for that purpose.”  The artist Charles Robert Leslie caught a rare glimpse on canvas of this library, in which appear his friends Lord and Lady Holland, who were also the host and hostess of Fenimore Cooper.  We are told by him that the dining-table was square; that the host had one corner and the hostess the centre; and the American author, “as the stranger, had the honor of a seat next to Lady Holland.”  When talking, he was offered by her a plate of herring, of which he frankly avowed he “ought to have eaten one, even to the fins and tail”; but little dreaming of their international worth just then, the herring were declined.  With good humor his hostess said:  “You do not know what you say; they are Dutch.”  With some vigor of look and tone Cooper repeated—­“Dutch!” The reply was:  “Yes, Dutch; we can only get them through an ambassador.”  Then Cooper rose to the occasion by replying:  “There are too many good things of native production to require a voyage to Holland on my account.”  Of their host Rogers’ record was:  “Lord Holland always comes down to breakfast like a man upon whom sudden good fortune had just fallen—­his was the smile that spoke the mind at ease.”  And after his death were found on Lord Holland’s dressing-table, and in his handwriting, these lines on himself: 

    Nephew of Fox and friend of Gay,
      Enough my meed of fame
    If those who deighn’d to observe me say
      I injured neither name.

[Illustration:  ROGERS’ SEAT.]

    “Here Rogers sat, and here forever dwell
    With me, those Pleasures that he sang so well.”

After dining at Lord Grey’s Cooper wrote of him:  “He on all occasions acted as if he never thought of national differences”; and the author thought him “the man of most character in his set.”  We are told that England is the country of the wealthy, and that the king is seldom seen, although the royal start from St. James for Windsor was seen and described as going off “at a slapping pace.”

[Illustration:  CHARLES ROBERT LESLIE.]

[Illustration:  SIR JAMES MACKINTOSH.]

[Illustration:  HOLLAND HOUSE.]

[Illustration:  LIBRARY OF HOLLAND HOUSE.]

[Illustration:  GILT CHAMBER OF HOLLAND HOUSE.]

[Illustration:  LORD GREY.]

[Illustration:  MRS. JOHN GIBSON LOCKHART.]

But it was in that dreamland of Rogers’ that Cooper’s heart found its greatest joy.  There he met the artists,—­Sir Thomas Lawrence, handsome and well-mannered; Leslie, mild, caring little for aught save his tastes and affections; and Newton, who “thinks himself” English.  Here, dining, he meets again Sir Walter Scott, his son-in-law and later biographer, Mr. Lockhart, Sir Walter’s daughters, Mrs. Lockhart and Miss Anne Scott.  He says Mrs. Lockhart “is just the woman to have success in Paris, by her sweet, simple manners.”  He had a stately chat with Mrs. Siddons, and Sir James Mackintosh he called “the best talker I have ever seen; the only man I have yet met in England who appears to have any clear or definite notions of us.”  Rare indeed were these flash-lights of genius that Samuel Rogers charmed to his “feasts of reason and flow of soul.”