that something advantageous to Goldy might arise from this introduction to the Northumberland family-especially as the Earl was Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, had all sorts of offices on the Irish establishment at his disposal, and might easily, with public approval, have given some sinecure to one who was not only a popular author, but an Irishman to boot. Goldsmith did have an interview with the Earl a: Northumberland House, received compliments from him on his Traveller, and was informed that the Earl had heard he was a native of Ireland, and would be glad to do him any kindness. Instead of improving the occasion for himself, "this idiot m the affairs of the world," as Sir John Hawkins calls him, only told the Earl he bad a brother in Ireland, a poor clergyman, who stood in much need of help. "As for myself," he said afterwards in telling the story to Sir John, "I have no dependence on the promises of great men: I look to the booksellers for support." This was no mere affectation on Goldy's part; it was really true. With the excep

tion of Mr. Robert Nugent, afterwards Lord Nugent, Viscount Clare and Earl Nugent-a jovial, elderly Irishman, of great wealth, and free-and-easy politics, who admired Goldsmith, and was always glad to see him at his seat at Gosfield Hall, Essex-Goldsmith never cared to trouble any of the "great people" with his timacy. And the utmost that came to him from this friendship, besides a week of country air now and then, was the appearance, once or twice, of a haunch of venison in his chambers in town. For, of course, Goldsmith was now done with Islington and Mrs. Fleming. The Temple, now and thenceforth, was his established place of residence. He had had rough temporary accommodation here, as we have seen, "on the library staircase," in 1764; and this he is found exchanging, nor about 1765, for superior chambers in the same court-i.e., Garden Court. These he retained till 1768.

In June 1765 Goldsmith, to take advantage of his new popularity, published, with his name, and under the title of Essays, and with the motto "Collecta Revirescunt," a selection from his anonymous papers in the Bee, the Busy-Body, the Lady's Magazine, the British Magazine, &c. Other people, he says in the preface, had been reprinting these trifles of his, and living on the pillage, and now he reclaimed the best of them. The republication was in one duodecimo volume, for which Newbery and Griffin, who were the joint-publishers, gave him ten guineas each. Then, again, through the rest of that year and the whole of 1766 and 1767,-his Traveller having brought him more applause than cash-he relapses, for cash-purposes, into hackwork, compilation, and translation. He thought of translating the Lusiad, but, his ignorance of Portuguese being a slight obstacle, left that undertaking for Mickle. Among the compilations which he did execute we hear of such things as A Survey of Experimental Philosophy and a Short English Grammar for Newbery, a translation of a French History of Philosophy (Physical Speculations) for Francis Newbery, a collection of Poems for Young Ladies for Payne of Paternoster Row, and another poetical collection in two volumes for Griffin called Beauties of English Poetry. For this last, to which he gave his name, he received a considerable sum; but the sale of the collection, which

was otherwise a tasteful one, is said to have suffered from the admission into it of two pieces of Prior not deemed fit for family reading. And what, all this while, had become of the l'icar of Wakefield? It emerged from the younger Newbery's shop in the very midst of the compilations just named-viz. on the 27th of March, 1766, or fifteen months after the Traveller had been out. The Vicar of Wakefield: A, Tale; supposed to be written by himself-such was the title under which the little prose masterpiece announced itself. With less of acclamation than had hailed the Traveller, but gently, quietly, and surely, as it was read in households, and its charming sweetness felt wherever it was read, the Tale made its way. There was a second edition in May, a third in August, and before Goldsmith died the sixth edition was in circulation.

As, by his Traveller, Goldsmith had taken his place among English poets, so by the Vicar of Wakefield he took a place, if not as one of the remarkable group of English "novelists" that distinguished the middle of the eighteenth century (for they had all been voluminous in this department), at least, with peculiar conspicuousness, near that group. Richardson had been five years dead; Fielding twelve years; only Smollett of the old three remained, with his Humphry Clinker still to be written. But Sterne, the fourth of the group, had recently flashed into notice-eight volumes of his Tristram Shandy, published between 1759 and 1765, having taken the literary world by storm, and made their strange author, then a middle-aged clergyman of loose notions, the lion of London society for the time! being, with dinner engagements always fourteen deep. Not the radiance of Tristram Shandy itself, however, diamond-darting in all colours athwart the literary heaven, could hide the pure soft star of Goldsmith's new creation. How simple this Vicar of Wakefield was, how humorous, how pathetic, how graceful in its manner, how humane in every pulse of its meaning, how truly and deeply good!¦ So said everybody; and gradually into that world of imaginary scenes and beings made familiar to British readers by former works of fiction, and the latest additions to which had been Smollett's and Sterne's inventions, a place of especial regard was found for the ideal Wakefield, the Primrose family, and all their belongings. Moses, with the gross of green spectacles and shagreen cases for which he sold the horse; the philosophical wanderer George; the two daughters, Olivia and Sophia; the bouncing Flamborough girls; Miss Carolina Wilhelmina Amelia Skeggs, and the other fine lady from London; the rogue Jenkinson and his repentance; the rascally Squire; and the good uncle, Sir William, alias Burchellwho could forget any of them? Above all the good clergyman himself, with his punctilious honour, his boundless benevolence, and his one or two foibles! Who could help laughing over that passage in which he tells how the rogue Jenkinson, in proceeding to swindle him, assails his weak point by asking if he is the great Dr. Primrose who had written so learnedly in favour of monogamy and against second marriages? "Never did my heart feel sincerer rapture than at this moment. "Sir,' cried I, 'the applause of so good a man as I am sure you are adds to "that happiness in my heart which your benevolence has already excited. You

