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A WEEKLY JOURNAL OF POLITICS, LITERATURE AND NEWS,

EDWARD WHELAN]

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Chis is true Liberty, mhen Free-born Men, having to advise the Wublic, man speak free——evRIPIDEs.

~ [EDITOR axo PUBLISHER.

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MOON'S PHASFS.— OCTOBER, 1856.

First Quarter 7th day, Oh. 58in. morning. = W. Full Moon 13th day, 6h. 20m. evening. KE. Last Quarter 20th day, Lh.2jm. evening. Ww New Moon 23th day, 5h. Lim. evening. W. a ~~ “Literature.

lS IT COME? {The following poem attracted the attention of the Marquis of Lands- downe, and induced him to make a present of £100 to the authoress, Miss Frances Brown. ]

Is it come? they said on the banks of Nile Who look’d for the world’s long promised day, And saw but the strife of Egypt's toil W ith the desert sands and granite gray. Frora the pyramid, temple and treasured dead, We vainly ask for her wisdom’s plan: They tell of the slave and tyrants em Yet there was liope when that day began.

The Chaldee came with his starry lore, That built up Babylon's crown and ereed ; And bricks were stamped on the Tigris’ shore With sigus- which our sages scarce can read. Prom Ninus’ temple and Nimrod’s Tower The rate of the old East's empire spread Unreasoning faith and unquestioned power— But still, is it come? the Watcher suid.

The light of the Persian’s worshipped flame, The ancient bondage its splendor threw ; And once on the West a sunrise came, When Greece to her freedom’s trust was true. With dreams to the utmost ages dear, With human gods and godlike men, No marval the far-off day seemed near To eyes that looked through her laurels then.

The Romans conquered and revelled too, Till honowr and faith and power were gone, And deeper old Europe's darkness grew As wave after wave the Goth came on, The gown was learning, the sword was law, The pee} le served in the oxen’s stead But ever some gleam the watcher saw, And ever more, is it come ? they said.

,

Poet and Seer that question caught Above the din of life’s fears and frets: It marched with letters—it toiled with thought Through schools and creeds which the earth forgets : And statesmen trifle, and priests deceive, And traders barter our world away ; Yet hearts to that golden promise cleave, And still at times, Is it come ? they say.

The days of the nation bear no trace Of all the sunshine so far foretold :

The cannon speaks in the teacher’s place— The age is weary with work and gold ;

And higher hopes wither and memories wane— On hearth and altars the fires are dead ;

But that brave faith bath not lived in vain: And this is all that oar Watcher said.

——_— ¢ —ae@ »—-

(Prom the North British Review for August, 1856.)

SAMUEL ROGERS AND HIS TIMES.

Recollections of the Table Talk of Samuel Rogers. Second Edition. London, Moxon, 1856. ( Continued.)

In the industrial order of facts, at all events, Rogers, in the course of his ninety-three years of life, saw an immensely changed world. The very earth of Great Britain did not bear the samg herbs, the same grasses, the same fruits in the last years of bis life as it had borne when, as a boy, he first became acquainted with its surface. Where he had once known patches of forests, he at last found level pasture; where he had once known furze and morasses, he at last found plonghed land and waving corn-fields. In some districts, not only the colours of the vegetation, but the very features of the scenery had been changed by the labours of the sur- veyor and the miner. . During the first ten years of his life, the illiterate Brindley was astonishing England with his canals, and people were exulting in what seemed then the ne plus uitra im the art of laud-carviage and locomotion. With mail-coaches England was already tolerably familiar ; but Rogers was twenty-two years of age, and had his first volume of poems ready for the press, before any mail-coach ran on the road between London and Edinburgh. . The steam-engine aud all its applications came into being while Rogers was alive. It was in the very ycar of his birth that the Glasgow mechaniciaa Watt set about making bis first improved model of Newcomen’s clumsy contrivance; he had reached manhood before Watt aud Bouiton sont forth their perfected engines from their works at Soho; he was fifty years of age before steam-boats began to paddle in the rivers or along seading a steamer across the Atlantic, in spite of Dr. Lard- ner, was performed after Rogers was seventy-five; and it was during the last five-and-twenty years of his life that Britain was netted with railways. ‘The first balloon rose in the air when Logers was a youth of twenty; he had passed the prime of his life before gas began to supercede oil-lamps and linkboys in the streets of our cities; aud he was almost & nouagenarian, when the electric telegraph began to flash its messages from spot to spot, making the thoughts and seusations of every part of our island simultaneous, and promising to reduce the globe itself, for all purposes of intercommunication, within the compass of a walk of sixty minutes, And then, when we think of the expansion in his time of our various manufactures! He was in his fifth year when Hargreaves

