Thomas Rogers

“ They are genial and tolerant in their judgment of others. Yes, they are mighty good fellows, until you turn them around and look at their other side. Rogers is lovable enough until he touches the other button. Then he goes with perfect ruthlessness for what he wants. And yet, though you are his victim, you can't bring yourself to hate him. After he has thrown you down and taken all you have and you turn yourself over and find the dark lantern has disappeared, and you hear him going up the lane, you pick yourself out of the gutter and admire the skill with which he did the job. ”

“ In a short time he became well known in Huntingdonshire as a preacher, and, returning to Essex, he received presbyterian ordination in 1647. About the same time he married a daughter of Sir Robert Payne of Midloe in Huntingdonshire, and became 'settled minister' of Purleigh in Essex, a valuable living. Rogers, however, found country life uncongenial, and, engaging a curate, he proceeded to London. There he renounced his presbyterian ordination, and joined the independents. Becoming lecturer at St. Thomas Apostle's, he preached violent political sermons in support of the Long parliament. ”

“ It is easy to find men who will declare by all that is sacred that Henry H. Rogers is one of the best fellows in the world, though as many more will as earnestly proclaim him the fiend incarnate. About Addicks, among those who know the man, there is but one opinion. I have yet to meet the man, woman, or child who would say aught of Addicks, after a month's acquaintance, other than, "Don't mention him! He is the limit." And it will be said with the calm of dispassionate conviction, as one might speak of a stuffed tiger in a dime-museum jungle. ”

“ Among those, William Rogers, a merchant of Bristol, was not the least, nor least accounted of by himself and some others. He was a bold and active man, moderately learned, but immoderately conceited of his own parts and abilities, which made him forward to engage, as thinking none would dare to take up the gauntlet he should cast down. ”

“ Rogers won a high reputation in England by his music for the services of the established church and by his reorganisation of important choirs. At the Restoration he had been reappointed lay clerk of St. George's Chapel, with an addition to his allowances in consideration of his playing the organ whenever Dr. Child was absent, and in 1662 he was also appointed organist to Eton College. Invited by Dr. Thomas Pierce [q. v.] to fill a similar post at Magdalen College, Oxford, he became, on 25 Jan. ”

“ Rogers was very much offended at its being said that his ‘Pleasures,’ &c. were to be found shining in green and gold morocco-bindings in most parlour-windows, and on the book-shelves of all young ladies.”
“But, don’t we all write to please them? I am sure I was more pleased with the fame my ‘Corsair’ had, than with that of any other of my books. Why? for the very reason because it did shine, and in boudoirs. Who does not write to please the women? And Rogers has succeeded: what more can he want or wish? ”

“ He is considerate, kindly, generous, helpful, and everything a man should be to his friends. But when it comes to business—his kind of business—when he turns away from his better self and goes aboard his pirate brig and hoists the Jolly Rover, God help you! And, then, as a buccaneer you have to admire him, for he is a master among pirates, and you have to salute him, even when he has the point of his cutlass at the small of your back and you're walking the plank at his order. Rogers is wonderful. He is one of the most prolific human creatures I have ever met ”

“ Rogers met my onslaught by a manœuvre new in "Standard Oil" tactics. He came into the open, issuing a proclamation over his own signature which gave me the lie, at the same time tearing off a yard or two of my skin and throwing on a bucket of brine to remind me I had lost it. This attack was just off the press when I was out with a rejoinder which he, in after-years, referred to as quite the hottest thing of its kind he had ever read. ”

“ The living was worth more than 100l. a year, and a letter from Archbishop Laud says it was given to the college out of friendship for him by ‘Mr. Nehemiah Rogers, now a minister in Essex, and a man of good note’ (Works, Oxford, 1860, vii. 242) . On 1 May 1636 Rogers was presented by the king to a stall in Ely Cathedral. He exchanged the living of Great Tey with Thomas Wykes for that of St. Botolph's, Bishopsgate, in 1642. Upon Wykes's death Rogers presented his eldest son, Nehemiah, to the Tey rectory on 15 Aug. ”

