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as well as impolitic, in encouraging a fellow, who, without parts, 'principles, property, or profession, has subsisted for these twenty "years by the qualities of a literary footpad." Precisely that newspaper jobbery it was, however, to whose success the absence of parts, principles, property, and profession is essential, which had procured Hiffernan his invitation to the reading of Bickerstaff's play. A good dinner preluded the reading, and much justice was done to this, and to the glass which circulated for half an hour afterwards, by "Hiff:" but his judgment, and enjoyment, of the play, were much less clearly evinced and when the first batch of opinions were collected at the end of the first act, "Very well, by -, very well!" was all that could be got from him. Alas, for what followed! "About the middle of the second act," says the teller of the anecdote, "he began to nod; and in a little time afterwards to snore so loud that the author could scarcely be "heard. Bickerstaff felt a little embarrassed; but raising his 66 voice, went on. Hiffernan's tones, however, increased; till at “last Goldsmith could hold out no longer, but cried out, 'Never """mind the brute, Bick! go on. So he would have served "Homer if he was here, and reading his own works.""

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Nothing was easier for Kenrick than to turn this into a comparison of Bickerstaff to Homer; and no laugh was heartier than Garrick's at the new proof of Goldsmith's folly. But, for his countenance of the libeller he was doomed to be severely punished, and in connection with this very Bickerstaff. Some four years after the present date, that wretched man was driven from society with an infamous stain, and Kenrick grossly connected it by allusion with Garrick; to whom at the very time, as we now know, the miserable culprit was writing from his hiding-place the most piteous petitions for charity that one human being ever addressed to another. An action was commenced against the libeller, and dropped upon ample apology. "I did not believe him guilty, but did it to plague the fellow," said Kenrick to Thomas Evans. The worthy bookseller never spoke to him again.

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Scoundrel as he was, it need not be denied that he had some cleverness. Johnson hit it off exactly when he described it as a faculty that made him public, without making him known. He used to lecture at the Devil and other taverns, on every conceivable subject from Shakespeare to the perpetual motion, which he thought he had discovered; having been, before he got his Scotch doctorship and became Griffiths's hack, a scale or rule-maker. Hence Johnson's quiet answer to the attack on his Shakespeare, that he could not consider himself "bound by his rules ;" and similar advice he always gave to Goldsmith, the next most frequent object of his attack. Nothing escaped this Ishmael of criticism, not

even the Traveller. But "never mind, sir," Johnson would say at some new venom, as he said always of the fellow's outrages on himself, "a man whose business it is to be talked of, is much “helped by being attacked." He explained the reason afterwards to Boswell. 66 Fame, sir, is a shuttlecock: if it be struck only at 66 one end of the room, it will soon fall to the ground; to keep it 66 'up, it must be struck at both ends." So too, on Boswell himself remarking, four years after the present, that he thought Goldsmith the better for the attacks so frequently made upon him, 66 Yes, sir," was the reply; "but he does not think so yet. When "Goldsmith and I published each of us something at the same "time, we were given to understand that we might review each "other. Goldsmith was for accepting the offer. I said, no, set "reviewers at defiance." Unhappily, his friend never could do this; and even the lesson of "retaliation" was learnt too late. Kenrick remained, to the last, his evil genius; and it seems to have been with a sort of uneasy desire to propitiate him, that Goldsmith yielded to Griffin's solicitation at the close of the present year, and consented to take part in the editing of a new Gentleman's Journal in which Kenrick was a leading writer, and for which Hiffernan, Kelly, and some others of doctorial dignity were engaged. It died soon after it was born; and, on some one remarking to him what an extraordinary thing so sudden a death was, "Not at all, sir," he answered: "a very common case; it died of too many Doctors."

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An amusing illustration which belongs nearly to this time, of inconvenience sometimes incurred from his Grub-street protégés and pensioners, will properly dismiss for the present this worshipful company of Kenricks and Hiffernans. The hero of the anecdote had all the worst qualities of the tribe; and "how do you think "he served me," said Goldsmith, relating the incident to a friend. Why, sir, after staying away two years, he came one evening "into my chambers, half drunk, as I was taking a glass of wine "with Topham Beauclerc and General Oglethorpe; and, sitting "himself down, with most intolerable assurance inquired after my "health and literary pursuits, as if we were upon the most friendly 66 footing. I was at first so much ashamed of ever having known “such a fellow, that I stifled my resentment, and drew him into a "conversation on such topics as I knew he could talk upon; in "which, to do him justice, he acquitted himself very reputably : “when all of a sudden, as if recollecting something, he pulled two 66 papers out of his pocket, which he presented to me with great ceremony, saying, 'Here, my dear friend, is a quarter of a pound "of tea, and a half pound of sugar, I have brought you; "for though it is not in my power at present to pay you the two "'guineas you so generously lent me, neither you, nor any man else,

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"shall ever have it to say that I want gratitude. This," added Goldsmith, was too much. I could no longer keep in my feelings, "but desired him to turn out of my chambers directly, which he very coolly did, taking up his tea and sugar; and I never saw "him afterwards." Certainly Hogarth should have survived to depict this scene. No less a pencil could have given us the fastidious face of Beauclerc,-than whom no man ever showed a more uniform and even painful sense of the ridiculous,-when the tea and sugar were produced.

