memoranda of books lent for the purposes of compilation; and he does not seem, himself, to have again laid it wholly aside. Indeed he now made a brief effort, at the suggestion of Reynolds, to make positive professional use of it. It was much to have a regular calling, said the successful painter; it gave a man social rank, and consideration in the world. Advantage should be taken of the growing popularity of the Traveller. To be at once physician and man of letters, was the most natural thing possible: there were the Arbuthnots and Garths, to say nothing of Cowley himself, among the dead; there were the Akensides, Graingers, Armstrongs, and Smolletts, still among the living; and where was the degree in medicine belonging to any of them, to which the degree in poetry or wit had not given more glad acceptance? Out came Goldsmith accordingly (in the June of this year, according to the account books, which Mr. Prior has published, of Mr. William Filby the tailor), in purple silk small-clothes, a handsome scarlet roquelaure buttoned close under the chin, and with all the additional importance derivable from a full dress professional wig, a sword, and a gold-headed cane. The style of the coat and smallclothes may be presumed from the "four guineas and a half" paid for them; and, as a child with its toy is uneasy without swift renewal of the pleasurable excitement, with no less than three similar suits, not less expensive, Goldsmith amazed his friends in the next six months. The dignity he was obliged to put on with these fine clothes, indeed, left him this as their only enjoyment; for he had found it much harder to give up the actual reality of his old humble haunts, of his tea at the White-conduit, of his alehouse club at Islington, of his nights at the Wrekin or St. Giles's, than to blot their innocent but vulgar names from his now genteeler page. In truth, he would say (in truth was a favourite phrase of his, interposes Cooke, who relates the anecdote), one has to make vast sacrifices for good company's sake; "for here am I "shut out of several places where I used to play the fool very "agreeably." Nor is it quite clear that the most moderate accession of good company, professionally speaking, rewarded this reluctant gravity. The only instance remembered of his practice, was in the case of a Mrs. Sidebotham, described as one of his recent acquaintance of the better sort; whose waiting-woman was often afterwards known to relate with what a ludicrous assumption of dignity he would show off his cloak and his cane, as he strutted with his queer little figure, stuck through as with a huge pin by his wandering sword, into the sick-room of her mistress. At last it one day happened, that, his opinion differing somewhat from the apothecary's in attendance, the lady thought her apothecary the safer counsellor, and Goldsmith quitted the house in high indigna

Q

tion. He would leave off prescribing for his friends, he said. "Do so, my dear Doctor," observed Beauclerc.

"Whenever you

"undertake to kill, let it only be your enemies." Upon the whole this seems to have been the close of Doctor Goldsmith's professional practice.

CHAPTER XII.

1765. Æt. 37.

VARIOUS PLACES. 1765-1766.

THE literary engagements of Doctor Oliver Goldsmith were meanwhile going on with Newbery; and towards the close of the year he appears to have completed a compilation of a kind somewhat novel to him, induced in all probability by his concurrent professional attempts. It was 66 A Survey of "Experimental Philosophy, considered in its present state of "improvement; and Newbery paid him sixty guineas for it. He also took great interest at this time in the proceedings of the Society of Arts; and is supposed, from the many small advances

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entered in Newbery's memoranda as made in connection with that Society, to have contributed sundry reports and disquisitions on its proceedings and affairs, to a new commercial and agricultural magazine in which the busy publisher had engaged. It was certainly not an idle year with him; though what remains in proof of his employment may be scant and indifferent enough. Johnson's blind pensioner, Miss Williams, had for several months been getting together a subscription volume of Miscellanies, to which Goldsmith had promised a poem ; and she complains that she found him always too busy to redeem his promise, and was continually put off with a "Leave it to me." Nor was Johnson, who had made like promises, much better. Well, we'll think "about it," was his form of excuse. With Johnson, in truth, a year of most unusual exertion had succeeded his year of visitings, and he had at last completed, nine years later than he promised it, his edition of Shakespeare. It came out in October, in eight octavo volumes; and was bitterly assailed (nor, it may be admitted, without a certain coarse smartness) by Kenrick, who, in one of the notes to his attack, coupling "learned doctors of "Dublin," with "doctorial dignities of Rheims and Louvain," may have meant a sarcasm at Goldsmith. I have indicated the latter place as the probable source of his medical degree; and, three months before, Dublin University had conferred a doctorship on Johnson, though not until ten years later, when Oxford did him similar honour, did he consent to acknowledge the title. He had now, I may add, left his Temple chambers, and become master of a house in one of the courts in Fleet-street which bore his own name; and where he was able to give lodging on the ground floor to Miss Williams, and in the garret to Robert Levett. It is remembered as a decent house, with stout old-fashioned mahogany furniture. Goldsmith appears meanwhile to have got into somewhat better chambers in the same (Garden) court where his library staircase chambers stood, which he was able to furnish more comfortably; and to which we shortly trace (by the help of Mr. Filby's bills, and their memoranda of altered suits) the presence of a man-servant.

