"offered it to his visitant, himself was obliged to sit in the window. "While they were conversing, some one gently rapped at the door, "and being desired to come in, a poor ragged little girl of very

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"decent behaviour, entered, who, dropping a curtsie, said, 'My mama sends her compliments, and begs the favour of you to "lend her a chamber-pot full of coals.'

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If the February number of the Critical Review lay near the reverend, startled, and long-descended visitor, perhaps goodnatured Goldsmith, as he scraped together his answer to that humble petition, proffered with a respectful deference which yet showed in what respect his poor neighbours held him, pointed with a smile to a description of the fate of poets which he had just published there. "There is a strong similitude," he had said, reviewing a new edition of the Fairy Queen, "between the lives of "almost all our English poets. The Ordinary of Newgate, we are "told, has but one story, which serves for the life of every hero "that happens to come within the circle of his pastoral care; how"ever unworthy the resemblance appears, it may be asserted that "the history of one poet might serve with as little variation for "that of any other.-Born of creditable parents, who gave him a "pious education. However, in spite of all their endeavours, in "spite of all the exhortations of the minister of the parish on "Sundays, he turned his mind from following good things, and "fell to writing verses! Spenser, in short, lived poor, was

"reviled by the critics of his time, and died at last in the utmost "distress."

He was again working for Hamilton. Smollett himself had not seen his new reviewer, but, the success of the Ovid papers having proclaimed the value of such assistance, he appears to have sent the publisher with renewed offers to Green Arbour-court. Goldsmith had resumed with this notice of Spenser; a discriminating proof of his appreciation of all true mastery in the divine art. Popular and practical himself, he wonders not the less at the "great magician:" suddenly taken "from the ways of the "present world," and far from Drury-lane alehouses or Auburn villages, in the sequestered remoteness of that gorgeous and luxurious fancy he thinks of Virgil, and even Homer, as moderns in comparison with Elizabeth's Englishman: and when he awakes from this Elysium, and comes back to the ways of the world, his conclusions are, that "no poet enlarges the imagination more than tr Spenser ; "that "Cowley was formed into poetry by reading "him ;" that "Gray and Akenside have profited by their study of "him ;" and that "his verses may one day come to be considered "the standard of English poetry." His next article, which appeared in the following number, was a notice of young Langhorne's translation of Bion's Elegy of Adonis; wherein he happily contrasted the false and florid tastes of the day with the pure simplicity of the Greeks. And subsequently, with as clear and shrewd a spirit, he discussed a book on Oratory by a Gresham professor of rhetoric; instancing the lawyer who, on "hearing his "adversary talk of the war of Troy, the beauteous Helena, and "the river Scamander, intreated the court to observe that his client "was christened, not Scamander, but Simon."

And here I will sum up, briefly as I may, what remain to be noticed of these humble and unacknowledged labours in the Critical Review. The tone is more confident than in the days when he wrote under the sign of The Dunciad; but the fair appreciation is the same. Obscure and depressed as the writer was, his free running hand very frankly betrays its work, amid the cramped laborious penmanship with which Smollett's big-wigged friends surrounded it. No man ever put so much of himself into his books as Goldsmith, from the very beginning to the end of his career; and no man wishing to hide under cover of a mean fortune, was ever so easily detected. Favourite expressions, which to the end of his life continued so, are here; thoughts he had turned to happy use in his Irish letters, reappear again and again; and disguise himself for Scroggen or James Willington as he may, he cannot write from other inspiration, or with a less natural instinctive grace, than his own. The work I now refer to con

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nects itself, for this reason, with the most brilliant to follow. foibles and social vanities which his Chinese friend is soon with indulgent humour to correct, are here already clear to him; the false poetic taste which he will shortly supplant with his natural manly verse, he does his best thus early to weaken and expose; and the do-me-good family romances, with which the moralmongers of the day would make stand against the Roderick Randoms and Tom Joneses, are thrust back from before the Vicar's way.

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Among his reviews, then, was one of Murphy's Orphan of China; containing not only better critical remarks than were usual with him both on Shakespeare and Voltaire, but good-natured evidence of curiosity as to the Chinese people, and of interest in the plans of his recent reverend visitor (Mr. Percy), at that time preparing a Chinese translation for the press. Butler's Remains furnished him another subject; in which, bewailing the “indigence in which the poet lived and died," he protested with generous "horror at the want of discernment, at the more "than barbarous ingratitude, of his contemporaries." A third was Marriott's Answer to the Critical Review; containing whimsical and humorous apology for his own satirical comparisons of three months before. And he found a fourth in Dunkins's Epistle to Lord Chesterfield; which he closed with humorous application of a Spanish story to exposure of the toadyism prevailing in small literary coteries. Noticeable also, in recapitulation of this drudgery, are papers on President Gouget's Origin of Laws, Arts, and Sciences, and on Formey's Philosophical Miscellanies, written with lively understanding of the characters of French and German intellect ;—on Van Egmont's Travels in Asia, wherein a scheme of later life was shadowed forth; "could we see a man set out upon a journey, not with an intent to discover rocks and rivers, but "the manners, the mechanic inventions, and the imperfect learning "of the inhabitants; resolved to penetrate into countries as yet “little known, and eager to pry into all their secrets, with a heart "not terrified at trifling dangers; if there could be found a man "who could thus unite true courage with sound learning, from "such a character we might expect much information ;"—on Guicciardini's History of Italy, showing some knowledge of Italian literature ;-on Montesquieu's Miscellaneous Pieces, justifying, by many expressions of intelligent interest in the minor and unacknowledged works of a man of genius, such rapid indication as I now give of his own earlier and less known performances ;—and finally, for my summary must be brief, on parson Hawkins's Works, and on the same irritable parson's Impartial Reader's Answer to the said review of his works; where Goldsmith thus drily, in the

