Eclectic Magazine of Foreign Literature, Science, and Art, February, 1885

IV

It was in the summer of 1844, a few days after the interment in Westminster Abbey of Thomas Campbell, the poet, author of the “Pleasures of Hope” and many other celebrated poems, that I received an invitation to breakfast with Samuel Rogers, to meet the Rev. Dr. Milman, the officiating clergyman on that solemn occasion. There were two other guests besides myself; the Rev. Alexander Dyce, well known as a commentator on Shakespeare, and Mr. Thomas Miller – originally a basket-maker – who had acquired considerable reputation as a poet and novelist and a hard-working man of letters.

Dr. Milman was at the time rector of St. Margaret’s – the little church that stands close to Westminster Abbey and interferes greatly with the view of that noble cathedral. He was afterwards Dean of St. Paul’s, and was known to fame as the author of the successful tragedy of “Fazio,” of many poetical volumes of no great merit, and of a “History of the Jews” and a “History of Christianity,” both of which still retain their reputation.

The conversation turned principally on the funeral of the poet, at which both Mr. Dyce and myself had been present. The pall-bearers were among the most distinguished men of the time, for their rank, their talent, and their high literary and political positions. They included Sir Robert Peel, Lord Brougham, Lord Campbell, the Duke of Argyll, the Earl of Strangford, and the Duke of Buccleuch, the last named the generous nobleman – noble in nature as well as in rank – who had offered, when a lad in his teens, to pay the debts of his illustrious namesake, Sir Walter Scott, when the great novelist had fallen upon evil days in the full flush of his fame and popularity. A long procession of authors, sculptors, artists, and other distinguished men followed the coffin to the grave. Many Polish exiles were conspicuous among them. As Dr. Milman pronounced the affecting words of the burial service, “ashes to ashes, dust to dust,” a Polish gentleman made his way through the ranks of mourners, and drawing a handful of earth from a little basket which he carried, exclaimed in a clear voice, “This is Polish earth for the tomb of the friend of Poland,” and sprinkled it upon the coffin. This dramatic incident recalled to my mind, as it no doubt did to that of other spectators, Campbell’s unwearied exertions in the cause of Poland, and of the indignant lines in the “Pleasures of Hope,”

Mr. Rogers, reminded, perhaps, of a grievance by the presence at the breakfast table of Dr. Milman, seemed to brood over an injustice that he thought had been done him with reference to the late poet. When Campbell, under the pressure of some pecuniary difficulty, complained of the scanty rewards of literature, and especially of poetry, Mr. Rogers was reported to have recommended him to endeavor to procure employment as a clerk. This was thought to be very unfeeling; but on this occasion Mr. Rogers explained to the whole company that he had been misunderstood, and that he had not meant any unkindness. “I myself,” he said, “was a clerk in my early days, and never had to depend upon poetry for my bread; and I only suggested that in Mr. Campbell’s ‘case,’ and in that of every other literary man, it would be much better if the writing of poetry were an amusement only and not a business.”

“No doubt,” said Mr. Dyce, “but men of genius are not always the masters of their own youth, and cannot invariably choose their careers or make choice of a profession which requires means and time to qualify for it. You, for instance, Mr. Rogers, when a clerk, were clerk to your father, and qualified yourself under his auspices for partnership in, or succession to the management of, his prosperous bank. Mr. Campbell had no such chances.”

“It is a large question,” said Dr. Milman. “The love of literature in a man of genius, rich or poor – especially if poor, is an all-absorbing passion; and shapes his life, regret it as we may. Literature has rewards more pleasant than those of money, pleasant though money undoubtedly is. If money were to be the ‘be-all’ and ‘end-all’ of life, it would be better to be a rich cheesemonger or butcher than a poor author. But no high-spirited, intelligent, and ambitious youth could be of this opinion and shape his life by it. Sensitive youths drift into poetry, as prosaic and adventurous youths drift into the army or the navy.”

“The more’s the pity,” replied Mr. Rogers, “as by drifting into poetry they too often drift into poverty and misery. I trust, however, you will all understand that the idle and the malevolent gossips did, and do me, gross unjustice when they say that I recommended Campbell to accept a clerkship rather than continue to rely upon poetry. I never thought of doing so. I merely expressed a general wish that every man of genius, not born to wealth, should have a profession to rely upon for his daily bread.”

“A wish that all men would agree in,” said Mr. Dyce, “and that after all had no particular or exclusive reference to Mr. Campbell. He did not find the literature which he adorned utterly unprofitable. He made money by his poetry and by his literary labor generally, besides gaining a pension of three hundred pounds per annum on the Civil List, and the society of all the most eminent men of his time, which he could not have done as a cheesemonger or a butcher, however successful he might have become in these pursuits.”

