I believe that for a time there was something very like a feud between those two Whig wits, Samuel Rogers and Sydney Smith, and that there was never very much cordiality in their friendship. The parson had forestalled the banker in some bons mots, and old Sam was exceedingly jealous of other men’s success in society, and was always so peevish and irritable. I have heard him say exceedingly ill-natured things of the author of the “Plymley Letters.” For example, he one night told Count Pecchio, myself, and two or three others, that Sydney’s father was a bum-bailiff by profession, and a very low fellow. On reporting this to W. S. Rose, he said: “That is so like Rogers! He knows as well as I do that Sydney’s father was a gentleman, but he fancied that you might not know this, and so take his fib for a fact.”
Rogers had brought out another most choice and
costly edition of his poems, in which were inserted several new pieces. The book was lying
on the drawing-room table, and among others Sydney
took it up. “What’s this?” cried he with a chuckle.
“What’s this? ‘Lines written at Paestum’? Why, here is a poem of some two hundred
lines! If written at Paestum Rogers must have stayed a
tremendously long time in that bare and very unhealthy place!” Mr. Hallam said that W. S.
Rose was there with him. The wit in orders turned to
Rose, and asked how long he and Rogers had
stayed at Paestum?
| 46 | SAMUEL ROGERS | [CHAP. V |
In good humour, in good temper, and in readiness of real wit, I should say that the parson was worth twenty of the banker. Rogers could bear neither children nor dogs; Smith was very fond of both, as every good-natured man must be. I have seen children, as well as dogs, resent old Sam’s unkind antipathies, for both know by instinct those who like and those who dislike them. I have often wondered how the poet’s calves could be safe in walking up the Haymarket.
When the author of “Méditations Poétiques” came over to
London, Prince Talleyrand, then Ambassador, invited,
among other English poets, the Bard of Memory to
meet him. The two bards sat down to dinner side by side, but did not at all cotton. As
Lamartine was, as yet, a scarcely converted
Carlist and Legitimist, and was all for Royalty, Authority, and aristocratical forms of
government, he could not have been in good odour at Holland House; and as
Rogers took his cue from that Tabernacle, it may be supposed that
he was not very cordial with his brother-poet. At a jerk, he asked
Lamartine if he knew Béranger. “No, sir!” said
Lamartine. “And I never would know or associate with a man of
his revolutionary, republican principles! I would rather walk five miles out of the way
than meet such a man.” “And I,” said
Sam, “would walk
| CHAP. V] | MEETING WITH LAMARTINE | 47 |
Now, considering that Lamartine confidently held himself to be by far the greatest poet then in the world, this was rather sharp and hard of Rogers. But, as regards Lamartine’s subsequent political gyrations, this little anecdote is worth preserving. The two poets did not fight, but up in the drawing-room they got into opposite, if not antagonistic, corners. I heard Rogers himself tell the story by dear Rose’s fireside at Brighton; and such was his obtuseness in certain things that he did not seem in the least aware that he had offered an affront to Lamartine.
When a man once gets an established reputation as a sayer of smart things, it is astounding what platitudes he may emit, with the certainty that they will be taken up and cried over half the town. There are always so many who cannot discriminate between a good joke and a bad one, and who are always so glad to repeat somebody’s “last.” In former days there was a certain friend, whom I will not denote even by initials, who had this failing to excess. On arriving at a dinner party, he said, before he could sit down, “Have you heard old Sam Rogers’ last?” We had not. “Well, I had it from him yesterday morning at breakfast. ‘I hear,’ said the poet, ‘that they are talking of erecting a statue to Tommy Campbell in Westminster Abbey, and of setting it up on a high and firm pedestal. Now you and I and all the town know that for the last fifteen years of his life Tommy was seldom able to stand steadily on his own feet.’”
The friend laughed at his own repetition; but the jest did not find favour with us. We thought it as dull as it was uncharitable. Yet I believe that Rogers had attended Campbell’s funeral in the Abbey, and that he had begun to write some pathetic verses on it.
| 48 | SAMUEL ROGERS | [CHAP. V |
The old poet was exceedingly fastidious and critical about dinners, cooking, laying out a table, and waiting; as indeed he was about everything else that came home to him, or in any way concerned himself. There was a fat, strutting, pompous rector and schoolmaster at Brighton, who took it into his head to give occasionally a grand, crowded, full-dress dinner party, without having either the proper means or appliances or the good taste and substantial knowledge requisite to the direction of such affairs. One morning, at Rose’s, the banker-poet told us that he had been invited to one of these banquets; and he seemed to think the rector had taken a great liberty in inviting him. “Shall you go?” said Rose. “I suppose I must,” said Rogers, “for this is the third time of asking.”
