Eclectic Magazine of Foreign Literature, Science, and Art, February, 1885. Various

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      “Not alone in numbers,” interposed Mr. Rogers, “but in anything. If I quoted Ben Jonson’s remark in relation to Shakespeare once only, the rumor spreads that I quoted it frequently; and so the gossip passes from mouth to mouth with continual accretion. Perhaps I shall go down to posterity as an habitual reviler and depreciator of Shakespeare.”

      “Perhaps you won’t go down to posterity at all,” said Mr. Dyce, good-naturedly.

      “Perhaps not,” replied Mr. Rogers, “but if my name should happen to reach that uncertain destination I trust I may be remembered, as Ben Jonson is, as a true lover of Shakespeare. But great as Shakespeare is, I don’t think that our admiration should ever be allowed to degenerate into slavish adoration. We ought neither to make a god of him nor a fetish. And I ask you, Mr. Dyce, as a diligent student of his works and an industrious commentator upon them, whether you do not think that very many passages in them are unworthy of his genius. If Homer nods, why not Shakespeare?”

      “I grant all that,” replied Mr. Dyce, “nay more! I assert that many of the plays attributed to him were not written by him at all. And more even than that. Several of his plays were published surreptitiously, and without his consent, and never received his final corrections or any revision whatever. The faults and obscurities that are discoverable even in the masterpieces of his genius, were not due to him at all, but to ignorant and piratical booksellers, who gave them to the world without his authority, and traded upon his name. Some also must be attributed to the shorthand writers who took down the dialogue as repeated by the actors on the stage. It is curious to reflect how indifferent Shakespeare was to his dramatic fame. He never seems to have cared for his plays at all, and to have looked at them, to use the slang of the artists of our days, as mere ‘pot-boilers,’ compositions that brought him in money, and enabled him to pay his way, but in which he took no personal pride whatever.”

      “His heart was in his two early poems – ‘Venus and Adonis,’ and the ‘Rape of Lucrece,’” said Dr. Milman, “the only compositions, it should be observed, that were ever published by his authority, and to which he appended his name. His sonnets, which some people admire so much – an admiration in which I do not share – were published surreptitiously, without his consent, and probably more than one-half of them were not written by him. Some of them are undoubtedly by Marlowe, and some by authors of far inferior ability. Shakespeare’s name was popular at the time; there was no law of copyright, and booksellers did almost what they pleased with the names and works of celebrated men; and what seems extraordinary in our day, the celebrated men made no complaint – most probably because there was no redress to be obtained for them if they had done so. The real law of copyright only dates from the eighth year of the reign of Queen Anne, 1710, or nearly a century after Shakespeare’s death.”

      “But authors in those early days, even in the absence of a well-defined law of copyright,” said Mr. Miller, “received payment for their works; witness the receipt of John Milton for five pounds on account of ‘Paradise Lost’ – now in the possession of our host – and which we have all seen.”

      “But that was long after the death of Shakespeare,” said Mr. Dyce, “and it does not appear that Shakespeare ever received a shilling for the copyright of any of his works. Perhaps he received gratuities from the Earls of Southampton and Pembroke, and the other rich young men about town, for whom it is supposed that he wrote many of his sonnets. That he also must have received considerable sums for his representation of his plays at the Globe Theatre is evident from the well-ascertained fact that he retired from theatrical business with a competent fortune and lived the life for some years of a prosperous country gentleman.”

      As it has been asserted in my presence by an eminent literary man, within a month of the present writing, that Samuel Rogers systematically depreciated Shakespeare, and that he was above all things a cynic, I think it right, in justice to his memory, to repeat the conversation above recorded. Though it took place nearly forty years ago, I wrote down the heads of it in my notebook on the very day when it occurred; and by reperusal of it I have refreshed my memory so as to be certain of its accuracy. Mr. Rogers doubtless said very pungent and apparently ill-natured things in his time; no professed wit, such as he was, can always, or indeed very often, refrain from shooting a barbed dart either to raise a laugh and to strengthen an argument, or to dispense with one; but there was no malevolence in the heart, though there might appear to be some on the tongue, of Samuel Rogers. To love literature, and to excel in poetical composition, were unfailing passports to his regard, his esteem, and if necessary, his purse. One of the guests of the morning on which these conversations took place, and who bore his part in them, was a grateful recipient and witness of his beneficence. Thomas Miller, who began life as a journeyman basket-maker, working for small daily wages in the fens of Lincolnshire, excited the notice of his neighbors by his poetical genius, or it may have been only talent, and by their praises of his compositions, filled his mind with the desire to try his literary fortune in the larger sphere of London. He listened to the promptings of his ambition, came to the metropolis, launched his little skiff on the wide ocean of literary life, and by dint of hard work, indomitable perseverance, unfailing hope, and incessant struggles, managed to earn a modest subsistence. He speedily found that poetry failed to put money in his purse, and prudently resorted to prose. When prose in the shape of original work – principally fiction – just enabled him to live from day to day, he took refuge in the daily drudgery of reviewing in the Literary Gazette, then edited by Mr. Jerdan, a very bad paymaster. He had not been long in London before he made the acquaintance or Mr. Rogers, and after a period of more or less intimacy, received from that gentleman the good, though old, and as it often happens, the unwelcome advice that he should cease to rely wholly upon literature for his daily bread. As poor Miller could not return to basket-making – except as an employer of other basket-makers, for which he had not sufficient, or indeed any, capital – and as, moreover, he had no love for any pursuits but those of literature, he resolved, if he could manage it, to establish himself as a bookseller and publisher. Mr. Rogers, to whom he confided his wish, approved of it, and generously aided him to accomplish it, by the advance without security of the money required for the purpose. The basket-maker carried on the business for a few years with but slight success, and once informed me that he had made more money by the sale of note paper, of sealing-wax, of ink, and of red-tape, than he had made by the sale of his own works, or those of anybody else.

      Mr. Rogers established another poet in the bookselling and publishing business, but with far greater success than attended his efforts in the case of the basket-maker. Mr. Edward Moxon, a clerk or shopman in the employ of Messrs. Longman, who wrote in his early manhood a little book of sonnets that attracted the notice of Mr. Rogers, to whom they had been sent by the author with a modest letter, became by the pecuniary aid and constant patronage of the “Bard of Memory,” one of the most eminent publishers of the time. He was known to fame as “the Poet’s publisher,” and issued the works not only of Mr. Rogers himself, but of Campbell, Wordsworth, Southey, Savage, Landor, Coleridge, and many other poetical celebrities. He also published the works of Ben Jonson, Marlowe, Beaumont and Fletcher, Peele, and other noted dramatists of the Elizabethan era.

      The friendly assistance, delicately and liberally administered in the hour of need, by Samuel Rogers to the illustrious Richard Brinsley Sheridan is fully recorded in the life of the latter by Thomas Moore; that which was administered, though under less pressing circumstances, to Thomas Campbell, has found a sympathetic historian in Dr. William Beattie. Rogers, in spite of the baseless libel concerning Shakespeare, had not a particle of literary envy in his composition. His dislike to Lord Byron was not literary but personal, and is adequately explained – and almost justified – by the gross and unprovoked attacks which Byron directed against him. —Gentleman’s Magazine.

      AN ACTOR IN THE REBELLION OF 1798

      In a tiny hovel on the mountain-side just above the romantic glens of Banagher, in the wildest part of the country Londonderry, СКАЧАТЬ