“ Rogers with oracular emphasis, "that is where your business education is flawed. No man has done his business properly who has missed a single dollar he could have secured in the doing of it. I do not think a fair judge would find me guilty of avarice, either in business or in the manner of my living, and yet I am made fairly miserable if I discover that, in any business I do, I have not extracted every dollar possible. It is one of the first principles Mr. Rockefeller taught me; it is one he has inculcated in every 'Standard Oil' man, until to-day it is a religion with us all." ”

“ People do wisest who take care of their fame when they have got it. That’s the rock I have split on. It has been said that he has been puffed into notice by his dinners and Lady Holland. Though he gives very good ones, and female Mæcenases are no bad things now-a-days, it is by no means true. Rogers has been a spoilt child ”

“ Rogers and his immediate associates, while these great wrongs were occurring, led social lives which, measured by the most rigid yardstick of mental or moral rectitude, were as near perfect as it is possible for human lives to be. ”

“ I met Bowles once at Rogers’s, and thought him a pleasant, gentlemanly man—a good fellow, for a parson. When men meet together after dinner, the conversation takes a certain turn. I remember he entertained us with some good stories. ”

“ Up to now Mr. Rogers and William Rockefeller had kept me between the people and their legal responsibility by having all public statements made over my signature. I had half-way concluded that this was done to avoid future accounting, but there might be other reasons. I determined when it came to the flotation, which would be the first time they took openly the public's money, to connect them publicly with my statements. It is next to impossible for any man to sit in front of Henry H. Rogers and give one reason for his actions and have another about his person ”

“ Rogers is out of town with Madame de Staël, who hath published an Essay against Suicide, which, I presume, will make somebody shoot himself;—as a sermon by Blinkensop, in proof of Christianity, sent a hitherto most orthodox acquaintance of mine out of a chapel of ease a perfect atheist. Have you found or founded a residence yet? and have you begun or finished a poem? ”

“ The first, because her 'Simple Story' and 'Nature and Art' are, to me, true to their titles; and, consequently, her short note to Rogers about 'The Giaour' delighted me more than any thing, except the Edinburgh Review. I like the Americans, because I happened to be in Asia, while the English Bards and Scotch Reviewers were redde in America. If I could have had a speech against the Slave Trade, in Africa, and an epitaph on a dog in Europe (i.e. in the Morning Post) , my vertex sublimis would certainly have displaced stars enough to overthrow the Newtonian system. ”

“ Most men who have ever been on the inside of "Standard Oil" know that no man with a bad record could do business, much less have an intimate relation, with Rogers and Rockefeller for nine seconds; and my connection extended over nine years.
The tone of my correspondence during the year was not by any means altogether friendly. The writer of the following letter presented his conclusions straight from the shoulder and I was equally direct in my reply:
Personal. ”

“ All the others of me, like most portraitsPg 281 whatsoever, are, of course, more agreeable than nature.
"Redde the Ed. Review of Rogers. He is ranked highly; but where he should be. There is a summary view of us all—Moore and me among the rest; and both (the first justly) praised—though, by implication (justly again) placed beneath our memorable friend. Mackintosh is the writer, and also of the critique on the Staël. His grand essay on Burke, I hear, is for the next number. ”

“ Brush Makers— Abel, Frederick, Unthank’s road
Candler, John, Rampant Horse street
Cooke, Samuel, 6, Davey place
Edgar, Thos., Chapel st., Crook’s pl.
Gay and Co., Upper market
Gooch, Thos., 7, Grout’s thoroughfare
Harper, Jas. K., St. Benedict’s street
Johnson, Edwin, Devonshire place, Holl’s lane
Livock, James, Bloomsbury place, Rose lane
Lord, George, Lower Westwick street
Mallett, H., Cross lane, St. George’s
Page, S. D., and Son, (wholesale) 23, Old Haymarket
Rix, Henry, Duke street
Rogers and Page, (wholesale) Wensum street
Scott, Peter Thomas, White Lion str. ”

