TABLE-TALK OF SAMUEL ROGERS. POESONIANA. ISAAC FOOT LIBRARY PKINTED BV JOHN BALE AND SONS, GREAT TITCHFIELD STREET, OXFORD STREET, W. : RECOLLECTIONS Table-talk of samuel Rogers. TO WHICH IS ADDED porsoniana. EDITED I!Y THE LATE KEV. ALEXANDEE DYCE. NEW SOUTHGATE H. A. ROGEES, 2, BOUNDS GEEEN EOAD. 1887. A^ ;: > ^ LIBRARY IZ^ UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA SANTA ;^^ BARJBAIiA ^^7 PREFACE TO THE TABLE-TALK OF SAMUEL KOGEKS. Samuel Kogeus was born at Stoke Newiugton, SOtli July, 17G3. His first publication, An Ode to Siiperstilion, ivUh some other Poems, ajDpeared in 1786 ; at which period the coldly classic Mason (then a veteran) and the feeble Hay- ley were perhaps the most popular of our living poets Cowper, though The Task* was in print, had scarcely won all his fame; Crabbe had put forth only his earlier pieces ; and Darwin was yet to come. By The Pleasures of Memory^ in 1792, Mr, Rogers rose to high reputation which he fully maintained by his Epistle to a Friend, with other Poems, in 1798, He gave nothing new to the public till 1812, when he added Columhusi to a re-im- pression of his Poems. It was succeeded, in 1814 by his * The second volume of Cowper's Poems, containing The Tasli, is noticed with high praise in The Gentleman's Matjazine for Dec. 1785. t Seep. 153 (note) in the present volume. vi. PREFACE, Jacqueline^ in 181'J by his Human Life^ and in 1822 by the First Part*- of his Italy, which was not completed till several years after, and which closes the series of his works. During the long remainder of his days he confined himself to a few copies of occasional verses, one of them composed so late as ISSo.f—Of all that Mr. Rogers has written, Tlic Pleasures of Memory and the Epistle to a Friend have been generally the most ad- mired : it is questionable, however, if Human Life will not be regarded by posterity as his master-piece,—as pre-eminent in feeling, in graceful simplicity of diction, and in freedom of versification. Mr. Rogers commenced life by performing the duties of a clerk in his fiither's banking-house ; but after in- heriting a large share of the concern, he ceased to take an active part in its management ; and, himself an object of interest to society, he associated on familiar terms, during more than two generations, with all who were most distinguished for rank and political influence, or most eminent in literature and art. — Genius languishing for want of patronage was sure to find in Mr. Rogers a * PuWished anonymously : see Literary Gazette tov January Id, 1822, where its reviewer thinks " there can be little hesitation in ascribing it to Southey." t See the lines, " Hence to the altar," &c,, in hisPocjiis, p. 305, ed. 1853. —: PllEFACE. vii. generous patron. His purse was ever open to the dis- tressed : —of tlie prompt assistance wliich he rendered in the hour of need to various well-known individuals there is ample record ; but of his many acts of kindness and charity to the wholly obscure there is no memorial— at least on earth. The taste of JNIr, Rogers had been cultivated to the utmost refinement ; and, till the failure of his mental powers a short time previous to his death, he retained that love of the beautiful which was in him a passion when more than ninety, and a prisoner to his chair, he still delighted to watch the changing colours of the even- ing sky, —to repeat passages of his favourite poets, or to dwell on the merits of the great painters whose works adorned his walls.—By slow decay, and without any suffering, he died in St. James's Place, 18th December, 1855. From my first introduction to Mr. Rogers, I was in the habit of writing down, in all their minutiae, the anecdotes, &c. with which his conversation abounded ; and once on my telling him that I did so, he expressed himself pleased,— the rather, perhaps, because he some- times had the mortification of finding impatient listeners. Of those memoranda, which gradually accumulated to a large mass, a selection is contained in the following viii. PREFACE, pages; the subjects being arranged (as far as such mis- cellaneous matter would admit of arrangement) under been inserted which distinct heads : and nothing having was likely to hurt the feelings of the living. A. D. RECOLLECTIONS TABLE-TALK OF SAMUEL ROGERS. I WAS taught by my mother, from my earhest in- fancy, to be tenderly kind towards the meanest liv- ing thing; and, however people may laugh, I some- times very carefully put a stray gnat or wasp out at the window.