"the conclusion, with good effect; but there, neither that nor "anything that can sully, shall appear as coming from you." So the Perrot anecdote is also lost, and the basket of absurdities by no means full !

"Farewell," says Milton, at the close of one of his early letters to his friend Gill, "and on Tuesday next expect me in London 66 among the booksellers." The booksellers were of little mark in Milton's days; but the presence of such men among them began a social change important to both, and not ill expressed in an incident of the days I am describing, when Horace Walpole met the wealthy representative of the profits of Paradise Lost at a great party at the Speaker's, while Johnson was appealing to public charity for the last destitute descendant of Milton. But from the now existing compact between trade and letters, the popular element could not wholly be excluded; and, to even the weariest drudge, hope was a part of it. From the loopholes of Paternoster-row, he could catch glimpses of the world. Churchill had emerged, and Sterne, for a few brief years; and but that Johnson had sunk into idleness, he might have been reaping a harvest more continuous than theirs, and yet less dependent on the trade. Drudgery is not good, but flattery and falsehood are worse; and it had become plain to Goldsmith, even since the days of the Enquiry, how much better it was for men of letters to live by the labour of their hands till more original labour became popular with trading patrons, than to wait with their hands across, as Johnson contemptuously described it, till great men came to feed them. Whatever the call that Newbery or any other bookseller made, then, he was there to answer it. He had the comfort of remembering that the patron had himself patrons; that something of their higher influence had been attracted to his Chinese Letters; and that he was not slaving altogether without hope. His first undertaking in 1762 was a pamphlet on the Cock Lane Ghost, for which Newbery paid him three guineas: but 1762. whether, with Johnson, he thought the impudent imposture worth grave enquiry; or, with Hogarth, turned it to wise purposes of satire; or only laughed at it, as Churchill did; it is not quite certain that the pamphlet has survived to inform But if, as appears probable, a tract on the Mystery Reveal'd published by Newbery's neighbour, Bristow, be Goldsmith's threeguinea contribution, the last is the most correct surmise. It is however, a poor production. His next labour, which has been attributed to him on the authority of "several personal acquaint"ances," was the revision of a History of Mechlenburgh from the first settlement of the Vandals in that country, which the settlement of the young Queen Charlotte in this country was expected to

us.

"Dr

make popular; and for which, according to his ordinary rates of payment, he would have received 201. This may have been that first great advance "in a lump" which to his monied inexperience seemed a sum so enormous as to require the grandest schemes for disposing of it. For a subsequent payment of 10l., he assisted Newbery with an Art of Poetry on a New Plan, or in other words, a compilation of poetical extracts; and concurrently with this, Mr. Newbery begged leave to offer to the young gentlemen and ladies of these kingdoms a Compendium of Biography, or a history of the lives of those great personages, both ancient and modern, who are most worthy of their esteem and imitation, and most likely to inspire their minds with a love of virtue; for which offering to the juvenile mind, beginning with an abridgment of Plutarch, he was to pay Goldsmith at the rate of about eight pounds a volume. The volumes were brief, published monthly, and meant to have gone through many months if the scheme had thriven; but it fell before Dilly's British Plutarch, and perished with the seventh volume. Nor did it run without danger even this ignoble career. Illness fell upon the compiler in the middle of the fifth volume. "Sir," he wrote to Newbery, "As I have been out of order for 66. some time past and am still not quite recovered, the fifth volume "of Plutarch's lives remains unfinished. I fear I shall not be able "to do it, unless there be an actual necessity and that none else 66 can be found. If therefore you would send it to Mr. Collier I "should esteem it a kindness, and will pay for whatever it may come to. N. B. I received twelve guineas for the two Volumes. 66 I am, Sir, Your obliged humble servt, OLIVER GOLDSMITH. Pray "let me have an "" answer. The answer was not favourable. Twelve guineas had been advanced, the two volumes were due, and Mr. Collier, though an ingenious man, was not Mr. Goldsmith. "Sir," returned the latter coldly, on a scrap of paper unsealed, and sent evidently by hand, “One Volume is done, namely the "fourth. When I said I should be glad Mr. Collier would do the "fifth for me, I only demanded it as a favour; but if he cannot "conveniently do it, tho' I have kept my chamber these three "weeks and am not yet quite recovered, yet I will do it. I send "it per bearer, and if the affair puts you to the least inconvenience "return it, and it shall be done immediately. I am, &c. O. G. "The Printer has the Copy of the rest." To this, his good nature having returned, Newbery acceded; and the book was finished by Mr. Collier, to whom a share of the pittance advanced had of course to be returned.

