their own disappointment, have been sobered down by longer experience and more extended views; when the keen contentions, and eager rivalries, which employed our riper age, have expired or been abandoned; when we have seen, year after year, the objects of our fiercest hostility, and of our fondest affections, lie down together in the hallowed peace of the grave; when ordinary pleasures and amusements begin to be insipid, and the gay derision which seasoned them to appear flat and importunate; when we reflect how often we have mourned and been comforted; what opposite opinions we have successively maintained and abandoned; to what inconsistent habits we have gradually been formed, and how frequently the objects of our pride have proved the sources of our shame, we are naturally led to recur to the careless days of our childhood, and, from that distant starting place, to retrace the whole of our career, and that of our contemporaries, with feelings of far greater humility and indulgence than those by which it had been actually accompanied ; — to think all vain but affection and honor, the simplest and cheapest pleasures the truest and most precious, and generosity of sentiment the only mental superiority which ought either to be wished for or admired. "We are aware that we have said something too much of this;' and that our readers would probably have been more edified, as well as more delighted, by Mr. Rogers' text, than with our preachment upon it. But we were anxious to convey to them our sense of the spirit in which this poem is written ;- and conceive, indeed, that what we have now said falls more strictly within the line of our critical duty than our general remarks can always be said to do; because the true character and poetical effect of the work seems, in this instance, to depend much more on its moral expression than on any of its merely literary qualities. 6 "The author, perhaps, may not think it any compliment to be thus told that his verses are likely to be greater favorites with the old than with the young;-and yet it is no small compliment, we think, to say that they are likely to be more favorites with his readers every year they live. And it is, at all events, true, whether it be a compliment or not, that as readers of all ages, if they are any way worth pleasing, have little glimpses and occasional visitations of those truths which longer experience only renders more familiar, so no works ever sink so deep into amiable minds, or recur so often to their remembrance, as those which embody simple, and solemn, and reconciling truths, in emphatic and elegant language, and anticipate, as it were, and bring out with effect, those salutary lessons which it seems to be the great end of our life to inculcate. The pictures of violent passion and terrible emotion, the breathing characters, the splendid imagery and bewitching fancy, of Shakspeare himself, are less frequently recalled, than those great moral aphorisms in which he has so often Told us the fashion of our own estate, and, in spite of all that may be said, by grave persons, of the frivolousness of poetry, and of its admirers, we are persuaded that the most memorable and the most generally admired of all its productions are those which are chiefly recommended by their deep prac tised wisdom, and their coincidence with those salutary imitations with which nature herself seems to furnish us from the passing scenes of our existence. "The literary character of the work is akin to its moral character; and the diction is as soft, elegant and simple, as the sentiments are generous and true. The whole piece, indeed, is throughout in admirable keeping; and its beauties, though of a delicate, rather than an obtrusive character, set off each other, to an attentive observer, by the skill with which they are harmonized, and the sweetness with which they slide into each other. The outline, perhaps, is often rather timidly drawn, and there is an occasional want of force and brilliancy in the coloring; which we are rather inclined to ascribe to the refined and somewhat fastidious taste of the artist, than to any defect of skill or of power. We have none of the broad and blazing tints of Scott, nor the startling contrasts of Byron, nor the anxious and endlessly repeated touch of Southey, but something which comes much nearer to the soft and tender manner of Campbell; with still more reserve and caution, perhaps, and more frequent sacrifices of strong and popular effect to an abhorrence of glaring beauties, and a disdain of vulgar resources." Soon after this appearance as a poet, we find him acting in a character which he seems almost as much to have affected, that of a peace-maker. Among the men of letters whom Dr. Parr visited in London, we are told by one of his biographers that he "always mentioned with marked distinction Samuel Rogers, whom he admired as a poet, and greatly esteemed as a friend." A clause in his will is in the following words: "I give a ring in token of high regard to Samuel Rogers, author of the justly celebrated poem, The Pleasures of Memory." Rogers had been the medium of reconciling the doctor to Sir James Mackintosh, with whom he had differed, and whom he first met, after a long coldness, at the hospitable board of the poet. The biographer of Mackintosh, after alluding to this difference, says, "It may be interesting to mention that the occasion on which the intimacy was renewed was offered by an acceptance of the following invitation from one whose 'Memory' is prodigal in such Pleasures. He best can paint them who can feel them most."" "DEAR MACKINTOSH: Dr. Parr dines with me on Thursday, the 3d of August, and he wishes to meet some of his old friends under my roof, as it may be for the last time. He has named Wishaw, and Sharp, and Lord Holland; and he says, I want to shake hands with Jemmy Mackintosh