arver 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 of a little child"; who had
been with Beckford at Fonthill; who had seen Porson slink back into the
dining-room after the company had left it and drain what was left in the
wineglasses; who had crossed the Apennines with Byron; who had seen Beau
Nash in the height of his career dancing minuets at Bath; who had known
Lady Hamilton in her days of beauty, and seen her often with Lord
Nelson; who was in Fox's room when that great man lay dying; and who
could describe Pitt from personal observation, speaking always as if his
mouth was "full of worsted." It was unreal as a dream to sit there in
St. James Place and hear that old man talk by the hour of what one had
been reading about all one's life. One thing, I must confess, somewhat
shocked me,--I was not prepared for the feeble manner in which some of
Rogers's best stories were received by the gentlemen who had gathered at
his table on those Tuesday mornings. But when Procter told me in
explanation afterward that they had all "heard the same anecdotes every
week, perhaps, for half a century from the same lips," I no longer
wondered at the seeming apathy I had witnessed. It was a great treat to
me, however, the talk I heard at Rogers's hospitable table, and my three
visits there cannot be erased from the pleasantest tablets of memory.
There is only one regret connected with them, but that loss still haunts
me. On one of those memorable mornings I was obliged to leave earlier
than the rest of the company on account of an engagement out of London,
and Lady Beecher (formerly Miss O'Neil), the great actress of other
days, came in and read an hour to the old poet and his guests. Procter
told m