SOURCE: "Samuel Rogers: The Last Augustan," in Augustan Worlds, edited by J. C. Hilson, M. M. B. Jones, and J. R. Watson, Barnes and Noble Books, 1978, pp. 281-97.

In the following essay, Watson discusses the sentimentality in Rogers's Augustan verse.

Samuel Rogers was born in 1763 and died in 1855. He was 20 years old when Johnson died (as a young man he was too timid to knock at the great man's door), and he lived to refuse the laureateship when it went to Tennyson; so not only did he live through the Romantic Period, but had one foot either side of it. From Augustan to Victorian, from Strawberry Hill to the Great Exhibition, from Reynolds (whom he heard lecture) to the Pre-Raphaelites—it is an extraordinary piece of longevity; and Rogers's general manner and appearance, his precise and formal conversation, confirmed the nineteenth-century impression that he was some kind of...