—My friend Lord Holland, though a kind-hearted man, does not mind killing flies and wasps; he says, "I have no feeling for msects."— "When I was on the Continent with Richard Sharp, we one day observed a woman amusing her child by holding what we at first thought was a mouse tied to a string, with which a cat was playing. Sharp was all indignation at the sight ; till, on looking more closely, he found that the supposed mouse was — — 2 KECOLLECTIOXS OF THE a small rat; upon which he exclauiied, "Oh, I have " no pity for luts! —People choose to give the term vermin to those animals that happen to like what they themselves like ; wasps eat peaches, and they call them vermin.—I can hardly persuade myself that there is no compensation in a future existence for the sufferings of animals in the present life,''' for instance, when I see a horse in the streets un- mercifully flogged by its brutal driver. I well remember one of the heads of the rebels upon a pole at Temple-Bar,—a black shapeless lump. Another pole was bare, the head having dropt from it.t In my childhood, after doing anything wrong, I used always to feel miserable from a consciousness * Compare a, poem Ofi tlie Future Existence of Brutes, by Miss Seward,— Poi?;; Worlis, ii. 58. Ed. " f The last heads which remained on the Bar were those of Fletcher and Townley. 'Yesterday,' says a uews-writer of the 1st of April, 1772, ' one of the rebels' heads on Temple Bar fell down. There is only one head now remaining.'" P. Cunning- ham's Ilcindhook of London, sub Temj'le Bar.— Ed. — TABLE-TALK OF SAMUEL ROGERS. 3 of having clone it : my parents were quite aware of this, and therefore seldom reproved me for a fault, —leaving me to reprove myself. When I was about thirteen, my father and mo- ther gave a great children's ball, at which many grown-up folks were also present. I was dancing a minuet with a pretty little girl ; and at the mo- ment when I ought to have put on my hat and given both hands to my partner, I threw the hat among the young ladies who were sitting on benches, and so produced great surprise and confusion in the room. This strange feat was occasioned by my sud- denly recollecting a story of some gallant youth who had signalised himself in the same way. In my boyhood, my father one day called me and my brothers into his room, and asked us each what professions we wished to follow. When my turn came, I said (to my father's annoyance) that I should like "to be a preacher;" for it was then the height of my ambition to figure in a pulpit ; I thought there was nothing on earth so grand. This predilection, I believe, was occasioned chiefly 4 RECOLLECTIONS OF THE by the admiration I felt for Dr. Price and for his preaching. He was our neighbour (at Newington Green), and would often drop in, to spend the evening with us, in his dressing-gown : he would talk, and read the Bible, to us, till he sent us to bed in a frame of mind as heavenly as his own. He lived much in the society of Lord Lansdowne and other people of rank ; and his manners were ex- tremely polished. In the pulpit he was great in- deed,—making his hearers forget the iweacher and think only of the subject. The passage " On Virtue," cited from Price in Enfield's SiJcahcr, is a very favourite one with me, though probably it is quite unknown to readers of the present day. ["IN PEAISE OP VIKTUE. " Virtue is of intrinsic value and good desert, and of indispensable obligation ; not the creature of will, but necessary and immutable ; not local or tem- porary, but of equal extent and antiquity with the Divine Mind ; not a mode of sensation, but ever- lasting Truth ; not dependent on power, but the guide of all power. Virtue is the foundation of honour and esteem, and the source of all beauty, ; TABLE-TALK OF SAMUEL ROGERS. 5 order and happiness in nature. It is what confers vakie on all the other endowments and qualities of a reasonable being, to which they ought to be ab- solutely subservient, and without which, the more eminent they are, the more hideous deformities and the greater curses they become. The use of it is not confined to any one stage of our existence, or to any particular situation we can be in, but reaches through all the periods and circumstances of our being.—Many of the endowments and talents we now possess, and of which we are too apt to be proud, will cease entirely with the present state but this will be our ornament and dignity in every future state to which we may be removed.