was precisely what he wished to bring it to: " a mere miscellaneous "collection of conspicuous men, without any determinate charac"ter." So, to the present day, it has continued. It may be said to have ceased to be the Literary club, as soon as it became necessary to call it so; and, though still stat magni nominis umbra, no effort has been made to revive its great, indeed its sole distinction. Colman's election seemed a studied slight to Garrick, but his claim was not inconsiderable. It was a choice between rival managers and rival wits; eager little figures both; both social and most agreeable men; and the scale was easily turned. Langton describes a club incident soon after Colman's admission. He says that Goldsmith, on the occasion of a play brought out by Mrs. Lennox (a very ingenious, deserving, and not very fortunate woman, who wrote the clever novel of the Female Quixote, and a somewhat silly book about Shakespeare, to which Johnson, a great friend of hers, was suspected to have contributed), told Johnson at the club that a person had advised him to go and hiss it, because she had attacked the great poet in her book called Shakespeare Illustrated. "And did you not tell him," returned Johnson sharply, "that he 66 was a rascal?"" "No, sir," said Goldsmith, "I did not. "Perhaps he might not mean what he said." "Nay, sir,” was the reply, "if he lied, it is a different thing." Colman was sitting by, while this passed; and, dropping his voice out of Johnson's hearing, slily remarked to Langton, "Then the proper expression “should have been, Sir, if you don't lie, you're a rascal.” play was produced at Colman's theatre with the title of the Sister, and encountered so strong an opposition that it was never repeated: but that the audience was not impartial may be suspected from Langton's anecdote, and it is borne out by a reading of the comedy itself. Though with too much sentiment, it is both amusing and interesting; and the Strawberry-hill critics who abused it, and afterwards pronounced Burgoyne's Heiress "the finest comedy in "the English language," might have had the justice to discover that three of the characters of the fashionable General were stolen from this very Sister of poor Mrs. Lennox. Goldsmith, however, had nothing to reproach himself with. He not only refrained from joining the dissentients, but assisted the comedy (perhaps first disposed to sympathise with it because Garrick had rejected it) by an epilogue written in his liveliest strain, and spoken by pretty Mrs. Bulkley. The Goldsmith has had few competitors in that style of writing. His prologues and epilogues are the perfection of the vers de société. Formality and ill-humour are exorcised by their cordial wit, which transforms the theatre to a drawing-room, and the audience into friendly guests. There is a playful touch, an easy, airy elegance, which, when joined to terseness of expression, sets it off with a finished beauty and incomparable grace: but few of our English poets have written this style successfully. The French, who invented the name for it, have been almost its only practised cultivators. Goldsmith's genius for it will nevertheless bear comparison with even theirs. He could be playful without childishness, humorous without coarseness, and sharply satirical without a particle of anger. Enough remains, for proof, in his collected verse; but in private letters that have perished, many most charming specimens have undoubtedly been lost. For with such enchanting facility it flowed from him, that with hardly any of his friends in the higher social circles which he now began to enter, did it fail to help him to a more gracious acceptation, to warmer and more cordial intimacy. It takes but the touch of nature to please highest and lowest alike; and whether he thanked Lord Clare or the manager of Ranelagh, answered an invitation to the charming Miss Hornecks, or supplied author or actor with an epilogue,-the same exquisite tact, the same natural art, the same finished beauty of humour and refinement, recommended themselves to all. The Miss Hornecks, girls of nineteen and seventeen, were acquaintances formed during this year; and they soon ripened into friends. They were the daughters of Mrs. Horneck, Captain Kane Horneck's widow; whose Devonshire family connected her with Reynolds, and so introduced her to Goldsmith. Her only son Charles, the "Captain in Lace " as they now fondly called him, had entered the Guards in the preceding year, and seems to have been as cordial and good-natured, as her daughters were handsome and young. The eldest, Catherine, "Little Comedy" as she was called, was already engaged to Henry William Bunbury (second son of a baronet of old family in Suffolk, whose elder son Charles had lately succeeded to the title), who is still remembered as "Geoffrey Gambado," one of the cleverest amateur artists and social caricaturists of his day. The youngest, Mary, had no declared lover till a year after Goldsmith's death, nor was married till three years after that engagement to Colonel Gwyn; but already she had the loving nickname of the "Jessamy Bride," and exerted strange fascination over Goldsmith. Heaven knows what impossible dreams may at times have visited the awkward unattractive man of letters! 