highest pitch, whose language was without blemish according to the taste of the day-terse, harmonious, and well selected; he treated his subject pleasingly, if tritely, and disclosed affectionate feeling without false sentimentality. It is not to be wondered at that he was applauded and sought after. He fairly earned his first reputation. But that this reputation should survive in the blaze of genius which so soon after burst forth, is a fact more to be wondered at. Yet it is not difficult to perceive the reasons for it. Between himself and the new race there were few common points for comparison. They were of a higher order altogether. His claims did not practically come into collision with theirs. Had he been more on their level, his title would not have passed so unquestioned as it did. He did not render himself obnoxious to the shafts of party; and he was in habits of familiar social intercourse with so wide a range of literary men, that scarcely one could be found to whom it would not have seemed some breach of civility to criticise him openly and justly. At that time personal considerations limited the range and dictated the tone of public criticism more powerfully than they even now do. The tone of attack was more direct, and was resented as a personal injury. If you were a bumptious warm-blooded little man, like Moore, or thought it a fine thing and incumbent on you as a gentleman, like Byron, you called out the reviewer, or said you would do so on your return to England. If your talent lay in a different line, you quarrelled with him, and made up as spiteful an epigram as you could, or otherwise took your revenge. But, owing to the above causes, Rogers escaped with a rub or two. He had many sincere adherents, and others granted his reputation as a matter of courtesy. Moreover he was much besides being a poet; and the man of taste and fashion, and the Mæcenas to whom the literary world owed much, carried off the man of letters.

At the present day, it can scarcely be denied that the rank which Rogers still nominally holds among English poets is mainly due to his not being read. His poems, associated with Stothard and Turner, lie on the table, and occur to young people who wish to make presents to one another. The book keeps the poetry alive; but the readers are pretty nearly an extinct race. With the exception of a few stragglers, Mr. Rogers survived the genuine admirers of his writings. To have disturbed the sensitive old man in his latter days by hostile criticism would have been cruel; and the world, as by one consent, respected the claims of age and a reputation sanctioned by its association in all memories with some of the foremost names in English literature: but now it can be neither unjust nor unseemly to attempt to estimate his genius, and to assign him his place in the

English commonwealth of letters. A far different judgment must await him in such a comparison than when he is weighed against those who occupied the stage when he first appeared on it.

A likeness might be imagined between each of our poets and some one of the constituent elements of landscape. Shakespeare would be the all-reflecting, all-embracing sea, unfathomable and ever fresh; Shelley the mountain-top, crowned with blue ether; Wordsworth the dewy pastures, commons, and serene widespreading plains; Byron a heady torrent, gleaming and swift, often foaming and chafing over stones; Milton a mighty solitary oak; Walter Scott a free-growing forest, waving its branches in inspiring morning air; Moore the restless fluttering singingbird; Crabbe his own village; and Coleridge a gorgeous sunset, where the clouds take a glory, and over level ridges, and through rents and chasms, shines from impenetrable depths beyond a calm undazzling fire. In such a scheme Rogers would be aptly represented by one of those would-be rustic ultra-artificial pleasuregrounds, on the elaboration of which some of our forefathers bestowed so much thought and labour; or, to give him narrower limits, he is the very image of one of the grottoes in such a place, such a one as he himself describes :

"Till o'er the mead a cool sequestered grot,
From its rich roof a sparry lustre shot;
A crystal water crossed the pebbled floor,
And on the front these simple lines it bore,
'Hence away, nor dare intrude,' &c."

His

Wonderfully simple lines, which we need not quote; but "sparry lustre" very happily describes the main characteristics of Rogers's poetry. Yet there is no false glitter about him, he has no purple patches: every thing is in perfect keeping. This is his highest claim to admiration, and, combined with the evenness and nicety of his versification, constitutes his great charm. system of ornamentation is elaborate, but all is smoothed down into exquisite harmony of tone. To read him is like entering a perfectly well-furnished drawing-room,-there is an air of luxury and easy-chairs about him. Or you may compare it to rolling along a smooth road in a well-hung chariot, with a knowledge that the whole turn-out is unexceptionable: it is not that you pass through a particularly delightful country, or that the pace is exciting; it is partly the absence of all jar, but more the pleasurable self-identification with so finished an equipage.

Rogers prided himself on the pains he took, and very justly. No other man ever made so much of so small a poetical capital. "I was engaged on the Pleasures of Memory for nine years, on Human Life for nearly the same space of time, and Italy was not

completed in less than sixteen years." His genius was active, and his taste exacting. He wrote, he himself tells us, at the rate of four lines a day. His was not the exuberant fancy and wild luxuriance of language, which require the pruning of matured judgment and the cooler survey of a distant eye. His works did not lie by nine years to be thus judged: they were nine years in the crucible, having every phrase retraced and retouched, each epithet set in the best light, each foot in the line hammered over and weighed in the balance, and every paragraph taken to pieces and put together again. It was a painstaking process to make the most of a little. The gardeners talk of very "dressy grounds:" the Pleasures of Memory is a very "dressy" poem.

