Like one of olden times :—
"Longa Tithonum minuit senectus"—[1]
the longer he lived the more attenuated he became ; the Voltaire of England,—resembling in excessive leanness, cadaveric livor, retention of faculties in extreme senility, and imputed malignity of wit, that great writer, to whose strictures upon Milton's personifications, Young replied by the well-known distich:—
"Thou art so witty, profligate and thin,
At once we see the Devil, Death and Sin,"—
which reminds me somehow of the bitter couplet attributed to Tom Moore:—
"With equal good nature, good grace, and good looks,
As the Devil gave apples, Sam Rogers gives books;"
and whose "portrait," as drawn by a contemporary hand, might serve indifferently for either poet:—
"Spectre vivant, squelette decharné.
Qui n'a rien vu que ta seule figure,
Croirait d'abord avoir vu d'un damné
L'épouvantable et hideuse peinture—"
A strangely favoured lot was that of Samuel Rogers. Born at Stoke Newington, July 30, 1763, of opulent parents, he enjoyed for nearly a century, ample leisure and means to indulge his favourite tastes and pursuits. He was the connecting link between the age of Johnson, Goldsmith, Reynolds, and our own. He was eating his eighth birthday pudding on the day that Gray, the poet, died. In the same year that the Ayrshire ploughman canvassed the weavers of Kilmarnock for subscriptions to that volume of Poems chiefly in the Scottish Dialect, which will only perish with the language in which they are written, the London banker took his first verses to Cadell, with a cheque to pay the probable expenses. He had seen, as he related to Mitford, John Wesley lying in state, after death, March 2, 1791, in the eighty-eighth year of his age. He had agitated the "tintinnabulary appendage" at the door of Samuel Johnson, and been blackballed at his club, though proposed by Fox and seconded by Windham; wandered over St. Anne's Hill with Fox and Grattan; dined with Condorcet at Lafayette's in 1789; listened to the trial of Home Tooke; breakfasted with Robertson, heard Blair preach, taken coffee with the Piozzis, and supped with Adam Smith, all in one day of that same eventful year; met Byron in Italy; and had enjoyed the intimacy of a host of celebrities, whose lives were but ephemeral episodes in his own. The Nestor,—rather, perhaps, the Tithonus,—of our poets, his pleasurable existence was prolonged to his ninety-fourth year,—a length of career only approached, so far as memory serves me, by the poet. Waller, who, coming into existence only two years after the death of Queen Elizabeth, missed but by a few months witnessing the accession of William and Mary. He retained his faculties nearly to the last, thus forming a striking exception
- ↑ Horat. Od. ii. 16, vol. iii. p. 57.
grave, he is, by order, dug up, and chopped all to pieces. Two merchants once, airing on horseback, had (as usual for protection) a janizary with them. Passing by the burying-place of the Jews, it happened that an old Jew sat by a sepulchre. The janizary rode up to him, and rated him for stinking the world a second time, and commanded him to get into his grave again."