when Arkwright left his barber’s shop in Preston to set up his roller-machinery in a will of his own; he was known as

e ccasts of LBritain or America; the miracle of

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on since his birth — London alone had more than tripled | In the fine arts Rogers was more in his element; for all|in wood. The ornaments on that mahogany sideboard and

| itself within the same period. When he was born, the popu- ‘lation of London was about 700,000; before he died, the

his life long he felt something more than the interest of an

ordinary dilettante in music, painting, sculpture and archi-

houses had crept over the green fields all round, so as to afford ‘tecture. In each of these arts, too, his time had produced

| accommodation for between two and three millions.

With all this progressive medley of facts, too, Rogers had /beea connected almost solely by the one accidental cireum- }stance that he had lived through it. Brindley would have constructed his canals; Arkwright would have developed the | cotton-manufactures; Watt would have invented his steam- jengime; gas would have come in, and railways would have _beeu made, all the same had there been no Rogers. Even

the reminiscences of the bard of Memory do not associate him much with this portion of the history of his times. He {remembered that cocked-hats used to be worn in his boyhood, land that he had himself, when grown up, walked in St. Paul's churchyard wearing a cocked-hat; he remembered the time

when umbrellas were rarities; he remembered being present

}at Lunardi’s first balloon-ascent in Eugland, when Fox had his pocket picked; and he doubtless remembered, as he went | to evening parties in his youth, seeing the sedan-chairs emit | their dowagers, and the boys extinguishing their smoking links | in those queer conical iron tubes which still form part of the | door-railings of the older houses in our street-squares. But, on the whole, his 7'a/le-talk does not seem to have abounded | with reminiscences of this kind. Such mechanical and in- dustrial improvements as came in his time, he seems to have jtaken for granted, not asking many questions about their origin, but enjoying them as a matter of course. The change, indeed, had been so gradual, that the old man of ninety, | travelling in a first class railway carriage, was probably quite jas techy, in case the speed was under thirty miles an hour, | a8 if that had been his accustomed rate of locomotion from his earliest infancy. Possibly, however, as a banker, Rogers may have had connexion with the industrial and commercial

| development of his time, which do not appear in memoirs of

| him as a poet.

The march of science in Rogers’s time was as wonderful as | the march of industrial enterprise; but Rogérs’s connection | with it was quite as slight. In mathematics, the differential aud intregal calculus, and the full development of the doc- trine of probabilities, may be considered—though he was innocent enough, we believe, of all concern with them—as -among the achievements of his time. In astronomy, the |planets, Uranus and Neptune, with no end of planetoids, comets, &e., came into sensible being while he was alive to hear the news; and, what with Herschel’s, what with Lord Rosse’s telescopes, the azure sphere of star-filled space brought within the ken of our earth before Rogers died, was 'a million times more vast, and a million times better searched, | than that which our keenest observatories could sweep when | Rogers was born. What had been done in his time in | General Physics, will be suggested if we remember such | uames as those of D’Alembert, Lagrange, Laplace, Hutton, | Leslie, Biot, Wollaston, Fresnel, Young, Fourier, Arago, Humboldt, Galvani, and Volta, all of them his earlier or later contemporaries. The science of electricity in any thing like its present extent of application and ramification, is a later thing on the earth than Rogers’s poetry; and modern chemistry was absolutely created while he was passing through

