The nature of the noises may be presumed from what is stated on the authority of a worthy Irish merchant settled in London (Mr. Seguin), to two of whose children Goldsmith stood godfather; and whose intimacy with the poet descended as an heirloom to his family, by whom every tradition of it has been carefully cherished. Members of this family recollected also other Irish friends (a Mr. Pollard, of Castle Pollard, and his wife) who visited London at this time, and were entertained by Goldsmith. They remembered dinners at which Johnson, Percy, Bickerstaff, Kelly, "and a variety of authors of minor note," were guests. They talked of supper parties with younger people, as well in the London chambers as in suburban lodgings; preceded by blindman's buff, forfeits, or games of cards; and where Goldsmith, festively entertaining them all, would make frugal supper for himself off boiled milk. They related how he would sing all kinds of Irish songs; with what special enjoyment he gave the Scotch ballad of Johnny Armstrong (his old nurse's favourite); how cheerfully he would put the front of his wig behind, or contribute in any other way to the general amusement; and to what accompaniment of uncontrollable laughter he "danced a minuet with "Mrs. Seguin."

Through all the distance of time may not one see even yet, moving through the steps of the minuet, that clumsy little figure, those short thick legs, those plain features,—all the clumsier and plainer for the satin-grain coat, the garter-blue silk breeches, the gold sprig buttons, and the rich straw-coloured tamboured waistcoat,—yet with every sense but of honest gladness and frank enjoyment lost in the genial good-nature, the beaming mirth and truth of soul, the childlike glee and cordial fun, which turns into a cheerful little hop the austere majesty of the stateliest of all the dances? Nor let me omit from these agreeable memories a delightful anecdote which the same Mr. Ballantyne who has told us of the Wednesday-club pleasantly preserves for us in his Mackliniana. It introduces to us the scene of another "cheerful "little hop," which, at about this time also, Macklin the actor gave at his house, when "Doctor Goldsmith, the facetious "Doctor Glover, Fenton the accomplished Welsh bard, and the "humane Tom King the comedian, were of the party.' On this occasion so entirely happy was Goldsmith, that he danced and threw up his wig to the ceiling, and cried out that " men were

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never so much like men as when they looked like boys!" Little of the self-satisfied importance which Boswell is most fond of connecting with him, is to be discovered in recollections like these.

And they are confirmed by Cooke's more precise account of

scenes he witnessed at the Wednesday-club, where Goldsmith's more intimate associates seem now to have attempted to restrain the too great familiarity he permitted to the humbler members. An amusing instance is related. The fat man who sang songs had

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a friend in a certain Mr. B, described as a good sort of man and an eminent pig-butcher; who piqued himself very much on his good fellowship with the author of the Traveller, and whose constant manner of drinking to him was, Come, Noll, here's my service to 66 you, old boy!" Repeating this one night after the comedy was played, and when there was a very full club, Glover went over to Goldsmith, and said in a whisper that he ought not to allow such liberties. "Let him alone," answered Goldsmith, "and you'll see "how civilly I'll let him down." He waited a little; and, on the next pause in the conversation, called out aloud, with a marked expression of politeness and courtesy, "Mr. B, I have the honour "of drinking your good health." "Thanke'e, thanke'e, Noll;" returned Mr. B, pulling his pipe out of his mouth, and answering with great briskness. "Well, where's the advantage of your "reproof?" asked Glover. "In truth," remarked Goldsmith, with an air of good-humoured disappointment, intended to give greater force to a stroke of meditated wit, "I give it up; I ought "to have known before now, there is no putting a pig in the “right way.”

The same authority informs us of liberties not quite so harmless as Mr. B's, and wit quite as flat as Goldsmith's, practised now and then on the poet for more general amusement, by the choicer spirits of the Globe. For example, he had come into the clubroom one night, eager and clamorous for his supper, having been out on some 'shooting party," and taken nothing since the morning. The wags were still round the table, at which they had been enjoying themselves, when a dish of excellent mutton chops, ordered as he came in, was set before the famishing poet. Instantly one of the company rose, and went to another part of the room. A second pushed his chair away from the table. A third showed more decisive signs of distress, connecting it with the chops in a manner not to be mistaken. "How the waiter could have dared "to produce such a dish!" was at last the reluctant remark to Goldsmith's alarmed inquiries. "Why, the chops were offensive; "the fellow ought to be made to eat them himself." Anxious for supper as he was, the plate was at once thrust from him; the waiter violently summoned into the room; and an angry order given that he should try to make his own repast, of what he had so impudently set before a hungry man. The waiter, now conscious of a trick, complied with affected reluctance; and Goldsmith, more quickly appeased than enraged, as his wont was, ordered a fresh

supper for himself, "and a dram for the poor devil of a waiter, "who might otherwise get sick from so nauseating a meal.”

