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Lamb said, 'gallops like a traveller, as it should do,' and is a form which we can read to-day more easily than those couplets out of which Rogers confesses that he got with so much difficulty. Wordsworth found in it 'rather too strong a leaning to the pithy and concise'; but Rogers does not aim appreciably higher than prose, and is wise in not doing so. 'Happy should I be,' he says, 'if by an intermixture of verse and prose, of prose illustrating the verse and verse embellishing the prose, I could furnish my countrymen on their travels with a pocketcompanion.' Was not an aim so humble more than attained when Ruskin, in his 'Præterita,' confessed that it was the birthday gift, at the age of thirteen, of Rogers' 'Italy' that 'determined the main tenor of his life'?

To go to Italy was for Rogers to make a pilgrimage to his Holy Land. In his epilogue he says:

'Nature denied him much,

But gave him at his birth what most he values;
A passionate love for music, sculpture, painting,
For poetry, the language of the gods,

For all things here, or grand or beautiful.'

It is the idolater of art who writes to a friend from Venice: 'Oh, if you knew what it was to look upon a lake which Virgil has mentioned, and Catullus has sailed upon, to see a house in which Petrarch has lived, and to stand upon Titian's grave as I have done, you would instantly pack up and join me.' His poem is the warm direct record of this enthusiasm; only, the verse is less warm than the prose, the sentiment cools a little in its passage into verse, the sharp details of the journal are softened, generalised, lose much of their really poetical substance. When Byron went on the grand tour, much less impressed really than Rogers by what he saw, he transfigured all these things in some atmosphere of his own, and 'Childe Harold' is a bad guide-book, and not always an honest or intelligent comment of the observer, but at least a very startling and personal poem. Rogers will put into his notes or prose

interludes such a vigorous utterance as this: 'When a despot lays his hand on a free city, how soon must he make the discovery of the rustic, who bought Punch of the puppet-show man, and complained that he would not speak'! Turning to the verse, you find vaguer epithets or a fainter discourse, as in the inexpressive lines which call forth that beautiful and significant note (which Rogers says he wrote ten times over before he was satisfied with it) on the Dominican at Padua, who, looking on his companions at the refectory table and then at the Last Supper fading off the painted wall, was 'sometimes inclined to think that we, and not they, are the shadows.' Had he but realised it, it is as a prose-writer that Rogers might have lived.

Rogers was a man of letters, and holds a position in the history of letters in England, almost apart from the actual quality of his work. This 'grim old dilettante, full of sardonic sense,' as Carlyle called him, was the typical man of taste of his time: 'his god was harmony,' Mrs. Norton said of him. His house was as carefully studied as his poems, and as elaborately decorated; the Giorgione 'Knight in Armour,' now in the National Gallery, was one of his pictures. Byron paid Rogers many extravagant compliments, but he was defining him very justly when in 'Beppo,' he classed him with Scott and Moore as 'Men of the world, who know the world like men.' He was not a great talker, but he had and deserved a reputation for neat, not always amiable, wit. 'They tell me I say illnatured things,' he said to Sir Henry Taylor. 'I have a very weak voice; if I did not say ill-natured things no one would hear what I said.' He was a benefactor to Wordsworth, to Campbell, to Sheridan, to Moore; a peacemaker among poets; a friend to men of genius and children. It was written of him by one of his guests: 'I suppose there is hardly any hero or man of genius of our time, from Nelson or Crabbe downwards, who has not dined at Rogers' table.' He loved beauty, and honoured genius, perhaps beyond any man of his time.

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HENRY LUTTRELL was described by Lady Blessington as a talker who makes one think, and by Byron as the most epigrammatical conversationalist whom he had ever met. No one, said Rogers (of whom he had said wickedly, speaking of his 'Italy,' that it would have dished but for the plates), could stick in a brilliant thing with greater readiness. His 'Advice to Julia' and, in a less degree, 'Crockford House? are typical of the intelligent and observant man about town. The Julia letters are written fluently, and respond to the motto from Rousseau: 'J'ai vu les mœurs de mon tems, et j'ai publié cette lettre.' Luttrell's brilliant society verses have their smaller place between Gay and Praed, perpetuating some of his finest qualities as a wit and talker.

