| <Saturday Review 6 August 1859: Bagehot>
| <Roger’s Recollections>
| Mr. Rogers is one of the authors who have taken too much 
| pains with their writings. The <hi> Pleasures of Memory 
| </hi> employed him seven years, <hi> Columbus </hi> 
| fourteen, <hi> Human Life </hi> six, <hi> Italy </hi> fourteen; 
| and even after the publication of these poems he did not 
| cease to correct them. In these days of hasty composition it 
| is impossible not to respect so much patience and so much 
| concentrated labour, and well-known maxims would lead us 
| to anticipate that very great excellence would be their result. 
| We believe, however, that in most cases these maxims are 
| erroneous. We incline to think that such extremely slow 
| production is very rarely favourable to the perfection of 
| works of genius. Writers forget what they mean to say. Who 
| can answer for the exact shade of thought which he intended 
| to express nine years ago? The author knows as little about 
| it as <reg orig=“any one”> anyone </reg> else. If the subject 
| is a favourite one, he is very apt to confuse it with other 
| thoughts which have come and gone in the intermediate 
| period. In consequence, when he is correcting, as he calls it, 
| the work of former years, he is apt to substitute a thought 
| materially different from the original one, and less suitable to 
| the connexion in which it occurs. The first thought, at any 
| rate, arose out of the thought which preceded it in the course 
| of composition. The interpolated idea was suggested by the 
| circumstances of succeeding years. Again, even if the writer 
| exactly remembers what he meant to say, the effect is often 
| worse. Probably the idea is a fixed idea to him ~~ a notion 
| which he carries through the earth, and which never leaves 
| him. In that case the thought is apt to be so familiar to him 
| that he hardly knows whether any particular words convey it 
| or not. All words on the same subject convey it to his mind, 
| and he is apt to expect that they will convey it to others. 
| Especially when he ha altered his own words ~~ as in the 
| course of nine or ten years a man well may, in a short poem, 
| many times ~~ he cannot say whether the thought is 
| adequately expressed or not. The very place in the poem 
| calls up the idea to him; and any words at all near the mark 
| which satisfy his ear are very apt to satisfy his mind. 
| Accordingly, a student of the most celebrated poems of Mr. 
| Rogers will discover many expressions out of which a patient 
| elaboration has extracted the whole meaning, and many 
| paragraphs of which the first flow has been destroyed by 
| interpolated thoughts and gradually modified ideas.
| But, however applicable the practice of very elaborate 
| composition might be thought to be to the production of very 
| exquisite poems, hardly <reg orig=“any one”> anyone </reg>, 
| we should have imagined, would have fancied that it was 
| applicable to memoirs and anecdotes. We might as well 
| apply it to letter-writing. Who would like to receive 
| compositions which had been days under cultivation, and 
| which worthily conveyed the elaborate dulness of patient 
| attention? We may like the schoolboy scrawl, but we are 
| certain to dislike the meritorious theme. Accordingly, the 
| great pains and labour which we are told that Mr. Rogers 
| spent on these Memoirs have been very perniciously spent. 
| He had exceedingly valuable materials. He was in the habit 
| of more or less constant intercourse with the best society in 
| London for about fifty years, and he entered in careful 
| journals what he heard there. If he had confined his attention 
| to setting down with distinctness and accuracy the 
| substance of what occurred on the occasions which 
| interested him the most, we could not have failed to have a 
| work full of valuable information, and exhibiting the sensitive 
| taste, cool sense, and refined cultivation which he 
| indisputably possessed. We could have borne with some 
| triviality, for much of it would probably have been 
| characteristic of the times, and even more of it of the writer. 
| Mr. Rogers has unfortunately adopted a very different course. 
| Instead of telling us that he went to dine with Horne Tooke at 
| such and such a time, that he had such and such a coat on, 
| that he was amusing or not amusing, he has given us 
| selected scraps of his conversation on very many different 
| occasions. We have sets of such sayings as the following: 
| ~~ <q> </q> Even if the sayings were in themselves happy, 
| they would lose much of their interest from our not being told 
| to whom they were said, before whom, and in what 
| connexion; and when they have, as is the case with the dicta 
| we have quoted, no intrinsic value at all, it is easy to imagine 
| the folly of the labour which has separated them from all 
| extrinsic sources of interest. We can conceive nothing duller 
| than this book to a person who had never heard of Charles 
| Fox, or Horne Tooke, or Lord Erskine. A reader who is 
| familiar with their characters and their circumstances will 
| occasionally, however, find something which is agreeable to 
| him, because his imagination will enable him to supply the 
| attendant circumstances and living details which Mr. Rogers 
| spent some years in omitting.
