part of The Man of Feeling,' while Julia de Roubigné ' was written, Scott says, in some degree as a counterpart to the earlier work. Rogers had read and admired this pathetic story, and went to Edinburgh full of desire to see its author, who was then one of the most distinguished persons in the literary society of the Scottish capital. Rogers's feeling with respect to Mackenzie at this time was that with which a young writer regards an author of established fame. He first saw him at Adam Smith's dinner-table, and remarks in his diary on his soft and pleasing manners. Mackenzie was an admirable talker. Just thirty years after Rogers had first met him Mr. Ticknor, the author of the History of Spanish Literature,' records in his diary that he had breakfasted one morning with Mackenzie at Lady Cumming's. 'He is now old,' says Ticknor, but a thin, active, lively little gentleman, talking fast and well upon all common subjects, and without the smallest indication of the "Man of Feeling" about him.' Rogers and he corresponded occasionally for five-and-forty years, and Mackenzie more than once visited Rogers in London. Their sympathy with each other was purely literary, for Mackenzie wrote against the French Revolution in the days when all liberal spirits in England were still hoping everything from it. He lived on through all the changes it brought, and saw the Monarchy of July, and the agitation for English Reform before he died. In a letter announcing his death, in January 1831, when he had got half-way through his eighty-sixth year, his son, Mr. J. H. Mackenzie expressed gratitude to Rogers, 'for your kind friendship to my father, which added so sensibly to the

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enjoyment of his declining years.' Mr. Joshua Henry Mackenzie, afterwards became a judge of the Edinburgh Court of Session, and his daughter, Miss Mackenzie of Moray Place, Edinburgh, is now the sole descendant of of The Man of Feeling.'

After his memorable stay in the Scottish capital Rogers was more than ever set on the attainment of literary distinction. He came back home to work hard at the poem by which he was to gain the fame he felt to be his right. He was always accumulating material for it, putting down happy thoughts and fortunate expressions, and polishing a line or a couplet into the perfect rhythm which distinguishes the poem. It was the chief subject in his thoughts, yet it is never mentioned in his letters or his diary. Perhaps it was because of this preoccupation with the work of this period of his life that there is no record of 1790, except one which he mentions in his Recollections.' ( It is a personal reminiscence of Burke. On the 10th December, 1790, Sir Joshua Reynolds delivered his fifteenth and last discourse at the Royal Academy. There was a crowded audience, and the front seats were reserved for persons of distinction, among whom was Burke. Younger and less known men, of whom Rogers was then one, were thus kept in the back of the room. Suddenly a beam under the floor gave way with a crash, and the people present rushed to the door. As there was no sign of further disaster the alarm was supposed to be a false one, and the audience struggled back to their places. Some of the younger got to the front, and Rogers was among them. Sir Joshua concluded his lecture with a striking passage: 'I feel a

self-congratulation in knowing myself capable of such great sensations as he intended to excite. I reflect, not without vanity, that these discourses bear testimony of my admiration of that truly divine man, and I should desire that the last words I should pronounce in this Academy and from this place should be the name of Michael Angelo.' He came down from the desk to mingle with the audience and Burke went up to him, and taking him by the hand repeated Milton's lines:

The Angel ended, and in Adam's ear

So charming left his voice that he awhile.

Thought him still speaking, still stood fix'd to hear.

'I was there,' writes Rogers, and heard it.'

CHAPTER V.

English feeling about France in 1789 and 1790-Wordsworth, Coleridge, Adams-Diary in Revolutionary Paris-Visits to Lafayette, de Châtelet, de Liancourt, the Duc de Rochefoucauld, etc.-National Assembly, Jacobin Club-The Theatres—The King and Queen-The Populace -Journey homewards through Belgium and Flanders-Dr. John Moore, father of Sir John and Sir Graham Moore

WHILE Rogers was enjoying the literary and social intercourse to which his friends had introduced him in the Scottish capital, events which greatly influenced the life of every prominent man in Europe were taking place in Paris. The destruction of the Bastille has made the 14th of July, 1789, a dividing line in history. It was the first great victory of the populace. The Bastille was at once the instrument and the symbol of despotism, and its fall announced to the world the overthrow of the ancient authority of a family and of a caste. The people of England rejoiced in the victory almost as much as the people of France. It was regarded by English Liberals as the formal entry of France on the career of constitutional government; as the proclamation of a new era, in which the old Whig toast of Civil and religious liberty all the world over' should come to complete realisation. It is difficult in these days to enter very fully into the feeling of that already distant time. It is only by recollecting how completely the near future is veiled from us

how impossible it was in 1790 and 1791 to foresee the deeds of 1793 and 1794-that we can understand the enthusiasm which the first movements of the Revolution aroused in men of liberal thought and training in England and the United States. They beheld in 1789 and 1790 nothing but the rosy dawn; they could not foresee the storms which were so soon to obscure it and blot the sky. Poets and philosophers, politicians and divines, saw in the earliest movements of the Revolution the power and the potency of all necessary ameliorations in the lot of the great masses of mankind, and the pledge of the quick coming of the better time in which Christendom, in spite of all disappointments, has passionately believed and still passionately believes. Southey, Coleridge and Wordsworth, Price, Priestley and Mackintosh, Charles Fox, Charles Grey, Whitbread, Francis, Erskine, Sheridan, Windham and Stanhope, and all the men who, like them, had been labouring in the popular cause, felt upon their faces the light and warmth of a new morning for the world. Wordsworth, looking back when he wrote The Prelude,' said of those days of illusive, yet not wholly illusive, hope

Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,

But to be young was very heaven.

Coleridge, writing his 'Ode to France' in 1797, just after the moment of worst disenchantment, sang of the time

When France in wrath her giant limbs upreared,
And, with an oath that smote air, earth, and sea,
Stamped her strong foot and said she would be free.

Even in those days Coleridge was not ashamed to