We met him on the Steyne the day after the feast. “Well, Rogers,” said Rose, “how did it come off?” “Hem!
Hum!” “Had you a good dinner?” “No!”
“Had you good wines?” “No!” “Had you
good company?” “No!” “Then what had
you?” “Why,” said old Sam, slightly
elevating his nostrils, and speaking slowly and emphatically, “I will tell you
what we had. We had nine red-faced bumpkins dressed out as footmen to wait at table,
and every clod-pole of them had a pair of scorching scarlet red plush breeches, a pair
of thick, coarse white cotton gloves, and a napkin under his arm as big as a
breakfast-tablecloth. Something more I had to my own private account. I had some soup
poured down the nape of my neck by one of the parson’s masquerading
ploughboys!” The author of the “Pleasures of Memory” would not soon forget, or
cease to talk about, the rector’s grand dinner. His wrath, his spite, in this brief
description of it, were very amusing. The reverend rector, as was his custom, inserted a
list of his guests in the “Fashionable Intelligence” of a Brighton newspaper,
taking care to put the name of the distinguished poet at the
| CHAP. V] | COLERIDGE AND LORD WARD | 49 |
I have often remarked that the English are the only people that advertise their own hospitalities in weekly newspapers. In this instance, I rather wished that the advertiser could hear what one of his guests said of the dinner. Rogers’ account might have done the rector moral and spiritual good, by rebuking his pomposity, and by wounding his conceit and pride. Yet I am not sure: “a fool at sixty is a fool indeed,” and likely to remain so through the remainder of his days.
Lord Ward, like all or most men of intellect and taste,
liked to know all his contemporaries who were distinguished by their taste or genius.
Moving in the society to which he belonged, and being a frequent looker-in at John Murray’s, he of course knew all the literary
men who were worth knowing; but poor Coleridge for
many years of his life was very much of a recluse, being perched up on the Highgate fork of
the London bi-forked Parnassus, and him his lordship had never met. He expressed his regret
to Lord Dover, who arranged a meeting at a very quiet,
small dinner party, providing—a rather necessary provision—for
Coleridge’s descent to Whitehall, and for his return to
Highgate. The philosopher and bard arrived, with his laudanum bottle in his pocket, ate
very little dinner, sipped a glass or two of wine, took another glass suspected to have
been nearly all diluted laudanum, and then went off at score into a monologue which lasted
the remainder of the dinner, the whole of the dessert, and for nearly an hour after. Nobody
interrupted him, as nobody could have cut across his torrent of talk without being washed
away. Lord Dover, who had had former experience, seemed
| 50 | SAMUEL COLERIDGE | [CHAP. V |
I never could boast of a surplus stock of patience; I never could have understood the half of Coleridge’s ultra-German, transcendental philosophy, but I could find high poetry in it, and could have listened to it—in the winter season when nights are long—from sunset till midnight. I met him but seldom, and then not in his best days—far from that; but each time I was astonished and delighted while I was with him, and left him with a perhaps unpleasant bewilderment or swimming of the head, but with an innermost persuasion that I had been, not talking with, but hearing talk, a wondrous man. My friend G. L. Craik, who saw him more frequently, and who was incomparably more of a metaphysician than I, has told me that he always left Coleridge with the same impression. The awful thing was to hear a second or third hand repetition of Coleridge’s theories and splendid dreams. Those from poor, kind, thoroughly good—at least as far as regarded Coleridge—Mr. Gillman, the medical practitioner at Highgate, in whose house the philosopher and bard lived for so many years, and in whose house he died, were almost enough to make one jump out of the window, or to cry out, with Lord Ward, summum bore-em! Nor do I think that the matter came very much mended from the lips of Coleridge’s bosom friend, and for a long time my near neighbour, Joseph Green, the eminent surgeon and pre-eminent German scholar and metaphysician, and the man whom Coleridge appointed to be his chief literary executor.
I intend to return to the subject of the illustrious Coleridge—and illustrious he was in spite of every
drawback—but I have broken many an intention, and
| CHAP. V] | KINDNESS TO YOUNG MEN | 51 |
His discourse was best described by Stewart Rose, who called it “rapt talk.”
“And these ‘ribbed sands’ was Coleridge pleased to face, While ebbing seas have hummed a rolling bass To his rapt talk.” W. S. Rose:
Rhymes, 1837. |
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