‘boyhood and manhood to his extreme old age. Black,

our earth into their elementary fumes when Rogers was learning his letters; Lavoisier, all his analyses and delicate weighings over, perished by the guiliotine when Rogers was receiving praises for his Pleasures of Memory; Davy was his junior by fifteen years, and closed his carecr while Rogers had twenty-six years longer to live; Dalton and his Atomic Theory were wholly contained within Rogers’s existence ; and he lived into the midst of the discoveries of Daguerre, and Liebig, and Dumas, and Faraday. Passing into the sciences of organic matter, we may next note, as asufficient indication of what had been accomplished in them, such facts as that Linneeus did not die till Rogers was in his sixteenth year; that Jussieu’s system and Gocthe’s botanical speculations came later; that Buffon and Hunter ended, and Blumenbach, and Cuvier, and St. Hilaire, and Oken, both began and ended their zoological and physiological researches while he was alive; and that Owen and others, still living, had made their fame before his decease. During his lifetime, too, the mixed science of Geology, with all its wonders, took its place in the system of our knowledge; Gall and Spurzheim tanght us to look at heads, and to connect character with brain and nerve ; and, continuing the experiments of Mesmer, another set of inquirers knocked a whole through the wall of the sensible and sub-tantial world in which we bad hitherto been dwelling, and revealed the phenomena, or the supposed phenomena of animal magnetism, somnambulism, and clairvoyance.

What little relation, whether in the way of observation, or of thought, Rogers had to the current of scientific discovery and investigation which thus rushed past him, and bore him on during his ninety-three years of life, will be best illustrated by one or two extracts from his Taéle-talk—almost the only seraps of this kind of allusion which the volume contains :—

Recollection of Priest/y.—* I was intimately aequainted with Dr. Priestly; and a more amiable man never lived; he was all gentleness, kindness and humility. He was once idining with me, when some one asked him (rather rudely) ‘how many books he had published?’ He replied, ‘ Many more, sir, than I should like to read.’ Before going to America, he paid me a visit, passing a night at my house. He left England chiefly in compliance with the wishes of his wife.”

| Cavendish and Priestly were tearing the solids and fluids of

much that was remarkable. In music, the world had, at the date of Rogers’s birth, but recently lost Handel; but Piccini, Cimarosa, Gluck, Haydn and Mozart, were at the height of their fame during his youth and manhood; and they were sueceeded by Beethoven, Weber, Bellini, Rossini, Men- delssohn, Chopin and Meyerbeer. Among British painters, after Hogarth, who died in 1764, Rogers could remember, as contemporaries, together or in succession, who had a}! died before him, such men as Sir Joshua Reynolds, Romney, West, Barry, Opie, Morland, Wilson, Gaiusborough, North- cote, Stothard, Lawrence, Wilkie, Etty, Collins and Turner ; while, as painters of a still larger generation, he left behind him many celebrated men, including the bold young pre- Raphaelities. {Sculptors in his day of British birth were Vlaxman, who was bora eight years before him, and who died when he had already passed his sixty-second year, and Chantrey, who, coming Jater, pre-deceased him by fourteen years; while, in the same art, the Continent had boasted in the same age of a Canova, Thorwaldsen, and a Dannecke. In architecture, Rogers had lived to hear of name after name, each name mentioned in connexion with some monument or building, the construction of which he could see going ov, and also to hear most of these names sentenced to oblivion, and Greek architecture run down and Gothic architecture exalted, in the criticism of Ruskin. Now, in all these arts, Rogers was himself a competent and cultured critic. To his latest day, he attended concerts and oratorios, aud found, like the Duke of Wellington, when he was nearly as old, a real pleasure in listening evening after evening to the Grisis and Linds and Albonis, whose divine voices thrilled in tbe same halls where he had in earlier days listened to voices equally divine, aud long since dumb in death; and to his latest day, in walking along the streets of the metropolis, he would look at new buildings with the eye of a connoisseur.

most signalized his love of art. From his youth upwards he sabenden picture sales and attended art-exhibitions; and his own collection of paintings and specimens of sculpture was as choice and various as any small private collection in Britain. Accordingly, his table-talk was peculiarly rich not only in reminiscences relating to the history of these two arts in his time, but also in remarks conveying judgments of his own respecting eminent painters and sculptors and their styles. Here are a few specimens :—

