Among the authors of England, I had desired to see especially Mr. Samuel Rogers, who is now the last survivor of a brilliant literary epoch, and whose long familiarity with the historical personages of a past generation, would of itself be enough to make him a man of note, and a patriarch in the republic of letters. Though now above ninety years of age, he still renders his elegant habitation an attractive resort, and I was indebted to him for attentions which were the more valuable, as he was, at that time, suffering from an accident, and hence peculiarly entitled to deny himself entirely to strangers. His house, in St. James’s-street, has been often described, and its beautiful opening on the Green Park is familiar from engravings. Here every Englishman of literary note, during the last half century, has been at some time a guest, and if its walls could but _Boswellize_ the wit which they have heard around the table of its hospitable master, no collection of _Memorabilia_ with which the world is acquainted, could at all be compared with it. Here I met the aged poet, at breakfast; Sir Charles and Lady Lyell completing the party. He talked of the past as one to whom the present was less a reality, and it seemed strange to hear him speak of Mrs. Piozzi, as if he had been one of the old circle at Thrale’s. When a boy, he rang Dr. Johnson’s bell, in Bolt Court, in a fit of ambition to see the literary colossus of the time, but his heart failed him at the sticking point, and he ran away before the door was opened. Possibly the old sage himself responded to the call, and as he retired in a fit of indignation, moralizing on the growing impertinence of the age, how little did he imagine that the interruption was a signal tribute to his genius, from one who, in the middle of the nineteenth century, should be himself an object of veneration as the Nestor of Literature! CHAPTER XVII. _Oxford—Martyrs—Boat-race._