That very law* which moulds a tear,
And bids it trickle from its source,-
That law preserves the earth a sphere,

And guides the planets in their course."

In

Though not always on so low a level, Mr. Rogers continued during the whole course of his long poetical career to breathe the atmosphere of the eighteenth century. Men are slow to learn of their youngers; and Mr. Rogers was not one whose temper and frame of mind were likely to render him an exception. But it is a striking evidence of the genuineness of his taste, and his power of appreciating and enjoying true excellence, that he was quick to recognise the merit of those new men whom he was so little able to emulate. He said of Wordsworth, "He deserves all his fame." And this was something for him to say. That his sympathy should have proved capable of extension to yet another race, and almost another school, is too much to expect. Such as it was, it always outwent his creative power. Jacqueline, an attempt to move in the free air of Walter Scott and Byron, is graceful, polished, and more easy than its author generally has the power to be; but it is mere embroidery-work, thin and finikin. În the Columbus, Mr. Rogers snatches at laurels far far out of his reach, and beats his flagging wings in all the suffering of fruitless effort-"fluttering in vast agony," like Peter Wilkins' rebel glumm general cut through the graundee by a sabre-stroke. In these poems, however, and even in the Italy, Mr. Rogers is true to old associations. He never really rises above the principles and practice of his art as they were received when he began to write. In fact, his was a genius to which they were specially suited; and he gave a higher perfection than any other living man was capable of doing to certain restricted conditions of form and diction. His was just the nature not to aim at a higher beauty, but to occupy itself in giving as much finish as possible to that which was at hand. He had no grasping and searching love of beauty. His was not a mind of that order which can enjoy great things in spite of defects; which not being blind to them, can yet bear with them. By a fastidious man, we mean one whose irritation at the presence of defects habitually outweighs his pleasure in beauty or excellence. Perhaps Rogers as artist was not quite a fastidious man, but he was one to value the lesser thing without blemishes above the greater thing with. He would have preferred looking on a clear-burning wax-candle to gazing on the sun with a consciousness of its spots. In the Pleasures of Memory he wrote a poem in which the prevailing versification was polished up to its

"The law of gravitation."

highest pitch, whose language was without blemish according to the taste of the day-terse, harmonious, and well selected; he treated his subject pleasingly, if tritely, and disclosed affectionate feeling without false sentimentality. It is not to be wondered at that he was applauded and sought after. He fairly earned his first reputation. But that this reputation should survive in the blaze of genius which so soon after burst forth, is a fact more to be wondered at. Yet it is not difficult to perceive the reasons for it. Between himself and the new race there were few common points for comparison. They were of a higher order altogether. His claims did not practically come into collision with theirs. Had he been more on their level, his title would not have passed so unquestioned as it did. He did not render himself obnoxious to the shafts of party; and he was in habits of familiar social intercourse with so wide a range of literary men, that scarcely one could be found to whom it would not have seemed some breach of civility to criticise him openly and justly. At that time personal considerations limited the range and dictated the tone of public criticism more powerfully than they even now do. The tone of attack was more direct, and was resented as a personal injury. If you were a bumptious warm-blooded little man, like Moore, or thought it a fine thing and incumbent on you as a gentleman, like Byron, you called out the reviewer, or said you would do so on your return to England. If your talent lay in a different line, you quarrelled with him, and made up as spiteful an epigram as you could, or otherwise took your revenge. But, owing to the above causes, Rogers escaped with a rub or two. He had many sincere adherents, and others granted his reputation as a matter of courtesy. Moreover he was much besides being a poet; and the man of taste and fashion, and the Mæcenas to whom the literary world owed much, carried off the man of letters.

At the present day, it can scarcely be denied that the rank which Rogers still nominally holds among English poets is mainly due to his not being read. His poems, associated with Stothard and Turner, lie on the table, and occur to young people who wish to make presents to one another. The book keeps the poetry alive; but the readers are pretty nearly an extinct race. With the exception of a few stragglers, Mr. Rogers survived the genuine admirers of his writings. To have disturbed the sensitive old man in his latter days by hostile criticism would have been cruel; and the world, as by one consent, respected the claims of age and a reputation sanctioned by its association in all memories with some of the foremost names in English literature: but now it can be neither unjust nor unseemly to attempt to estimate his genius, and to assign him his place in the

English commonwealth of letters. A far different judgment must await him in such a comparison than when he is weighed against those who occupied the stage when he first appeared on it.

A likeness might be imagined between each of our poets and some one of the constituent elements of landscape. Shakespeare would be the all-reflecting, all-embracing sea, unfathomable and ever fresh; Shelley the mountain-top, crowned with blue ether; Wordsworth the dewy pastures, commons, and serene widespreading plains; Byron a heady torrent, gleaming and swift, often foaming and chafing over stones; Milton a mighty solitary oak; Walter Scott a free-growing forest, waving its branches in inspiring morning air; Moore the restless fluttering singingbird; Crabbe his own village; and Coleridge a gorgeous sunset, where the clouds take a glory, and over level ridges, and through rents and chasms, shines from impenetrable depths beyond a calm undazzling fire. In such a scheme Rogers would be aptly represented by one of those would-be rustic ultra-artificial pleasuregrounds, on the elaboration of which some of our forefathers bestowed so much thought and labour; or, to give him narrower limits, he is the very image of one of the grottoes in such a place, such a one as he himself describes :

"Till o'er the mead a cool sequestered grot,
From its rich roof a sparry lustre shot;
A crystal water crossed the pebbled floor,
And on the front these simple lines it bore,
'Hence away, nor dare intrude,' &c."

