went by Paris and Switzerland.

He crossed the Alps

by the Pass of the Simplon. He visited Milan, Venice, Bologna, Florence, Rome, and Naples where Murat was reigning as king. From Naples he turned homeward, and had reached Florence in the beginning of April 1815, when news met him that Napoleon had escaped from Elba, and had returned to France, and that Europe was again plunged into war. He thereupon hurried home through the Tyrol and Germany, in the rear of the allied armies, which were then preparing for a great battle with the French. He passed through Brussels while it was occupied by Wellington's army, and through Ghent while it was the residence of Louis XVIII.; and he reached England six weeks before the battle of Waterloo.

While in Italy Mr. Rogers observed everything with the eye of a painter and a poet. He noted carefully in his journal the picturesque appearances of the country, the climate, and the people; and he put on paper the thoughts which arise in a refined and educated mind on visiting spots ennobled by great deeds. This careful journal was in preparation for a future work; but it was laid aside for the present, as he had a poem already half written which was first to be attended to.

This poem he published in 1819. It was entitled 'Human Life,' and is full of generous sentiments and true wisdom. He therein teaches us to look upon our fellow-creatures with respect, and so pictures our trials and our enjoyments as to encourage us to aim after excellence, by showing us that it is within our

reach. By most readers this will probably be considered his best work; he considered it so himself. He was fifty-six years of age, and full of experience helped by reading and reflection. He does not task his imagination, as in Columbus;' but, like a thoughtful man, points out, as to those younger than himself, the good actions that they ought to imitate. The versification is free, and, like that of 'Columbus' and 'Jacqueline,' has not the regularity of his earlier poems; the pauses do not fall upon the rhymes, nor is the sense bounded by the couplet. Its scenery is wholly English; it had been begun before the journey to Italy, and it bears very few traces of thoughts gained in that classic country. Those thoughts, as before remarked, were to be made use of in a poem by themselves.

Seven and twenty years had now passed since Mr. Rogers, on the publication of the 'Pleasures of Memory,' took his place among the English poets. Since that time all who had before him been successful in their efforts to gain the ear and favour of the public by poetry, had ceased from their labours and gone to rest. A new race of poets had arisen, with new tastes and new canons of criticism. Crabbe, Scott, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey, Campbell, Moore, and Byron had taken their place beside him. He admired their genius, and welcomed them as friends, although they did not follow the lights which had guided him. Crabbe and Campbell alone could be called of the old school of Pope, with whom shortness and neatness of expression was a marked aim. The others had

rebelled, some against the regularity and careful finish which used to be required in verse, and some against the neatness and compactness of the sentences. Byron would have belonged to the old school, if he had followed his own judgment. As the readers were delighted with Childe Harold, he wrote accordingly; but for himself he valued most his Hints from Horace. 'We are all,' he writes in 1820, 'on a wrong revolu'tionary system (or no system) from which Rogers 'and Crabbe are alone free. It is all Horace then ' and Claudian now among us.' Thus, whether for better or for worse, the poetical taste of the nation, both writers and readers, had undergone a change; and Mr. Rogers's later poems, 'Columbus' and 'Human Life,' show that his taste had in part undergone the same change. He lived, indeed, to see a yet further change come over the public taste in poetry, when clearness and order in the thoughts were no longer required by the reader. But he strongly blamed all such cloudiness and want of ease in style; and he used to say of the writer who now-a-days takes pains to make his style simple, and to set forth his thoughts in the order most plain to the reader's understanding, that he is one of the most disinterested of men. So many readers now prefer obscurity, that an author is often less valued in proportion as he has taken care to make himself understood.

In the same volume with 'Human Life,' Mr. Rogers published the lines entitled 'The Boy of Egremond,' which are, perhaps, the least valuable of his poetry; and also the 'Lines written at Pæstum.' These latter

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