He

Pleasures of Memory.' Gilbert Wakefield's pamphlet was as mild as the toasts at the Fox dinner, but it seems to have been thought that the time had come for the prosecution of some person whose position would make his condemnation strike terror into others; or, as Dr. Aikin says: a victim to the liberty of the press, of name and character to inspire a wide alarm, was really desired.' Gilbert Wakefield was therefore selected for the sacrifice, and no pains was spared to secure his conviction. was not attacked at once. Johnson and Jordan, the booksellers who sold the pamphlet, were first tried, and sentenced the former to a fine of fifty pounds and six months' imprisonment; the latter to a year's confinement. Mr. Cuthell, the publisher, was also punished; and then the blow fell on the gentle scholar and divine. He was tried, found guilty, and sentenced to two years imprisonment in Dorchester gaol. This fierce blow at freedom of discussion created almost a panic. Gilbert Wakefield's friends did all that could be done to modify the rigour of his confinement, and Fox kept up with him that learned correspondence which had been begun in happier circumstances, and which was afterwards published. Many of the Whigs made Wakefield's prison cell the object of a pious pilgrimage; and Rogers and his sister Sarah were among them. The utmost consideration was shown to Wakefield by his gaolers, but the imprisonment shortened his life, and he died less than four months after his liberation in 1801. To the end of his life Rogers never failed to speak of him with affection and regard, and of his prosecution and sentence as infamous. It brought home in the strongest way to him.

PARR AND MACKINTOSH

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and to his friends the full nature of the oppression which they held to justify the Whigs for seceding for a time from a House of Commons which kept such a Government in power.

In his Recollections' of Fox Rogers tells the story, as repeated by Fox in 1805, of an apparently discourteous reply of Dr. Parr to Mackintosh. The same story is also told in Mr. Dyce's book. Mr. Dyce reports Rogers as saying that when he read to Parr the account of O'Quigley's death-who had been hanged on Penenden Heath for a traitorous correspondence with France-the tears rolled down his cheeks. His reply to Mackintosh arose out of a conversation on the subject at a party at which many Whigs were present. Parr said O'Quigley was no impostor, that he died in the conviction that the cause in which he intrigued and suffered was a good one. 'I am hurt,' rejoined Mackintosh, to hear Dr. Parr employing his great talents in defence of such a wretch as O'Quigley, who was as bad a man as could possibly be.' 'No, no, Jamie,' responded Dr. Parr; not so bad a man as could possibly be: for, recollect O'Quigley was a priest -he might have been a lawyer; he was an Irishman—he might have been a Scotchman; he was consistent, Jamie -he might have been an apostate.' I tell the story, as it is given by the Rev. C. Colton in the notes to his satire, 'Hypocrisy.' It has no meaning, however, apart from the explanation Colton gives and Rogers omits, that Parr and many of Mackintosh's friends were greatly pained at what some of them regarded as Mackintosh's political apostasy. Rogers has himself recorded that Mackintosh had confessed to Burke some change of view; and at a later

period he tells us that Fox resented Mackintosh's acceptance of the recordership of Bombay from the then existing Government. The slight indications all these circumstances give of Rogers's political position in the closing years of the century combine together to prove that he and his circle of intimate friends held firmly to their Whig principles, and that though he took little part in public movements, he heartily concurred with them in holding aloof from all contact or sympathy with a Government which was, as they held, betraying constitutional freedom in the house of its friends.

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CHAPTER XII.

The Pursuits of Literature - A winter at Exmouth -Classical reading -George Steevens-Jackson of Exeter-Letters to Richard SharpDr. Moore's Mordaunt '--Dr. Moore's death-Richard Sharp and Fredley-Brighton in 1801.

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THE contrast presented by the beginning and the end of the last chapter, which opened with poetry and the praise of country life, and closed with political persecution and danger, aptly illustrates Rogers's life during these gloomy years. How completely he was able to live in his poetry, is shown by the entire absence from it of any allusion to the outer world of politics. The chief literary excitement of this period was caused by the publication of the satirical poem, The Pursuits of Literature,' which appeared in parts, the first in 1794, the second and third in 1796, and the fourth in 1797. There was nothing in the poem itself to call attention to it. It is a feeble imitation of Gifford. But it was made the vehicle of an immense bundle of Notes, full of personal attacks on all the chief Liberals of the time. The first part of the poem has only two hundred and fifty lines; but there are many pages which contain but one line or two, and all the rest of the page is 'notes.' In this way the first part swelled to a volume of more than a hundred pages. The authorship of the poem was

at first a mystery; and the magazines were full of speculations about it. It was at last discovered to be by T. J. Mathias. He was a friend of Rogers's, though of different politics, and Rogers had a good deal of intercourse with him in succeeding years. It is a testimony to Rogers's literary position that the political satirists of the period usually let him alone. One of the persons attacked in the notes was Dr. Joseph Warton, whose Life of Pope' was described as 'A Commonplace Book upon Pope.' He was, himself, spoken of as 'drivelling on the page of Pope;' and a dozen pages of notes were devoted, with all the capitals and italics by which feeble writers attempt to make their sentences emphatic, to what was intended to be a very severe assault upon him as a poet, a critic, and a biographer. Warton wrote to Rogers about it, speaking of Mathias as his 'pious critic,* but Rogers agreed with some of the criticism, as Warton had printed some things-such as the 'Imitation of the Second Satire of the First Book of Horace '-which Pope had never publicly acknowledged as his own. Nothing in later times has created quite such an excitement and hubbub among literary men as this book. It was an early product of the reaction the French Revolution had produced. Scarcely a single writer who was on the Liberal side escaped, and gross personalities were used in an attempt to throw discredit on them. Rogers, who knew Steevens, used to say that Steevens had said to Mathias: 'Well, since you deny the authorship of "The Pursuits of Literature," I need have no hesitation in telling you that the person who wrote it is a liar and a blackguard!' Rogers one day asked Mathias whether he had written.