houses on London Bridge. To assist them to proper opinions on these and al other subjects, there were the London newspapers of that date-daily, weekly, an bi-weekly, Whig, Tory, and what not; and, in addition to the newspapers, quite : abundance of critical journals, reviews, and magazines. For it was beginning to a very busy time in British literature. That organization of literature into commerce which the Tonsons may be said to have commenced had now be pretty well improved and regularized. It was no longer on the Court, or on W and Tory Ministers, or on the casual patronage of noblemen of taste, that men letters depended, but on the demand of the general public of readers and bo purchasers, as it could be ascertained and catered for by booksellers mak publishing their business. The centre of this book-trade was naturally Londo and here, accordingly, hanging on the booksellers, and writing for the newspape and magazines, but with side-glances also to the theatres and their managers, wi now congregated such a host of authors and critics by profession as had ne been known in London before. To borrow from Mr. Forster a convenient list those whom we have now dismissed into oblivion as the smaller fry of this Ga Street world of London in the latter days of George II., there were the "Purde, Hills, Willingtons, Kenricks, Kellys, Shiels, Smarts, Bakers, Guthries, Wor Ryders, Collyers, Joneses, Francklins, Pilkingtons, Huddleston Wynnes, Hiffernans." They did not consider themselves small fry, but were busy 2 boisterous enough-the Irish among them fighting with the Scotch, and both withi English; and perhaps the last-named Irishman, Hiffernan, ought to have a place literary history still, as the inventor of the grand word "impecuniosity." But in midst of these less-known or forgotten one would seek out now the figures of th. who were undoubtedly the Thames-kindlers in chief. And first among these com Johnson, now forty-seven years of age, and a Londoner already for nearly twe years not yet "Dr.," and not in possession of his literary dictatorship, the advancing towards it. The poet Young was alive in old age, and at l occasionally in London; and Londoners confirmed were Richardson, approach his seventieth year, and with all his novels published, and Smollett, not past thirty-seventh year, but with some of his best novels published, and now work hard at histories, reviews, and all sorts of things. Fielding had been dead * years, and Sterne, though some years over forty, had not yet been heard of. I poet Collins was dying, in madness, at Chichester. Slump together the veter and not much-liked Mallet, and Armstrong, Glover, Akenside, Garrick, For Murphy, and the Wartons, without being too particular in inquiring whether t were all in London habitually at the exact time under consideration; remem also that Chesterfield, Warburton, Dyer, Shenstone, Gray, Horace Walpole, Mason were alive here or there in England, and could be in London if they lik and that away in Scotland, only dreaming of London in the distance, were a northern lights, with Allan Ramsay still surviving among them; finally imag Burke, who was Goldsmith's junior, already an adventurer in London, and s other men of about Goldsmith's own age as Percy of the Ballads, the sat

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Churchill, and the elder George Colman, either come to London or tending thither; and you will have an idea of the state of the world of British letters at the end of the Second George's reign, and also some rough notion of the extent to which that world and its interests interpenetrated London when Goldsmith first gazed about in the crowded streets. And who was the nominal chief or

laureate? Who but Colley Cibber, of whom Johnson had written

Great George's acts let tuneful Cibber sing,
For Nature formed the poet for the king.

But Cibber, who was now eighty-four years of age, did not live beyond 1757. He was succeeded by a William Whitehead, whose laureateship extended from 1757 to 1788. The whole of Goldsmith's literary career, as it happened, and large portions also of the lives of Johnson, Smollett, Burke, Garrick, Reynolds, and others whom we now associate with Goldsmith, fell within the laureateship of this memorable Whitehead.

We have been attaching Goldsmith to the London world of letters somewhat in anticipation of his own efforts at any such connexion. Not to set the Thames on fire, but to get anything whatever to do by which he could earn sheer bread for his own teeth and mouth, with a daily gulp of beer, was the poor fellow's one object during a whole year after his arrival in London. It was desperate work, and the details were locked up, for the most part, in his own memory, and never told connectedly to anybody. "When I lived among the beggars in Axe Lane," he would sometimes afterwards say with a laugh; and there are traces of him in various capacities just above Axe Lane and its beggars. He was, for some time, an usher somewhere under a false name; he was then employed in the shop of a druggist in Fish-street Hill; next he is heard of as having set up for himself as a physician among the poor of Bankside, and as wearing a miserable second-hand suit of green and gold; and again he is found as reader for the press to Richardson, the novelist and printer, in his printing-office in Salisbury Court, Fleet Street. Of this last connexion, in which one might have fancied some likelihood, nothing more came than some acquaintance with Richardson himself and a sight of the poet Young; and Goldsmith had some glorious project of getting appointed to go out to the East, on a salary of 300l. a year, to decipher the inscriptions on "the Written Mountains" (the necessary Arabic to be learnt in the process), when an ushership in a boardingschool of the better sort turned up at Peckham. Here he lived for some time with Dr. Milner, a Dissenting minister, the proprietor of the school, and was apparently not worse off than other ushers. One day, however, Griffiths, the bookseller of Paternoster Row, dined with the Milners, and, from something he saw or had heard of the Irish usher, fancied he might be useful for hackwork on the Monthly Review -a periodical which had been started by Griffiths in 1749 on Whig principles, but against which a Tory rival had recently been set up in the Critical Review, edited by Smollett. After getting some specimens of what Goldsmith could do in the kind of work wanted, Griffiths was discerning enough to engage him. Accordingly, in April 1757, he took up his quarters in the house of Griffiths, over the shop in