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second of these articles, put the difference between himself and the reverend writer. "He is for putting his own works upon the 'same shelf with Milton and Shakespeare, and we are for allowing “him an inferior situation; he would have the same reader that "commends Addison's delicacy to talk with raptures of the purity "of Hawkins; and he who praises the Rape of the Lock to speak "with equal feelings of that richest of all poems, Mr. Hawkins's "Thimble. But we, alas! cannot speak of Mr. H. with the same "unrestrained share of panegyric that he does of himself. Perhaps 66 our motive to malevolence might have been that Mr. Hawkins "stood between us and a good living? We can solemnly assure "him we are quite contented with our present situation in the "church, are quite happy in a wife and forty pounds a year, nor "have the least ambition for pluralities."

Nor should I close this rapid account of Goldsmith's labours in the Critical Review, without referring at least to the unsparing yet not ill-natured satire with which he laughed at a form of fiction which was then beginning to be popular; a foreshadowing of the insipidities of the Minerva press; a kind of fashionable family novel, with which the stately mother, and the boarding-school miss, were instructed to fortify themselves against the immoralities of Smollett and of Fielding. As with Jonathan Wild in the matter of Cacus, Goldsmith "knew a better way;" and in his witty exposure of Jemima and Louisa, showed himself prepared to make it known.

That was his last contribution either to Smollett or to Mr. Griffiths. With it Goldsmith's adieu to both Reviews was said, and he left them to fight out their quarrels with each other. Mr. Griffiths might accuse Smollett of selling his praise for a fat buck, and Smollett might retort upon Mrs. Griffiths that an antiquated Sappho sat ill in the chair of Aristarchus; but this interchange of abuse will in future cease to have a bitterness personal to his own fortunes. We are gradually now to follow him, and them, to “ 66 more removed ground." Yet not until the scene of life shall entirely close will it be permitted him to forget that he once toiled in humiliating bondage at the sign of The Dunciad in Paternosterrow, and was paid retainer and servant to "those significant 66 emblems, the owl and the long-ear'd animal, which," according to Smollett, "Mr. Griffiths so sagely displays for the mirth and "information of mankind."

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CHAPTER VII.

1759.

AN APPEAL FOR AUTHORS BY PROFESSION. 1759.

MEANWHILE the Dodsleys had issued their advertisements, and the London Chronicle of the 3rd of April, 1759, announced Et. 31. the appearance, the day before, of An Enquiry into the Present State of Polite Learning in Europe. It was a very respectable, well-printed duodecimo; was without the author's name on the title-page, though Goldsmith was anxious to have the authorship widely known; and had two learned mottoes. The Greek signified that the writer esteemed philosophers, but was no friend to sophists; and the Latin, that those only should destroy buildings who could themselves build.

The first idea of the work has been seen; as it grew consolingly, like the plant in the Picciola, from between the hard and stony environments of a desperate fortune. Some modifications it received, as the prospects of the writer were subjected to change; and its title held out much too large a promise for the limited materials, both of reading and experience, brought to its composition. But it was in advance of any similar effort in that day. No one was prepared, in a treatise so grave, for a style so enchantingly graceful. To combine liveliness with learning, is thought something of a heresy still.

With any detailed account of this well-known Enquiry I do not propose to detain the reader; but for illustration of the course I have taken in this memoir, some striking passages should not be overlooked, and others will throw light forward on new scenes that await us. The contents of the treatise too, as found in the current collections, are wanting in much that gives interest to the duodecimo now lying before me, the first of the Dodsley editions. For it is not, in these days at any rate, with any remarkable concern for the state of polite learning in Europe we now turn to its pages. We may feel its title to be undoubtedly so far a misnomer that to substitute Mr. Griffiths's Shop for Europe would perhaps more correctly describe the polite learning it enquires into; but it is this very fact, and the personal interest derived from it, which constitutes now for us its principal and great attraction.

Manifest throughout the book is one over-ruling feeling, under various forms; the conviction that, in bad critics and sordid booksellers, learning has to contend with her worst enemies. When he