Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 49.djvu/145

 being taken prisoner by Lord Stirling at Mamaroneck. Soon after he went to England, and in 1778 he was proscribed and banished by the provincial congress of New Hampshire. He died in London in 1800. Among his works are: 'A Concise Account of North America,' and 'Journals,' giving a graphic account of his early adventures as a ranger, London, 1765, 8vo, and edited by Franklin B. Hough, Albany, 1883. (The 'Journals' are also condensed in Stark's 'Reminiscences of the French War,' 1831, and in the 'Memoir of John Stark,' 1860). 'Ponteach, or the Savages of America: a Tragedy,' by Rogers in verse, appeared in 1766, 8vo; only two copies are known to exist, one in the possession of Mr. Francis Parkman, and the other in the British Museum Library. Rogers's 'Diary of the Siege of Detroit' was first edited by F. B. Hough at Albany in 1860.

 ROGERS, SAMUEL (1763–1855), poet, was born at Stoke Newington on 30 July 1763. The family is said to have been originally Welsh, with a dash of French blood through the marriage of the poet's great-grandfather, the first ancestor of whom there is any record, with a lady from Nantes. The poet's father, Thomas Rogers, was son of a glass manufacturer at Stourbridge, Worcestershire, and through his mother was related to [q. v.]; he went in youth to London to take part in the management of a warehouse in which his father was a partner with Daniel Radford of Stoke Newington. In 1760 Thomas married Daniel Radford's daughter Mary, and was taken into partnership in the following year. Daniel Radford, who descended through his mother from Philip Henry, was treasurer of the presbyterian congregation at Stoke Newington, and an intimate friend of Dr. Price and other notable persons connected with it. His son-in-law, whose family connections had been tory and high church, embraced liberal and nonconformist principles, and the children were brought up as dissenters.

Samuel Rogers received his education at private schools in Hackney and Stoke Newington, at the former of which he contracted a lifelong friendship with [q. v.] His Newington master, Mr. Burgh, afterwards gave him private lessons in Islington, and exercised a highly beneficial influence upon him. He lost his mother in 1776. His own choice of a vocation had been the presbyterian ministry, but his father, who had in the meantime become a banker in Cornhill, in partnership with a gentleman of the name of Welch, wished him to enter the bank, and he complied. His intellectual tastes found an outlet in a determination to acquire fame as an author. During long holidays at the seaside, necessitated by indifferent health, he read widely and familiarised himself with Johnson, Goldsmith, and Gray, who remained his models throughout his life. He went, with his friend Maltby, to proffer his personal homage to Dr. Johnson, but the youths' courage failed, and they retreated without venturing to lift the knocker. In 1781 he contributed several short essays to the 'Gentleman's Magazine,' and the following year wrote an unacted opera, 'The Vintage of Burgundy,' of which some fragments remain. In 1786 he published, anonymously, 'An Ode to Superstition, with some other Poems.' An elder brother, Thomas, died in 1788, and his share in the bank's management and profits became considerable. In 1789 he visited Scotland, where he received especial kindness from Dr. Robertson, the historian, and made the acquaintance of almost every Scottish man of letters, but heard nothing of Robert Burns. In 1791 he visited France, and in 1792 published, again anonymously, the poem with which his name as a poet is, on the whole, most intimately associated, 'The Pleasures of Memory.' The child of 'The Pleasures of Imagination' and the parent of 'The Pleasures of Hope,' it entirely hit the taste of the day. By 1806 it had gone through fifteen editions, two-thirds of them numbering from one to two thousand copies each.

Rogers's father died in June 1793. His eldest brother, Daniel, had offended his father by marrying his cousin; the family share in the bank was bequeathed to Samuel, and he found himself possessed of five thousand a year. Without immediately giving up the family house on Newington Green, he took chambers in Paper Buildings, and laid himself out for society. He had already many literary acquaintances; and now constrained by hereditary connections and his own well-considered opinions to chose his friends mainly from the opposition, he became intimate with Fox, Sheridan, and Horne Tooke. Another friend who had more influence upon him than any of the rest was [q. v.], generally known as 'Conversation Sharp,' one of the best literary judges of his time. In 1795 Rogers wrote an epilogue for Mrs. Siddons, a sufficient proof of the position which he had gained as a poet, a position which was even raised by the 'Epistle to a