at the age of thirty-five, as the former poem, the 'Pleasures of Memory,' shows his mind at the age of twenty-nine. The Epistle to a Friend' describes his views of life and his feelings on art, on literature, and on society, as one who valued cheap pleasures, who had lived out of town, and was separated thereby from London's round of gaiety and glitter. But it shows some change in his habits and tastes since he published the 'Pleasures of Memory.' In that earlier poem the Portrait is almost the only work of art spoken of. It was almost the only one known in his father's house. In this later poem, on the other hand, we find that he had gained a knowledge and love of art of the highest class, and understood the beauties of Greek sculpture and Italian painting. But he cultivated art as yet only as a student and with economy. He had not begun to form his own valuable collection; and the works therein recommended to our purchase are not pictures and marbles, but copies from the antique in plaster and sulphur, and engravings after the Italian painters. He had not then taken a house in St. James's

'Amid the buzz of crowds, the whirl of wheels,'

and ornamented with original pictures and costly ancient vases and marbles. But his tastes were changing in favour of a town life; and in the same year in which he published this Epistle' with its apology for a literary life in the country, he sold the house at Newington Green and for the future lived in London.

While his father lived, Mr. Rogers's friends had been as much chosen for their politics as for their literature. In the year 1792, when a society was formed for obtaining a reform in Parliament, under the name of the Friends of the People, Mr. Rogers and his father both belonged to it, together with his brother-in-law, Mr. John Towgood, and they signed the address to the nation which was then put forth by Charles Grey, James Mackintosh, Samuel Whitbread, Philip Francis, Thomas Erskine, R. B. Sheridan, and others, who all thought that the way to save our constitution was to reform its abuses, and that a violent revolution, like that in France, was more likely to be brought on than avoided by the obstinacy of the Tories. Among his political friends were Priestley, the theological writer and chemist; and Gilbert Wakefield, the classical scholar; and Horne Tooke, who wrote on language; and W. Stone, at whose house in Hackney he met Charles Fox; and Erskine, the barrister who defended Stone and Tooke on their trials for treason. Dr. Priestley paid him a visit at Newington Green, when on his way to America, after his house at Birmingham had been burnt down by the Tory mob. Horne Tooke's more violent politics did not frighten him; and he felt warmly for him when in 1794 he was carried prisoner to the Tower

'thro' that gate misnamed, thro' which before,
'Went Sidney, Russell, Raleigh, Cranmer, More,
'Or into twilight within walls of stone,

"Then to the place of trial.'

There Mr. Rogers was present as a spectator; and

with every friend of liberty he rejoiced heartily at his acquittal.

He often visited Horne Tooke at his house at Wimbledon, where the old man, while digging in his garden, would talk about the peculiarities of language as described in his 'Diversions of Purley,' and about the political changes then hoped for and demanded by the reformers. Of all the able men whom Mr. Rogers had the good fortune to know, he thought Horne Tooke in conversation the most able. His wish he tells us in the following lines :

'When He, who best interprets to mankind

"The "Winged Messengers" from mind to mind,
'Leans on his spade, and, playful as profound,

'His genius sheds its evening-sunshine round,
'Be mine to listen.'

In return for the compliment of these verses Horne Tooke afterwards gave him his copy of Chaucer's Works in black letter, full of manuscript notes, and with an account of his being arrested and taken to the Tower written in the margin.

In 1796, Mr. Rogers was summoned before the Privy Council, and afterwards as a witness in the Court of King's Bench, on the trial of Stone for treason, in consequence of a few words that passed between them in Cheapside. He was called against the prisoner, but his evidence told in his favour; for it was justly argued that Stone's doings or designs could not be very treasonable if he stopped the first friend he met in the street to talk about them.

Fox he often visited in the country, where he describes

him

'at St. Anne's so soon of care beguiled,

'Playful, sincere, and artless as a child!

'How oft from grove to grove, from seat to seat,
'With thee conversing in thy loved retreat,

'I saw the sun go down! Ah, then 't was thine
'Ne'er to forget some volume half divine,
'Shakspeare's or Dryden's, thro' the chequered shade
'Borne in thy hand behind thee as we strayed;
'And when we sate (and many a halt we made)

To read there with a fervour all thy own,
'And in thy grand and melancholy tone,
'Some splendid passage not to thee unknown,
'Fit theme for long discourse'

With Grattan he became acquainted on a visit to Tonbridge Wells, where took place the walks with him under the trees on Bishop's Down, that he has described in his poem :

'A walk in Spring-Grattan, like those with thee
'By the heath-side (who had not envied me?)
'When the sweet limes, so full of bees in June,
'Led us to meet beneath their boughs at noon;
'And thou didst say which of the Great and Wise,
'Could they but hear and at thy bidding rise,

Thou wouldst call up and question.'

In his Epistle to a Friend' Mr. Rogers describes his feelings at this period of his life, the value which he set upon the society of men rich in knowledge and in the powers of conversation, and at the same time his own fixed purpose to gain a rank for himself and to make himself both worthy and thought worthy to associate with them,

'pleased, yet not elate,

'Ever too modest or too proud to rate
'Myself by my companions; self-compelled
'To earn the station that in life I held.'

After an hour or two spent in the company of these able and distinguished men, Mr. Rogers on his return home often noted down in his journal those opinions and remarks which he had heard that were best worth remembering. In this way he left behind him a few pages, chosen out of many, of his conversations with Horne Tooke, Erskine, Fox, and Grattan, to which he afterwards added some others. In after-life he used often to read these notes aloud to his friends; and they have since his death been published by my brother William.

His circle of acquaintance was much enlarged since he fixed his abode wholly in London. His society was eagerly sought for by ladies of fashion as well as by men of letters. His father when young and living in Worcestershire had mixed with the men of rank in his own neighbourhood. He had been intimate with the Earl of Stamford and Warrington, and that excellent man the first Lord Lyttelton, the poet, and his son-inlaw Lord Valencia, the father of the traveller. But though such society had been cultivated by the grandfather at the Hill, it was by no means to the father's taste. When speaking of the aristocracy he had given his son the strong advice, 'Never go near them, Sam.' But their doors were now open to the young and wealthy poet; and he did not refuse to enter. At Lady Jersey's parties he was a frequent visitor; and with his 'Epistle to a Friend,' in 1798, he published

e