before I die.' "May I ask you to be of the party? That you can forgive, I know full well. That you will forgive in this instance- much as you have to forgive I hope fervently. "Some of the pleasantest moments of my life have been spent in the humble office I am now venturing to take upon myself, and I am sure you will not take it amiss, if, on this occasion, I wish to add to the number. "Yours, very truly, "SAMUEL ROGERS. July 23d, 1820." Moore mentions in his diary, that in 1824 he passed an evening in looking over Rogers' Common Place Book with him, where he found highly curious records of his conversations with eminent men, particularly Fox, Grattan and the Duke of Wellington. A diary of Rogers, with his opportunities, and his admirable faculty of compression in his prose style, could hardly fail to be the most entertaining literary history that ever appeared. He has been more familiar with a large number of distinguished persons, for a longer period, than any other man of letters whom we now remember. There is hardly a person distinguished in English history for the last sixty or seventy years, whose name is not in some way connected with that of the venerable poet, if not otherwise, at least as the partaker of his liberal and elegant hospitality. His social sphere has always been a very large one. It included whigs and tories, wits and statesmen, poets and philanthropists; not only the habitués of society, but men who were but seldom seen in worldly circles. Sir Samuel Romilly enters in his diary, a few months before his lamented death,"To-day I dined with Rogers (the poet). A very pleasant dinner with Crabbe (whom I had never before seen), Frere and Jekyll.” An extract from the diary of Wilberforce shows that he did not think so well of this dining with poets: "Feb. 19, 1814.- Dined Duke of Gloucester's, to meet Madame de Staël, at her desire. Madame, her son and daughter, duke, two aides-de-camp, Vansittart, Lord Erskine, poet Rogers, and others. Madame de Staël quite like her book, though less hopeful. Complimenting me highly on abolition, and all Europe, &c. But I must not spend time in writing this. She asked me, and I could not well refuse, to dine with her on Friday, to meet Lord Harrow by and Mackintosh, and poet Rogers on Tuesday sennight. "23d. Breakfast, Mr. Barnett about the poor. Letters. Wrote to Madame de Staël and poet Rogers, to excuse myself from dining with them. It does not seem the line in which I can now glorify God. Dinner quiet, and letters afterwards." In his diary, under date of the 5th November, 1821, Moore makes the following entry: "By the by, I received the other day a manuscript from the Longmans, requesting me (as they often do) to look over it, and give my opinion whether it would be worth publishing anonymously. Upon opening it, found, to my surprise, that it was 'Rogers' Italy,' which he has sent home thus privately to be published." This work was published in the following year, and is the last and best of its author's productions. Its merits have been set forth with exquisite taste and skill, by a writer in the New Monthly Magazine: "Turn we to the last and greatest of our author's poems, Italy.' "The great character of this poem (Italy) as it is in The Pleasures of Memory, is simplicity; but here simplicity assumes a nobler shape. Although to a certain degree there is an alteration in the tone of the last from that of the first published poem, an alteration seemingly more marked from the difference between blank verse and rhyme; and although there is something of the new Persian odors, breathing from the myrtle wreaths of a muse, whom displicant nexæ philyrâ coronæ,' yet, unlike what we felt inclined to blame in Jacqueline' and the Human Life,' we see nothing that reminds us of individual traits in another; nothing that reminds us of Byron, though he strung his harp to the same theme; nothing that recalls any contemporaneous writer, unless it be occasionally Wordsworth, in Wordsworth's purer, if not loftier vein we see no harsh, constrained abruptness, emulating vigor; no childish mirauderies, that would gladly pass themselves off for simplicity. Along the shores and palaces of old glides one calm and serene tide of verse, wooing to its waters every legend and every stream that can hallow and immortalize. : "This poem differs widely from the poems of the day, in that it is wholly void of all that is meretricious. Though nature itself could not be less naked of ornament, yet nature itself could not be more free from all ornament that is tinsel or inappropriate. A contemplative and wise man, skilled in all the arts, and nursing all the beautiful traditions of the past, having seen enough of the world to moralize justly, having so far advanced in the circle of life as to have supplied emotion with meditation, telling you, in sweet and serene strains, all that he sees, hears and feels, in journeying through a country which nature and history combine to consecrate, — this is the character of Rogers' Italy; and the reader will see at once how wholly it differs in complexion from the solemn Harold, or the impassioned Corinne. This poem is perfect as a whole; it is as a whole that it must be judged; its tone, its depth, its hoard of thought and description, make its main excellence, and these are the merits that no short extracts can adequately convey. "Of all things, perhaps the hardest in the world for a poet to effect is to gossip poetically. We are those who think it is in this that Wordsworth rarely succeeds, and Cowper as rarely fails. This graceful and difficult art Rogers has made his own to a degree almost unequalled in the language. "With the author of The Pleasures of Memory-a banker, a wit, a man of high social reputation—we find it is from the stony heart of the great world that the living waters of a pure and transparent |