LITERATURE AND THE FINE ARTS. 85 



All the Kembles fell within his span. He heard the first remarks on the 'Yicar 

 of Wakefield, 1 and read, damp from the press, all the fiction that has appeared 

 since, from the Barneys, the Edgeworths, the Scotts, the Dickenses, and the Thack- 



•'. As for t!ie poetry, he was aghast at the rapidity with winch the Scotts. 



ona, and Moores poured out their works; and even Campbell was too quick 



for hi:ii — he, with all his leisure, and being always at it, producing to the amount 



of two octavo volumes in his whole life. Somebody asked, one day, whether Rogers 



written anything lately. Only a couplet, was the reply— (the couplet being 

 his celebrated epigram on Lord Dudley). 'Only a couplet?' exclaimed Sydney 

 Smith. 'Why, what would you have? When Rogers produces a couplet, he 

 goes to bed, and the knocker is tied, and straw is laid down, and caudle is made, 

 and the answer to inquiries is that Mr Rogeis is as well a3 can be expectec.' Mean- 

 time, he was always substantially helping poor poets. His aids to Moore have been 

 recently made known by the publication of Moore's Diaries. It was Rogers who 

 secured to Crabbe the £3,000 from Murray, which were in jeopardy before. He 

 advanced £-500 to Campbell to purchase a share of the Metropolitan Magazine, 

 and refused security. And he gwe thought, took trouble, used influence, and ad- 

 ventured advice. This was the conduct and the method of the last of the patrons 

 of literature in England." 



" For half a century," says the Times, 11 his house was the centre of literary society ; 

 and the chief pride of Mr Rogers lay not so much in gathering round his table 

 men who had already achieved eminence as in stretching forth a helping hand to 

 friendless merit. Wherever he discerned ability and power in a youth new to the 

 turmoils and struggles of London life, it was his delight to introduce his young 

 client to those whom he might one day hope to equal." 



If we turn for a moment from the congenial arena of literary life to the scene of 

 noise and strife which the politics of the early years of the reign of George III. pre- 

 sent, we find the poet already enlisted on the side of progress, and associating with 

 men whose names are foremost on the pages of British history in that eventful age, 

 when the foundations of empire were laid on this continent by the colonists who 

 then dictated terms to the mother eountry. "Let us carry back our minds," says 

 the biographer last quoted, " to the days of Wilkes and the Duke of Grafton, and 

 remember but the mere names of the statesmen who have administered the affairs 

 of the country from that time to the present, and we will have present to our 

 recollection a list of the associates and frien Is of Rogers. It is, however, to the 



iry history of the century we must mainly look for a correct appreciation of 

 Rogers's career. He not only outlived two or three generations of men, but two or 

 three literary styles. The Poet of Memory, as he has been called, must not be 

 rashly judged by the modern student, whose taste has been partly exalted, partly 

 vulgarized, by the performances of later writers — we are speaking of a cctempo- 



el Dr. Johnson. Rogers must have been a young man some 20 years old 

 when the great lexicographer died, and, therefore, a great portion of Johnson's 

 writings must have been to him cotemporary literature. Let those who are in- 

 clined to cavil at the gentler inspirations of Rogers think for a moment what 

 'tween the deaths of Goldsmith and Johnson and the appear- 

 ance poem redeems the solitary waste from 

 absolute condemnation at the most unfortunate epoch in our literature. Rogers no 

 formed his shleupon earlier models, but he was no servile copyist ; he could 

 fcel, without an v to apish imitation, the beauties of such authors as 



