constitution. "I can take no interest whatever," says Coleridge, "in hearing or saying any thing merely as a fact-merely as having happened. It must refer to something within me before I can regard it with any curiosity or care. My mind is always energic-I don't mean energetic; I require in every thing what I may call propriety-that is, a reason why the thing is at all, and why it is there or then rather than elsewhere or at another time." You cannot depend even on the facts preserved by such a mind as that of Rogers; not because they are not exactly observed and recorded-they will probably be both; but because such a mind has nothing to guide its selection, and you have no security that the evidence is to the purpose. All that is of the pith of the matter in hand may have been lost, and only the accidental or even exceptional incident connected with it preserved. The observations on persons of a man who has no insight into character, or pleasure in the study of it, are of as little value as the observations of a man unskilled in science on the natural history of an unexplored country. Men of this sort are better fitted for the intercourse of society than those who think they possess nothing till they have made it a part of themselves. The former give and take knowledge, such as it is; anecdote and wit are reflected quickly from them: they give sparks of their own in the collision of society. Such a man can say what he has to say in those interstices which a dinner adınits of, whereas the other requires the world to sit round listening while he expounds his convictions and limits his theories; but the latter gathers water like a well, filtered and stored up, while the former runs away like a brook sparkling and bubbling over the stones, and after fifty years of familiar intercourse with the best society in England leaves the contents of such a volume as this as the fruits of his experience.

Of course Rogers talked in society better than he is here represented as doing. You cannot reproduce in this way the conversation of such a man; not that Rogers was a conversationalist, but he had vigour and quickness of mind enough to hold his own in general intercourse; he was industrious in collecting and agreeable in imparting all the little ana of the day; he was sensible, rich, and well informed, and he could say caustic things of his acquaintance, which always makes a man agreeable among mutual friends. He was a kind-hearted man, but he was bilious and thin-skinned; he was not without a real enjoyment of excellence, but his taste on the whole was more of that negative kind which shows itself in a sensitiveness to any breach in the harmony and propriety it loves. Mr. Rogers carried this very far. He said that to hear the modern pronunciation, 'balcony' for 'balcony,' made him sick. A susceptibility of this sort is

apt to result in a critical and cavilling temper, which, when it exercises itself on friends, is always amusing, but not always amiable. Byron wrote a very savage personal satire on his friend. It is too bad to be quoted entire; but some lines give what we apprehend is, if an overdrawn, still a characteristic picture of the tone Rogers's conversation was apt to assume:

"Hear his tone (which is to talking
That which creeping is to walking),
Now on all-fours, now on tiptoe;
Hear the tales he lends his lip to,-
Little hints of heavy scandals;
Every friend in turn he handles;
All which women or which men do
Glides forth in an innuendo;
Clothed in odds-and-ends of humour,
From devices down to dresses,
Women's frailties, man's excesses;
All which life presents of evil

Makes for him a constant revel."

Medwin has a story of Byron's putting this satire, of whose abusive bitterness the above lines give no idea, under the cushion of the sofa when Rogers came to see him at Pisa, and seating him on it, while talking in the most friendly way to him. The story is not an improbable one; it is in character with Byron's mischievous spirit: a gentleman could not have done it; but Byron was only an outside gentleman, and ungenerous and vulgar in his heart's core. In the notes to the present work (generally better worth reading than the text) are two amusing anecdotes of Byron :

"A lady resident in Aberdeen told me that she used to sit in a pew of St. Paul's Chapel in that town, next to Mrs. Byron's; and that one Sunday she observed the poet (then about seven or eight years old) amusing himself by disturbing his mother's devotions: he every now and then gently pricked with a pin the large round arms of Mrs. Byron, which were covered with white kid gloves.

At the house of the Rev. W. Harness I remember hearing Moore remark, that he thought the natural bent of Byron's genius was to satirical and burlesque poetry: on which Mr. Harness related what follows. When Byron was at Harrow, he, one day, seeing a young acquaintance at a short distance who was a violent admirer of Buonaparte, roared out this extemporaneous couplet,

'Bold Robert Speer [Robespierre] was Bony's bad precursor;
Bob was a bloody dog, but Bonapart's a worseṛ.'

Rogers, we fancy, was not very much at ease among the poets and men of genius. They were too much in earnest for him. He loved the easy polished tone of well-bred society; he preferred talk to discussion; and Luttrell's brilliant flashes, or Bobus Smith's quotations, had more charms for him than Wordsworth's

serious disquisitions, Lamb's stuttering wit, or Byron's arrogant and clever assertions. They put him out, too, in little things; and how strong an impression such things made on him we see by the hold they retained on his memory. Once Sheridan was talking at Rogers's house "in his very best style," [every thing going off as well as possible] "when, to my great vexation, Moore (who has that sort of restlessness which never allows him to be happy where he is) interrupted Sheridan, by exclaiming, 'Isn't it time to go to Lydia White's?"" Rogers went abroad with Mackintosh; but they did not hit it off together. At Lausanne Mackintosh wouldn't care to borrow the Decline and Fall, and read the concluding passages on the very spot where they were written; and at Geneva he did not scruple to appropriate Rogers's carpetbag, and fill it with newly-purchased books. You can fancy the distracted man in the midst of his shirts and toothbrushes, and Mackintosh waiting for him in the carriage below, quietly reading, with the bag on the opposite seat. Uvedale Price once called forth all his ingenuity to get him out of the house; and Coleridge would sit all day after breakfast talking matter of which neither he nor Wordsworth could understand a word. Still worse were the metaphysicians:

"When I lived in the Temple, Mackintosh and Richard Sharp used to come to my chambers, and stay there for hours, talking metaphysics. One day they were so intent on their first cause,' 'spirit,' and 'matter,' that they were unconscious of my having left them, paid a visit, and returned ! I was a little angry at this, and, to show my indifference about them, I sat down and wrote letters, without taking any notice of them.'