Reminiscences of Sir Joshua Reynolds.— 1 was present when Sir Joshua Reynolds delivered his last lecture at the Royal Academy. On entering the room L found that a semicircle of chairs immediately in front of the pulpit was reserved for persons of distinction, being labelled, ‘Mr. Burke,’ ‘Mr. Boswell,’ &¢., Kc; and I, with other voung men, was forced to station myself a good way off. During the lecture a great crash was heard; and tne company, fearing that the building was about to come down, rushed towards the door. Presently, however, it appeared that there was no cause for alarm,” [the editor says in a footnote that there was cause | for alarm, a beam having given way;] ‘and they endea-

who could first get them; and I, pressing forward, secured one of them. Sir Joshua concluded the lecture by saying, with great emotion— And I should desire that the last words which I should pronounce in this Academy and from this place might be the name of—Michacl Angelo.’ As he descended from the rostrum, Burke went up to him, took his hand, and said—

* The angel ended, and in Adam’s ear,

So charming left his voice, that he a while

Thought him still speaking, still stood fixed to hear.’ —What a quantity of snuff Sir Joshua took! I once saw him at an academy-dinner, when his waistcoat was absolutely powdered with it... . I can hardly believe what was told me long ago by a gentleman living in the Temple, who, however, assured ine that it was a fact. Ie happened to be passing by Joshua’s house in Leicester Square, when he saw a poor girl seated on the steps and crying bitterly. He asked what was the matter; and she replied that she was ‘erying ‘because the one shilling which she had received |from Sir Joshua for sitting to lim at a mode!, had proved to 'be a bad one, and he would not give her another.’ ”

English Art-Collections.—“ We have in England the finest series of pictures and the finest of sculptures in the world,—I mean the cartoons of Raphael and the Elgin marbles. Our national gallery is superior to any private collection of pictures in Italy,—superior, for instance, to the Doria and Borghese collections, which contain several very indifferent things, Perhaps the choicest private col- lection in this country is that at Panshanger, (Earl Cowper's ;) it is small, but admirable; what Raphacls, what Andrea del Sartes, what Claudes!”’

say, that among ‘painters there were three pre-eminent for invention —Giorgone, Rembrandt and Rubens ; and perhaps he was right. Sir Thomas Lawrence has painted several

very pleasing pictures of children ; but, generally, his men are effeminate, and his women weretricious.. Of his early portraits Sir Joshua Reynolds said—‘ That young man has a great deal of talent; but there is an affectation in his

style which he will never entirely shake off.’ ”

Recent English Painters.—" We have now in England

| But it was in painting and sculpture, as all know, that he! p + ’

| voured to resume their places; but, in consequence of the | confusion, the reserved seats were now occupicd by those |

Sir Thomas Lawrence.—*“ Sir Thomas Lawrence used to!

lon that stand, (in Mr. Rogers’s dining-room,) were carved by him. * * When he was at Rome in the height of his celebrity, he injured himself not a little by talking with contempt of the finest statues of antiquity. Jackson (the painter) told me that he and Chantrey wenf into the studio of Dannecke, the sculptor, who happened to be from home. There was an unfinished bust in the room; and Chantrey, taking up a chisel, proceeded to work upon it. One of the assistants immediately rushed forward, in great alarm, to stop him ; but no sooner had Chantrey given a blow on the chisel, than the man exclaimed, with a knowing look, *‘ Ha! ha !’—as much as to say, ‘I see you perfectly understand what you are about.’ Chantrey practised portrait-painting both at Sheffield and after he came to London. It was in allusion to him that Lawrence said, ‘ A broken-down painter will make a very good sculptor.’ ”’