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'behold before you, Sir, that Dr. Primrose, the monogamist, whom you have been pleased to call great. You here see that unfortunate divine, who has so long, "aad, it would ill become me to say successfully, fought against the deuterogamy of the age." And the description of the family picture, executed by the travelling painter who took likenesses at fifteen shillings a head! Their neighbours, the Famboroughs, had been painted, seven of them in all, each holding an orange; at the Primroses would not be painted that way. "We desired to have "something in a brighter style; and, after many debates, at length came to a "unanimous resolution of being drawn together, in one large historical family "piece. This would be cheaper, as one frame would serve for all, and it would "be infinitely more genteel; for all the families of any taste were now drawn in the same manner. As we did not immediately recollect an historical subject to hit **as, we were contented each with being drawn as independent historical figures. My wife desired to be represented as Venus, and the painter was desired not to be too frugal of diamonds in her stomacher and hair. The two little ones were to be as Cupids by her side; while I, in my gown and band, was to present her with my books on the Whistonian controversy. Olivia would be drawn as an Amazon sitting upon a bank of flowers, dressed in a green joseph richly laced 'with gold, and a whip in her hand. Sophia was to be a shepherdess, with as many sheep as the painter could put in for nothing; and Moses was to be dressed at with a white hat and feather. Our taste so much pleased the Squire that he "ussted on being put in as one of the family, in the character of Alexander the "Great, at Olivia's feet." But there was no end to the passages that people acted and continued to quote. Nay, not to Britain alone was the renown of the ry confined. There had been French translations of one or two of Goldsmith's onymous writings before; but the Vicar of Wakefield ran, almost at once, over The Continent. It was four years after its first publication when young Herder in Strasburg read a German translation of it to young Goethe. Every reader of Goethe's Autobiography knows what an impression the beautiful prose-idyll, as he called it, made on the heart and imagination of the glorious youth, and how he el its names and fancies to invest with a poetic haze the realities of his own early German loves. To the end of his days, and after he had long been the narch of German literature, Goethe retained his affection for the book, and spoke of it as having been an influence of subtle spiritual blessing to him at an important moment of his mental history. Here was praise, indeed, could Goldsmith have heard of it! But Goethe was but twenty years of age when he first read the Vicar of Wakefield, and it is doubtful whether, when Goldsmith died, he knew that there was such a person as Goethe in the world!

On the strength of his increasing literary reputation, Goldsmith, even before the publication of his Vicar, had made one more attempt to get into practice as a London physician. He had been advised to this by Reynolds, who thought there were a good many families that might rather like to have the author of the Traveller for their medical man, and was anxious to see his friend in the receipt of a less precarious

on the point of being so; but already with much of his greatest work done, and firm in his literary dictatorship. Goldsmith was nineteen years younger, and with the best of his work before him.