So passed the year 1765. It was the year in which he had first felt any advantage of rank arising from literature; and it closed upon him as he seems to have resolved to make the most of his growing importance, and enjoy it in all possible ways. Joseph Warton, now preparing for the head mastership of Winchester school, was in London at the opening of 1766, 1766.

and saw something of the society of the club. He had Et. 38. wished to see Hume; but Hume, though he had left Paris (where he had been secretary of the embassy to Lord Hertford,

recalled and sent to Dublin by the new administration), was not yet in London. A strange Paris " season it had been, and odd and ill-assorted its assemblage of visitors. There had Sterne, Foote, Walpole, and Wilkes, been thrown together at the same dinner-table. There had Hume, with his broad Scotch accent, his unintelligible French, his imbecile fat face, and his corpulent body, been the object of enthusiasm without example, and played the Sultan in pantomimic tableaux to the prettiest women of the time. There had the author of the Heloise and the Contrat Social, half crazed with the passionate admiration which had welcomed his Emile, and flattered out of the rest of his wits by the persecution that followed it, stalked about with all Paris at his heels, in a caftan and Armenian robes, and so enchanted the Scotch historian and sage, to whom he seemed a sort of better Socrates, that he had offered him a home in England. There was the young painter student Barry, writing modest letters on his way to Rome, where William and Edmund Burke had subscribed out of their limited means to send him. There was the young lion-hunting Boswell, more pompous and conceited than ever; as little laden with law from Utrecht, where he has studied since we saw him last, as with heroism from Corsica, where he has visited Pascal Paoli, or with wit from Ferney, where he has been to see Voltaire; pushing his way into every salon, inflicting himself on every celebrity, and ridiculed by all. There, finally, was Horace Walpole, twinged with the gout and smarting from political slight, revenging himself with laughter at everybody around him and beyond him : now with aspiring Geoffrin and the philosophers, now with blind Du Deffand and the wits ("women who violated all the duties "of life and gave very pretty suppers"); lumping up in the same contempt, Wilkes and Foote, Boswell and Sterne; proclaiming as impostors in their various ways, alike the jesuits, the methodists, the philosophers, the politicians, the encyclopedists, the hypocrite Rousseau, the scoffer Voltaire, the Humes, the Lytteltons, the Grenvilles, the atheist tyrant of Prussia, and the mountebank of history Mr. Pitt; and counting a ploughman who sows, reads his almanack, and believes the stars but so many farthing candles created to prevent his falling into a ditch as he goes home at night, a wiser and more rational, and certainly an honester being than any of them. Such was the winter society of Paris ; let Joseph Warton describe what he saw of literature in London. "I only dined with Johnson," he writes to his brother, "who "seemed cold and indifferent, and scarce said anything to me. "Perhaps he has heard what I said of his Shakespeare, or rather, 66 was offended at what I wrote to him-as he pleases. Of all "solemn coxcombs, Goldsmith is the first; yet sensible; but

"affects to use Johnson's hard words in conversation.

We had a

"Mr. Dyer, who is a scholar and a gentleman. Garrick is entirely "off from Johnson, and cannot, he says, forgive him his insinuating "that he withheld his old editions, which always were open to him, "nor, I suppose, his never mentioning him in all his works.'

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What Garrick could with greatest difficulty forgive (Warton's allusion is to that passage in the Preface to his edition which regrets that he could not collate more copies, since he had not found the collectors of those rarities very communicative) was the studied absence of any mention of his acting. He had not withheld his old plays; he had been careful, through others, to let Johnson understand (too notoriously careless of books, as he was, to be safely trusted with rare editions) that the books were at his service, and that in his absence abroad the keys of his library had, with that view solely, been entrusted to a servant : but this implied an overture from Johnson, who thought it Garrick's duty, on the contrary, to make overtures to him; who knew that the other course involved acknowledgments he was not prepared to make; and who laughed at nothing so much, on Davy's subsequent loan of all his plays to George Steevens, as when he read this year, in the first publication of that acute young Mephistophelean critic that "Mr. Garrick's zeal would not permit him to withhold “anything that might ever so remotely tend to show the perfections "of that author who only could have enabled him to display his own." Johnson could not have hit off a compliment of such satirical nicety; he must have praised honestly, if at all, and it went against his grain to do it. He let out the reason to Boswell eight years afterwards. "Garrick has been liberally paid, sir, for "anything he has done for Shakespeare. If I should praise him, “I should much more praise the nation who paid him.” With better reason he used to laugh at his managerial preference of the player's text (which it is little to the credit of the stage that the latest of the great actors, Mr. Macready, should have been the first to depart from), and couple it with a doubt if he had ever examined one of the original plays from the first scene to the last. Nor did Garrick take all this quietly. The king had commanded his reappearance in Benedict at the close of the year; and, though he did not think it safe to resume any part of which Powell was in possession, except Lusignan, Lothario, and Leon, his popularity had again shone forth unabated. It brought back his sense of power; and with it a disposition to use it, even against Johnson. The latter had not hesitated, notwithstanding their doubtful relations, to seek to "secure an honest prejudice" in favour of his book, by formally asking the popular actor's "suffrage" for it on its appearance; yet the suffrage of the popular actor was certainly