Page:Letters from Abroad to Kindred at Home (Volume 1).djvu/81

78 follows it. Now that ideas travel so rapidly from one quarter of the world to another. I trust some steamer will bear to America that which is recently received in England, and has, as long as other cardinal points of philosophy, governed Continental society, viz., that eating and drinking is not a necessary element in social intercourse.

We had the pleasure of a breakfast at Rogers'. Your long familiarity with his poetry tells you the melancholy fact that he is no longer young; a fact kept out of your mind as far as possible, on a personal acquaintance, by the freshness with which he enjoys, and the generosity with which he imparts. I have heard him called cynical, and perhaps a man of his keen wit may be sometimes overtempted to demonstrate it, as the magnanimous Saladin was to use the weapon with which he adroitly severed a man's head from his body at a single stroke. If so, these are the exceptions to the general current of his life, which, I am sure, flows in a kindly current K. told me he met him one winter in Paris, where he found him enjoying art like a young enthusiast, and knowing every boy's name in the street he lived in, and in friendship with them all. Does not this speak volumes?

He honoured our letters of introduction by coming immediately to see us, and receiving us as cordially as if we were old friends. He afterward expressed a regret to me that he had not taken that morning, before we plunged into engagements, to show me Johnson's and Dryden's haunts, the house