But A Still Greater Honour - Perhaps The Greatest Compliment
I Ever Had Paid Me - Was To Come.
I had lodgings at this
time in an old house, long since pulled down, in York Street.
One day, when I was practising the fiddle, who should walk
into my den but Rogers the poet! He had never seen me in his
life. He was in his ninetieth year, and he had climbed the
stairs to the first floor to ask me to one of his breakfast
parties. To say nothing of Rogers' fame, his wealth, his
position in society, those who know what his cynicism and his
worldliness were, will understand what such an effort,
physical and moral, must have cost him. He always looked
like a death's head, but his ghastly pallor, after that
Alpine ascent, made me feel as if he had come - to stay.
These breakfasts were entertainments of no ordinary
distinction. The host himself was of greater interest than
the most eminent of his guests. All but he, were more or
less one's contemporaries: Rogers, if not quite as dead as
he looked, was ancient history. He was old enough to have
been the father of Byron, of Shelley, of Keats, and of Moore.
He was several years older than Scott, or Wordsworth, or
Coleridge, and only four years younger than Pitt. He had
known all these men, and could, and did, talk as no other
could talk, of all of them. Amongst those whom I met at
these breakfasts were Cornewall Lewis, Delane, the Grotes,
Macaulay, Mrs. Norton, Monckton Milnes, William Harcourt (the
only one younger than myself), but just beginning to be
known, and others of scarcely less note.
During the breakfast itself, Rogers, though seated at table
in an armchair, took no part either in the repast or in the
conversation; he seemed to sleep until the meal was over.
His servant would then place a cup of coffee before him, and,
like a Laputian flapper, touch him gently on the shoulder.
He would at once begin to talk, while others listened. The
first time I witnessed this curious resurrection, I whispered
something to my neighbour, at which he laughed. The old
man's eye was too sharp for us.
'You are laughing at me,' said he; 'I dare say you young
gentlemen think me an old fellow; but there are younger than
I who are older. You should see Tommy Moore. I asked him to
breakfast, but he's too weak - weak here, sir,' and he tapped
his forehead. 'I'm not that.' (This was the year that Moore
died.) He certainly was not; but his whole discourse was of
the past. It was as though he would not condescend to
discuss events or men of the day. What were either to the
days and men that he had known - French revolutions, battles
of Trafalgar and Waterloo, a Nelson and a Buonaparte, a Pitt,
a Burke, a Fox, a Johnson, a Gibbon, a Sheridan, and all the
men of letters and all the poets of a century gone by?
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