Friend,’ published in 1798. In 1802 he took advantage of the peace of Amiens to pay a visit to Paris, which exercised an important influence upon a taste which had been slowly growing up in him—that for art. With this he had been inoculated about 1795 by his brother-in-law, Sutton Sharpe, the friend of many painters; and he had already, in 1800, been concerned with others in bringing over the Orleans gallery to England. By 1802 the victories of Bonaparte had filled the Louvre with the artistic spoils of Italy, and Rogers's prolonged studies made him one of the first of connoisseurs. He proved his taste in the following year by building for himself a house in St. James's Street, Westminster, overlooking the Green Park. Flaxman and Stothard took a share in the decoration, but all details were superintended by Rogers, who proceeded to adorn his mansion, modest enough in point of size, with pictures, engravings, antiquities, and books, collected with admirable judgment. His younger brother, Henry, now relieved him almost entirely of business cares, and he henceforth lived wholly for letters, art, and society. Except for the absence of domestic joys, which he afterwards lamented, his position was enviable. He had won, in the general opinion, a high place among the poets of his age, not indeed without labour, for no man toiled harder to produce less, but with more limited productiveness than any poet of note, except the equally fastidious Gray and Campbell. He might have found it difficult to maintain this position but for the social prestige which came to him at a critical time through his new house and his refined hospitality. ‘Rogers's first advances to the best society,’ says Mr. Hayward, ‘were made rather in the character of a liberal host than of a popular poet.’ Gradually he came to be regarded as a potentate in the republic of letters. Except when violent political antipathies intervened, every one sought his acquaintance; and the more age impaired his originally limited productive faculty, the more homage he received as the Nestor of living poets. Apart from the exquisite taste, artistic and social, which distinguished both his house and the company he gathered around him, his influence rested mainly upon two characteristics, which at first sight seemed hardly compatible—the bitterness of his tongue and the kindness of his heart. Everybody dreaded his mordant sarcasm; but everybody thought first of him when either pecuniary or personal aid was to be invoked. When some one complained to Campbell of Rogers's spiteful tongue, ‘Borrow five hundred pounds of him,’ was the reply, ‘and he will never say a word against you until you want to repay him.’ Campbell did not speak without warrant; his experience of Rogers was equally honourable to both poets.
The history of Rogers's life henceforth, apart from his travels and the gradual growth of his art collections, is mainly that of his publications and of his beneficent interpositions in the affairs of clients and friends. The latter are more numerous than his verses. He soothed the last illness of Fox; he was the good angel of the dying Sheridan; he reconciled Moore with Jeffrey, and negotiated his admission as a contributor to the ‘Edinburgh Review;’ under his roof the quarrel between Byron and Moore was made up; he procured Wordsworth his distributorship of stamps by a seasonable hint to Lord Lonsdale; he obtained a pension for Cary (the translator of Dante, who had renounced his acquaintance), and regulated as far as possible the literary affairs of that impracticable genius, Ugo Foscolo. In comparison with these good deeds the acerbity of his sarcasms appears of little account. Sometimes these were prompted by just resentment, and in other cases it is usually evident that the incentive to their utterance was not malice, but inability to suppress a clever thing. It would no doubt have been an ornament to Rogers's character if he had possessed in any corresponding measure the power of saying amiable and gracious things, and his habitually censorious attitude fully justified the remark of Moore, a sincere friend, not unconscious of his obligations: ‘I always feel that the fear of losing his good opinion almost embitters the possession of it.’ How generous Rogers could be in his estimate of the productions of others appears from his declaration to Crabb Robinson, that every line of Wordsworth's volume of 1842, not in general very enthusiastically admired, was ‘pure gold.’ He could be equally kind to young authors coming into notice, such as Henry Taylor. So unjust was Lady Dufferin's remark that he gave what he did not value—money—but withheld what he did value—praise. Rogers's poems met with respectful treatment from his contemporaries, Byron, in particular, claiming him, with several other much stronger poets, as a champion of sound taste against the Lake school, now a conspicuous example of a verdict reversed.
His first production of importance after settling in Westminster was his fragmentary epic on ‘Columbus’ (1810, but privately printed two years earlier). The subject was