CAROLINA, LADY NAIRNE (1766-1845) 2

LADY NAIRNE was one of the many 'restorers' of old Scottish songs. She began by writing 'words suited for refined circles,' which were to replace the original words in a collection of national airs, called 'The Scottish Minstrel,' published in six volumes, from 1821 to 1824. Her admiration of Burns showed itself in the desire to publish a 'purified' edition of his songs. But she found that 'some of his greatest efforts of genius,' having 'a tendency to inflame the passions,' 'would n't do,' would n't be purified, that is; and the edition was happily abandoned. How far her desire to introduce 'words suited for refined circles' contributed to the artistic bettering of the songs which she restored may remain questionable. But there is no question of the merit of her own

1 (1) Lines on Ampthill Park, 1819. (2) Advice to Julia, a letter in Rhyme, 1820. (3) A Letter to Julia, 1822. (4) Crockford House, 1827. 2 (1) Lays from Strathearn, 1846. (2) Life and Songs, 1869.

songs, whose authorship she concealed during the main part of her life. Her sense of form was generally sure, she had a firm grasp on the ballad-metre, and a personal originality, in which ready humour and womanly feeling were mingled. The Jacobite songs are rarely without a light gallop of their own; there is a delightful sly chuckle in 'The Laird of Cockpen'; and 'Caller Herrin',' the best of all her songs, is a sad and gay fisherwomen's song with a changing rhythm always in tune. The most famous of her poems, 'The Land o' the Leal,' is the expression of a sentiment verging upon sentimentality; but something, perhaps in the slow, monotonous cadence of the verse, has helped to keep it alive, like an old tune in the memory.

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD (1766-1823) 1

ROBERT BLOOMFIELD was born at Honington, a village near Bury St. Edmunds, on December 3, 1766; he was the son of a tailor, and though for a short time a 'farmer's boy,' was too sickly for the work, and was sent to work at tailoring in a London garret. 'The Farmer's Boy,' written in another garret after his marriage, was published in 1800, and nearly thirty thousand copies of it were sold in three years. Bloomfield was lionised, patronised, and then left to himself, when, says Mr. Bullen in the Dictionary of National Biography, ‘having now become hypochondriacal and half blind, he retired to Shefford, where he died in great poverty on 19 August, 1823, leaving a widow and four children. Had he lived longer he would probably have gone mad.'

When Lamb said that Bloomfield had 'a poor mind' he has sometimes been taken to mean no more than a rather cruel

1 (1) The Farmer's Boy, 1800. (2) Rural Tales, Ballads and Songs, 1802. (3) Good Tidings; or News from the Farm, 1804. (4) Wild Flowers, 1806. (5) The Banks of the Wye, 1811. (6) May-Day with the Muses, 1822. (7) Hazlewood Hall; a Village Drama, 1823. (8) Works, 1824.

pun. But the epithet is strictly just. At his best he goes no further than a stiff and good-humoured realism; his point of view is anecdotal; the language is on the village level or is strained to a formal fitness; never is there an original epithet. a touch of illumination. In his homely ballads he uses his material in the strict manner of prose, getting nothing from his form; his stories never go beyond triviality; his songs have the yokel's simper. Addressing his 'old oak table,' he says that on it

'I poured the torrent of my feelings forth,
Conscious of truth in Nature's humble track,

And wrote "The Farmer's Boy" upon thy back.'

But the detail of 'The Farmer's Boy,' which is copious, is diluted or disguised by a vague acquired manner, which tries to give a traditional turn to what can only interest us if it is set down frankly, as Clare set it down. How preferable is Clare's

'Hodge whistling at the fallow plough'

to Bloomfield's gibe:

'His heels deep sinking every step he goes,

Till dirt adhesive loads his clouted shoes.'

The writer of those lines was trying to write elegantly.

JOHN HOOKHAM FRERE (1769-1846)1

JOHN HOOKHAM FRERE was a politician and scholar, who, in the intervals of a fastidious and unambitious career, found time to do certain poems and translations of an unique kind,

1 (1) Prospectus and Specimen of an intended National Work, by William and Robert Whistlecraft, of Stowmarket in Suffolk, Harness and Collar Makers, 2 vols., 1817, 1818. (2) The Monks and the Giants (same as above), 1821. (3) Fables for Five-Year Olds, 1830. (4) The Frogs, 1839. (5) Aristophanes, a Metrical Version of the Acharnians, the Knights, and the Birds, 1840. (6) Theognis Restitutus, 1842. (7) Psalms, 1848. (8) Works, 3 vols., 1874.

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