says Mr. Carlyle, "stipends, endowments, and all furtherance of "cash, will do little toward the business. On the whole, one is "weary of hearing about the omnipotence of money. I will say "rather, that, for a genuine man, it is no evil to be poor. . Money, "in truth, can do much, but it cannot do all. We must know "the province of it, and confine it there; and even spurn it back, "when it wishes to get farther." One of the lively illustrations of the Enquiry is not very unlike this. "The beneficed divine," says Goldsmith, "whose wants are only imaginary, expostulates as "bitterly as the poorest author that ever snuffed his candle with 'finger and thumb. Should interest or good fortune advance the "divine to a bishopric, or the poor son of Parnassus into that place "which the other has resigned, both are authors no longer. 66 one goes to prayers once a day, kneels upon cushions of velvet, "and thanks gracious Heaven for having made the circumstances “of all mankind so extremely happy; the other battens on all the "delicacies of life, enjoys his wife and his easy chair, and some"times, for the sake of conversation, deplores the luxury of these 66 degenerate days. All encouragements to merit are therefore "misapplied, which make the author too rich to continue his "profession."

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The

But he would not therefore starve him, or to the mercies of blind chance altogether surrender him. He recals a time he would wish to see revived, when, with little of wealth or worldly luxury, the writer could yet command esteem for himself and reverence for the claims of his calling (for this, and not the vulgar thought of merely feasting with a lord, is what he intends by the allusion to Somers); and he dwells upon the contrast of existing times, in language which will hereafter connect itself with the deliberate dislike of Walpole, and the uneasy jealousy of Garrick.

When the link between patronage and learning was entire, then all who deserved fame were in a capacity of attaining it. When the great Somers was at the helm, patronage was fashionable among our nobility. The middle ranks of mankind, who generally imitate the great, then followed their example, and applauded from fashion if not from feeling. I have heard an old poet [he alludes to Young] of that glorious age say, that a dinner with his lordship has procured him invitations for the whole week following; that an airing in his patron's chariot has supplied him with a citizen's coach on every future occasion. For who would not be proud to entertain a man who kept so much good company? But this link now seems entirely broken. Since the days of a certain prime-minister of inglorious memory, the learned have been kept pretty much at a distance. A jockey, or a laced player, supplies the place of the scholar, poet, or the man of virtue. . . . Perhaps of all mankind an author in these times is used most hardly. We keep him poor and yet revile his poverty. Like angry parents, who correct their children till they cry, and then correct them for crying, we reproach him for living by his wit, and yet allow him no other means to live. His taking refuge in garrets and cellars has of late been violently objected to him, and that by men who I dare

hope are more apt to pity than insult his distress. Is poverty the writer's fault? No doubt he knows how to prefer a bottle of champaign to the nectar of the neighbouring alehouse, or a venison pasty to a plate of potatoes. Want of delicacy is not in him but in us, who deny him the opportunity of making an elegant choice. Wit certainly is the property of those who have it, nor should we be displeased if it is the only property a man sometimes has. We must not underrate him who uses it for subsistence, and flies from the ingratitude of the age even to a bookseller for redress. If the profession of an author is to be laughed at by the stupid, it is certainly better to be contemptibly rich than contemptibly poor. For all the wit that ever adorned the human mind will at present no more shield the author's poverty from ridicule, than his high-topped gloves conceal the unavoidable omissions of his laundress. To be more serious, new fashions, follies, and vices, make new monitors necessary in every age. An author may be considered as a merciful substitute to the legislature; he acts not by punishing crimes but preventing them; however virtuous the present age, there may be still growing employment for ridicule or reproof, for persuasion or satire. If the author be therefore still so necessary among us, let us treat him with proper consideration as a child of the public, not a rent-charge on the community. And indeed a child of the public he is in all respects; for while so well able to direct others, how incapable is he frequently found of guiding himself! His simplicity exposes him to all the insidious approaches of cunning; his sensibility to the slightest invasions of contempt. Though possessed of fortitude to stand unmoved the expected bursts of an earthquake, yet of feelings so exquisitely poignant as to agonise under the slightest disappointment. Broken rest, tasteless meals, and causeless anxiety, shorten his life, or render it unfit for active employment; prolonged vigils and intense application still farther contract his span, and make his time glide insensibly away. Let us not then aggravate those natural inconveniences by neglect; we have had sufficient instances of this kind already. Sale and Moore will suffice for one age at least. But they are dead, and their sorrows are over. The neglected author of the Persian Eclogues [Collins], which, however inaccurate, excel any in our language, is still alive. Happy, if insensible of our neglect, not raging at our ingratitude. It is enough that the age has already produced instances of men pressing foremost in the lists of fame, and worthy of better times, schooled by continued adversity into an hatred of their kind, flying from thought to drunkenness, yielding to the united pressure of labour, penury, and sorrow, sinking unheeded, without one friend to drop a tear on their unattended obsequies, and indebted to charity for a grave.