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Oglethorpe was a recent acquaintance, and has become, by the compliment of Pope, and in the page of Boswell, an historical name. Now thirty years older than Goldsmith, he survived him upwards of eleven years and to the last preserved, not only that love of literature and genius which made him the first active patron of Johnson's London while yet the author was quite unknown; but that "strong benevolence of soul" which connects his memory with the colonisation of Georgia, as well as those Jacobite leanings which involved him in a court-martial after the affair of '45, and subsequently shelved him as a soldier. He became a member of the House of Commons, sat in several parliaments, compelled a reluctant inquiry into prisons and punishments, and distinguished himself as much by humane as by high tory crotchets. The sympathies which attracted him to Goldsmith, and continued their intimacy, appear in the commencement of the only letter that survives of their correspondence. "How just, sir," writes Oglethorpe, were your observations, that the poorest objects were by "extreme poverty deprived of the benefit of hospitals erected for "the relief of the poorest." And he incloses five pounds for his friend to distribute as he may think proper. Nor were they without the other point of agreement which had attracted Oglethorpe to Johnson. For Goldsmith, though the social bearing of politics always interested him most, and he cared little at any time for its party questions, had something of a half-fanciful Jacobite leaning, dabbled now and then in Jacobite opinions, and was as ready for a hit at the Hanoverian-rat as Johnson himself. An anecdote of their stroll one day into Westminster Abbey, has preserved for us pleasant record of this. They stood together in Poets' Corner; surveyed the dead but sceptred sovereigns that there, from storied urn and monumental bust, still rule and glorify the world; and the natural thought probably rose to the minds of both, "perhaps 66 our names, too, will one day be mingled with theirs.” Johnson broke the silence, and whispered the hope in a Latin verse,

"Forsitan et nostrum nomen miscebitur istis."

They walked away from the Abbey together, and arrived at

Temple-bar; where the ghastly remains of the last Jacobite execution were still rotting on the spikes above; and where, till not

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long before, people had made a trade of letting spy-glasses at “a halfpenny a look." Here Goldsmith stopped Johnson, pointed up, and slily returned his whisper,

"Forsitan et nostrum . . . miscebitur ISTIS."

CHAPTER IV.

LABOURS AND ENJOYMENTS PUBLIC AND PRIVATE. 1769.

1769. Et. 41.

WITH the opening of 1769, we find Goldsmith busily engaged upon new projects, his Roman History being completed; and it was now, Percy tells us, that Johnson took him to Oxford, and obtained for him the degree ad eundem of M.B. The fact must rest on the bishop's authority; for the present Oxford registrar, though "he inclines to believe that the "Bishop of Dromore's impression was correct," finds a chasm in the University register which leaves it without positive corroboration. They were at this time much together, it is certain; and if Johnson's opinion of the genius of Goldsmith was now at its highest, it was repaid with very hearty affection. "Look," said Gray, as, in walking this year with a friend through a crowded street of the city, he saw a large uncouth figure "rolling" before them: "look, look, Bonstetten! the Great Bear! There goes

It was Johnson!

"Ursa Major!" "Ah!" said Goldsmith, when such expressions were repeated to him, "they may say that! "Johnson, to be sure, has a roughness of manner, but no man "alive has a more tender heart. He has nothing of the bear but "his skin.” Their entertainer at Oxford was the accomplished lawyer, Chambers, at this time Vinerian Professor, and five years later a judge in India; in whose rooms his more celebrated townsman Scott (both were Newcastle men, and on the old panel of the grammar-school to which I went in my boyhood, I remember cutting my name underneath theirs) was afterwards introduced to Johnson. Chambers had lately been admitted a member of the Gerrard-street club.

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His election, with that of Percy, and George Colman, took place on the resignation of Hawkins. The records of the early years of the club are really so scanty and imperfect, that it is difficult to ascertain the simplest fact in connection with it: but it appears certain, as I formerly stated, that on the occasion of this second ballot for members it was resolved to enlarge the original number to twelve; when, as a result of the resignation of Hawkins, and of Beauclerc's forfeiture by continued non-attendance, four vacancies had to be filled. To the first, Percy was elected; the second was re-claimed by Beauclerc, whose recent marriage with Lady Di Spencer, on her divorce from Lord Bolingbroke, sufficiently explained his temporary withdrawal; and the third and fourth were filled by Chambers and George Colman. It was on the occasion of this slight increase that Goldsmith seems to have urged the expediency of a larger infusion of new men. “We should change companions oftener,” Mrs. Thrale reports him to have said with a special reference to Johnson; we exhaust one "another, and shall soon be both of us worn out." "It would give "the club an agreeable variety," ," is Boswell's version of his remark; "there could now be nothing new among the members, "for they had travelled over each other's minds." This nettled Johnson; being too much in his own way. Sir," he said, "you "have not travelled over my mind, I promise you.' Nevertheless, Reynolds agreed with Goldsmith, thinking that life wanted colour and diversity as much as his own canvasses did; and immediately before Goldsmith died, the number was increased to twenty. But from that time Johnson took little interest in the meetings. Almost all the rising men of the day were whigs, cursed whigs, bottomless whigs, as he prematurely called Burke; and the spectacle of Charles Fox in the chair, quoting Homer and Fielding to the astonishment of Joe Warton, was one he could not get reconciled to. Within three years, he was himself the advocate of a yet further increase to thirty; and the form the club then assumed

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