England" put forward as the author. On the fall of Hugh Kelly, however, there had arisen a more formidable antagonist in the person of Richard Cumberland. He came into the field with every social advantage. He was the son and great grandson of a bishop; his mother was the celebrated Bentley's daughter; he had himself held a fellowship of Trinity; and, connected as private secretary with Lord Halifax, he had passed through the subordinate political offices, when weariness of waiting for promotion turned his thoughts to the stage. His first comedy, ushered in by a prologue in which he attacked all contemporary dramatists, and complimented Garrick as "the immortal actor," was played at Covent-garden; and Garrick being present, and charmed with the unexpected compliment (for in earlier days he had rejected a tragedy by Cumberland), Fitzherbert, in whose box he was, made the author and actor known to each other, a sudden friendship was struck up, and Cumberland's second comedy secured for Drury-lane. This was the West Indian; produced with decisive success in the present year, and an unquestionably strong reinforcement of the sentimental style. Cumberland thought himself, indeed, the creator of his own school, and affected ignorance of the existence of poor Kelly; but that was only one of many weaknesses he afterwards more fully developed, and which Sheridan amusingly satirised in Sir Fretful Plagiary. He vouchsafed ridiculous airs of patronage to men who stood confessedly above him; professed a lofty indifference to criticism that tortured him; abused those dramatists most heartily whose notions he was readiest to borrow; and had a stock of conceit and self-complacency which was proof against every effort to diminish it. Goldsmith discovered all this, long before Sheridan; subtly insinuated it in those famous lines,

Here Cumberland lies having acted his parts,
The Terence of England, the mender of hearts;
A flattering painter, who made it his care,

To draw men as they ought to be, not as they are.
His gallants are all faultless, his women divine,

And Comedy wonders at being so fine!

Like a tragedy queen he has dizen'd her out,
Or rather like Tragedy giving a rout, &c.

which were written in a spirit of exquisite persiflage at once detected by the lively Mrs. Thrale; and lived to receive amusing confirmation of its truth, in Cumberland's grave gratitude for these very verses. He had not discovered their real meaning, even when he wrote his Memoirs five-and-thirty years later. He remained still grateful to Goldsmith for having laughed at him; and so cordial and pleasant is the laughter, that his mistake may perhaps fairly be forgiven.

It

Nevertheless, Goldsmith was now conscious of an opponent in the author of the West Indian who challenged his utmost exertion; and, eager again to make it in behalf of the merriment, humour, and character of the good old school of comedy (Colman so far encouraged this purpose, as to revive the Good Natured Man for a night or two during the run of the West Indian), withdrew to the quiet of a country lodging to pursue his labour undisturbed. The Shoemaker's Paradise was no longer his; but he continued his liking for the neighbourhood, and had taken a single room in a farmer's house near the six mile stone on the Edgware-road. so suited his modest wants and means, and he liked the farmer's family so much, that he returned to it the following summer to write his Natural History, "carrying down his books in two "returned post chaises ;" and it was then that Boswell's curiosity was moved to go and see the place, taking with him Mr. Mickle, translator of the Lusiad, and author of the ballad of Cumnor Hall. "Goldsmith was not at home; but having a curiosity to see his apartment we went in, and found curious scraps of "descriptions of animals, scrawled upon the wall with a black-lead pencil." Seeing these, Boswell no doubt would remind his friend of what he had heard Johnson say, "Goldsmith, sir, will 'give us a very fine book upon the subject; but if he can distinguish a cow from a horse, that, I believe, may be the extent of "his knowledge of natural history ;" and very probably he would proceed to ascertain, by closer examination of the black-lead scrawls, whether or not that distinction had yet been thoroughly mastered.

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No doubt Goldsmith began with very imperfect knowledge, the labour which was now his country occupation; but perhaps neither Johnson nor any other of his friends knew the pains he had been taking to supply his defects, and the surprise he was thus preparing for them he unhappily did not live himself to enjoy. He had not forgotten his fishing and otter-hunting "when a boy" in Ireland; or the nest of the heron, "built near a school-house" he well knew; or the five young bats he had found in one hole together ; or the great Irish wolf-dog he took such pleasure in describing; or his absorbing interest in the seals, kept by a gentleman known to him in that early time. In London he was himself well known, at the Tower, for his frequent visits to the "lions" there, and with the Queen's menagerie at Buckingham-gate he was perfectly familiar; in the former place he had been at no small pains to measure through the bars" and "as well as I could" an enormous tiger, and in the latter he had narrowly escaped a kick from a terrified zebra. Many such amusing experiences are set down in his volumes, which, whatever their defects of information may be,

are at least thoroughly impressed with the love of nature and natural objects, with a delighted enjoyment of the beauties and wonders of creation, and with that devoutly unaffected sense of religion, that cheerful and continual piety, which such contemplations inspire. We hardly need to be told, after reading the book, that almost all of it was written in the country, either here, or at Kingsbury, or in some other rural place near London: and, as we observe its occasional humorous notices of things to be seen at country fairs, of the giants, the dwarfs, or other vagrant notabilities with which he has "sometimes conversed," the possibility occurs to us that if Boswell and his friend could have ascertained from the farmer's family the exact road which The Gentleman (as they called their lodger) had taken, he might have been discovered in some adjoining lane or common, questioning the proprietor of a travelling booth; hearing a highly accomplished raven "sing the "Black Joke with great distinctness, truth, and humour;" listening to that "ridiculous duet" between the giant and the dwarf which was so popular at the time among the country labourers and their children; observing the man without hands or legs apply his stumps to the most convenient purposes; marvelling to see two white negroes born of black parents; laughing at the monkey amusing itself in imposing on the gravity of a cat; unspeakably amazed when he first saw the size of the elephant ; admiring the canary-bird that had been taught, at the word of command, to pick up letters of the alphabet so as to spell any person's name in company; attracted by the hare on his hind legs with such "a remarkable good ear," who used his forepaws as hands, beat the drum, danced to music, and went through the manual exercise; and, though doubting "the credibility of the person who showed " the bonassus, and thus letting him feel that a showman's tricks would not always pass upon travellers, yet not the less ready with a pleasant candour to admit that he had seen sheep that would eat flesh, and a horse that was fond of oysters."