After all, whether as reminiscence or as opinion, this is light enough ; and, uneless Mr. Dyce has failed to give a fair representation of Rogers’s talk, even on what were his favourite subiects, we can easily see that, neither in facts re- lating to the history of art in his day, nor in doctrines and conclusions appertaining to the theory of art, was the con- versation of Rogers by any means so rich as might have been expected from his reputation as an art-patron. Through- out the whole volume there is not a gleam of any real prin- ciple in art, in which Rogers was in the habit of propound- ing; Not a symptom of any such habit of research and generalization as pervades every page about art writtea, for exaniple, by Ruskin, And yet, evidently, Rogers’s taste for paiutings and statues was perfectly genuine. He liked to be surrounded by them; he had a quiet enjoyment of their beauties, which he could at least feel and avow, if he could not explain it; and he had preferences and dislikes, in matters of art, which, simply as the preferences and dis- likes of a man of fine perceptions, were entitled to respect. Probably his own lines in his Epistle to a Friend, inviting him to pay him a visit, express justly enough (though the kind of mansion pictured in them hardly comes up to the ireality of St. James’s Place) the nature and extent of Kogers’s pleasure in walks of art :

‘* Here no state-chambers in long line unfold,

Bright with broad mirrors, yourt with fretted gold ; Yet modest ornament, with use combined,

Attracts the eye to exercise the mind.

Small change of scene, small space his home requires, Who leads a life of satisfied desires,

What though no marble breathes, no canyas glows, From every poimt a ray of genius flows!

Be mine to bless the more mechanic skill

That stamps, renews and multiplies the will ;

And cheaply circulates thro’ distant climes,

The fairest relies of the purest times.

Here from the mould to conseious being start

Those finer forms, the miracles of art ;

Here chosen gems, imprest on sulphur, shine,

That slept fer ages in a second mine ;

And here the faithful graver dares to traco

A Michael's grandeur, and a Raphael’s grace * Thy gallery, Florence, gilds my humble walls ;

And my low roof the Vaticaa recalls !”’

There remains yet to be passed in review, in connection with the life of Rogers, that portion or department of the tiscellangous incident and activity of his age, with which his relations Were more intimate and peculiar than even with its Art—to wit, its Literature. Here, also mach came into being, attained its bloom, and again shed its seed for future growths, during the nivety-three years of Rogers’s pilgrim- age on earth. Let us feature more exactly what:came and went during those ninety-three years in this department also.

And, first, as regards the philosophy of this period, the literature of its highest speculative thoaght. Here, if we may so speak, there had been a complete cireuit of the clock, or even a circuit and a half, in Rogers’s lifetime. The latest names of eminence in British metaphysics at the date of his birth in 1763, were those of Bishop Berkeley, Bishop Butler and Dayid Hartley, all of whom had died within the ten preceding years. Then, as the chief representatives of British philosophy during the first thirty years of Rogers's life, there were the Scottish thinkers, Hume and Reid, and Adam Smith, with their less solid compatriots, Kames and Monboddo ; balanced somewhat inadequately in South Britain by such men as Priestley and Paley. Rogers was a boy of thirteen when David Hume died; but all the others here named lived till Rogers had reached manhood, and he was personally acquainted with Adam Smith and Monboddo, as well as with Priestley. After these men, too, had passed away in their generation, the metaphysical succession was kept up by Dugald Stewart and Jeremy Bentham, aod Mackintosh and Coleridge, and Thomas Brown and James Mill, all of whom were his coevals within a few years, and all of whom, after he had been on intimate terms with some of them, he survived twenty years or more. Thus Coleridge and Bentham both died in 1834. Lastly, ere he died, tue old poet was breathing an atmosphere charged with the philosophy of Sir William Hamilton and Carlyle, and the younger Mill, and many others with whose names, at least, as powers in the intellectual world, who had made their appearance when bis own career was all but finished, he must have been familiar. So much as regards the mere external history of the period of British philosophy which be had lived through. If we take into account the internal history ‘represented in such a series of facts and names, the impres- sion of what he did thus live through, will be much in- creased, In living through the period marked by such men

