favourite authors was Manzoni, whose _Promessi Sposi_ he was inclined to
think he would rather have written than all Scott's novels; and he never
tired of reading Louis Racine's _Memoires_ of his father, 1747,--that
"_filon de l'or pur du dix-septieme siecle_"--as Villemain calls
it--"_qui se prolonge dans l'age suivant._" Some of Rogers's likings
sound strange enough nowadays. With Campbell, he delighted in Cowper's
_Homer_, which he assiduously studied, and infinitely preferred to that
of Pope. Into Chapman's it must be assumed that he had not
looked--certainly he has left no sonnet on the subject. Milton was
perhaps his best-loved bard. "When I was travelling in Italy (he says),
I made two authors my constant study for versification,--Milton _and
Crowe_" (The italics are ours.) It is an odd collocation; but not
unintelligible. William Crowe, the now forgotten Public Orator of
Oxford, and author of _Lewesdon Hill_, was an intimate friend; a writer
on versification; and, last but not least, a very respectable echo of
the Miltonic note, as the following, from a passage dealing with the
loss in 1786 of the _Halsewell_ East Indiaman off the coast of Dorset,
sufficiently testifies:--

The richliest-laden ship
Of spicy Ternate, or that annual sent
To the Philippines o'er the southern main
From Acapulco, carrying massy gold,
Were poor to this;--freighted with hopeful Youth
And Beauty, and high Courage undismay'd
By mortal terrors, and paternal Love, etc., etc.

It is not improbable that Rogers caught the mould of his blank verse
from the copy rather than from the model. In the matter of style--as
Flaubert has said--the second-bests are often the better teachers. More