The old poet received the correction, with much kindness, and thanked me for so effectually setting him right.  Indeed, this encounter was the groundwork of a long and to me advantageous friendship between us.  I soon discovered that it was the principle of his sarcastic wit not only to sacrifice all truth to it, but even all his friends, and that he did not care to know any who would not allow themselves to be abused for the purpose of lighting up his breakfast with sparkling wit, though not quite, indeed, at the expense of the persons then present.  I well remember, on one occasion afterwards, Mr. Rogers was entertaining us with a volley of sarcasms upon a disagreeable lawyer, who made pretensions to knowledge and standing not to be borne; on this occasion the old poet went on, not only to the end of the breakfast, but to the announcement of the very man himself on an accidental visit, and then, with a bland smile and a cordial shake of the hand, he said to him, “My dear fellow, we have all been talking about you up to this very minute,”—­and looking at his company still at table, and with a significant wink, he, with extraordinary adroitness and experienced tact, repeated many of the good things, reversing the meaning of them, and giving us the enjoyment of the double-entendre. The visitor was charmed, nor even dreamed of the ugliness of his position.  This incident gave me a painful and repugnant impression of Mr. Rogers, yet no doubt it was after the manner of his time, and such as had been the fashion in Walpole’s and Johnson’s days.

I should be unjust to the venerable poet not to add, that notwithstanding what is here related of him, be oftentimes showed himself the generous and noble-hearted man.  I think that in all my long acquaintance with him he evinced a kind of indirect regret that he had commenced with me in such an ugly attack on dear Keats, whose fame, when I went to England in 1838, was not only well established, but was increasing from day to day, and Mr. Rogers was often at the pains to tell me so, and to relate the many histories of poets who had been less fortunate than Keats.

It was in the year of the Reform Bill, 1830, that I first heard of the Paris edition (Galignani’s) of Keats’s works, and I confess that I was quite taken by surprise, nor could I really believe the report until I saw the book with the engraved portrait from my own drawing; for, after all the vicissitudes of Keats’s fame which I had witnessed, I could not easily understand his becoming the poet of “the million.”  I had now the continued gratification in Rome of receiving frequent visits from the admirers of Keats and Shelley, who sought every way of showing kindness to me.  One great cause of this change, no doubt, was the rise of all kinds of mysticism in religious opinions, which often associated themselves with Shelley’s poetry, and I then for the first time heard him named as the only really religious poet of the age.  To the growing fame of Keats