'The Accounts of Eminent Men'

“I always distrust the accounts of eminent men by their contemporaries. None of us has any reason to slander Homer or Julius Caesar; but we find it very difficult to divest ourselves of prejudices when we are writing about persons with whom we have been acquainted.” 

Further confirmation of a statement I heard long ago, though I can no longer remember from whom: “Propinquity breeds special relationships.” Whether good or bad, it should be added. It cuts both ways. Homer is reduced to his epics. We know nothing about him, not even if he existed. But I can think of several writers I have met and interviewed from whom I would hide if they were to knock on my front door.

 

The observer quoted above is Samuel “Breakfast” Rogers (1763-1855), the English banker and poet who earned his nickname by hosting social breakfasts at his home in St. James Place, attended by such luminaries as Macaulay and Sydney Smith. Rogers’ preferred medium was conversation (laced heavily with the social grease of gossip). A year after his death, his nephew published Recollections of the Table-Talk of Samuel Rogers, based on his uncle’s notebooks, from which the passage at the top is drawn.

 

Rogers befriended Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Scott, Thackeray, Tennyson and the Duke of Wellington, and was best friend to the comparably well-nicknamed Richard “Conversation” Sharp. Charles Lamb dedicated a sonnet to him. Dickens dedicated Master Humphrey's Clock and The Old Curiosity Shop to Rogers, who boasted that he had entertained three American presidents in his home – John Quincy Adams, Martin Van Buren and Millard Fillmore – as well as Daniel Webster, Washington Irving, Herman Melville and James Fenimore Cooper.

 

Years ago, Guy Davenport, not some dutiful English Lit prof, introduced me to Rogers, which suggests that most worthwhile educations are pursued autodidactically, away from the syllabus. In a letter to Hugh Kenner on December 26, 1964, Davenport recommends that his friend read Rogers’ Table-Talk:

 

“And then find a lazy afternoon and enjoy it. . . . The book defines a civilization now utterly lost. Anecdotes of [Charles James] Fox, [Richard Brinsley] Sheridan, [Jack Horne] Tooke—that gang: all as polished and direct as a sabre.”

 

Here’s a sample of Rogers’ gift for concise, amusing, revealing anecdote (and for impressive namedropping):

 

“While Rousseau was lodging in Chiswick Terrace, [Richard] Fitzpatrick called upon him one day, and had not been long in the room when David Hume entered. Rousseau had lost a favourite dog; and Hume, having exerted himself to recover it, now brought it back to its master, who thanked him with expressions of the most fervent gratitude, and shed tears of joy over the animal.” 

 

Nice to know Rousseau was capable of gratitude, at least when it came to dogs.

 

[The Davenport letter can be found in Questioning Minds: The Letters of Guy Davenport and Hugh Kenner (ed. Edward M. Burns, Counterpoint, 2018).]