“The love of learning, the sequestered nooks,
    And all the sweet serenity of books.”

I shall not soon forget the first morning I walked with Procter and Kenyon to the famous house No 22 St. James Place, overlooking the Green Park, to a breakfast with Samuel Rogers.  Mixed up with this matutinal rite was much that belongs to the modern literary and political history of England.  Fox, Burke, Talleyrand, Grattan, Walter Scott, and many other great ones have sat there and held converse on divers matters with the banker-poet.  For more than half a century the wits and the wise men honored that unpretending mansion with their presence.  On my way thither for the first time my companions related anecdote after anecdote of the “ancient bard,” as they called our host, telling me also how all his life long the poet of Memory had been giving substantial aid to poor authors; how he had befriended Sheridan, and how good he had been to Campbell in his sorest needs.  Intellectual or artistic excellence was a sure passport to his salon, and his door never turned on reluctant hinges to admit the unfriended man of letters who needed his aid and counsel.

We arrived in quite an expectant mood, to find our host already seated at the head of his table, and his good man Edmund standing behind his chair.  As we entered the room, and I saw Rogers sitting there so venerable and strange, I was reminded of that line of Wordsworth’s,

    “The oldest man he seemed that ever wore gray hair.”

But old as he was, he seemed full of verve, vivacity, and decision.  Knowing his homage for Ben Franklin, I had brought to him as a gift from America an old volume issued by the patriot printer in 1741.  He was delighted with my little present, and began at once to say how much he thought of Franklin’s prose.  He considered the style admirable, and declared that it might be studied now for improvement in the art of composition.  One of the guests that morning was the Rev. Alexander Dyce, the scholarly editor of Beaumont and Fletcher, and he very soon drew Rogers out on the subject of Warren Hastings’s trial.  It seemed ghostly enough to hear that famous event depicted by one who sat in the great hall of William Rufus; who day after day had looked on and listened to the eloquence of Fox and Sheridan; who had heard Edmund Burke raise his voice till the old arches of Irish oak resounded, and impeach Warren Hastings, “in the name of both sexes, in the name of every age, in the name of every rank, as the common enemy and oppressor of all.”  It thrilled me to hear Rogers say, “As I walked up Parliament Street with Mrs. Siddons, after hearing Sheridan’s great speech, we both agreed that never before could human lips have uttered more eloquent words.”  That morning Rogers described to us the appearance of Grattan as he first saw and heard him when he made his first speech in Parliament.  “Some of us were inclined to laugh,” said