[In the following excerpt, Bishop, finding little of merit within Rogers's work, discusses the author's popularity.]

It would be idle to pretend that Rogers is a figure of importance, or one whose works literary fashion will some day rediscover. His poetry—and I have read most of it before considering myself entitled to make such a statement—is dead beyond much hope of resurrection. There was never a great deal of it, and it is one of the lasting miracles of literary history that upon so scanty a foundation he should have been able to rear so lofty a reputation. How this came about is, indeed, very much more interesting than the poetry itself. It is as a social portent that Rogers must chiefly concern us to-day; and as such a portent he is still, I think, remarkable.

His remarkableness, I may say, rests chiefly on the fact that there would seem to be hardly any figure in recent literature to whom may be found so many contemporary references which yet yield so little. Rogers knew everybody, and none of the memoirs of his time are without copious references to him. And yet, strangely enough, these references tell us next to nothing about him. There is the façade, of course, the impeccable house in St. James's Place with its Flaxman mantelpieces, its Giorgione Knight and its Bellini Doge; there are the literary breakfasts; there are the carefully prepared impromptu witticisms: but one may seek in vain behind this façade for the figure of the real man. After his death, and after the publication of Dyce's book and the Recollections, there was a longish period of silence before, in 1887-9, a Mr. P. W. Clayden, at the behest of the executors, deposited upon Rogers's memory three large and heavy volumes that were based upon his own papers and entitled, respectively, The Early Life of Samuel Rogers and Rogers and his Contemporaries in two volumes. These tomes, which are crammed with very carefully 'edited' original documents, are dedicated, for the most part, to the laudable end of demonstrating that Rogers was a virtuous and benevolent man, an important literary figure, a representative Dissenter and Whig. As a slight corrective to this impressive canonisation, a few acid references to him are to be found in Greville, in Creevey, in Carlyle, and in the Memoirs of Harriet Martineau, to say nothing of an exceedingly savage lampoon by Byron, if Byron in his most mordant vein may be taken as evidence. . . .

[From an early age Rogers] nourished literary aspirations. . . . [By] the time he was eighteen, Rogers had already contributed essays to the Gentleman's Magazine, and shortly after this he composed a comic opera called The Vintage of Burgundy, in the course of which his heroine was pursued by her lover in the guise, then deemed highly poetical, of an organ-grinder. At three-and-twenty he published his first poem, which somewhat resembled Gray's Bard and was entitled An Ode to Superstition; or, rather, it would be more accurate to say that he paid Cadell thirty pounds to publish it. This, from Cadell's point of view, was just as well, since by the end of four years only twenty copies of the work had been sold. Soon after this he contributed a poem, "On a Tear," to The World, the organ of the Della Cruscans. . . .

[There] should just be added the fact that, with the exception of his Jacqueline which was published jointly with Byron's Lara, Rogers [in the case of each publication] followed the method which he had employed with his earliest poem, and himself paid the expenses of publication. .. .

.. . And, indeed, little need be said now of these works [of Rogers] which, in Hazlitt's words, have "nothing like truth of nature, or simplicity of expression"; in proof of which he goes on to refer to Rogers's description, in his Epistle to a Friend, of that friend's icehouse, "in which Mr. Rogers has carried the principle of elegant evasion and delicate insinuation of his meaning so far, that the Monthly Reviewers mistook his friend's ice-house for a dog-kennel". Nevertheless, The Pleasures of Memory gauged the taste of the time to a nicety; it said nothing much, but it said it very smoothly, with the result that, by 1816, nineteen editions of it had been sold. As for Columbus, the last word may safely be left with Wordsworth: on being asked for his opinion of it, he replied, with crushing ambiguity: "Columbus is what you meant it to be." Human Life is perhaps the most readable of the longer flights, though even this Miss Mitford described as "one of those sort of poems which are very short and seem very long"; and Italy is certainly the most sustained and ambitious of them all. It must not, moreover, be forgotten that Italy, in the sumptuous Turner-illustrated edition which the author produced at a cost to himself of some £7,335 after the earlier, unillustrated (and anonymous) editions had proved a total failure ("It would have been dished," said Luttrell "but for the plates"), was the work that first directed the juvenile Ruskin's lively mind towards the scenery and architecture of Italy. There are, indeed, some good things in Italy, if one is prepared to dig for them, though most of them, oddly enough, are in prose. There is, preeminently, the famous note on Raphael's Transfiguration, upon which Rogers is reputed to have worked ceaselessly for a fortnight:

'You admire that picture,' said an old Dominican to me at Padua, as I stood contemplating a Last Supper in the Refectory of his Convent, the figures as large as the life. 'I have sat at my meals before it for seven and forty years; and such are the changes that have taken place among us—so many have come and gone in the time—that, when I look upon the company there—upon those who are sitting at that table, silent as they are—I am sometimes inclined to think that we, and not they, are the shadows'....

But when all is said and done, these poems have had their day and have achieved the purpose for which they were written. . . .

But before we utterly abandon Rogers as a poet . . . , is it quite impossible to find in all his collected works any lines that serve a little to justify his pretensions? I think we may do so in at least two cases. There are, first, the touching verses that he wrote as an epitaph on the robin-redbreast of Miss Johnes of Hafod:

Tread lightly here, for here, 'tis said,
When piping winds are hushed around,
A small note wakes from underground,
Where now his tiny bones are laid.
No more in lone and leafless groves,
With ruffled wing and faded breast,
His friendless, homeless spirit roves;
—Gone to the world where birds are blest!
Where never cat glides o'er the green,
Or school-boy's giant form is seen;
But Love, and Joy, and smiling Spring
Inspire their little souls to sing!

Really, well-known as it is, it is charming; and then, far less well-known are the brief lines called "Captivity," which Hookham Frere compared to a Greek epigram, and which I myself think, written by Rogers's own account as early as his 'teens, is a most unexpected forerunner of so pre-Raphaelite a matter as Tennyson's Mariana:

Caged in old woods, whose reverend echoes wake
When the hern screams along the distant lake,
Her little heart oft flutters to be free,
Oft sighs to turn the unrelenting key.
In vain! the nurse that rusted relic wears,
Nor moved by gold—nor to be moved by tears;
And terraced walls their black reflection throw
On the green-mantled moat that sleeps below.

Such lines were not very common as early as the 1780's; they seem almost to be the first stirrings of the great wind that was to blow through Christabel and Kubla Khan. . . .