“ Laws, Robert, Dereham road
Lebbell, Thomas, Heigham street
Leggatt, John, Scoles’ green
Norman, Elizabeth Maria, King st.
Pank, James, King street
Palmer, John and W., St. Augustine’s
Riches, William, Barn road
Rogers, John, Muspole street
Shalders, T., Hay hill, Market place
Shreeve, J., (shoeing) Magdalen st.
Thaxter, John, Barrack street
Warner, James, Trafalgar street
Wegg, Christopher, Fishgate street
Blind Makers (see Venetian Blind Makers) —Boat Builders— Britcher, John, Carrow abbey
Fisher, James, Oak street
Hobrough, William, Bishop’s bridge
Houghton, Robert, St. ”

“ He'd be happy—just the happy son of his father that I loved, old Bill Rogers, my pardner. It's not right for the soul of a man to shiver when he's but twenty-five, and to think that the greatest game of all, the game of life, is done, and him barred from any further playin' on its so many numbers. I can't brace him up. Help me, won't you? You're his kind. You've got the young heart and the young mind. Help me make Tommy Rogers forget. ”

“ In judging a man we must in justice to ourselves ask, "What effect has this man's life, taken as a whole, had on the world?"
To lift out samples here and there and hold them up does not give us the man, any more than a sample brick gives you a view of the house. And viewing the life of Rogers for years, from the time he saw the light of a whale-oil lamp in Fairhaven, to the man as we behold him now, we must acknowledge his initiative and his power. He gave profitable work to millions. He directly made homes and comforts possible for thousands upon thousands. ”

“ These works have steadily extended his fame; and amid the truest enjoyment of that fame, Mr. Rogers has lived a long and honored, and, singularly for a poet, fortunate life. His wealth and position in society, not less than his wealth and position in the world of mind, have drawn around him all the distinguished characters of his time; and his house, filled from top to bottom with evidences of his taste, and of his means of indulging it, has been the resort of most of those who have given its intellectual stamp to the age. ”

“ Amid the great struggles and events of that period, the wars, the revolutions, and the social contests which have communicated their fiery elements to the spirit of genius, and produced works of a like extreme character, the mind of Rogers, calm and self-balanced, has pursued its course, apparently uninfluenced by all that moved around him. With human nature, and human life in general, he sympathized ”

“ He is Director of the Imperial Oil Co., Ltd., and Vice-President of Harris & Company, Woollen Manufacturers, Rockwood. Mr. Rogers is also Chairman and Treasurer of the Board of Management of Pickering College, Newmarket, near which he owns and operates a farm that affords a country outlook to the students. He is a member of the National Club and Lambton Golf and Country Club, of Toronto, as also of the Toronto Board of Trade and the York Pioneers. In religion he belongs to the Society of Friends. ”

“ These exercises were of more than local interest, because the man in whose honor they were held has filled a great place in American education and American science. Born in Philadalphia in 1804, he passed his early boyhood and manhood at the old William and Mary College at Williamsburg, Va. In this institution his father was professor of natural science, and in the academic freedom of which this college was then one of the few exemplars, the young Rogers was able to follow the leadings of his own genius. ”

“ Rogers was not a man of exceptional mental powers or moral force, but such of his characteristics as exceeded the average standard were precisely those which contribute most to the embellishment of human life. ”

“ Rogers in evidence of the declaration. After her divorce she married Captain John Roach, master of an English vessel in the fur trade. The tradition is that, having sailed from Quebec for London, he most unaccountably lost his reckoning and found himself in Portsmouth (New Hampshire) harbor. Here for reasons satisfactory to himself, he sold the cargo on his own account and quit sea life.17 After his marriage he lived with his wife and her son by the former marriage on the estate in Concord, previously mentioned as having been conveyed by Rogers to her father. ”

“ When, hark! a voice sung sweetly thro’ the shade.
It ceas’d—yet still in FLORIO’S fancy sung,
Still on each note his captive spirit hung;
Till o’er the mead a cool, sequester’d grot
From its rich roof a sparry lustre shot.
A crystal water cross’d the pebbled floor,
And on the front these simple lines it bore:
Hence away, nor dare intrude!
In this secret, shadowy cell
Musing MEMORY loves to dwell,
With her sister Solitude.
Far from the busy world she flies,
To taste that peace the world denies.
Entranc’d she sits; from youth to age,
Reviewing Life’s eventful page ”