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
given him the utmost economy of words; and as far as brevity and point
are concerned, his method left nothing to be desired. Many of his best
efforts are still to be found in the volume of _Table-Talk_ edited for
Moxon in 1856 by the Rev. Alexander Dyce; or preferably, as actually
written down by Rogers himself in the delightful _Recollections_ issued
three years later by his nephew and executor, William Sharpe.

Notes:

[36] _Recreations of a Literary Man_, 1882, p. 137.

[37] _My Confidences_, by Frederick Locker-Lampson, 1896, pp. 98
and 325.

[38] The duellists were an Englishman and a Frenchman; and
Rogers was in the habit of adding as a postscript: "When I tell that in
Paris, I always put the Englishman up the chimney!"