When on one occasion he asked Sharp a metaphysical question, Sharp politely told him he was not one of the only two men with whom he talked metaphysics. "It so offended my sister," says Rogers, "that she said I ought immediately to have ordered a post-chaise and left him there." He went with Byron to the Pitti Palace at Florence; but his rude and callous friend sat down in a corner; 66 and when," says Rogers, "I called out to him, 'What a noble Andrea del Sarto!' the only answer I received was his muttering a passage from the Vicar of Wakefield,- Upon being asked how he had been taught the art of a cognoscente so very suddenly, he assured me that nothing was more easy. The whole secret consisted in a strict adherence to two rules; the one, always to observe, the picture might have been better if the painter had taken more pains, and the other to praise the works of Pietro Perugino.'" Byron and Rogers were two spirits not very well calculated for amicable intercourse, and their friendship seems to have consisted in quarrels over-night,

and reconciliations in the morning. Indeed, Byron was a man with whom it was almost impossible for any one to continue long in harmony. Shelley, with his sweetness and true nobleness, his firm will and high courage, was the only one of his associates to whom Byron bowed; and even that superiority was one he never acknowledged even to his own heart. That he often indemnified himself for the secret feeling by rude taunts, and a tone half-jesting, half-insulting (as in a scene Mr. Rogers was witness to), we can well believe. Such things fell off from Shelley's quiet dignity without touching him; he never descended into the arena of Byron's personal squabbling:

"One day, during dinner, at Pisa, when Shelley and Trelawney were with us, Byron chose to run down Shakespeare (for whom he, like Sheridan, either had, or pretended to have, little admiration). I said nothing. But Shelley immediately took up the defence of the great poet, and conducted it in his usual meek yet resolute manner, unmoved by the rude things with which Byron interrupted him,—'Oh, that's very well for an atheist,' &c."

Mr. Rogers's stock of facetic appears to have been an indifferent selection, with few claims to novelty; nor was he himself very successful in this line, if we may judge from the only specimen preserved in these memoranda.

Mr. Rogers's own bon-mot:

"A man who attempts to read all the new publications must often do as a flea does-skip.'

An epigram by Erskine, which Mr. Rogers thought "far from bad:"

"The French have taste in all they do,

Which we are quite without;

For Nature, that to them gave goût,
To us gave only gout.'

Instance of wit in Mr. Canning:

6

"I once mentioned to Canning the anecdote, that, while Gray was at Peter House, Cambridge, some young men of the college having learned that he had a fire-escape in his rooms, alarmed him in the middle of the night by a cry of fire-and that presently Gray descended from the window by a ladder of ropes, and tumbled into a tub of water, which the rogues had placed there;-upon which, Canning added, that they had made a mistake in calling out 'fire,' when they meant to cry' water.'

It is not very easy for an editor to know what good sayings are old and what new; but there are things here which any court would take judicial cognisance of as matters of universal notoriety, and many others which have only just appeared in contemporaneous publications. At any rate, quasi-witty things, faded

epigrams, fickle anomalous pleasantries, and defunct repartees, ought not to be disinterred. It is like relighting a half-smoked cigar. A humorous thing, on the contrary, is never old. There is a venerable story (we feel grateful to Mr. Moore for reviving it) of a man who came vexed with losses out of a gamingroom, and finding another at the top of the stairs tying his shoe, kicked him down the whole flight, saying, "Damn you, you're always tying your shoe!" You cannot exhaust that sort of thing; the oftener you hear it the better you appreciate it; you laugh when you think of it to yourself. So it is with most of Sydney Smith's sayings: they enjoy perpetual youth;* no one need be afraid of telling them over and over again. Mr. Rogers has a right to tell the story about his own dining-room :

"At one time, when I gave a dinner, I used to have candles placed all round the dining-room, and high up, in order to show off the pictures. I asked Smith how he liked that plan. Not at all,' he replied; above, there is a blaze of light, and below, nothing but darkness and gnashing of teeth.'

When his physician advised him to take a walk upon an empty stomach,' Smith asked, ' Upon whose?'

He said that his idea of heaven was eating foie gras to the sound of trumpets.

There is an exquisite incongruity in this last idea; the mode employed of raising an earthly enjoyment into the heavenly category is amazingly felicitous and absurd.

We will do Mr. Canning the justice to quote a better saying of his than the last. It is in the present collection of Table-Talk and elsewhere:

A lady having put to Canning the silly question, 'Why have they made the spaces in the iron gate at Spring Gardens so narrow?' he replied, 'Oh, ma'am, because such very fat people used to go through' (a reply concerning which Tom Moore said, that the person who does not relish it can have no perception of real wit')."

It is not wit at all, really. It is the humorous mock plausibility of the idea that gives it its charm-the making the spaces in the gate narrow because fat people used to go through the gateway; this, and the quiet assumption of the necessity of excluding very fat people from the park, make it a most happy saying.

The account of the king's consternation at being asked how he was is amusing enough, and within the limits of Mr. Rogers's own experience. It may serve to conclude our extracts :

*Sydney Smith's Life, by his daughter, deserves to be noted as an exception to the flagrant voluminousness of modern biographies. The first volume contains a life-like picture within just limits of a man whose portraiture was well worth preserving.