proceeded with; here the new poem, worked at in the adjoining lanes, and in pleasant strolls along the shady hedges, began to grow in importance; here, thus tuning his exquisite song outside the bars of his London prison, he might within himself enjoy that sense of liberty for which it so delighted him to listen to the songs of other uncaged birds; and here, so engaged, Goldsmith seems to have passed the greater part of the summer, apparently not much moved by what was going on elsewhere. Walpole, mourning for the loss of his Lady Hervey and his Lady Suffolk, was reading his tragedy of the Mysterious Mother to his lady-friends who remained, and rejoicing that he did not need to expose himself to "the "impertinencies of that jackanapes Garrick, who lets nothing 66 appear but his own wretched stuff, or that of creatures still 66 duller, who suffer him to alter their pieces as he pleases ;"—but Goldsmith's withers are unwrung. Hume was receiving a considerable increase to his pension, with significant intimation of the royal wish that he should apply himself to the continuation of his English History; while great lords were fondly dandling Robertson into the good graces of the booksellers, and the Chief Justice was admiringly telling the Duke of Bedford that 4500l. was to be paid him for his History of Charles the Fifth, and Walpole was reasonably sneering at what Scotch puffing and partiality might do ;but the humbler historian at Edgeware pursues his labours unbribed and undisturbed. The Sentimental Journey was giving pleasure to not a few; even Walpole was declaring it "infinitely "preferable to the tiresome Tristram Shandy;" while, within a few months, at a grand dinner-table round which were seated two dukes, two earls, Mr. Garrick, and Mr. Hume, a footman in attendance was announcing Sterne's lonely death in a common lodging-house in Bond-street;—but Goldsmith does not yet see the shadow of his own early decay. Gray, who had in vain solicited the Cambridge professorship of modern history while he yet had the health it would have given him spirit to enjoy, and was now about to receive it from the Duke of Grafton when no longer able to hold it, was wondering at a new book about Corsica, in which he found a hero pourtrayed by a green goose, and where he had the comfort of feeling that what was wise in it must be true, for the writer was too great a fool to invent it ;-but Goldsmith had never been much interested in Boswell, and Paoli is not very likely to increase his interest. Having made this unavailing effort to empty his head of Corsica, Boswell himself had visited London in the spring, had followed Johnson to Oxford, and was now making him the hero of dinner parties at the Crown and Anchor in the Strand, where Percy was quite unwarrantably attacked, Robertson slighted, and Davies turned into ridicule;— but Goldsmith is doubtless well content, for a time, to escape his chance of being also "tossed and gored." Kindness he could not escape so easily, if Reynolds had it in his gift. For this, too, was the year when the great painter, entering the little room where a party of his brother artists were in council over a plan for an "Academy of Arts," was instantly, all of them rising to a man, saluted "president ;" and the year had not closed before the royal patronage was obtained for the scheme, and that great institution was set on foot which has since so greatly flourished, yet has had no worthier or more famous entry on its records than the appointment of Samuel Johnson as its first Professor of Ancient Literature, and of Oliver Goldsmith as its first Professor of History. Whether the clamour of politics, noisiest when emptiest, failed meanwhile to make its way into the Shoemaker's paradise, may be more doubtful. A year of such profligate turmoil perhaps never degraded our English annals. The millennium of rioters as well as libellers seemed to have come. The abandoned recklessness of public men was seen reacting through all the grades of society; and in the mobs of Stepney-fields and St. George's, were reflected the knaves and bullies of White's and St. James's. The election for a new Parliament, the old one dying of its seventh year in March, let loose every evil element; and Wilkes found his work half done before he threw himself into it. His defeat for London, his daring and successful attempt on Middlesex, his imprisonment pending the arguments on his outlawry, the result of those arguments, his election as Alderman, and clumsy alternations of rage and fear in his opponents, confirmed him at last the representative of Liberty; and amid tumult, murder, and massacre, the sacred cap was put upon his head. Mobs assembled round his prison to offer him help, and succeeded so far as to involve Scotch soldiers, and their ministerial employers and defenders, in the odium of having fired fatally upon unarmed men. The laws seemed to have lost their terror, the magistracy their means of enforcing them. In one part of London there was a riot of Irish coal-heavers which lasted nine hours, and in which eighteen persons were killed, before the guards arrived upon the scene. The merchant sailors on the river to the number of four thousand rose for an increase of wages, and stopped outward-bound ships from sailing till their demands were compromised. The Thames watermen, to the best of their ability, followed the example; so did the journeymen hatters, with what assistance they could give to the general confusion; and even a riot of journeymen tailors threatened to be formidable, till Sir John Fielding succeeded in quelling it. Walpole has connected these various disturbances with the "favorable "Wilkes season," and tells us that in all of them was heard the cry of Liberty and its champion. Liberty by itself, to not a few of its advocates, had ceased to convey any meaning. "I take the "Wilkes-and-liberty to inform you," wrote a witty merchant to his correspondents. It was now that Whitfield put up prayers for Wilkes before his sermons; that Dukes were made to appear in front of their houses and drink his health; that city voters in a modest way of trade, refused to give him their votes unless he'd take a gift of money as well, in one instance as much as 201.; and that the most notoriously stately and ceremonious of all the ambassadors (the Austrian) was tumbled out of his coach, head over heels, to have his heels chalked with Number 45. In the midst of a Wilkes mob the new parliament met. "Good God," cried the Duke of Grafton, when the Duke of Richmond laughed at Lord Sandwich's proposition to send and see if the riots had ceased, "is it matter for laughter when mobs come to join the name of "Wilkes with the sacred sound of liberty!" The poor Duke saw none of the causes that had brought this about,, nor dreamt of connecting them with the social disorganisation all around him : with the seat