The convenient bondage of Goldsmith to the bookseller Newbery continued till the end of 1764, or even beyond that. In May 1762 Newbery published the Citizen of the World in its completed form, giving Goldsmith five guineas for the new copyright. Somewhat later in the same year Goldsmith, whose health had suffered from his recent laboriousness, went to Tunbridge and Bath for recreation ; and from Bath he brought back to London materials for a memoir of Beau Nash, the famous master of the ceremonies or King of the Fashion at Bath, then just dead. This curious and rather amusing little book, for which Newbery gave him fourteen guineas, was published in October 1762, under the title of The Life of Richard Nash, Esq. It was immediately popular; Johnson, who was by no means a bookbuyer, is found purchasing a copy; and there was a second edition in December. By this time Goldsmith had made a new arrangement in the matter of domicile, or Newbery had made a new arrangement for him. The lodging in Wine Office Court was either given up or retained for occasional use only, and apartments were taken in the suburban neighbourhood of Canonbury, Islington, in the house of a Mrs. Elizabeth Fleming, close to Canonbury House, where Newbery himself resided. The terms with Mrs. Fleming were to be 50. a year for Goldsmith's board and lodging equivalent to about 100l. a year now; and Newbery undertook to make the regular quarterly payments, deducting them from whatever might be Goldsmith's earnings. Thus saved all trouble on the main point, and with only his incidental expenses to care for-which, however, were considerable enough, for a guinea could never remain a day whole in his pocket, and he had begun to have a gaudy taste in dress, and to have extensive dealings with Mr. Filby, the tailor, at the Harrow in Water Lane-Goldsmith went on compiling for Newbery, touching up books for him, writing prefaces where they were wanted, and furnishing papers for his magazines. For each bit of work so done Goldsmith was credited for so much in Newbery's books-one guinea, two guineas, three guineas, or higher sums, according to the extent of the work; and Goldsmith drew, or overdrew, for what he wanted as he went along, leaving the bookseller to look at the state of affairs every quarter when he came to pay Mrs. Fleming her 12/. 10s., together with any little extras for wine, sassafras, cakes, &c., incurred with her by Goldsmith. That lady, to do her justice, kept most punctual accounts, and does not seem to have been at all exacting in the extras; for, when Goldsmith brought a friend home to dinner and tea, especially if it was the Irish physician Dr. Redmond, her practice was to charge nothing on that account, but only to make such an entry as this in the bill-"Dr. Reman's dinner and tea, ol. os. od." There is some reason to believe that among the friends who sometimes visited Goldsmith in his Islington lodgings, but are not recorded to have had gratis dinners from Mrs. Fleming, was the painter Hogarth, then in the last years of his life. Altogether, in these lodgings Goldsmith seems to have been tolerably comfortable and tolerably industrious through 1763 and 1764.

Among the fruits of his industry, in addition to a great deal of miscellaneous work which need not be inquired after particularly (though, if Goody Two Shoes were really his, one would like to know it), was a History of England in a series of Letters from a Nobleman to his Son. This work, which must not be confounded with a sabsequent History of England from his pen, was published by Newbery in two pocket volumes in June 1764. The title was a ruse to attract attention to the book, and it succeeded. It was attributed to Lord Chesterfield or Lord Orrery, and then very generally to Lord Lyttelton, and became very popular. Goldsmith, having reaved 21., which remained as the balance due to him for the work, did not wish to undeceive the public. He had, indeed, by him, finished or nearly finished, certain things of his own, not written to Newbery's order, but for private pleasure, and for which he cared more than for any compilation. But of these presently.

Lington, though more out of the bustle of central London then than it is now, was not so far off but that a walk every other day would bring Goldsmith into Fleet Street and its purlieus. And more and more now there were attractions for Goldsmith tn that cosy heart of London. His acquaintance with Johnson had led to his introduction to Mr. (not yet Sir Joshua) Reynolds, then forty years of age, Iving in his mansion in Leicester Square, and hospitable, with his kind serenity of disposition and his 6,000l. a year of income, to the largest circle of attached friends that any man ever drew around him. At those noctes cœnæque Deûm at Reynolds's Leicester Square, long afterwards remembered with such relish by Boswell, Goldsmith was certainly welcome even thus early. Here he would meet Burke, who barely remembered him at Trinity College, Dublin; and sometimes he and Johnson, leaving Reynolds's, and parting with Burke at the door, would go down the Strand to Johnson's chambers in Inner Temple Lane, or perhaps (for Johnson hated early hours) drop in, for more talk, at the Mitre Tavern in Fleet Street. Just at this time, too, Boswell's visage does begin to be seen on the skirts of the group of which he was to be so singularly intimate a member, and hose fastory he was to write for the whole world. He had been up to London for the first time in 1760, a mere lad of twenty years, but already a devoted worshipper of Johnson, and possessed with a passion for being introduced to him. He had failed in that object then; but in the end of 1762 he was again in London on his way to Utrecht to study law. Two chapters in his "Life of Johnson"—two as interesting chapters of anecdote as ever man wrote-preserve the particulars of that visit, which extended over more than six months, or to August 1763. Early in the visit, it appears, he met Goldsmith at dinner at the house of Thomas Davies, the ex-actor and bookseller, in Russell Street, Covent Garden-whose shop was perhaps then the most noted afternoon rendezvous in London for poets, wits, dramatists, and literary gossips. Improving this meeting, he had even, he tells us, become "pretty well acquainted" with Goldsmith before he made that greater acquaintanceship for which his soul panted. What mattered it to know Goldsmith, with Wilkes, Churchill, Lloyd, Robert Dodsley, and others--to all of whom the eager young fellow had somehow pushed his way-so long as Johnson was unknown? At last the

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