| Mr. Fox is one of the best known persons of whom Mr. 
| Rogers recollected much, and many persons will therefore 
| feel a slight interest in looking over the disconnected 
| memoranda which he has left us. Sometimes the buoyancy 
| and life of Mr. Fox’s character almost prevail over the 
| jejeuneness of the reminiscent. We like the read the 
| following of the great statesman: ~~ <q> </q>
| There is something of the simple emphasis of real 
| conversation in these phrases ~~ we feel that they were said. 
| Mr. Rogers observes that his memorials of Mr. Fox show 
| <q> </q>. There is no doubt that they do so; and if Mr. 
| Rogers had told us the actual details of what happened, they 
| would have shown these estimable qualities still more. Few 
| statesmen have felt so ardent a love of letters as Fox ~~ 
| fewer still have recurred to them with the same fresh gaiety 
| in the midst of a very unsuccessful political career. He 
| thought poetry the <p> “great thing, after all,” </p> and 
| agreed with Burke that there was <p> “no truth” </p> ~~ no 
| adequate representation, that is, of great subjects ~~ 
| elsewhere. His insensibility to the kindred art is in contrast 
| curious: ~~ <q> </q> But we cannot say that the undress 
| conversations of this volume will tend to raise the fame of 
| Mr.Fox as a statesman. His situation in later life was 
| singularly unfortunate for a person who had spent his earlier 
| life as he did. He had passed a youth of fashionable excess 
| qualified by fractious debating. From neither of these 
| pursuits had he acquired ~~ for in neither of them had he an 
| opportunity of acquiring ~~ a great store of political reflection. 
| On these subjects, as he declared in the House of Commons, 
| he sat at the feet of Mr. Burke. If he had been thrown, as Mr. 
| Pitt was, among the details of office, there is considerable 
| evidence that he would have mastered them with real vigour 
| ~~ thought upon them with fresh originality. But he had no 
| such opportunity. The twenty years of his life in which his 
| mind would have been most fit for such a task were passed 
| in Opposition. His views, in consequence, were almost 
| always defective ~~ often singularly so for a man of his 
| ability in his position. We do not dwell on his dislike of 
| political economy, which is curiously shown in these <hi> 
| Recollections. </hi> <q> </q> said Lord Lauderdale, before 
| Adam Smith wrote. <q> </q> says Fox. <q> </q>. We have 
| no right to complain of a statesman of even the end of the 
| eighteenth century for not having given a real attention to the 
| true theory of trade. Those who then did so deserve great 
| praise, but those who were deficient in it scarcely merit great 
| blame. Lord Derby said he was born in the <p> “prescientific 
| period,” </p> and Mr. Fox certainly was so. But the volume 
| before us shows distinct traces of a very uncultivated mind 
| on parts of politics which do not need so elaborate a 
| treatment. Mr. Rogers heard him say ~~ <q> </q> Of course 
| such reflections are but childish absurdities.
| The reminiscences of Horne Tooke, in Mr. roger’s <hi> 
| Memorandum-book, </hi> are likewise occasionally curious. 
| His literal kind of wit ~~ set off, as tradition recounts, by a 
| courteous manner and by imperturbable coolness ~~ is not 
| ill shown in the following: ~~ <q> </q>. It is a trait of manners 
| that the <p> Rev. Mr. Horne” </p> must have been a young 
| clergyman at the time of this conversation; he did not, as it is 
| well known, take the name of Tooke till a later period. We 
| have a trace, too, of his philological acuteness in Mr. 
| Rogers’s pages: ~~ <q> </q> It is not surprising that a sharp 
| logical wit should be an acute interpreter of language.
| If, as is generally thought, the general reader be a person of 
| no information, we do not recommend him to read the 
| disconnected scraps to which the punctilious care of Mr. 
| Rogers has reduced his reminiscences; but <reg orig=“any one”>
| anyone </reg> who knows a little of the principal 
| people who have appeared in England during the last sixty 
| or seventy years will find something to interest him, though 
| much less than he would have found if the same materials 
| had been used more freely and more naturally.