Paternoster Row, on the understanding that, for board, lodging, and some small salary besides, he was to write such articles and reviews of books as might be required from him. Griffiths, and (what was worse for Goldy) Mrs. Griffiths, were to be judges of the articles, and were to clip and doctor them to suit.

Behold Goldsmith at last with the pen put into his hand-his one predestined instrument in the world! In the circumstances, however, he does not seem to have taken to it kindly. For five months, indeed, he sat daily in his room in the bookseller's house from nine o'clock till two, and sometimes later, writing, or sup posed to be writing, notices of books and such-like for the Monthly Review. His contributions, longer and shorter, in the successive numbers of the Review from April to September 1757, have been picked out from among the articles supplied by other members of the Griffiths staff-Griffiths himself, Ruffhead, Grainger, Ralph, Kippis, Langhorne, &c. They include a paper on Mallet's "Mythology of the Celts," and reviews of Home's "Douglas,” Burke's "Essay on the Sublime and Beautiful," Smollett's "History of England," Voltaire's "Universal History,” . Wilkie's "Epigoniad," and the "Odes" of Gray. They were fair magazine-articles of the kind then going, and something of Goldsmith's lightness and ease of style is discernible in all or most of them. But, whether because Goldsmith's rate of industry did not satisfy the methodical bookseller, or because Mrs. Griffiths did not like his ways, or because the tampering of both with what he wrote and their general treatment of him hurt his sensitiveness, the engagement, which had been for a year, was broken short at the end of the five months. A new hand, named Kenrick, took Goldsmith's place as Griffiths's resident hack; and Goldsmith was again adrift-not absolutely cashiered by Griffiths, and indeed still writing for him, though they were not on the best of terms, but at liberty to take other work,

Why dwell over the particulars of the next year or two of Goldsmith's anonymous drudgery? Let the merest sketch suffice:-In or about September 1757, after leaving Griffiths, he went into a garret somewhere near Salisbury Square; and here it was that his youngest brother, Charles, came in upon him, and lived for a day or two with him ruefully, on his way to Jamaica. He was then living on translations from I the French and other things, still chiefly for Griffiths, with the Temple Exchange! Coffee House, near Temple Bar, as his daily house of call, where letters could be addressed to him, and where he could meet and talk with a few fellow-craftsmen like himself, or somewhat more flourishing. Then he is traced going back for a little while, in his despair, to his ushership at Peckham-only, however, to emerge again and resume literary hackwork. In 1758 he is found living in No. 12, Green Arbour Court, Old Bailey—a dingy little old square, approached from Farringdon Street by a passage called Break-Neck Steps, now all demolished, and surviving only in Washington Irving's description of it when he visited it for Goldsmith's sake, and found it a colony of washerwomen, and slovenly with wash-tubs on the pavement and clothes hung to dry on lines from the windows. Here, when it was much in the same state, Goldsmith lived from some time in 1758 till late in 1760-i.e. till George II. was king no longer, but young George III. reigned