Wonderfully simple lines, which we need not quote; but " sparry lustre" very happily describes the main characteristics of Rogers's poetry. Yet there is no false glitter about him, he has no purple patches: every thing is in perfect keeping. This is his highest claim to admiration, and, combined with the evenness and nicety of his versification, constitutes his great charm. His system of ornamentation is elaborate, but all is smoothed down into exquisite harmony of tone. To read him is like entering a perfectly well-furnished drawing-room,-there is an air of luxury and easy-chairs about him. Or you may compare it to rolling along a smooth road in a well-hung chariot, with a knowledge that the whole turn-out is unexceptionable: it is not that you pass through a particularly delightful country, or that the pace is exciting; it is partly the absence of all jar, but more the pleasurable self-identification with so finished an equipage.

Rogers prided himself on the pains he took, and very justly. No other man ever made so much of so small a poetical capital. "I was engaged on the Pleasures of Memory for nine years, on Human Life for nearly the same space of time, and Italy was not

completed in less than sixteen years." His genius was active, and his taste exacting. He wrote, he himself tells us, at the rate of four lines a day. His was not the exuberant fancy and wild luxuriance of language, which require the pruning of matured judgment and the cooler survey of a distant eye. His works did not lie by nine years to be thus judged: they were nine years in the crucible, having every phrase retraced and retouched, each epithet set in the best light, each foot in the line hammered over and weighed in the balance, and every paragraph taken to pieces and put together again. It was a painstaking process to make the most of a little. The gardeners talk of very "dressy grounds:" the Pleasures of Memory is a very "dressy" poem.

One inevitable consequence of all this pinching and pruning and transplanting is, that the connection between parts is obscured, the natural connecting-links broken; the sense is difficult to follow, and the poem assumes the form of ill-jointed fragments. A miscroscopic anxiety about details is not often combined with the power of commanding the larger proportions of a whole. "This little animal," says Mr. Rogers of the bee, "from the extreme convexity of her eye, cannot see many inches before her." Hence, while his verses flow with a wonderful smoothness and sweetness, and within certain limits a most agreeable variety of cadence, his meaning is by no means so quickly followed. The natural sympathy which, in all true poetry, obtains between the flow of the thought and the flow of the verse, and makes the two mutual interpreters one of the other, has been lost by frequent patching. The sense goes to the wall in these never-ceasing amendments. The assiduous self-criticiser has dwelt on the sentences so long, that a mere glance tells him the meaning they were appointed to convey; and he does not perceive that in the course of so many petty alterations it has become a good deal obscured to his readers. So often is this the case, that we defy any one to read Rogers's poetry correctly "at sight." The joints in the mosaic will infallibly trip him up. His defective composition arises often from an undiscriminating use of the parenthesis, and of the present participle in an absolute sense; but to analyse it would take us too far out of the way. Often it seems to have been arranged expressly to provide pitfalls for the reader. Almost any casual extract will serve to show that Mr. Rogers is not remarkable for lucidity of construction:

Again:

To each his place in the invisible world,—
To some an upper region, some a lower;
Many a transgressor sent to his account,
Long ere in Florence numbered with the dead;
The body still as full of life and stir

At home, abroad; still and as oft inclined
To eat, drink, sleep; still clad as others were,
And at noon-day, where men were wont to meet,
Met as continually; when the soul went,
Relinquished to a demon, and by him

(So says the bard, and who can read and doubt ?)
Dwelt in and governed."

"And let us from the top of Fiesole,

Whence Galileo's glass by night observed
The phases of the moon, look round below
On Arno's vale, where the dove-coloured steer
Is ploughing up and down among the vines,
While many a careless note is sung aloud,
Filling the air with sweetness-and on thee,
Beautiful Florence, all within thy walls,

Thy groves and gardens, pinnacles and towers,
Drawn to our feet.'

The ease of the reader, we are told, is secured by the labour of the writer. Mr. Rogers (except as far as his versification goes) is not an instance of this. Goldsmith seems to have served to some extent as his model in the Pleasures of Memory, as Gray and Milton (from whom he often borrows lines) undoubtedly did for the Ode to Superstition. Rogers was flattered when D'Este called him a child of Goldsmith; but those who are curious to note the contrast between easy natural painting and constrained, hampered, artificial enamel-work may read the Deserted Village and the Pleasures of Memory together.

Again, Rogers is neither a correct nor a precise writer. Few men have taken more liberties with the English language, or have been more easily content to pen a well-sounding phrase, without asking whether it represents a definite idea or carries a poetic impression that can be grasped by the imagination. Such an assertion may be thought to require proof. It is not difficult to find it. Begin at the beginning. Take the two first lines of the Pleasures of Memory: they bear evidence that he was not giving expression to a distinct imaginative conception existing in his own mind, but was putting words together:

"Twilight's soft dews steal o'er the village green,
With magic tints to Larmonise the scene.'

Now any poet might have said, and many have said, the dews steal down on to the green or elsewhere; but Rogers's object is to mend the language and say something a little new and per