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the theatres all now sit in the parterre, a change effected by the Revolution; nor could Yorick now address them with "In England we sit more at our ease." Every woman here carries her pocket-handkerchief on her arm in a kind of work-bag; and I have seen dirty nursery girls with a tottering infant in one hand and their ridicule in the other. The houses have no verandahs, and the window curtains are of two different colours, crossing each other, which have a very rich and lively effect. But I have now exhausted my paper and your patience. Adieu, once more! You see I have not forgotten you, though a sea lies between us, and many a province and many a field of battle.

Your ever affectionate friend,

'SAMUEL ROGERS.

Mr. Fox has left us, to my great regret. He was delighted beyond measure.'

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Rogers was much with Fox during this visit to Paris, when some of the conversations recorded in the Recollections' took place. Walking in the Louvre they one day met Mackintosh, whom Fox passed with a nod and the briefest of salutations, telling Rogers he was angry with Mackintosh for accepting the place in India offered him by a Tory Government. But General Richard Fitzpatrick, whom Rogers met at Fox's dinner-table, as well as at the Luxembourg and the Gobelins, told Rogers that their wives were at the bottom of the coolness. Fox had lately publicly acknowledged Mrs. Armstead,

Recollections, pp. 20-28, 35.

to whom he had been married privately in 1795, as his wife, and Mrs. Mackintosh had not paid her a formal call. A fortnight before Rogers arrived in Paris Fox had dined with Bonaparte, when the First Consul had told him that some persons thought Windham had assisted in the plot to blow him up by an infernal machine. Fox told Rogers that he had energetically protested that the suspicion was a libel on Windham, and that no Englishman would mix himself up in such a business. Rogers afterwards told Windham what Fox had said in his vindication, and Windham replied that he would have done the same for Fox.

The next conversation with Fox recorded in the 'Recollections' is dated January, 1803, and took place during a visit of Rogers to Fox at St. Anne's, 'a small low white house on the brow of a hill commanding a semicircular sweep, rich and woody.' Rogers was then busily occupied in preparing his new home, and he puts on record Fox's remarks that a distance is essential to a house, and that the Green Park is the best situation in London. (The bow windows of Rogers's new house looked over the Green Park. He was fitting it up with great He had made notes of household arrangements he had seen in houses in which he had visited; had given much study to questions of decoration and ornament; and had designed the furniture himself, with the assistance of Hope's work on the subject. The mantelpiece in the drawing-room was executed by Flaxman, who superintended the general decoration of the walls and the ceiling. Stothard designed a cabinet for antiquities, ornamenting it with paintings by his own hand. By an

care.

ACALM RECESS SO RICHLY FRAUGHT'

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accident it happened that some of the wood-carving in the dining-room was executed by Chantrey. Rogers only knew this five-and-twenty years afterwards, when Chantrey had become famous. Much of the work was done under Rogers's personal supervision, and with drawing in hand he one day received a journeyman sent by a wood-carver to execute some ornamentation on a sideboard in the dining-room. At dinner, long afterwards, in the same room, Chantrey, pointing to the sideboard, asked Rogers whether he remembered the circumstance, and Rogers, who never forgot anything, recollected it clearly. Well,' said Chantrey, 'I was that journeyman.' The furniture and decoration followed the Greek models, and one of the striking features of the house was its large and beautiful collection of Greek vases. Round the staircase,' says his nephew, 'was added a frieze, taken from the Panathenaic procession among the Elgin marbles.' Rogers's long studies in the Louvre in the previous autumn had done much to complete the formation of that perfect taste which found expression in the furniture and decoration of his house.

A contemporary account of Rogers, of his house, and of the company he gathered in it, is given by Dr. Burney in his diary under the date of the 1st of May, 1804. Dr. Burney says of Rogers that he is a good poet, has a refined taste in all the arts, has a select library of the best editions of the best authors in all languages, has very fine pictures, very fine drawings, and the finest collection I ever saw of Etruscan vases; and moreover, he gives the best dinners to the best company of men of talents and genius I know; the best served, and with the

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best wines, liqueurs, &c. . . . His books of prints of the greatest engravers from the greatest masters in history, architecture, and antiquities, are of the first class. His house in St. James's Place, looking into the Green Park, is deliciously situated and furnished with great taste.'

This account of Rogers's house and parties in 1804 may be compared with a description written by Charles Sumner, the American Senator, in a letter to G. S. Hilliard, thirty-five years later, in January 1839: You have often heard of Rogers's house. It is not large, but the few rooms-two drawing-rooms and a dining-room only-are filled with the most costly paintings, all from some of the great galleries of Italy or elsewhere, most of which cost five or ten thousand dollars apiece. I should think there were about thirty in all; perhaps you will not see in the world another such collection in so small a space. There was a little painting by Raphael, about a foot square, of the Saviour praying in the Garden, brimful of thought and expression, which the old man said he should like to have in his chamber when dying. There were masterpieces by Titian, Correggio, Caracci, Guido, Paul Veronese, Rubens, Barocchio, Giotto, and Reynolds. He pointed out the picture of an armed knight, which Walter Scott always admired. His portfolios were full of the most valuable original drawings. There were all Flaxman's illustrations of Homer and the Tragedians, as they left the pencil of the great artist. Indeed, he said that he could occupy me for a month, and invited me to come. and breakfast with him any morning that I chose, sending him word the night before.'

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'ONE CHOSEN SEAT THAT CHARMS'

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Rogers had now cut himself entirely free from busiHis youngest brother Henry had become the active partner and working head of the banking firm, and there was no occasion for the chief partner to trouble himself with its concerns. His income, though not large, was sufficient for one who had only a bachelor's establishment to maintain, and who led the life of satisfied desires.' He had no expensive habits beyond those which sprang from a determination to make his house the ideal abode of the man of taste and the man of letters. He had not even the ambition to become the patron of poor authors, though circumstances were continually forcing that duty on him. His wish was to surround himself with what was best, and he chose his friends as he chose his pictures and his furniture-for their quality in this noblest sense. It soon became known that the charming house in St. James's Place, about which society was talking, was open to all who had a claim to be regarded as men of letters, or artists, or wits, or statesmen: though of the latter, it was chiefly the Whigs who found themselves at home.