Before I pass from these humble records of the Wednesday-club, it will be proper to mention Kelly's withdrawal from it. Alleged attacks by Goldsmith on his comedy having been repeated to him with exaggerations, Kelly resolved to resent the unfriendliness. What the exact character of their friendship had been, I cannot precisely ascertain; but though recent, it had probably for a time been intimate. Kelly succeeded Jones as editor of the Public Ledger, and the mutual connexion with Newbery must have brought them much together; we find Kelly, as the world and its prospects became brighter with him, moving into chambers in the Temple, near Goldsmith's; nor is it difficult to believe the report of which I have found several traces, that but for his sensible remonstrance on the prudential score, his wife's sister, who lived in his house and was pretty and poor as his wife, being simply, as she had been, an expert and industrious needlewoman, would have been carried off and wedded by Goldsmith. Since their respective comedies they had not met; when, abruptly encountering each other one night in the Covent-garden green-room, Goldsmith stammered out awkward congratulations to Kelly on his recent success, to which the other, prepared for war, promptly replied that he could not thank him because he could not believe him. "From that hour they never spoke to one another :" and Kelly, reluctant that Goldsmith should be troubled to "do anything more "for him," resigned the club. The latter allusion was (by way of satire) to a story he used to tell of the terms of Goldsmith's answer to a dinner invitation which he had given him. "with pleasure accept your kind invitation," so ran the whimsical and very pardonable speech, "but to tell you the truth, my dear 66 boy, my Traveller has found me a home in so many places, that "I am engaged, I believe, three days. Let me see. To-day I "dine with Edmund Burke, to-morrow with Doctor Nugent, and "the next day with Topham Beauclerc; but I'll tell you what "I'll do for you, I'll dine with you on Saturday." Now Kelly, though conceited and not very scrupulous, was not an ill-natured man, on the whole; he wrote a novel called Louisa Mildmay, which, with some scenes of a questionable kind of warmth, an illnatured man could not have written; but he was not justified in the tone he took during this quarrel, and after it. It was not for him to sneer at Goldsmith's follies, who was for nothing more celebrated than for his own unconscious imitations of them; who was so fond, in his little gleam of prosperity, of displaying on his sideboard the plate he possessed, that he added to it his silver spurs; and who, even as he laughed at his more famous country

"I would

man's Tyrian bloom and satin, was displaying his own corpulent little person at all public places in " a flaming broad silver-laced "waistcoat, bag-wig, and sword."

Mr. William Filby's bill marks the 21st of January as the day when the “Tyrian bloom satin-grain, and garter-blue silk breeches" (charged 81. 2s. 7d.) were sent home; and doubtless this was the suit ordered for the comedy's first night. Within three months, Mr. Filby having meanwhile been paid his previous year's account by a draught on Griffin, another more expensive suit ("lined with "silk, and gold buttons") was supplied; and in three months more, the entry on the same account of "a suit of mourning," furnished on the 16th of June, marks the period of Henry Goldsmith's death. At the close of the previous month, in the village of Athlone, had terminated, at the age of forty-five, that brother's life of active piety, and humble but noble usefulness, whose unpretending Christian example, far above the worldlier fame he had himself acquired, his brother's genius has consecrated and preserved for ever. Shortly after he had tidings of his loss, the character of the Village Preacher was most probably written; for certainly the lines which immediately precede it were composed about a month before. From his father and his brother alike, indeed, were drawn the exquisite features of this sketch; but of the so recent grief we may find marked and unquestionable trace, as well in the sublime and solemn image at the close, as in those opening allusions to Henry's unworldly contentedness, which already he had celebrated, in prose hardly less beautiful, by that dedication to the Traveller which he put forth and paraded with as great a sense of pride derived from it as though it proclaimed the patronage of a prince or noble. Now too is repeated, with yet greater earnestness, his former tribute to his brother's hospitality.

A man he was to all the country dear;

And passing rich with forty pounds a year.
His house was known to all the vagrant train;
He chid their wanderings, but relieved their pain:
The long-remember'd beggar was his guest,
Whose beard descending swept his aged breast;
The ruin'd spendthrift, now no longer proud,

Claim'd kindred there, and had his claims allow'd;
The broken soldier, kindly bade to stay,

Sat by his fire, and talk'd the night away;

Wept o'er his wounds, or, tales of sorrow done,

Shoulder'd his crutch and show'd how fields were won. . . .
At church, with meek and unaffected grace,

His looks adorn'd the venerable place;

Truth from his lips prevail'd with double sway,
And fools who came to scoff remain'd to pray.

The service pass'd, around the pious man,
With steady zeal, each honest rustic ran;
Even children follow'd, with endearing wile,
And pluck'd his gown, to share the good man's smile :
His ready smile a parent's warmth express'd,

Their welfare pleased him, and their cares distress'd.
To them his heart, his love, his griefs were given,

But all his serious thoughts had rest in heaven:
As some tall cliff, that lifts its awful form,

Swells from the vale, and midway leaves the storm,

Though round its breast the rolling clouds are spread,
Eternal sunshine settles on its head.

The idea of the Deserted Village was thrown out at the close of the Traveller,

(Have we not seen, at pleasure's lordly call,
The smiling long-frequented village fall?
Beheld the duteous son, the sire decay'd,

The modest matron, and the blushing maid,
Forc'd from their homes. .)

and on the general glad acceptance of that poem he had at once turned his thoughts to its successor. The subject of the growth of trade and opulence in England, of the relation of labour to the production of wealth, and of the advantage or disadvantage of its position in reference to manufactures and commerce, or as connected with the cultivation of land, which, two years after the Traveller appeared, Adam Smith exalted into a philosophic system by the publication of his immortal Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, was one that Goldsmith had frequently adverted to in his earliest writings, and on which his views were undoubtedly less sound than poetical. It may be worth remark, indeed, that a favourite subject of reflection as this theme always was with him, and often as he adverts to such topics connected with it as the effects of luxury and wealth on the simpler habits of a people, it is difficult to believe that he had ever arrived at a settled conclusion in his own mind, one way or the other. What he pleads for in his poetry, his prose for the most part condemns. Thus the argument of the Deserted Village is distinctly at issue with the philosophy of the Citizen of the World, in which he reasons that to the accumulation of wealth may be assigned not only the greatest part of our knowledge, but even of our virtues; and exhibits poets, philosophers, and even patriots, marching in luxury's train. On the other hand, he occasionally again breaks out (as in the Animated Nature) into complaints as indignant as they are shallow and ill founded, that "the rich should cry out for liberty while they thus starve "their fellow-creatures" (he is alluding to the obligation on the