The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1856-02-26 00:00:00

WE ARE ALL HERE.

We are all, all here ;
Not a vacant chair
Speaks sadly of one
• Who once sat there ;
We miss no dear face from our circle to-night,
Or sigh that one comes not to gladden our sight.
No thought of one absent,
With sorrowful power,
Flings a shadow of gloom
O'er the joy of the hour.
There's no void at the fireside, all our lov'd ones are near,
And echoes each glad heart, " We're all, we're all here."

The wide world forgotten—
Its joy and its pain,
Around the old hearthstone
We cluster again.
And pleasure may beckon, but unheeded its call,
While once more the roof-tree o'ershadows us all.
While our frail barks are drifting
On Life's stormy main,
Will its waves ever anchor
Us all here again ?
Oh ! the joy of the present is dimmed by a fear
That never the future will find us all here.

' But we know that our Father,
• Let what will betide,
Each wanderer's footsteps
Will lovingly guide ;
And when widely parted, the loved household bands
May not doubt that our treasures are safe in His hands.

I ITER ..1 TUBB.

Recollections of the Table Talk of Samuel Rogers

To which is added Porsoniana: London: Moxon.

The volume of table-talk here presented to the
public possesses a good deal of interest, and it also
contains a great amount of twaddle. The taste and
industry applied to watching, noting, and arranging
the off-hand conversational remarks of individuals
wholly unconscious of the espionage under which they
are speaking and acting have been frequently and
justly reprobated. If such a practice be liable to
censure in ordinary circumstances, the instance now
under consideration will do little to remove the odium.
The collection is open to the charge of being fre-
quently insipid, and often, malignant. Its editor
shelters himself under the averment that Rogers was
aware of the fact, that he (the editor) made careful
notes of the conversations which passed at the cele-
brated and long-continued breakfasts which the
dilletante -banker was in the habit of giving to his
friends. So far as the gossip of Rogers himself went,
this may be some palliative ' • but even that must be
taken with circumspection. The ana retailed by the
garrulous old gentleman, like those of other gossip-
mongers, involved the character of others, both living
and dead, whom he bad no right to exhibit in the
pillory of his defamatory twaddle.
What he says of himself he was, of course, entitled
to have reported in any way he chose, as that most in
unison with the dictates of his own vanity ; but he
could not, claim, far less confer, the right of gibbet-
ting those who were his guests : and, if possible, he
had still -less right so to dispose of the personal
character or peculiarities of those whose evil fortune
it was to form the subjects of those conversations.
Many of his reminiscences, extending, as they did,
over so long a period, are fraught with matter for
'sage reflection. The remembrance of himself and
others, when boys, chasing butterflies about the fields,
in cocked' hats, is at once amusing and suggestive.
Less satisfactory, in our esteem, is the confidential
communication made by an hotel-waiter to Stothard
the painter, that Fox and Dundas drank seven bottles
of wine at a sitting. Of the frightful consequences of
popular tumult, many examples have been adduced in
different ways—few of them perhaps more striking
or more novel than the annexed recollection con-
nected with