One inevitable consequence of all this pinching and pruning and transplanting is, that the connection between parts is obscured, the natural connecting-links broken; the sense is difficult to follow, and the poem assumes the form of ill-jointed fragments. A miscroscopic anxiety about details is not often combined with the power of commanding the larger proportions of a whole. "This little animal," says Mr. Rogers of the bee, "from the extreme convexity of her eye, cannot see many inches before her." Hence, while his verses flow with a wonderful smoothness and sweetness, and within certain limits a most agreeable variety of cadence, his meaning is by no means so quickly followed. The natural sympathy which, in all true poetry, obtains between the flow of the thought and the flow of the verse, and makes the two mutual interpreters one of the other, has been lost by frequent patching. The sense goes to the wall in these never-ceasing amendments. The assiduous self-criticiser has dwelt on the sentences so long, that a mere glance tells him the meaning they were appointed to convey; and he does not perceive that in the course of so many petty alterations it has become a good deal obscured to his readers. So often is this the case, that we defy any one to read Rogers's poetry correctly "at sight." The joints in the mosaic will infallibly trip him up. His defective composition arises often from an undiscriminating use of the parenthesis, and of the present participle in an absolute sense; but to analyse it would take us too far out of the way. Often it seems to have been arranged expressly to provide pitfalls for the reader. Almost any casual extract will serve to show that Mr. Rogers is not remarkable for lucidity of construction:

Again:

To each his place in the invisible world,—
To some an upper region, some a lower;
Many a transgressor sent to his account,
Long ere in Florence numbered with the dead;
The body still as full of life and stir

At home, abroad; still and as oft inclined
To eat, drink, sleep; still clad as others were,
And at noon-day, where men were wont to meet,
Met as continually; when the soul went,
Relinquished to a demon, and by him

(So says the bard, and who can read and doubt ?)
Dwelt in and governed."

"And let us from the top of Fiesole,

Whence Galileo's glass by night observed
The phases of the moon, look round below
On Arno's vale, where the dove-coloured steer
Is ploughing up and down among the vines,
While many a careless note is sung aloud,
Filling the air with sweetness-and on thee,
Beautiful Florence, all within thy walls,

Thy groves and gardens, pinnacles and towers,
Drawn to our feet."

The ease of the reader, we are told, is secured by the labour of the writer. Mr. Rogers (except as far as his versification goes) is not an instance of this. Goldsmith seems to have served to some extent as his model in the Pleasures of Memory, as Gray and Milton (from whom he often borrows lines) undoubtedly did for the Ode to Superstition. Rogers was flattered when D'Este called him a child of Goldsmith; but those who are curious to note the contrast between easy natural painting and constrained, hampered, artificial enamel-work may read the Deserted Village and the Pleasures of Memory together.

Again, Rogers is neither a correct nor a precise writer. Few men have taken more liberties with the English language, or have been more easily content to pen a well-sounding phrase, without asking whether it represents a definite idea or carries a poetic impression that can be grasped by the imagination. Such an assertion may be thought to require proof. It is not difficult to find it. Begin at the beginning. Take the two first lines of the Pleasures of Memory: they bear evidence that he was not giving expression to a distinct imaginative conception existing in his own mind, but was putting words together:

"Twilight's soft dews steal o'er the village green,

With magic tints to harmonise the scene.'

Now any poet might have said, and many have said, the dews steal down on to the green or elsewhere; but Rogers's object is to mend the language and say something a little new and per

fectly well-sounding, so he says the dews steal o'er the green, i.e.
across the green; and this, we venture to say, is what no man
ever would say who really wished to convey a true impression of
the mode in which the falling dew makes itself perceived. The
next line speaks for itself. It is sheer words. Perhaps he
once had present to his mind the variations of shadow, and the
softening influence of growing obscurity as twilight deepens.
Possibly in some former draft that idea was expressed; but
now he raises utterly incongruous ideas by the words "magic
tints," and attributes the effects to the dews.
further---

"As jars the hinge, what sullen echoes call!
O haste, unfold the hospitable hall!
That hall where once, in antiquated state,
The chair of justice held the grave debate."

Go a little

Can one unfold a hall? But granting that one may, is there any sense in which a chair of justice (whatever its antiquated state) can hold a grave debate? Either the words are used in their metaphorical sense of conducting a debate, in which they are not applicable to a chair, or else the chair must hold two parties, for with less it cannot embrace a debate. Did the squire and the poacher use to sit there together? That some nearly analogous expression once had a meaning is very likely; but we cannot find it here; and the more earnestly we look for it, the more it eludes us.

Take another instance from the first page and a half:

"Ye household deities! whose guardian eye

(the rhyme requires they should have but one among them)
Marked each pure thought, ere registered on high,
Still, still ye walk the consecrated ground,
And breathe the soul of Inspiration round.'

He means they fill the chambers with inspiration. He might very fairly have said they breathe it round, though there still remains an inherent awkwardness in the idea of exhaling inspiration round a room; he might even have said they breathe the very essence or spirit of it round: but strain the metaphor a little further, call it soul instead of essence, and do all in your power to personify inspiration by the aid of a capital I, and you have a ludicrous image: one set of persons going about exhaling the soul of another person. The man of decorative taste is pleased with the refined heightening of tone; a sensitive imagination would have shrunk instinctively from the outraged metaphor. In the same way, we have often heard of darkness shrouding, or of the shroud of darkness covering a thing; but