in his stead. Here, through part of 1758 and part of 1759, he was at his very worst. Never having quite ceased to hope something from his medical studies and his degree of M. B., he had set his heart on going out to India as a medical officer in the Company's service, and had actually, through Dr. Milner, obtained the promise of some such appointment on the Coromandel coast. This prospect failing in some unexplained way, he resolved to try for an appointment as surgeon's mate in the Army or Navy. The result appears from an entry in the books of the College of Surgeons. At a Court of the Examiners for the College, held on the 21st of December, 1758, in the Old Bailey, not far from Goldsmith's lodging, various candidates were found qualified for appointments. Among them was a James Barnard, who passed as mate to an hospital;" after the record of which fact there is this brief entry, 'Oliver Goldsmith, found not qualified for ditto." It was a dreadful blow, not only on account of the shame should the fact become known (it was pretty well kept secret during Goldy's lifetime), but also on account of some immediate consequences. To appear becomingly before the examiners he had wanted a new suit of clothes; and, though by this time he had begun to have dealings with other publishers than Griffiths-with Newbery, the proprietor of the Literary Magazine, and with Archibald Hamilton, the proprietor of the Critical Review, which Smollett edited-yet it was to Griffiths that he had ap plied in his difficulty. For four articles contributed in advance for the Monthly Review Griffiths had become his security to the tailor for the new suit, on condition that the suit should be returned or paid for within a certain time. But, four days after Goldsmith's rejection at Surgeons' Hall, his landlord, to whom he was in arrears, was hauled off to prison for debt, and, to help somewhat in the landlady's distress, not only the new suit went into pawn, but the books of Griffiths which Goldsmith had for review. Griffiths, learning the fact, and probably all the angrier with Goldsmith because he had written for Hamilton and the rival Review, demanded his books, called Goldsmith a "sharper" and a " villain," and threatened all sorts of horrors. "Sir," wrote Goldsmith in reply, "I know of no misery "but a jail to which my own imprudences and your letter seem to point. I have seen it inevitable these three or four weeks, and, by heavens! request it as a "favour-as a favour that may prevent somewhat more fatal. I have been some "years struggling with a wretched being, with all that contempt which indigence “brings with it, with all those strong passions which make contempt insupportable.” But Griffiths's bark was worse than his bite, and Goldsmith was let live on in Green Arbour Court.

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An extract or two from letters written by him to his Irish relatives and friends, either shortly before or shortly after his rejection by the College of Surgeons, will picture him better in this time of his deepest distress than any mere description. "Whether I eat or starve," he writes to his brother-in-law Hodson at Lissoy, "live "in a first floor or four pair of stairs high, I still remember them [his Irish friends] with "pleasure; nay, my very country comes in for a share of my affection. Unaccountable "fondness for country, this maladie du pays, as the French call it! Unaccountable

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How will they bewail the If ever my works find their Suppose one of your Chinese

"that he should still have an affection for a place who never, when in it, received "above common civility; who never brought anything out of it but his brogue and "his blunders! Surely my affection is equally ridiculous with the Scotchman's, wha "refused to be cured of the itch, because it made him unco' thoughtful of his wife "and bonny Inverary." He goes on to say that, if he went to the opera, where Signora Columba was pouring forth all the mazes of melody, it only made him sigi for Lissoy fireside and "Johnny Armstrong's Last Good Night" from the lips Peggy Golden, and that, if he climbed Hampstead Hill, the magnificent prospec thence only made him think of the dearer landscape from the little mount before. Lissoy Gate. Again in a letter to an old college friend, Bryanton, whom he jocose takes to task for having forgotten him: "God's curse, Sir! who am I? Eh! what "am I? Do you know whom you have offended? A man whose character may "one of these days be mentioned with profound respect in a German comment or "Dutch Dictionary; whose name you will probably hear ushered in by a ‘doctis "simus doctissimorum,' or heel-pieced with a long Latin termination. . . . There will "come a day, no doubt it will-I beg you may live a couple of hundred years longe! "only to see the day-when the Scaligers and Daciers will vindicate my character! 'give learned editions of my labours, and bless the times with copious comments of "the text. You shall see how they will fish up the heavy scoundrels who disregar me now, or will then offer to cavil at my productions. "times that suffered so much genius to lie neglected! "way to Tartary or China, I know the consequence. "Owanowitzers instructing one of your Tartarian Chianobacchi-you see I use "Chinese names to show my erudition, as I shall soon make our Chinese talk like "an Englishman to show his. This may be the subject of the lecture, Oliver "Goldsmith flourished in the 18th and 19th centuries. He lived to be an hundred, "and three years old, and in that age may be justly styled the Sun of Literature and "the Confucius of Europe,' ,""&c. Again, in a letter to his cousin, Uncle Contarine's daughter, now Mrs. Lauder: "Alas! I have many a fatigue to encounter before tha "happy time arrives when your poor old simple friend may again give a loose to the "luxuriance of his nature, sitting by Kilmore fireside, recount the various adventures! "of a hard-fought life, laugh over the follies of the day, join his flute to your har "sichord, and forget that ever he starved in those streets where Butler and Otway} starved before him." And, best of all, in a long letter to his brother Henry: "It "gives me some pain to think I am almost beginning the world at the age of thirtyThough I never had a day's illness since I saw you, I am not that strong active man you once knew me. You scarcely can conceive how much eight years of 'disappointment, anguish, and study, have worn me down. If I remember right, 'you are seven or eight years older than me; yet I dare venture to say that, if a1 'stranger saw us both, he would pay me the honours of seniority. Imagine to your "self a pale melancholy visage, with two great wrinkles between the eyebrows, with "an eye disgustingly severe, and a big wig; and you have a perfect picture of my I can neither laugh nor drink; have contracted a hesi

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