GEORGE MORLAND. THE “BULL INN” HIGHGATE.
Perhaps more interesting than either of these, from a literary standpoint, is the house of Samuel Rogers, 22 St. James’s Place, overlooking the Green Park. You can scarcely open the memoirs of any man of letters of his time, but you may read some account of a breakfast or a dinner at Rogers’s. “What a delightful house it is!” says Macaulay. “It looks out on the Green Park just at the most pleasant point. The furniture has been selected with a delicacy of taste quite unique.... In the drawing-room the chimney-pieces are carved by Flaxman into the most beautiful Grecian forms. The bookcase is painted by Stothard, in his very best manner, with groups from Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Boccaccio. The pictures are not numerous, but every one is excellent. The most remarkable objects in the dining-room are, I think, a cast of Pope, taken after death by Roubiliac; a noble model in terra-cotta by Michael Angelo, from which he afterwards made one of his finest statues, that of Lorenzo de Medici; and, lastly, a mahogany table on which stands an antique vase. When Chantrey dined with Rogers some time ago he took particular notice of the vase and the table on which it stands, and asked Rogers who made the table. ‘A common carpenter,’ said Rogers. ‘Do you remember the making of it?’ said Chantrey. ‘Certainly,’ said Rogers, in some surprise; ‘I was in the room while it was finished with the chisel, and gave the workman directions about placing it.’ ‘Yes,’ said Chantrey, ‘I was the carpenter.’” Byron, who was a guest at Holland House and at Lady Blessington’s, was a frequent guest at Rogers’s table also. It was Rogers who introduced him to Miss Milbanke, the unfortunate lady who was to become his wife; and Byron seems by turns to have admired him, disliked him, and looked upon him with a sort of laughing contempt. “When Sheridan was on his deathbed,” he writes, “Rogers aided him with purse and person: this was particularly kind in Rogers, who always spoke ill of Sheridan (to me, at least); but indeed he does that of everybody. Rogers is the reverse of the line ‘The best good man with the worst-natured Muse,’ being ‘The worst good man with the best-natured Muse.’ His Muse being all sentiment and sago, while he himself is a venomous talker. I say ‘worst good man,’ because he is (perhaps) a good man—at least he does good now and then, as well he may, to purchase himself a shilling’s worth of Salvation for his Slanders. They are so little, too—small talk, and old womanny; and he is malignant too, and envious.”
ROGERS. ST. JAMES’S PLACE. FROM GREEN PARK.
Rogers had a fine head, a distinguished manner, a bland, silky way of saying the most cutting and cynical things. He was not so much a poet as a banker of a poetical temperament. His poetry will presently be forgotten, but his breakfasts and his dinners will be remembered because he lived to be well over ninety, was a very wealthy man of taste, and had the will and the means to play the generous host to some three generations of the wisest, wittiest, greatest men of his era, and several of them said brighter and better things in his dining and drawing-rooms than he ever wrote in his books. He covered such a long span of time that he could entertain Sheridan, who was born in 1751, and Dickens, who died in 1870. Many of the same glorious company had a meeting-place also until a more recent day at Bath House, Mayfair, where Lady Ashburton, the great friend of the Carlyles, held famous receptions, of which Carlyle himself and the Brookfields have left us reminiscences. And the invaluable Allingham has one or two notes about her in his Diary; one dated 5th November 1875, in which he says Carlyle passed his house “about four to-day. I overtook him in the Fulham Road, and walked with him to Lady Ashburton’s door at Knightsbridge. He said, ‘Browning in his young days wore a turn-down shirt collar with a ribbon for a necktie, and a green coat. I first met him one evening at Leigh Hunt’s, a modest youth, with a good strong face and a head of dark hair. He said little, but what he said was good.’” Possibly the talk fell upon him because Browning was among the guests he was to meet that day at Lady Ashburton’s.
BORROW’S HOUSE. HEREFORD SQUARE.