A physiological (?) notion of John Hunter's.—“ John|a greater number of tolerably good painters than ever | and names, he had, whether he kuew it or not, lived through Hunter believed that when there was only one daughter and | existed here together at any former period: but, ales, we one of those periods in the history of universal thought, in several sons in a family, the daughter was always of a mas-|have no Hogarth and no Reynolds! I must not, however, ‘which the old and ever-recurring battle between the two an- culine disposition; and that when a family consisted of forget that we have Turner,—a man of first-rate genius in| tagonistie philosophies which have divided men since the several daughters and only one son, the son was always/|his line. There is in some of his pictures a grandeur whiclr| beginning of the world, had been fought over afresh—nay,

effeminate. Payne Knight used to say that Homer seems to neither Claude nor Poussin could give to theirs. Turner | probably fougut Over twice—with a vigour unparalleled since had his house torn down about him by the Lancashire spinners have entertained the same idea; for in the Liliad we find that thinks that Ruben’s landscapes are deficient in xarwre. I the middle ages, and in forms of language quite new. The for inventing his spinnivg-jenny; he was but two years older | Dolon, who proves to be such a coward, was an only son, and differ from him. Indeed, there” [#.e., on the wall of Mr.

had several sisters.” Clairvoyance.—* When | was at Paris, I went to Alexis

/one extreme of his life, for example, rests in that epoch

| Rogers's dining-room] “is a proof that he is mistaken. when, out of the Anglo-Lvish Idealism of Berkeley, couuter- Look at that forest-scene by Rubeus: the foreground of itis.

acted, as it was, by the English sensatiopalism and incipient

& poet before Crompton was heard of ; and Heathcote’s inven- | and desired him to describe to me my house in St. James’s truth itself. The Art-Union is a perfect curse: it buys and materialism of Hartley, there bas already been bred the

tion did not come into use till he was an elderly man. Add to these inventions for textile fabrication, the endless later

|

Place. On my word, he astonished me! He described most | engraves very inferior pictures, and copseyuently encourages thorough-going Scottis scepticism of Hume; and when, | exnll the peculiarities of the stair-case,—and that not far mediocrity of talent; it makes young men, who have no) in order to restore faith, Hume’s countryman, Reid, has

modifications of them to adapt them to steampower, and the | from the window in the drawing-room there was a picture of genius, abandon the desk and counter, and set up for painters.” | already rushed, or, rather patiently trudged into the vacuum,

niyriads of machines devised to bring all the other processes |a man in armour, (the painting by Glorgone) &e. &e. Col. | H : st of universal manufacture in whatever material within the ;Gurwood, shortly before his death, assured me that he was sculptor of his day,—the neglect which he experienced is

Flazman and Canova.—* As to Flaxman, the greatest

reach of the same docile ageney ; and there is less difficulty | reminded by Alexisof some circumstances which had happened something inconceivable. Canova, who was well acquainted in understanding how it was that, whereas, at the time of |to him in Spain, and which he eould not conceive how any with his exquisite illustrations of Dante, ete., could hardly Rogers's birth, the entire population of the three British | human being, except himself, should know, Still I cannot believe that a man of such genius was not an object of ad-

islands did not exceed ten or eleven millions—before he died, it Was approaching thirty millions, and feeding colonies with the surplus. Not to speak of Manchester, Liverpool, Bir- mingham, Glasgow, and other large towas—all of them creations of the iudustial movement which had been going

believe in clairvoyance,—because the thing is impossible.” | Eyidently, the science of his time had little interest for | Rogers, when, from a volume of his 7ab/e-talk, all that can

Ibe selected bearing the slightest reference to scieutific topics, ‘ you see with your cars!”

‘ consists of one or two bits of gossip such as the aleve.

) Chantrey.—“ Chantrey began his career’ by being a carver

‘to feel for the solid rock and lay down, block by block, his philosophy of common sense, From that day forward, the true opposition in Britain is between the Scottish philosophy of Reid, and the native English sensationalism bequeathed ‘by Locke and Hartley, and working itself out slowly to its

'miration among his countrymen; and, in allusion to their final consequences. The two stiecams flow together, and insensibility to Flaxman’s merits, and to their patronage of inferior artists, he said to some of the English at Rome,

‘sometimes cross and intermix. Meanwhile, however, the | same great battle has been fighting itself, in other fo: ms, on ' the Continent. In Germany, Kant, roused as Reid had been in Scotland, to 2 defence of the faith in philosophy against

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