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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.

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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 I 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

Gray. But like Dante, who studied from Virgil, and Reynolds, who studied from Michael Angelo, while he wished to profit by their inspiration, he certainly did not imitate them. He blamed their choice of words, as not being those used in every day life. He thought that the feelings of the heart could be best uttered in the language of the nursery; and as an example of lofty thoughts made yet more striking because clothed in simple language, he would quote Mrs. Barbauld's lines beginning

'Life we've been long together.'

He compared the passage in which Gibbon describes his feelings on bringing his great historical work to a close, with that in which Cowper describes the same feelings when he had finished his translation of Homer; and he placed the simple narrative of the Poet above the more measured sentences of the Historian. 'Poets,' he said, ' are the best prose writers.'

'The

For his use of a word, when he had a doubt about it, he was chiefly guided by Dryden, Milton, and King James's Bible, and more particularly by the last. 'How fortunate for us,' he remarked, 'that the Bible 'was translated when the English language was in such 'a state of purity.' He made the same use of Cruden's Concordance as of Johnson's dictionary. When an old and new word, or an old and new arrangement of words were before him for his choice, he chose the older if still in use. By so doing we check the too rapid change in the language.

He never spared his labour when composing. While writing the Epistle to a Friend,' he used from time to time to show it to Richard Sharp, who highly approved of it, and who would say, 'Let it alone, it can't be better.' But Mr. Rogers was not so easily satisfied, and continued to re-cast the thoughts, and to mend the rugged lines; and when he again showed it to his critic, Sharp would say, with yet warmer praise, 'It is quite another thing.'

He spoke of himself as an author with the boast of true humility, 'I always did my best.' 'What is 'written with ease,' he would say, 'is often read with 'difficulty. Moreover, what is written in a short time, 'will live only for a short time. If you neglect time, 'time will be revenged upon you.' He used to read with approval Ben Jonson's remarks upon Shakespear, and his wish that the great dramatist had taken more pains. He thought that even this greatest of our writers would sometimes have done better if he had corrected his first thoughts.

He took great pleasure in the circulation of his poems, and owned that he was not too proud to help the sale by the lowness of the price, and by the beauty of the illustrations. He gave away copies of them most freely to those who came to visit him. When they were once pirated in a cheap edition and sold for sixpence, he was rather pleased than otherwise, saying that he thereby gained the more readers; and instead of stopping the piracy he himself bought many of the pirated copies to give away. The number of editions which he printed was very large. His poems were