never asked what she should read to him without 

 his putting into her hands his own poems, which 

 always lay by him on his table. For this wad the 

 Rogers who had announced his intention of being 

 ' read to, when old and bedridden, by young 

 people Scott's novels perhaps." There is not much 

 more to tell of him the bank-robbery (47,000, 

 1844) ; the proffer by Prince All>ert of the laureate- 

 ship (1850); the street accident knocking down 

 by a carriage (1850) which crippled him for the 

 Test of his life ; and the peaceful ending of that 

 life (fft. ninety-two) on 18th December 1855. He 

 is buried at Hornsey. 



See Alexander Dyce's Kecollectiom of the Table-talk 

 of Samuel Royert ( 1856 ) ; Recollections by Rogers, edited 

 by his nephew William Sharpe (1859); Hayward's 

 article in the Edinburgh Review for July 1856 (reprinted 

 in his Ktsays, 1879); and, especially, P. W. Clayden's 

 Knrhi Life nf Roijeri (1887), and Rogers and hit Con- 

 temporaries ( 2 vols. 1889 ). 



Koget, PETER MARK, was born in London in 

 1779, the only son of a Genevan who had settled as 

 minUter of a French church in London and married 

 the sister of Sir Samuel Romilly. He was educated 

 at Edinburgh, became physician to the Manchester 

 Infirmary in 1804, and in 1808 settled in London, 

 where he became physician to the Northern Dis- 

 pensary ; F.R.H. (18l"5), and afterwards for nearly 

 twenty years its secretary ; Fullerian professor of 

 Physiology at the Royal Institution ; and an ori- 

 ginal member of senate of the University of London, 

 surviving till September 17, 1869. He wrote one 

 of the ' Bridgewater Treatises,' On Animal and 

 Vegetable Physiology considered with Reference to 

 Natural Theology (1834), and the more famous 

 Thesaurus of Enr/tiili \\'nnln mul Phrases (1852), 

 passed through 28 editions in his lifetime. 



. an assessment formerly levied 

 on every county in Scotland ' for defraying the 

 charges of apprehending criminals, or subsisting 

 them when apprehended, and of carrying on prose- 

 cutions against them.' This tax was first imposed 

 by statute, 11 Geo. I. chap. 26, on the narrative 

 that criminals were in the habit of escaping punish- 

 ment for lack of the funds necessary to bring them 

 to justice. The freeholders in each shire were 

 directed to fix the assessment at any of the head 

 courts yearly, and to appoint collectors. By 31 

 and 32 Viet. chap. 82 rogue-money in the shires 

 was abolished, and in lieu thereof power was con- 

 ferred on the Commissioners of Supply to levy by 

 rate a 'County General Assessment." By the 

 Local Government (Scotland) Act, 52 and 53 Viet, 

 chap. 50, sect. 11, this power of the Commissioners of 

 Supply is now vested in the locally elected county 

 councils. It is to be observed, however, that the 

 repealed portions of 31 and 32 Viet. chap. 82 do not 

 include sect. 10, which reserves the existing right 

 of any burgh to levy rogue-money. 



Rohan, an ancient Breton family of princely 

 rank, descended in the male line from the dukes of 

 Brittany, the name taken from the village of Rohan 

 in the department of Morbihan. Its motto was 

 characteristic of its pride : ' Roy ne puys, Due ne 

 daygne, Rohan suys. ' The family still flourishes 

 in the line of Rohan-Guemenee-Rochefort, natural- 

 ised with princely rank in Austria. The line of 

 Rohan-Soumse became extinct in 1787, that of 

 Rohan-Gie in 1638. The founder of the family was 

 Alain I., fourth son of the Vicomte Eudon de 

 Porhoet, who became Vicomte de Rohan in 1128. 

 Under Charles IX. in 1570 the domain of Gucmenee 

 was formed into a principality for Louis Rohan VI., 

 whose son Louis de Rohan-Guemenee was made in 

 1588 by Henry III. Due de Montbazon. Both the 

 latter and his son Hercule (died 1654) bore arms 

 against the League. The famous beauty, wit, and 

 political intriguer, the Duchesse de Chevreuse (died 

 1679), was a daughter of Hercule. Louis, Prince 

 de Rohan-Guemenee (born 1635), lost the favour 

 of Louis XIV. by his dissolute life, and died on the 

 scaffold in 1674 for treasonable dealings with the 

 Dutch. 



Louis RENE EDOUARD, PRINCE DE ROHAN- 

 GUEMENEE, born 25th September 1735, embraced 

 the clerical life in spite of dissolute morals and an 

 extravagant love of luxury, and at an early age 

 became coadjutor to his uncle the Bishop of Stras- 

 burg. In 1772 he was sent as a special minister to 

 Vienna. His habits were displeasing to Maria 

 Theresa, and he ruined himself at the French court 

 by slanderous gossip about Marie Antoinette. He 

 was recalled in 1774, and, although with grudging, 

 made grand-almoner in 1777. Next year came a 

 cardinal's hat, through the influence of Stanislaus 

 Poniatowski, king of Poland ; and a year later the 

 succession to the bishopric of Strasburg, held by 

 three members of his family before him. His eager- 

 ness to recover his footing at court made him an 

 easy victim to the schemes of Cagliostro and the 

 adventuress Lamotte, and their clumsy forgeries 

 and personations were enough to make him pur- 

 chase the famous Diamond Necklace for the queen. 

 As soon as the plot was discovered the cardinal 

 was sent to the Bastille, but was acquitted by the 

 Parlement of Paris, 31st May 1786. He found 

 himself for the moment a hero of the mob, was 

 elected to the States-general in 1789, but refused to 

 take the new oath to the constitution in January 

 1791, and retired to Ettenheim in the German part 

 of his diocese, where he died, 17th February 1803. 



See DIAMOND NECKLACE, and books enumerated 

 thereat ; also the far from trustworthy Mimoires inlditet 

 du Comte de Lamotte-Valois (edited by Louis Lacour, 

 1858), and G. C. D'est Ange, Marie Antoinette et le 



