Rogers, SAMUEL, the poet, was born at the suburban village of Stoke-Newington on 30th July 1763, the third son in a family of nine. His father, a City banker, was a Whig and dissenter, a member of the congregation of Dr Price (q.v.); his mother, Mary Radford, was the great-granddaughter of Philip Henry. After a private education, at sixteen or seventeen he entered the bank, in 1784 was taken into partnership, and on his father's death in 1793 became head of the firm. His taste for literature and for the company of literary men awoke at an early period, and one day with a friend he had gone to call upon Dr Johnson at his house in Bolt Court, but his courage failed him when his hand was on the knocker. In 1781 he contributed eight short essays to the Gentleman's Magazine; next year wrote a comic opera, containing a score of songs; and in 1786 (the year of Burns's first volume) published An Ode to Superstition, with some other Poems. In 1792 appeared The Pleasures of Memory, on which his poetical fame was chiefly based, and which in 1816 reached a nineteenth edition (more than 23,000 copies). There followed, 'written with laborious slowness,' An Epistle to a Friend (Richard Sharp, 1798), the fragmentary Voyage of Columbus (1812), Jacqueline (1814, bound up with Byron's Lara), and the 'inimitable' Italy (1822-28). The last, in blank verse, proved a monetary failure; but the loss was recouped by the splendid edition of it and his earlier poems, brought out at a cost of £15,000 (2 vols. 1830-34), with 114 illustrations by Turner and Stothard.
Meanwhile he had left the old home on Newington Green, and in 1803 (in which year, with £5000 a year, he withdrew from the bank as a sleeping partner) had given up the chambers in the Temple, and settled down finally to bachelor life in his exquisite house, 22 St James's Place, looking into the Green Park. He had had his affairs of the heart, had proposed, indeed, to a daughter of Banks the sculptor. She refused him, and left him free to cultivate his muse and caustic wit, to raise breakfast-giving to a fine art, to make little tours at home and on the Continent, and to gather an art-collection which sold at his death for £50,000. With Rogers one cannot help harping upon money, for he was rich as no poet perhaps before or after him. At least he made a good use of his riches, for he was quietly generous to Moore and Campbell, and others, unknown ones, whom it was no such credit to have aided. But with the kindest heart he had the unkindest tongue. 'I have a very weak voice,' he explained once to Sir Henry Taylor; 'if I did not say ill-natured things no one would hear me.' With which, however, Campbell's saying should be coupled: 'Borrow five hundred pounds of Rogers, and he will never say a word against you till you want to repay him.' Anyhow it has come to pass that 'melodious Rogers,' whom Byron ranked above Wordsworth and Coleridge, as we too might rank him if only his works had perished, is better remembered to-day by a few of those ill-natured things (e.g. by his witty couplet upon Ward; see EPIGRAM) than by his poetry, which, chaste though it be, and elegant and cultured, with 'no such thing as a vulgar line in it,' is dead and mummified. It is no more a pleasure of memory, but unread, not even forgotten. One is reconciled somewhat to such oblivion by remembering how, when in his old age Fanny Kemble used to go and sit with Rogers, she never asked what she should read to him without his putting into her hands his own poems, which always lay by him on his table. For this was the Rogers who had announced his intention of being 'read to, when old and bedridden, by young people—Scott's novels perhaps.' There is not much more to tell of him—the bank-robbery (£47,000, 1844); the proffer by Prince Albert of the laureateship (1850); the street accident—knocking down by a carriage (1850)—which crippled him for the rest of his life; and the peaceful ending of that life (æt. ninety-two) on 18th December 1855. He is buried at Hornsey.
See Alexander Dyce's Recollections of the Table-talk of Samuel Rogers (1856); Recollections by Rogers, edited by his nephew William Sharpe (1859); Hayward's article in the Edinburgh Review for July 1856 (reprinted in his Essays, 1879); and, especially, P. W. Clayden's Early Life of Rogers (1887), and Rogers and his Contemporaries (2 vols. 1889).