out but three days after the Bee. He was writing for the Lady's Magazine, started not many days later by persevering Mr. Wilkie, in the hope of propping up the Bee. He had taken his place, and would go to his journey's end. Since the " 'pleasure "stage coach" had not opened its door to him, he had mounted "the waggon "of industry;" not yet despairing, it might be, to be overtaken again by his old 66 vanity whim ; and with such help, even hopeful to come up with the "landau of riches," and find lodgment at last in the "fame machine." We note this pleasant current of his thoughts in the Bee's fifth number. There, in that last conveyance he places Addison, Steele, Swift, Pope, and Congreve; and, vainly stretching out a number of his own little blue-backed book to entice the goodly company, resolves to be useful

since he may not be ambitious, and to earn by assiduity what merit does not open to him. But not the less cheerfully does he concede to others, what for himself he may not yet command. He shuts fame's door, indeed, on Arthur Murphy, but opens it to Hume and to Johnson: he closes it against Smollett's History, but opens it to his Peregrine Pickle and his Roderick Random. And with this paper, I doubt not, began his first fellowship of letters in a higher than the Grub-street region. Shortly after this, I trace Smollett to his door; and, for what he had said of the author of the Rambler, Johnson soon grasped his hand. "This was a very

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grave personage, whom at some distance I took for one of the "most reserved and even disagreeable figures I had seen; but as he approached, his appearance improved; and when I could dis"tinguish him thoroughly, I perceived that in spite of the severity "of his brow, he had one of the most goodnatured countenances "that could be imagined." In that sentence lay the germ of one of the pleasantest of literary friendships.

The poor essayist's habits, however, know little change as yet. His single chair and his window-bench have but to accommodate Mr. Wilkie's devil, waiting for proofs; or Mr. Wilkie himself, resolute for arrears of copy. The landlady of Green Arbour-court remembered one festivity there, which seems to have been highly characteristic. A "gentleman" called on a certain evening, and asking to see her lodger, went unannounced up stairs. She then heard Goldsmith's room door pushed open, closed again sharply

from within, and the key turned in the lock: after this, the sound of a somewhat noisy altercation reached her; but it soon subsided: and to her surprise, not unmingled with alarm, the perfect silence that followed continued for more than three hours. It was a great relief to her, she said, when the door was again opened, and the "gentleman," descending more cheerfully than he had entered, sent her out to a neighbouring tavern for some supper. Mr. Wilkie or Mr. Pottinger had obtained his arrears, and could afford a little comforting reward to the starving author.

Perhaps he carried off with him that mirthful paper on the clubs of London, to which a pleasant imagination most loved to pay festive visits on solitary and supperless days. Perhaps that paper on public rejoicings for a victory which described the writer's lonely wanderings a few nights before, from Ludgate-hill to Charing-cross, through crowded and illuminated streets, past punchhouses and coffee-houses, and where excited shoe-makers, thinking wood to be nothing like leather, were asking with frightful oaths whatever would become of religion if the wooden-soled French papishes came over! Perhaps that more affecting lonely journey through the London streets, which the Bee soon after published with the title of the City Night Piece, in which there was so much of the past struggle and the lesson it had left, so much of the grief-taught sympathy, so much of the secret of the genius, of tolerant, gentle-hearted Goldsmith. What he was to the end of his London life, when miserable outcasts had cause with the great and learned to lament him, this paper shows him to have been at its beginning. The kind-hearted man would wander through the streets at night, to console and reassure the misery he could not otherwise give help to. While he thought of the rich and happy who were at rest; while he looked up even to the wretched roof that gave shelter to himself; he could not bear to think of those to whom the streets were the only home. 'Strangers, wanderers, and orphans,” too humble in their circumstances to expect redress, too completely and utterly wretched for pity;—“poor shivering girls" who had seen happier days, and been flattered into beauty and into sin, now lying peradventure at the very doors of their betrayers;-" poor houseless creatures" to whom the world, responsible for their guilt, gives reproaches but will not give relief. These were teachers in life's truths, who spoke with a sterner and wiser voice than that of mere personal suffering. 66 The 66 slightest misfortunes of the great, the most imaginary uneasiness of "the rich, are aggravated with all the power of eloquence, and held "up to engage our attention and sympathetic sorrow. The poor weep "unheeded, persecuted by every subordinate species of tyranny; "and every law which gives others security becomes an enemy to

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"them.

Why was this heart of mine formed with so much sensi"bility, or why was not my fortune adapted to its impulse?" In

thoughts like these, and in confirmed resolution to make the poor his clients and write down those tyrannies of law, the night wanderings of the thoughtful writer not unprofitably ended. It was a resolution very manifest in his next literary labour.

CHAPTER II.

1759.