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Such experiences as these we must doubtless carry with us, if we would also understand the somewhat strange unconsciousness with which, in this pleasant Natural History book, even greater marvels and conjectures yet more original were quietly accepted; as where he throws out grave intimation of the perfect feasibility of improving the breed of the zebra into an animal for common use as "large as the horse, as fleet, as strong, and much more beautiful ;" or where, speaking of the ostrich, he seriously indulges the expectation that "posterity may avail themselves of this creature's "abilities; and riding upon an ostrich may one day become the 'favourite, as it most certainly is the swiftest, mode of convey

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ance. And in like manner, when he gravely relates the story of the Arabian Caliph who marked with an iron ring a dolphin caught in the Mediterranean, and so identified it for the self-same dolphin caught afterwards in the Red Sea; when he gives Margrave's account of the orderly deliberations and debates of the Ouarines; when he transcribes from a letter in the German Ephemerides the details of a fight between an enormous serpent and a buffalo, wherein the bones of the latter, as the folds of his enemy entwine him, are heard to crack as loud as the report of a cannon; when he tells what he has found in Father Labat of the monkey's mode of managing an oyster in the tropics, how he will pick up a stone and clap it between the opening shells, and then return at leisure to eat the fish up at his ease; when he relates the not less marvellous manner in which the same sort of intelligent monkey manages at his pleasure to enjoy a fine crab, by putting his tail in the water, letting it be seized, and drawing out with a violent jerk the victim of appetite; when he repeats what he has heard of Patagonian horses not more than fourteen hands high, carrying men nine feet high; when he tells Gesner's story of the hungry pike seizing the mule's nose; or the more marvellous story in which Gesner celebrates the two nightingales who were heard repeating what they had overheard of a long and not remarkably decent conversation between a drunken tapster and his wife, as well as of the talk of two travellers about an impending war against the Protestants,-in all these and many other cases, notwithstanding his care to give in every case his authorities, it is too manifest that for his own part he sees nothing that may not be believed. Indeed he avouches his belief at times in very amusing ways; nor is it possible to refrain from smiling at the gravity with which, after reporting a Munchausen relation about all the dogs of a Chinese village turning out for pursuit and attack, when they happen to see a man walking through the street whose trade it is to kill and dress them, he adds: "This I should 66 hardly have believed but that I have seen more than one instance "of it among ourselves. I have seen a poor fellow who made a prac"tice of stealing and killing dogs for their skins, pursued in full cry "for three or four streets together by all the bolder breed of dogs, "while the weaker flew from his presence with affright.. such is the "fact." Nevertheless, perhaps the cautious reader will be as little disposed to accept it for a fact as to believe that other marvel, which "as it comes from a variety of the most credible witnesses, we cannot refuse our assent "to, about the baboons who have such a love for women that they will attack a village when they know the men are engaged in their rice-harvest, assail the poor deserted wives in a body, force them into the woods, keep them

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there against their wills, and kill them when refractory! In justice to him let us add, however, that when of the same class of imitative creatures he protests his inability to see why monkeys should not be able to conduct debates and deliberations in quite as orderly a manner as any civilised human assembly, his remark has probably more of purposed sarcasm than of undesigned absurdity in it. At this very period his friend Burke was subjected nightly to interruptions in the House of Commons that really would have been discreditable to an assembly of apes.

But leaving him to the amusing mistakes and simple enjoyments in natural history which occupied him in his country home, incidents which attended the publication of his English History must now be named before these country labours and relaxations are resumed.

CHAPTER XI.

Et. 43.

COUNTRY LABOURS AND RELAXATIONS.

1771.

A MORE innocent production than the English History, which appeared in August, could hardly have been imagined. It 1771. was simply a compilation, in his easy flowing style, from four historians whom he impartially characterised in his preface; and with as little of the feeling of being influenced by any, his book throughout had been written. "They have each," he says, speaking of Rapin, Carte, Smollett, and Hume, "their "peculiar admirers, in proportion as the reader is studious of "political antiquities, fond of minute anecdote, a warm partizan, 66 or a deliberate reasoner." Nevertheless, passages of very harmless narrative were displayed in the party papers as of very questionable tendency; he was asked if he meant to be the tool of a minister, as well as the drudge of a bookseller; he was reminded that the favour of a generous public (so generous always at other people's cost), was better than the best of pensions; and he finally was warned against betraying his country "for base and scandalous "pay." The poor publisher became alarmed, and a formal defence of the book appeared in the Public Advertiser. Tom was himself a critic, and had taken the field full-armed for his friend (and his property). "Have you seen," he says in a letter to Granger, "an "impartial account of Goldsmith's History of England? If you "want to know who was the writer of it, you will find him in "Russell-street: but Mum!"

Meanwhile, indifferent enough to this blustering reception