SUNDAY SCHOOLS

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Gloucester in 1781. So in this same letter Thomas Rogers reports in 1785, Mr. Foley, the rector of the parish, and several gentlemen, are very busy in drawing up a plan for Sunday Schools. Sufficient money is raised, but the school-houses are not yet fixed upon, nor the masters and mistresses appointed. There will be about six for boys, and the same number for girls.' He adds a wish which was realised fifty-five years afterwards by some of his descendants. I hope the gentlemen of Islington and the Green will establish some in the neighbourhood. I wish one or two could be established at the Green, and the children brought to meeting, as I know no place where there are so many poor people with so little attendance upon public worship.'

The autumn of 1786 finds him again at "The Hill," and he writes to Sam, who had just returned from Brighton, of some delightful excursions they had made. One to Downton, to Dick Knight's Castle, and over a lofty range of hills in that neighbourhood, commanding Herefordshire, Shropshire, and part of Wales.' The other excursion was to Mr. Harley's at Berrington, near Leominster. 'The house not large, but taking in horses' stables, gardens, with the establishment of servants, the whole may be called princely. No park and not much shrubbery, but some hundred acres of ground, beautiful in situation, laid out in great taste, and kept up at a profusion of expense.' In this letter he expresses the hope that in Tom's absence Sam will get early to town, and attend as much as possible to Mr. Welch's ease, doing everything he can to relieve him from too much application.

In most of these letters he speaks of Sam's health.

In 1781 Sam had gone to Margate, and his father strongly recommends him to take horse exercise, promising to send the brown mare if he cannot get a decent horse by hiring. Sam had said something about dancing, and his father expresses the hope that he will be so prudent in the use of it as not, like Penelope, to undo by night the work of the day.' Year after year there are references in the letters to a weakness of the eyes from which Sam was suffering. He seems to have had a very odd experience with respect to them. One of his poems. is entitled To the Gnat,' and admirably describes in sixteen lines the whirring wings' and 'shrill horn' of the mosquito. If it had been written on Staten Island, near New York, or in some other place haunted by the scourge of continental climates, it could not have pictured more graphically the possible horrors of an autumn night; but addressed to our poor English midge, the lines seem exaggerated, and Mr. Sharpe thinks the piece might have been written in order that it might end in mock-heroic style with Dryden's line—

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They wake in horror and dare sleep no more.

Yet Rogers always declared that the lines literally described his own experience. In his young days the gnats at Stoke Newington distressed him as the mosquitos plague an Englishman who without due precautions ventures to sleep with an open window in some parts of the United States. His eyes, he says, were often swollen with the bites of gnats when he woke in the morning. This annoyance was probably due to his weak health. Every year during his clerkship at the bank he took long

holidays at Margate or at Brighton; year after year seabathing and horse exercise were recommended him by the doctors, and he found benefit from them. His father had to exhort him not to spend too much time in reading, but to lay his favourite books aside and look after his health. In the summer of 1785 he writes to his father

'Margate: 24 Septr. '85.

'Dear Sir, I arrived here last Tuesday night, after a very pleasant journey. The hop-picking had thrown an air of gaiety over the country, and women and children were everywhere singing songs and filling their baskets. The weather has been very changeable, and the showers so partial that yesterday when I was riding with Mr. Seawell (who is here, and boards in the same house with me) a very heavy shower fell within twenty yards of us, and we could distinctly see the drops. Margate is rather full, but the height of the season seems to be past. Mr. Seawell and myself propose to take a little trip to Calais next week, and on our return to Dover I shall be met by Mr. Joseph Collier, who will accompany me along the coast to Brighthelmstone. Mr. Wm. Maltby is there for his health, which is very indifferent, and I hope to stay there a week or ten days. The sea has been very calm since I came, and I have bathed every morning. As we shall make easy journeys every day, I mean to bathe at Rye and Eastbourne. Mr. Bearcroft and his family are here, and are extremely civil to me. I walked down to the pier this morning, and counted twenty-four West India merchantmen, which are just visible on the line of the horizon. I have found the sea air have the same

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effect it used to have, and my appetite is so keen that I am sometimes ashamed of it. I beg my duty to my aunts, and my love to my cousins; and remain, dear Sir, 'Your dutiful and affectionate son,

'SAML. ROGERS.'

He was at this time preparing his first book for the press, but there is not a hint concerning it in any of his letters. There is, however, a letter from his sister Maria, written when she was twelve or thirteen years old, which supplies the material for a slight sketch of Rogers's evenings at home in these early days. Maria speaks of being with him in the study when he is reading and she is writing, and her only pleasure is to look up to him from time to time, wishing to know his thoughts. She speaks in most affectionate terms of his kindness in always doing everything to oblige her, and says she is sure there is not one brother in a hundred who so behaves to his sister. In the Rogers's house the law in the library was that of silence when anyone was reading or writing. Samuel could therefore sit and write comparatively undisturbed, and had not to learn, like Maria Edgeworth, to compose amid the prattle of a family. Communication was to be by correspondence, and the letters were put in a place in the library called the Post Office.' There Maria placed her letters, and there she found her brother's answers after he had gone to business in the morning. In this way a correspondence was carried on between a brother and sister living under the same roof; and Maria says of Samuel's letters: "If I am grave they make me merry, and if I am merry I still continue so.'

EVENINGS AT HOME

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As Samuel's eyes were weak his sisters sometimes read to him, and it is easy to picture the pleasant scene in the study on many an evening in those happy years-the girls writing or reading or preparing their lessons, the brothers sitting with them at similar work, and Samuel, the literary brother, studying the poets or himself writing what he hoped might live, or, like a later and less fortunate aspirant for fame, with old bards of honourable name, measuring his soul severely. In this way he became an author.