ON the 29th of November, the Bee's brief life closed, with its eighth number; and in the following month its editor, Mr. Oliver Goldsmith, was sought out both by that distinguished t. 31. author Doctor Smollett, and by Mr. John Newbery the bookseller, of St. Paul's-churchyard. But as he had meanwhile made earnest application to Mr. David Garrick for his interest in an election at the Society of Arts, it will be best to describe at once the circumstances involved in that application, and its result

on the poor author's subsequent intercourse with the rich manager and proprietor of the theatre royal in Drury-lane. Goldsmith was passionately fond of the theatre. In prosperous days, it will ring with his humour and cheerfulness; in these struggling times, it was the help and refuge of his loneliness. We have seen him steal out of his garret to hear Columba sing: and if she fell short of the good old music he had learnt to love at Lissoy, the other admiration he was taught there, of happy human faces, at the theatre was always in his reach. If there is truth in what was said by Sir Richard Steele, that being happy, and seeing others happy, for two hours, is a duration of bliss not at all to be slighted by so short-lived creature as man, it is certain that he who despises the theatre adds short-sightedness to short life. If he is a rich man, he will be richer for hearing there of what account the poor may be; if he is a poor man, he will not be poorer for the knowledge that those above him have their human sympathies. Sir Thomas Overbury held a somewhat strong opinion as to this; thinking the playhouse more necessary in a wellgoverned commonwealth than the school, because men were better taught by example than by precept: and however light the disregard it has fallen into now, it does really seem to be a question not altogether unimportant, whether a high and healthy entertainment, the nature of which, conservative of all kindly relations between man and man, is to encourage, refine, and diffuse humanity, might not claim a kind and degree of support which in England has been always withheld from it.

This remark occurs to me here, because many disappointments in connection with it will occur hereafter; and already even Garrick's fame and strength had been shaken by his difficult relations with men of letters. "I am as much an admirer of Mr. "Garrick," said Mr. Ralph, in his Case of Authors by Profession, published in 1758, "and his excellences, as I ought to be: and I "envy him no part of his good fortune. But then, though I am "free to acknowledge he was made for the stage, I cannot be "brought to think the stage was made only for him; or that the "fate of every dramatic writer ought either to be at his mercy, or "that of any other manager whatever. .. When the playhouse is "named," he added bitterly, "I make it a point to pull off 'my hat, and think myself obliged to the lowest implement "belonging to it. I am ready to make my best acknowledgments "to a harlequin, who has continence enough to look upon an “author in the green-room, of what consideration soever, without "laughing at him." Other pamphlets followed in the cry; and Ned Purdon drew up a number of anonymous suggestions as to "how Mr. Garrick ought to behave."

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It was the employment of this tone that introduced needless elements of bitterness, for the charge was a simple one, and might have been stated simply. No doubt Garrick, in common with every manager-actor, before or since his time, was fairly exposed to it. I have turned to the play-bills of the season directly preceding the appearance of Mr. Ralph's pamphlet, and find, amidst revivals of Fletcher's Rule a Wife and Have a Wife, and Shirley's comedy of The Gamester, and Shakespeare's Tempest as an opera, and Taming of the Shrew as a farce, but one original production: Lilliput, played by children. It is not immaterial to the question, however, to recount the highest tragic claimants thus affronted by Shakespeare, Fletcher, Shirley, and Lilliput. They were Whitehead, Crisp, Francis, Francklin, Glover, Brown, Mallet, Murphy, and Dodsley: for denying whose higher attractiveness to the Shakespeares and Fletchers, nay, for preferring even the comic to that tragic Lilliput, the public seems a better object of attack than the manager. When, some years afterwards, Horace Walpole joined the cry, this had sarcastic admission. "Garrick is treating "the town as it deserves," he said "and likes to be treated: with scenes, fireworks, and his own writing. A good new play I never expect to see more; nor have seen since the Provoked 66 Husband, which came out when I was at school." Was it Garrick's crime, without good new plays, to make the venture of good old ones?

In truth, looking fairly at his theatrical management, with the light his published Correspondence has thrown upon it, it was a great improvement, in all generous and liberal points, on those which preceded it. Booth treated writers of Anne much more scurvily than the writers of George the Second were treated by Garrick. "Booth often declared," says his biographer, "in public

company, that he and his partners lost money by new plays ; "and that, if he were not obliged to it, he would seldom give his "consent to perform one of them." Garrick transposed and altered often; but he never forced upon the unhappy author of a tragedy a change in the religion of his hero, nor told a dramatist of good esteem that he had better have turned to an honest and laborious calling, nor complacently prided himself on choaking singing birds, when his stern negative had silenced a young aspirant. Those were the achievements of manager Cibber. He was at all times fonder than needful of his own importance, it is true but society has no right to consent to even the nominal depression, in the so-called social scale, of a man whose calling exacts no common accomplishments, and then resent the self-exaggeration unwholesomely begotten on its own injustice. When Junius took offence at the player whom dukes and duchesses tolerated at their