These paltry advances are a hopeless entanglement. They bar freedom of judgment on anything proposed, and escape is felt to be impossible. Some days, some weeks perhaps, have been lost in

M

idleness or illness, and the future becomes a mortgage to the past; every hour has its want forestalled upon the labour of the succeeding hour, and Gulliver lies bound in Lilliput. 66 Sir," " said Johnson, who had excellent experience on this head, "you may escape a 'heavy debt, but not a small one. Small debts are like small "shot; they are rattling on every side, and can scarcely be escaped "without a wound. Great debts are like cannon, of loud noise "but little danger."

66

It

Mention of Goldsmith's illness now frequently recurs. originated in the habits of his London life, contrasting with the activity and movement they had replaced; and the remedy prescribed was change of scene, if change of life was impossible. He is to be traced in this year to Tunbridge and Bath; at the latter place he seems to have been a frequent visitor, and I find him known to Mr. Wood, whose solid and tasteful architecture was then ennobling the city; and one of Mr. Newbery's pithy acknowledgments is connected with those brief residences, where the improbus labor had not failed to follow him. "Receiv'd from

"Mr. Newbery at different times and for which I gave receipts "fourteen guineas which is in full for the Copy of the life of Mr. "Nash. Oliver Goldsmith." The recent death of the celebrated Beau had suggested a subject, which, with incidents in its comedy of manners that recommended it to a man of wit in our own day, had some to recommend it to Goldsmith. The king of fashion had at least the oddity of a hero; and sufficient harmlessness, not to say usefulness, to make him original among heroes and kings. It is a clever book; and as one examines the original edition with its 234 goodly pages, still not uncommon on the book-stalls, it appears quite a surprising performance for fourteen guineas. No name was on the title page; but the writer, whose powers were so various and performance so felicitous "that he always seemed to do best "that which he was doing," finds it difficult not to reveal his name. The preface was discerningly written. That a man who had diffused society and made manners more cheerful and refined, should have claims to attention from his own age, while his pains in pursuing pleasure, and his solemnity in adjusting trifles, were a claim to even a smile from posterity, was so set forth as to reassure the stateliest reader; and if somewhat thrown back by the biographer's bolder announcement in the opening of his book, that a page of Montaigne or Colley Cibber was worth more than the most grandiose memoirs of "immortal statesmen already forgotten,” he had but to remember after how many years of uninterrupted power the old Duke of Newcastle had just resigned, to think that as grave a lesson might really await him in the reign of an old minister of fashion.

