business, yet my opportunities of listening to his conversation have not been more frequent than those of many others. I never lived in the same house with him; my engagements in business and at home did not allow me to visit him so often as he kindly wished; and I was separated from him by a wide difference in our ages.

HIGHBURY PLACE, July 1859.

IN the year 1763, Thomas Rogers the elder, the Poet's grandfather, was a wealthy glass manufacturer at Stourbridge in Worcestershire, and lived at a large house called the Hill, near that town. His wife Martha, a daughter of Richard Knight of Downton, was dead. His family at the Hill consisted of himself and five unmarried daughters. Without giving up his business at Stourbridge, he had entered into partnership with Daniel Radford, who was a large warehouseman in Cheapside; and his only son, Thomas Rogers the younger, had left Worcestershire to join this London partnership. This led to an intimacy with Daniel Radford's only child, Mary, whom Thomas Rogers the younger married in the year 1760. He thereupon became an inmate in Daniel Radford's family; and they lived together in Daniel Radford's house in Newington Green, Middlesex, till the death of the latter in 1767. The house stands on the Southgate road, on the west side of the green, and is the house nearest to London on that side. Here Samuel Rogers was born on the 30th of July, 1763.

The last hundred years have made fewer changes in Newington Green than in most other spots in the neighbourhood of London. Modern stucco has made the old red-brick house white, as indeed the Poet took the liberty of describing it. It still has a row of elms in front of it, and a large field on the side, though the road into which the gate opens from the field no longer deserves the name of the "Green Lanes," by which it was once known. In other respects it is much the same as when he claimed to

"Point out the Green Lane rough with fern and flowers;
The sheltered gate that opens to my field,

And the white front, thro' mingling elms revealed."

Daniel Radford, the Poet's grandfather on his mother's side, by careful attention to business, had been the maker of his own fortune. He was the son of Samuel Radford, a linendraper in Chester, and of Eleanor, a daughter of the Rev. Philip Henry, once incumbent of Worthenbury, in Flintshire, but afterwards one of that noble band of two thousand clergymen, who, on the passing of the Act of Uniformity in the beginning of Charles the Second's reign, left their churches and livings for conscience' sake, and became the founders of the sect of English Presbyterians. Daniel and his three sisters were early left as orphans, and they very

"What though his ancestors, early or late,
Were not ennobled by the breath of kings;
Yet in his veins was running at his birth

The blood of those most eminent of old

For wisdom, virtue,-those who could renounce
The things of this world for their conscience' sake,
And die like blessed martyrs."

The elder Mr. Rogers at the Hill in Worcestershire had been a strong Tory when party feelings ran very high. He usually joined the neighbouring squires at the county dinners, when they drank to the success of the Church and State party, and to the confusion of the Whigs. In those days wine-drinking was often carried to excess, and it was sometimes one of the jokes of the evening to fling a powdered wig into the fire by way of making the Tory owner give proof of his dislike to Whig politics, and to send him away in a nightcap when his carriage came to fetch him home. But as Thomas Rogers the younger became after his marriage a Dissenter in religion, so he was naturally a Whig in politics. His children were brought up to watch with interest the Dissenters' unsuccessful struggles in Parliament for the Repeal of the Corporation and Test Acts, and to point to the new Mansion House in the City as built by fines levied upon the Dissenters, who were chosen to the office of Sheriff, one after another, to the number of forty-five, and paid £400 a-piece to escape taking the Church Sacrament on serving. Samuel was the third son; and when the American revolution began with riots in Boston, in 1774, he was eleven years old. He then received a lesson which he never forgot, when his father one night, after reading the Bible to his family, closed the book and explained to his children the cause of the rebellion, adding, that our nation was in the wrong, and that it was not right to wish the Americans should be conquered. He remembered also the Recorder of London, in the following year, putting on mourning for the battle of Lexington, and Granville Sharp giving up or refusing an office in the Tower, because he did not think it right to ship warlike stores against the Colonists.

He attended public worship with his father's family in the old Presbyterian Meeting House on Newington Green, where Dr. Joseph Towers preached in the morning, and Dr. Richard Price in the afternoon, where his grandfather Radford, and his great-grandfather Harris, had attended before him. He sat in the south-east corner of the chapel, in the pew facing and furthest from the minister on his left-hand side. The chapel is not without other literary claims to notice. In the next pew to him on the east side sat a young lady, afterwards eminent in letters, Mary Wollstonecraft; Daniel Defoe had attended worship there a century carlier; and a few years after Mr. Rogers had left Newington Green

may have been that in front of his father's house, where he was within the sound of Mr. Burgh's school-bell, which he describes as

"Quickening my truant feet across the lawn."

The Hill is in the parish of Old Swinford; and there in the churchyard are the tombstones of the Rogers family. There he had thoughtfully traced the name of Rogers

"On yon grey stone, that fronts the chancel-door,
Worn smooth by busy feet now seen no more."

This churchyard the Poet had in his mind when he said

"Here alone

I search the record of each mouldering stone."

The visits to the Hill also sometimes led him to the Leasowes, lately the picturesque seat of the Poet Shenstone, who had been intimate with his father. At that time Shenstone's artificial additions to the natural beauties of the place had not fallen to decay; and the visits to Worcestershire gave the following couplet to the "Pleasures of Memory,"

"Thus, thro' the gloom of Shenstone's fairy grove
Maria's urn still breathes the voice of love."

In 1776 his excellent mother died. Through her the Dissenting principles and strong feelings of religion had been brought into the family. In her last illness she called her children round her, and told them that it mattered little what happened to them when she was gone, provided they were good. She left eight, of whom one died in a few months; and the others, four sons and three daughters, all grew up to do honour to the good principles in which they were educated. On their mother's death they fell to the care of her friend and cousin, Mary Mitchell, who had lived with her from childhood, and continued with her on her marriage, and who now took the management of Thomas Rogers's house at Newington Green.

The eldest son, Daniel, was sent to Cambridge, and intended for a barrister; the second, Thomas, was taken as a clerk into the bankinghouse; and Samuel, on le hool, wished to be sent to the Dissenting