“These are all truisms,” said Mr. Rogers, somewhat sharply, as if annoyed. “What I complain of is that the world, the very ill-natured world, should have spread abroad the ridiculous story that I recommended Mr. Campbell, in his declining years, to apply for a clerkship.”

“I think no one believes that you did so,” said Dr. Milman, “or that you could have done so. Your sympathy with men of letters is well known and has been proved too often, not by mere words only, but by generous deeds, for such a story to obtain credence.”

“Falsehoods,” replied Mr. Rogers, still with a tone of bitterness, “are not cripples. They run fast, and have more legs than a centipede. I saw it stated in print the other day that I depreciate Shakespeare and think him to have been over-rated. I know of no other foundation for the libel than that I once quoted the opinion expressed of him by Ben Jonson, his dearest friend and greatest admirer. Though Ben Jonson called Shakespeare ‘the Swan of Avon,’

and affirmed that:

he did not hesitate to express the wish, in answer to one who boasted that Shakespeare had never blotted a line, ‘would to Heaven he had blotted a thousand.’ Ben Jonson saw the spots on the glorious face of the sun of Shakespeare’s genius, and was not accused of desecrating his memory because he did so; but because I quoted that very saying and approved of it, I have been accused of an act of treason against the majesty of the great poet. Surely my offence was no greater than that of Ben Jonson! If there were treason in the thought, it was treason that I shared with him who had said he loved Shakespeare with as much love as was possible to feel on this side of idolatry.”

“I think,” remarked Dr. Milman, “that such apparently malevolent repetitions of a person’s remarks are the results of careless ignorance or easy-going stupidity, rather than of positive ill-nature or a wilful perversion of the truth.”

“It is very curious,” said Mr. Dyce, “how very few people can repeat correctly what they hear, and that nine people out of ten cannot repeat a joke without missing the point or the spirit of it.”

“And what a widely prevalent tendency there is to exaggerate, especially in numbers. If some people see a hundred of anything, they commonly represent the hundred as a thousand and the thousand as ten thousand.”

“Not alone in numbers,” interposed Mr. Rogers, “but in anything. If I quoted Ben Jonson’s remark in relation to Shakespeare once only, the rumor spreads that I quoted it frequently; and so the gossip passes from mouth to mouth with continual accretion. Perhaps I shall go down to posterity as an habitual reviler and depreciator of Shakespeare.”

“Perhaps you won’t go down to posterity at all,” said Mr. Dyce, good-naturedly.

“Perhaps not,” replied Mr. Rogers, “but if my name should happen to reach that uncertain destination I trust I may be remembered, as Ben Jonson is, as a true lover of Shakespeare. But great as Shakespeare is, I don’t think that our admiration should ever be allowed to degenerate into slavish adoration. We ought neither to make a god of him nor a fetish. And I ask you, Mr. Dyce, as a diligent student of his works and an industrious commentator upon them, whether you do not think that very many passages in them are unworthy of his genius. If Homer nods, why not Shakespeare?”

“I grant all that,” replied Mr. Dyce, “nay more! I assert that many of the plays attributed to him were not written by him at all. And more even than that. Several of his plays were published surreptitiously, and without his consent, and never received his final corrections or any revision whatever. The faults and obscurities that are discoverable even in the masterpieces of his genius, were not due to him at all, but to ignorant and piratical booksellers, who gave them to the world without his authority, and traded upon his name. Some also must be attributed to the shorthand writers who took down the dialogue as repeated by the actors on the stage. It is curious to reflect how indifferent Shakespeare was to his dramatic fame. He never seems to have cared for his plays at all, and to have looked at them, to use the slang of the artists of our days, as mere ‘pot-boilers,’ compositions that brought him in money, and enabled him to pay his way, but in which he took no personal pride whatever.”

“His heart was in his two early poems – ‘Venus and Adonis,’ and the ‘Rape of Lucrece,’” said Dr. Milman, “the only compositions, it should be observed, that were ever published by his authority, and to which he appended his name. His sonnets, which some people admire so much – an admiration in which I do not share – were published surreptitiously, without his consent, and probably more than one-half of them were not written by him. Some of them are undoubtedly by Marlowe, and some by authors of far inferior ability. Shakespeare’s name was popular at the time; there was no law of copyright, and booksellers did almost what they pleased with the names and works of celebrated men; and what seems extraordinary in our day, the celebrated men made no complaint – most probably because there was no redress to be obtained for them if they had done so. The real law of copyright only dates from the eighth year of the reign of Queen Anne, 1710, or nearly a century after Shakespeare’s death.”