of government in daily disorder, Ireland insurrectionary, the colonies on the eve of rebellion, and the continent overbearing and arrogant; while, to himself, a woman or a horserace was first in the duties of life, and his allies the Bedfords, "with each of them his three thousand a-year and his three "thousand bottles of claret and champagne," were insensate and reckless of disgrace. That language of Walpole is not to be adopted to its full extent, it may be true, any more than the expressions of the more terrible assailant who was now, (with such signatures as Mnemon, Lucius, and Atticus), sharpening his nameless weapons for a more fatal and enduring aim; but in neither case is the desperate bitterness to be condemned as uncalled-for, simply because it involved individual injustice. The time had come, when, even at the expense of individual suffering, it was well that such things should be thought and said; and when it was fitting that public men, privately not unamiable or dishonest, should at length be made bitterly responsible for public wrongs, whether sanctioned or committed. Lord Chatham was no worshipper of the mob, but this year roused him from his apathy, and replumed his popular fame. He saw much of what at last was impending. In "timber"merchants," who began now to contest seats in the large cities against the Selwyns and men of the aristocratic families, he saw something more than Gilly Williams's "d-d carpenters" who (according to Lord Carlisle) should be "kept in their saw-pits.” A new power was about to make itself felt, and it found Chatham prepared. He withdrew his name from the ministry, already reeling under the storm of Wilkes; Shelburne soon after followed him; Camden was not long in following Shelburne; the poor Duke of Newcastle, inapt for new notions, sank into the grave with his old ones; and young Charles James Fox, to whom the great friend and associate of his mature life was already intimately known, for the first time heard Mr. Burke familiarly talked about at his father's table. The latter incident may mark what the great families found it now no longer possible to affect ignorance of; though it is just as likely that his purchase of an estate induced the talk, as his late fiery speeches in the House of Commons. Burke became this year a landed proprietor. With money bequeathed him by his father and brother, and with large help from Lord Rockingham (at once intended to requite service and render it more effective), he purchased an estate in Buckinghamshire called Gregories, or Butlers-court, about a mile from the market town of Beaconsfield, and subsequently known by the latter name. Assisted as he was, the effort must have straitened his means; for in the following year he asks a loan of a thousand pounds from Garrick, which his "dear David," his "dearest Garrick," at once accords. The estate was twenty-four miles from London, and within a hundred yards of the house were the ruins of what once had been Edmund Waller's home. Gregories itself has since become a ruin, consumed by fire; but nobler memories than the old poet's now linger round what once was the home of Edmund Burke, and Goldsmith has his share in them. 66 Exciting news at the Edgeware cottage that Beaconsfield purchase at least must have been, though even the noise of Wilkes had failed to force an entrance there. In October, Goldsmith was again in the Temple, and is to be traced at his old haunts, and in the theatres. Somewhat later in the season which now began, Garrick brought out a new tragedy by Home; but so hateful had Wilkes again made the Scotch, that its author's name had to be suppressed, its own name anglicised, and a young English gentleman brought up from Oxford to the rehearsals, to personate the author. Goldsmith discovered the trick, and is said by Davies to have proposed a hostile party against the play, not inaptly called the Fatal Discovery. "It would hardly be credited that this man "of benevolence, for such he really was, endeavoured to muster a "party to condemn it ;" but this, the same authority afterwards remarks, was the transient thought of a giddy man, who upon "the least check, would have immediately renounced it, and as heartily joined with a party to support the piece he had before "devoted to destruction." It was probably renewed spleen at Garrick; whose recent patronage of Kenrick, for no apparent 66 66 reason than his means of mischief and his continued abuse of more successful men, had not tended to induce oblivion of older offences. Kenrick's latest form of malice was the epigram; but the wit was less apparent than the venom of connecting Goldsmith's with other names just now rife in the playbills. What are your Britons, Romans, Grecians, Ev'n Homer's self is but their foster-brother. The last halting allusion was to a story the humbler wits were now telling against Goldsmith. Bickerstaff had invited a party to his house to hear one of his dramatic pieces read; and among the company were Goldsmith and one Paul Hiffernan, already mentioned as one of his Grub-street protégés, of the Purdon and Pilkington class. He was an eccentric, drunken, idle, Irish creature; educated for a physician, and not without talents and even scholarship; but a continual victim to what he called impecuniosity, and so unprovided with self-help against the disease. that he lived altogether upon the help of other people. Where he lived, however, nobody could ever find out: he gave his address at the Bedford; and beyond that, curiosity was baffled, though many and most amusing were its attempts to discover more: nor was it till after his death that his whereabout was found, in one of the wretched little courts out of St. Martin's-lane. He wrote newspaper paragraphs in the morning, foraged for his dinner, slept out the early part of the night in one of the theatres, and, in return for certain critical and convivial displays which made his company attractive after play-hours, was always sure of a closing entertainment at the Black Lion in Russell-street, or the Cyder Cellar in Maiden-lane. Latterly, he had taken altogether to dramatic criticism, for which he had some talent,—his earliest Irish efforts in that line, when he ought to have been practising his profession, were thought mighty pleasant by Burke, then a lad at Dublin College,—and this, with its usual effect upon the Drurylane manager, had recently obtained him a sort of pension from Garrick. It was the great actor's worst weakness to involve himself thus with the meaner newspaper men; and it was only this very year he was warned, by a letter from Foote, of its danger in the case of Hiffernan. "Upon the whole," wrote that master in the art of literary libel, for there is nothing like the voice of a Gracchus for a good complaint against sedition, “it is, I think, "worthy of consideration, whether there is not something immoral, |