‘My dear Sir,—Many thanks for your beautiful present. Beautiful as it is, the scrap of your writing in
1 William Sotheby—translator of Wieland’s Oberon, of the Georgics, the Iliad, and the Odyssey, dramatist and poet, of whom Byron said that he imitated everybody and occasionally surpassed his models—had died on the 30th December, 1833, aged 76. |
| 88 | ROGERS AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES |
‘The poems, as far as I have yet examined them, are all such as I have long known and admired. I do not perceive anything new. But such a series of illustrations I never saw or expected to see. I used to say that if your “Italy” were dug up in some Pompeii or Herculaneum two thousand years hence, it would give to posterity a higher idea of the state of the arts amongst us than anything else which lay in an equally small compass. But Italy is nothing to the new volume. Everybody says the same. I am charged with several copies for ladies in India. How the publishers of the annuals must hate you. You have certainly spoiled their market for one year at least.
