were the first fruits of his journey to Italy, and are warm with the enthusiasm of a visit to the land of Horace and Virgil, of Dante and Petrarch, of Raphael and Michael Angelo. The solemn temples of Pæstum had been much in his mind before starting on his journey; the copy of a Doric column from one of those buildings, stood every day before his eyes in the corner of his room; hence he naturally greeted them as an old acquaintance:

'From my youth upward have I longed to tread
'This classic ground.—And am I here at last?
'Wandering at will through the long porticoes,
'And catching, as through some majestic grove,
'Now the blue ocean, and now, chaos-like,
'Mountains and mountain-gulfs, and, half-way up,

Towns like the living rock from which they grew?'

These lines are almost the first that he wrote in blank verse ; and they mark the continued change of his taste from the more careful structure of his early verses to a looser and freer style. They were the forerunners of his larger poem on Italy, which he was at that time employed upon.

Three years afterwards, in 1822, he published in a small volume by itself, another portion of the thoughts gained on his journey, under the title of 'Italy, a Poem; Part the First.' To this volume he did not put his name, nor did he allow himself to be known as the author even by his friends. To make the concealment more certain, he had the secret kept from the bookseller, and took the trouble to be out of

England at the time that it was published.

Moreover, he leads the reader into Italy by the Great St. Bernard, while he himself had entered by the Simplon. The poem is in blank verse, and the same in style as the Lines written at Pæstum.' This First Part stopped at Florence; the rest of the journey was to follow in Part the Second. It was not discovered who wrote it till he returned home and thought proper to own it. One of the reviewers thought it was certainly the work of Southey. But had they remembered the 'Lines written at Pæstum,' they could have had no difficulty in recognising the author of 'Italy;' though, certainly, it is very unlike any of the former poems by Mr. Rogers.

While the First Part of 'Italy' was being published at home, Mr. Rogers was on his route to visit the same country a second time, to examine with renewed pleasure spots that he had seen nine years before, and to see towns that he had before left unvisited. He again crossed the Alps by the Simplon pass, and went as far as Naples, and he returned home by Pisa, Genoa, Turin, and Paris. On this journey he fell in with Byron and Shelley, who were then living in Italy.

In 1828 he published the Second Part of 'Italy; and by putting his name to it he acknowledged himself as the author of both parts. The sale of this poem was at first small. It was never reviewed by either of the two chief reviews. It addresses itself only to the few, to those who have travelled in Italy, and to those who by study are acquainted with its works of art and the deeds of its great men. It describes not so

much what he saw on his travels, as the feelings with which every man of education and refinement would wish to view a land ennobled by great actions, and familiar to us by classic recollections, and one to which ourselves owe so much of our civilisation. Mr. Rogers fancied that the cool manner in which this poem was at first received amounted to an unfavourable verdict. He was not disposed to question the taste of the public in the case of a work which was meant to please the public. So he made a bonfire, as he described it, of the unsold copies, and set himself to the task of making it better. He at the same time engaged the services of several artists to ornament it with plates descriptive of the places mentioned.

In 1830 he published a large edition of 'Italy,' beautifully illustrated with engravings after drawings made for the purpose by Stothard, Turner, and others. In 1834 he published his earlier poems in another volume, illustrated in the same manner. Each of these volumes engaged his attention for two or three years, while he directed the artists, watched the progress of their designs, pointed out changes that he wished made, and then gave the same care to the engravers to see that they faithfully represented the original drawings. When finished, he was fully rewarded by the success of the work. The volumes equalled his expectations, and were acknowledged to be the two most beautiful ever published. Their sale was very large. He had spent about seven thousand pounds upon the two; and the whole money returned to him in due time.

In the chapter entitled The Bag of Gold, he mentions dining with an old Italian prelate, the Archbishop of Toronto, who placed his cats beside him on the dinner-table; and the last addition which Mr. Rogers made to his collection of pictures was a portrait of one of these cats. When the archbishop died, his pictures were sent to England to be sold, and Mr. Rogers, for old recollection's sake, gave a trifle for a portrait of the favourite cat.

We have already traced Mr. Rogers's change of taste from the regular couplet to freer versification and irregular rhymes, and then to blank verse; and now we note a final change in favour of prose. Several chapters in the ' Italy' are written in prose, and they are by no means the least valuable in the volume. After this time he wrote very few lines of poetry. They may be summed up in a short piece addressed to Lord Grenville, 'on his visiting Dropmore in 1831;' another 'to Earl Grey, in 1834, on his Reform of Parliament ;' a third, in the same year, 'on the Emancipation of the Negro Slaves in the West Indies;' a fourth on Strathfieldsaye Park,' perhaps on visiting the Duke of Wellington there, in 1838; and a few yet shorter pieces, which he named 'Reflections.' Some of these last had been written for his 'Human Life;' but not used in that poem. With these exceptions the few additions to his works were short essays in prose, added to the Notes at the end of his poems. These were written most carefully; every word was weighed and re-weighed ; he bestowed as much time upon them as upon his verse, and thought them equally deserving of such

care. The piece in which he thought himself most successful is the ten lines which describe the old friar's remarks upon the picture of the Last Supper, which hung in the dining-room of the convent. This anecdote was told to him by Wilkie, the artist, and it has been repeated in verse by Wordsworth and Monkton Milnes, and in prose by Southey. The North American Review, for July, 1842, compares together these four versions of the same story, and justly gives the palm to that by Mr. Rogers.

This turn to prose was not merely a change of practice from dislike to the labour of making verse; it was accompanied with a change of opinion. He then praised blank verse over rhyme, and prose over both; and he thought the sonnet the worst kind of verse, because it is most encumbered with rules. He once intended to add the following opinion on the sonnet, as a note to the chapter on Bergamo, in ‘Italy;' but he kept it back through fear that it should give pain to Mr. Wordsworth: 'Great as are the authorities for 'the sonnet, illustrious as are those who have devoted 'to it no small portion of their lives, I cannot but compare it to a dance in fetters, a dance of so many 'steps, nor more nor less, and to very monotonous 'music. The Procrustes who invented it is unknown.' He thought his 'Human Life' the best of his poems, the fruit of his ripened judgment and experience; compared with this, he would call his 'Pleasures of Memory' the work of a young man.

The two poets that he most read, and whose volumes he took with him on his journeys, were Milton and