In truth the book is neither uninstructive nor unamusing; and it is difficult not to connect some points of the biographer's own history with its oddly mixed anecdotes of silliness and shrewdness, taste and tawdriness, blossom-coloured coats and gambling debts, vanity, carelessness, and good-heartedness. The latter quality in its hero was foiled by a want of prudence, which deprived it of half its value; and the extenuation is so frequently and so earnestly set forth in connexion with the fault, as, with what we now know of the writer, to convey a sort of uneasy personal reference. Remembering, indeed, that what we know now was not only unknown then, but even waiting for what remained of Goldsmith's life to develop and call it forth, this Life of Beau Nash is in some respects a curious, and was probably an unconscious, revelation of character. As yet restricted in his wardrobe, and unknown to the sartorial books of Mr. William Filby, he gravely discusses the mechanical and moral influence of dress, in the exaction of respect and esteem. Quite ignorant, as yet, of his own position among the remarkable men of his time, he dwells strongly on that class of impulsive virtues, which, in a man otherwise distinguished, are more adapted to win friends than admirers, and more capable of raising love than esteem. A stranger still to the London whist table, even to the moderate extent in which he subsequently sought its excitement and relief, he sets forth with singular pains the temptation of a man who has "led a life of expedients and "thanked chance for his support," to become a stranger to prudence, and fly back to chance for those" vicissitudes of rapture "and anguish" in which his character had been formed. With light and shade that might seem of any choosing but his, he exhibits the moral qualities of Nash, as of one whose virtues, in almost every instance, received some tincture from the follies most nearly neighbouring them; who, though very poor, was very fine, and spread out the little gold he had as thinly and far as it would go, but whose poverty was the more to be regretted, that it denied him the indulgence not only of his favourite follies, but of his favourite virtues; who had pity for every creature's distress, but wanted prudence in the application of his benefits, and in whom this ill-controlled sensibility was so strong, that, unable to witness the misfortunes of the miserable, he was always borrowing money to relieve them; who had, notwithstanding, done a thousand good things, and whose greatest vice was vanity. The self-painted picture will appear more striking as this narrative proceeds; and it would seem to have the same sort of unconscious relation to the future, that one of Nash's friends is mentioned in the book to have gone by the name of The Good-natured Man. Nor should I omit the casual evidence of acquaintanceship between its hero and

his biographer that occurs in a lively notice of the three periods of amatory usage which the beau's long life had witnessed, and in which not only had flaxen bobs been succeeded by majors, and negligents been routed by bags and ramilies, but the modes of making love had varied as much as the periwigs. "The only way "to make love now, I have heard Mr. Nash say, was to take no "manner of notice of the lady."

Johnson's purchase of this book, which is charged to him in one of Newbery's accounts, shows his interest in whatever affected Goldsmith at this opening of their friendship. His book-purchases were never abundant; though better able to afford them now than at any previous time, for the May of this year had seen a change in his fortunes. Bute's pensions to the Scottish crew showing meaner than ever in Churchill's daring verse, it occurred to the shrewd and wary Wedderburne (whose sister had married the favourite's most intimate friend) to advise, for a set-off, that Samuel Johnson should be pensioned. Of all the wits at the Grecian or the Bedford, Arthur Murphy, who had been some months fighting the North Briton with the Auditor, and was now watching the Courts at Westminster preparatory to his first circuit in the following year, was best known to Bute's rising lawyer; and Arthur was sent to Johnson. It was an "abode of wretched"ness," said this messenger of glad tidings, describing on his return those rooms of Inner Temple-lane where a visitor of some months before had found the author of the Rambler and Rasselas, now fifty-three years old, without pen, ink, or paper, "in poverty, "total idleness, and the pride of literature.' Yet, great as was the poverty and glad the tidings, a shade passed over Johnson's face. After a long pause, "he asked if it was seriously intended." Undoubtedly. His majesty, to reward literary merit, and with no desire that the author of the English Dictionary should “dip his "pen in faction" (these were Bute's own words), had signified through the premier his pleasure to grant to Samuel Johnson three hundred pounds a year. "He fell into a profound medita❝tion, and his own definition of a pensioner occurred to him." He was told that "he, at least, did not come within the defini"tion ;" but it was not till after dinner with Murphy at the Mitre on the following day, that he consented to wait on Bute and accept the proffered bounty. To be pensioned with the fraudulent and contemptible Shebbeare, so lately pilloried for a Jacobite libel on the revolution of '88; to find himself in the same Bute-list with a Scotch court-architect, with a Scotch court-painter, with the infamous David Mallet, and with Johnny Home, must have chafed Sam Johnson's pride a little; and when, in a few more months, as author of another English Dictionary, old Sheridan the