It

These words had been written but a very few years, when the hand that traced them was itself cold; and, yielding to that united pressure of labour, penury, and sorrow, with a frame exhausted by unremitting and ill-rewarded drudgery, Goldsmith was indebted to the forbearance of creditors for a peaceful burial. is not, then, in the early death of learned Sale, driven mad with those fruitless schemes of a society for encouragement of learning, which he carried, it may be hoped, to a kinder world than this; it is not from the grave of Edward Moore, with melancholy playfulness anticipating, in his last unsuccessful project, the very day on which his death would fall; it is not even at the shrieks of poor distracted Collins, heard through the melancholy cathedralcloister where he had played in childhood: but it is in this life,

adventures, and death of Oliver Goldsmith, that the mournful and instructive moral speaks its warning to us now.

I know of none more deeply impressive, or of wider import and significance. When Collins saw the hopes of his youth in the cold light of the world's indifference, with a mixed impulse of despair and revenge he collected the unsold edition of his hapless Odes and Eclogues, and with a savage delight beheld them slowly consume, as, in his own room, he made a bonfire of them. When Goldsmith was visited with a like weakness, something of a like result foreboded; but the better part was forced upon him in his own despite, and in the present most affecting picture of his patience the hectic agony of Collins is but an idle frenzy. Steadily gazing on the evil destinies of men of letters, he no longer desires to avoid his own; conscious of the power of the booksellers, he condemns and denounces it; without direct hope, save of some small public favour, he protests against cruelties for which the public are responsible. The protest will accompany us through the remainder of his life : and be remembered as well in its lightest passages, as in those where any greatness of suffering will now be less apparent than a calmness of endurance; a resolute quiet power of persevering exertion, in which, with whatever infirmities of disposition or temper, he will front and foil adversity.

Such, at the worst, is the resource of a healthy genius. It works evil into good, and has within it a principle of sustainment and of self-consolation. The more particularly does it become the world to take note of this, as a party far more deeply concerned than bookseller or than author. That cry of Goldsmith is little for himself. Who wins his passage to the goal, may care little at the close for a larger suffering or a less: the cry is raised for others, meanwhile perishing by the way. When Irene failed, and Johnson was asked how he felt, he answered "like the Monu"ment;" but when he had arrived at comfort and independence, and carelessly taking up one day his own fine satire, opened it at the lines which paint the scholar's fate, and the obstructions, almost insurmountable, in his way to fortune and fame, he burst into a passion of tears. Not for what he had himself endured, whose labour was at last victoriously closed; but for all the disastrous chances that still awaited others. It is the world's concern. There is a subtle spirit of compensation at work, when men regard it least, which to the spiritual sense accommodates the vilest need, and lightens the weariest burden. Milton talked of the lasting fame and perpetuity of praise, which God and good men have consented should be the reward of those whose published labours have advanced the good of mankind; and it is a set-off, doubtless, in the large account. The "two carriages" and the

"style" of Griffiths are long passed away into the rubbish they sprang from, and all of us will be apt enough now to thank heaven that we were not Griffiths. Jacob Tonson's hundred thousand pounds are now of less account than the bad shillings he insinuated into Dryden's payments; and the fame of Secretary Nottingham is very much overtopped by the pillory of De Foe. The Italian princes who beggared Dante are still without pity writhing in his deathless poem, while Europe looks to the beggar as to a star in heaven; nor has Italy's greater day, or the magnificence which crowded the court of Augustus, left behind them a name of any earthly interest to compare with his who restored land to Virgil, and who succoured the fugitive Horace. These are results which have obtained in all countries, and been confessed by every age; and it will be well when they win for literature other living regards, and higher present consideration, than it has yet been able to obtain. Men of genius can more easily starve, than the world, with safety to itself, can continue to neglect and starve them. What new arrangement, what kind of consideration may be required, will not be very distant from the simple acknowledgment that greater honour and respect ARE due.

This is what literature has wanted in England, and not the laced coat and powdered wig, the fashionable acceptance and great men's feasts, which have on rare occasions been substituted for it. The most liberal patronage vouchsafed in this country to living men of letters, has never been unaccompanied by degrading incidents; nor their claims at any time admitted without discourtesy or contumely. It is a century and a half since an act of parliament was passed to "protect" them, under cover of which their most valuable private rights were confiscated to the public use; and it is not twenty years since another legislative arrangement was made on their behalf, by favour of which the poet and the royal writing-master, the historian and the royal dancing-master, the philosopher and the royal coachman, Sir Christopher Wren's great grand-daughter and the descendant of Charles the Second's French riding-master, are permitted to appear in the same annual charitable list. But though statesmen have yet to learn what the state loses by such unwise scorn of what enlightens and refines it, they cannot much longer remain ignorant to what extent they are themselves enslaved by the power they thus affect to despise, or of the special functions of government and statesmanship which it is gradually assuming to itself. Its progress has been uninterrupted since Johnson's and Goldsmith's time, and cannot for as many more years continue unacknowledged. Pitt sneered when the case of Burns was stated to him, and talked of literature taking care of itself,-which indeed it can do, and in a

different and larger sense from what the minister intended: but whether society can take care of itself, is also a material question.

Towards its solution, one sentence of Goldsmith's protest is an offering from his sorrow in these times of authorship by compulsion, not less worthy than his more cheerful offerings in those days of authorship by choice, to which the reader is now invited. "An author may be considered as a merciful substitute to the "legislature. He acts not by punishing crimes, but by preventing "them."

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