O Knight of fire and Squire of earth!-- O changing give-and-take between The aim too high, the aim too mean, I hail your birth,-- Three centuries past,--in sunburned SPAIN, And hang, on Time's PANTHEON wall, My votive tablet to recall That lasting gain! Note: [35] _I.e._ January 1905. THE BOOKS OF SAMUEL ROGERS One common grave, according to Garrick, covers the actor and his art. The same may be said of the raconteur. Oral tradition, or even his own writings, may preserve his precise words; but his peculiarities of voice or action, his tricks of utterance and intonation,--all the collateral details which serve to lend distinction or piquancy to the performance--perish irrecoverably. The glorified gramophone of the future may perhaps rectify this for a new generation; and give us, without mechanical drawback, the authentic accents of speakers dead and gone; but it can never perpetuate the dramatic accompaniment of gesture and expression. If, as always, there are exceptions to this rule, they are necessarily evanescent. Now and then, it may be, some clever mimic will recall the manner of a passed-away predecessor; and he may even contrive to hand it on, more or less effectually, to a disciple. But the reproduction is of brief duration; and it is speedily effaced or transformed. In this way it is, however, that we get our most satisfactory idea of the once famous table-talker, Samuel Rogers. Charles Dickens, who sent Rogers several of his books; who dedicated _Master Humphrey's Clock_ to him; and who frequently assisted at the famous breakfasts in St. James's Place, was accustomed--rather cruelly, it may be thought--to take off his host's very characteristic way of telling a story; and it is, moreover, affirmed by Mr. Percy Fitzgerald[36] that, in the famous Readings, "the strangely obtuse and owl-like expression, and the slow, husky croak" of Mr. Justice Stareleigh in the "Trial from _Pickwick_" were carefully copied from the author of the _Pleasures of Memory_, That Dickens used thus to amuse his friends is confirmed by the autobiography of the late Frederick Locker,[37] who perfectly remembered the old man, to see whom he had been carried, as a boy, by his father. He had also heard Dickens repeat one of Rogers's stock anecdotes (it was that of the duel in a dark room, where the more considerate combatant, firing up the chimney, brings down his adversary);[38]--and he speaks of Dickens as mimicking Rogers's "calm, low-pitched, drawling voice and dry biting manner very comically."[39] At the same time, it must be remembered that these reminiscences relate to Rogers in his old age. He was over seventy when Dickens published his first book, _Sketches by Boz_; and, though it is possible that Rogers's voice was always rather sepulchral, and his enunciation unusually deliberate and monotonous, he had nevertheless, as Locker says, "made story-telling a fine art." Continued practice had