66 And here perhaps it will be right to observe, since the foregoing hint, thrown out in my first edition, may have led to the error, that its suggestion has been much too freely expanded into an ascertained fact by a very agreeable writer, Mr. Washington Irving, who has proceeded to instal the "Jessamy Bride" in all the honours of a complete conquest of Goldsmith, which, as he tells his readers (Life of Goldsmith, 370), "has hung a poetical wreath above her Y 66 "grave." In Mr. Irving's little book, the "Jessamy Bride" becomes the very centre of all Goldsmith's hopes and thoughts in latter life. If there is a dance, the Jessamy Bride must of course be his “ partner' (308); if there is an expensive suit of clothes, it is to "win favour "in the eyes of the Jessamy Bride" (228); if there is an additional extravagance of wardrobe," the bright eyes of the Jessamy Bride" are made responsible for it (255); if he cannot resist an invitation of Mr. Bunbury's, it is "especially as the Jessamy Bride would of 66 course be among the guests" (275); if a blue velvet suit "makes sudden appearance in Mr. Filby's bills, "again we hold the Jessamy "Bride responsible for this splendour of wardrobe" (304); if she attends a rehearsal of one of his comedies, it is the Jessamy Bride's presence that " may have contributed to flutter the anxious heart of "the author" (312); as death approaches, "the Jessamy Bride has "beamed her last smiles upon the poor poet" (360); and when all is over, a simple request of Mrs. Bunbury and her sister for a memorial of their pleasant friend, hereafter to be recorded, is turned into "the enthusiasm" of "one mourner" for his memory, "the "Jessamy Bride's," which "might have soothed the bitterness of "death" (369). This is running down a suggestion indeed!—and with whatever success for romance-loving readers, less pleasantly, it must be admitted, for sober seekers after truth. But though it is fairly doubtful whether Goldsmith at any time aspired, in this direction, to other regard than his genius and simplicity might claim, at least for these the sisters heartily liked him ; and perhaps the happiest hours of the later years of his life were passed in their society. Burke, who was their guardian, tenderly remembered in his premature old age the delight they had given him from their childhood; their social as well as personal charms are uniformly spoken of by all; and when Hazlitt met the younger sister in Northcote's painting-room some twenty-five years ago (she survived Little Comedy upwards of forty years, and died little more than twelve years since), she was still talking of her favourite Doctor Goldsmith, with recollection and affection unabated by age. Still, too, she was beautiful, beautiful even in years. The Graces had triumphed over Time. "I could almost fancy the shade of "Goldsmith in the room," says Hazlitt, "looking round with "complacency." Soon had the acquaintance become a friendship. To a dinnerparty given this year by their mother's friend and Reynolds's physician, Doctor (afterwards Sir George) Baker, the sisters appear at the last moment to have taken on themselves to write a joint invitation to Goldsmith, to which he replied with some score of humorous couplets, at the top of which was scrawled, "This is a poem ! This is a copy of verses!" Your mandate I got, You may all go to pot; I put off being shaved; Or to put on my duds; And the Captain in Lace- When he comes to enlist. Your worships must know For the foot guards so stout But, alas! your good worships, how could they be wiser, Does not this life-like humour re-furnish the hospitable table, re-animate the pleasant circle around it, and set us down again with Reynolds and his Angelica ? The most celebrated of the woman painters had found no jealousy in the leading artist of England. His was the first portrait that made Angelica Kauffman famous here; to him she owed her introduction to the Conways and Stanhopes; he befriended her in the misery of her first thoughtless marriage, now not many months dissolved, though himself (it was said) not unmoved by tenderer thoughts than of friendship; and he placed her in the list of the members of the new Academy. It was little wonder that their names should have passed together into print, and become a theme for the poet's corner of the Advertiser. In the same number of that journal appeared an advertisement of the Roman History, which had been first announced in the preceding August, and was issued in the May of the present year. It was in two octavo volumes of five hundred pages each, was described as for the use of schools and colleges, and obtained at once a very large sale. What Goldsmith has given as his reason for writing it, that other histories of the "period were either too "voluminous for common use, or too meanly written to please," will suffice also to explain its success. It was a compact and not The critics received it a big book, and it was charmingly written. well; and one of them had the grace to regret that “the author of 66 one of the best poems that has appeared since those of Mr. Pope, "should not apply wholly to works of imagination." Johnson thought, on the other hand, that the writer's time had been occupied worthily; and when, a year or two after this, in a dinner conversation at Topham Beauclerc's, he was putting Goldsmith in the first class not only as poet and comic writer but also as historian, and Boswell exploded a protest in behalf of the Scotch writers of history, Johnson more decisively roared out his preference for his friend over "the verbiage of Robertson and the foppery of "Dalrymple." Hume he had never read, because of his infidelity; but Robertson, he protested, might have put twice as much into his book as he had done, whereas Goldsmith had put into his as much as the book would hold. This, he affirmed, was the great art for the man who tells the world shortly what it wants to know, will, with his plain, full narrative, please again and again; while the more cumbrous writer, still interposing himself before what you wish to know, is crushed with his own weight, and buried under his own ornaments. "Goldsmith's abridgement," he added, "is better than that of Lucius Florus or Eutropius; and I will ven"ture to say that if you compare him with Vertot, in the same "places of the Roman History, you will find that he excels Vertot. Sir, he has the art of compiling, and of saying everything he has "to say in a pleasing manner. He is now writing a Natural History, and will make it as entertaining as a Persian Tale.” 66 For this Natural History the first agreement dates as early as the close of February in the present year, five years before it was completed and published. It is made between Griffin and Goldsmith and stipulates that the history is to be in eight volumes, each containing "from twenty-five to twenty-seven sheets of pica "print;" that for each, a hundred guineas are to be paid on its |