For Longfellow’s poems, then just published in England, he expressed the warmest admiration, and thought the author of “Voices of the Night” one of the most perfect artists in English verse who had ever lived.

Rogers’s reminiscences of Holland House that morning were a series of delightful pictures painted by an artist who left out none of the salient features, but gave to everything he touched a graphic reality.  In his narrations the eloquent men, the fine ladies, he had seen there assembled again around their noble host and hostess, and one listened in the pleasant breakfast-room in St. James Place to the wit and wisdom of that brilliant company which met fifty years ago in the great salon of that princely mansion, which will always be famous in the literary and political history of England.

Rogers talked that morning with inimitable finish and grace of expression.  A light seemed to play over his faded features when he recalled some happy past experience, and his eye would sometimes fill as he glanced back among his kindred, all now dead save one, his sister, who also lived to a great age.  His head was very fine, and I never could quite understand the satirical sayings about his personal appearance which have crept into the literary gossip of his time.  He was by no means the vivacious spectre some of his contemporaries have represented him, and I never thought of connecting him with that terrible line in “The Mirror of Magistrates,”—­

    “His withered fist still striking at Death’s door.”

His dome of brain was one of the amplest and most perfectly shaped I ever saw, and his countenance was very far from unpleasant.  His faculties to enjoy had not perished with age.  He certainly looked like a well-seasoned author, but not dropping to pieces yet.  His turn of thought was characteristic, and in the main just, for he loved the best, and was naturally impatient of what was low and mean in conduct and intellect.  He had always lived in an atmosphere of art, and his reminiscences of painters and sculptors were never wearisome or dull.  He had a store of pleasant anecdotes of Chantrey, whom he had employed as a wood-carver long before he became a modeller in clay; and he had also much to tell us of Sir Joshua Reynolds, whose lectures he had attended, and whose studio-talk had been familiar to him while he was a young man and studying art himself as an amateur.  It was impossible almost to make Rogers seem a real being as we used to surround his table during those mornings and sometimes deep into the afternoons.  We were listening to one who had talked with Boswell about Dr. Johnson; who had sat hours with Mrs. Piozzi; who read the “Vicar of Wakefield” the day it was published; who had heard Haydn, the composer, playing at a concert, “dressed out with a sword”; who had listened to Talleyrand’s best sayings from his own lips; who had seen John Wesley lying dead in his coffin, “an old man, with the countenance