[John Roget [Jean Roget], Geneva-born protestant pastor in London, father of Thesaurus compiler Peter Mark Roget and brother-in-law of Sir Samuel Romilly.] Two childhood Autograph Commonplace Books (‘Livres d'Extraits’ and ‘Fruits de mes Lectures’).

See the entries in the Oxford DNB for his brother-in-law Sir Samuel Romilly and his son Peter Mark Roget, as well as Joshua Kendall’s 2008 biography of the latter, ‘The Man Who Made Lists’. The two items were commenced while Roget was a fifteen-year-old schoolboy in Geneva, and nine years before his 1775 emigration to London. The two volumes of the same dimensions, but not uniform. Vol.1: 179pp, small 4to. Vol.2: 146pp, small 4to. Both tight and internally in good condition, lightly aged, in worn card wraps, each with a different stencilled design on the covers. The spine of the first volume carries the words ‘Extraits (Revd. J. Roget) 1766’ in a nineteenth-century hand (P. M. Roget’s?), while that of the second bears the remains of a pink paper label with the words ‘MSS. Revd. J. ROGET’ in the same hand. The first volume is titled on a fly-leaf: ‘Livre d’Extraits / Commencé ce 27 Juin 1766. / Jean Roget / de la 1ere Classe. / Jean Roget / 1766 / Fruits de mes Lectures / Tome I’. The second volume is titled: ‘Fruits de mes lectures / Livre d’extraits, ou recueil de pieces intéressantes de littérature choisie de poësie, de traits d’histoire ancienne et moderne; de découvertes des science et des arts. &c, &c, &c. / [Charrago? Pharrago?] / Tome 2d. / Commencé ce 17 Décembre 1766 / Par Jean Roget / de la 1ere classe’. The first volume contains, on 163 pages, 244 numbered extracts in prose and verse, followed by a twelve-page ‘Table des Numeros’. The authors are not named, nor is the magazine from which the extracts have been made, but occasional entries give volume number and page. The first entry is a poem titled ‘Vers sur la liberté’ (in fact a stanza from the ‘Ode sur le Temps’ of Antoine Léonard Thomas); the last is ‘Henriade travestie en vers burlesques’ (by Louis-Charles Fougeret de Monbron). The second volume is arranged in similar style, but with longer extracts, this time numbered to 76, and no table. The first entry in this volume is a poem titled ‘Devoirs de la Société’ (again by Thomas); the last is a prose text titled ‘Ne Craignez pas ceux qui ne peuvent qu’ôter la vie du Corps’. From the Roget family papers.