“But authors in those early days, even in the absence of a well-defined law of copyright,” said Mr. Miller, “received payment for their works; witness the receipt of John Milton for five pounds on account of ‘Paradise Lost’ – now in the possession of our host – and which we have all seen.”

“But that was long after the death of Shakespeare,” said Mr. Dyce, “and it does not appear that Shakespeare ever received a shilling for the copyright of any of his works. Perhaps he received gratuities from the Earls of Southampton and Pembroke, and the other rich young men about town, for whom it is supposed that he wrote many of his sonnets. That he also must have received considerable sums for his representation of his plays at the Globe Theatre is evident from the well-ascertained fact that he retired from theatrical business with a competent fortune and lived the life for some years of a prosperous country gentleman.”

As it has been asserted in my presence by an eminent literary man, within a month of the present writing, that Samuel Rogers systematically depreciated Shakespeare, and that he was above all things a cynic, I think it right, in justice to his memory, to repeat the conversation above recorded. Though it took place nearly forty years ago, I wrote down the heads of it in my notebook on the very day when it occurred; and by reperusal of it I have refreshed my memory so as to be certain of its accuracy. Mr. Rogers doubtless said very pungent and apparently ill-natured things in his time; no professed wit, such as he was, can always, or indeed very often, refrain from shooting a barbed dart either to raise a laugh and to strengthen an argument, or to dispense with one; but there was no malevolence in the heart, though there might appear to be some on the tongue, of Samuel Rogers. To love literature, and to excel in poetical composition, were unfailing passports to his regard, his esteem, and if necessary, his purse. One of the guests of the morning on which these conversations took place, and who bore his part in them, was a grateful recipient and witness of his beneficence. Thomas Miller, who began life as a journeyman basket-maker, working for small daily wages in the fens of Lincolnshire, excited the notice of his neighbors by his poetical genius, or it may have been only talent, and by their praises of his compositions, filled his mind with the desire to try his literary fortune in the larger sphere of London. He listened to the promptings of his ambition, came to the metropolis, launched his little skiff on the wide ocean of literary life, and by dint of hard work, indomitable perseverance, unfailing hope, and incessant struggles, managed to earn a modest subsistence. He speedily found that poetry failed to put money in his purse, and prudently resorted to prose. When prose in the shape of original work – principally fiction – just enabled him to live from day to day, he took refuge in the daily drudgery of reviewing in the Literary Gazette, then edited by Mr. Jerdan, a very bad paymaster. He had not been long in London before he made the acquaintance or Mr. Rogers, and after a period of more or less intimacy, received from that gentleman the good, though old, and as it often happens, the unwelcome advice that he should cease to rely wholly upon literature for his daily bread. As poor Miller could not return to basket-making – except as an employer of other basket-makers, for which he had not sufficient, or indeed any, capital – and as, moreover, he had no love for any pursuits but those of literature, he resolved, if he could manage it, to establish himself as a bookseller and publisher. Mr. Rogers, to whom he confided his wish, approved of it, and generously aided him to accomplish it, by the advance without security of the money required for the purpose. The basket-maker carried on the business for a few years with but slight success, and once informed me that he had made more money by the sale of note paper, of sealing-wax, of ink, and of red-tape, than he had made by the sale of his own works, or those of anybody else.

Mr. Rogers established another poet in the bookselling and publishing business, but with far greater success than attended his efforts in the case of the basket-maker. Mr. Edward Moxon, a clerk or shopman in the employ of Messrs. Longman, who wrote in his early manhood a little book of sonnets that attracted the notice of Mr. Rogers, to whom they had been sent by the author with a modest letter, became by the pecuniary aid and constant patronage of the “Bard of Memory,” one of the most eminent publishers of the time. He was known to fame as “the Poet’s publisher,” and issued the works not only of Mr. Rogers himself, but of Campbell, Wordsworth, Southey, Savage, Landor, Coleridge, and many other poetical celebrities. He also published the works of Ben Jonson, Marlowe, Beaumont and Fletcher, Peele, and other noted dramatists of the Elizabethan era.

The friendly assistance, delicately and liberally administered in the hour of need, by Samuel Rogers to the illustrious Richard Brinsley Sheridan is fully recorded in the life of the latter by Thomas Moore; that which was administered, though under less pressing circumstances, to Thomas Campbell, has found a sympathetic historian in Dr. William Beattie. Rogers, in spite of the baseless libel concerning Shakespeare, had not a particle of literary envy in his composition. His dislike to Lord Byron was not literary but personal, and is adequately explained – and almost justified – by the gross and unprovoked attacks which Byron directed against him. —Gentleman’s Magazine.

AN ACTOR IN THE REBELLION OF 1798