Of him, as of Shelley, some foolish and hurtful things have been said. In life he was no effeminate "aesthetic" or "decadent," divided between sensual gratification and unmanly _Katzenjammer_, between paganism and puerility, but an honest, manly Englishman, whose strength only yielded to unconquerable disease, whose impulses were always healthy and generous. Despite his origin,--and, it must be added, some of his friendships,--there was not a touch of vulgarity about him; and if his comic vein was not very full-pulsed, he had a merry laugh in him. There is no "poisonous honey stolen" from anywhere or extracted by himself from anything in Keats; his sensuousness is nothing more than is, in the circumstances, "necessary and voluptuous and right." But these moral excellences, while they may add to the satisfaction with which one contemplates him, hardly enhance--though his morbid admirers seem to think that the absence of them would enhance--the greatness and the value of his poetical position, both in the elaboration of a new poetic style and language, and still more in the indication of a new road whereby the great poetic exploration could be carried on. Round or under these great Seven--for that Byron was great in a way need not be denied; Southey, the weakest of all as a poet, had a very strong influence, and was one of the very greatest of English men of letters--must be mentioned a not inconsiderable number of men who in any other age would have been reckoned great. The eldest of these, both in years and in reputation, holds his position, and perhaps always held it, rather by courtesy than by strict right. Samuel Rogers[7] was born in London on 30th July 1763, and was the son of a dissenting banker, from whom he derived Whig principles and a comfortable fortune. It is said that he once, as a very young man, went to call on Dr. Johnson, but was afraid to knock; but though shyness accompanied him through life, the amiability which it is sometimes supposed to betoken did not. He published a volume of poems in 1786, and his famous _Pleasures of Memory_, the piece that made his reputation, in 1792. Twenty years afterwards _Columbus_ followed, and yet two years later, in 1814, _Jacqueline_; while in 1822 _Italy_, on which, with the _Pleasures of Memory_, such fame as he has rests, was published, to be reissued some years afterwards in a magnificent illustrated edition, and to have a chance (in a classical French jest) _se sauver de planche en planche_. He did not die till 1855, in his ninety-third year: the last, as he had been the first, of his group.