loneliness, had befallen them; and how to make allowance in others for disadvantages never felt by ourselves, is still the great problem for us all. Poor Goldsmith's blunder was only a false emphasis. He meant that he wondered Malagrida, being the name of a good sort of a man, should be used as a term of reproach. But his whole life was a false emphasis, says Walpole. In his sense, perhaps it was so. He had been emphatic throughout it, where Walpole had only been indifferent; and what to the wit and man of fashion had been a scene for laughter, to the poet and man of letters had been fraught with serious suffering. "Life is 66 a comedy to those who think, and a tragedy to those who feel.” Democritus laughed, and Heraclitus wept. Beauclerc told Lord Charlemont in the same letter just quoted, that Goldsmith had written a prologue for Mrs. Yates, which she was to speak that night at the Opera-house. "It is very good. "You will see it soon in all the newspapers, otherwise I would "send it to you." The newspapers have nevertheless been searched in vain for it, though it certainly was spoken; and it seems probable that Colman's friends had interfered to suppress it. Mrs. Yates had quarrelled with the Covent-garden manager; and one object of the "poetical exordium" which Goldsmith had thus written for her, was to put before that fashionable audience the injustice of her exclusion from the English theatre. He had great sympathy for Mrs. Yates, thinking her the first of English actresses; and it is not wonderful that he should have lost all sympathy with Colman. Their breach had lately widened more and more. Kenrick, driven from Drury-lane, had found refuge at the other house; and, on the very night of Mrs. Yates's prologue, Colman suffered a new comedy, by that libeller of all his friends, to be decisively damned at Covent-garden. If Goldsmith could have withdrawn both his comedies upon this, he would probably have done it; for at once he made an effort to remove the first to Drury-lane, which he had now the right to do. But Garrick insisted on his original objection to Lofty; and justified it by reference to the comparative coldness with which the comedy had been received during the run of She Stoops to Conquer in the summer, though with the zealous Lee Lewes in that part (Lewis had not yet assumed it). He would play the Good Natured Man if that objection could be obviated, not otherwise. Here the matter rested for a time. But in the course of what passed, Goldsmith found that Newbery had failed to observe his promise in connection with the unpaid bill still in Garrick's hands. This was hardly generous; since the copyright of She Stoops to Conquer had passed in satisfaction of all claims between them, and was already promising Newbery the ample profits which it subsequently realised beyond his debt. These are said to have amounted to upwards of three hundred pounds; and the play was still so profitable after several years' sale, that when the booksellers engaged Johnson for their first scheme of an Edition and Memoir, the project was defeated by a dispute about the value of the copyright of She Stoops to Conquer. The other larger debt to "the trade," which had suggested to Goldsmith his project of a Dictionary, he had now no means of discharging but by hard, drudging, unassisted labour. His so favourite project, though he had obtained promises of co-operation from Johnson, Burke, and Reynolds, had been finally rejected. Davies, who represented the craft on the occasion, whose own business had not been very prosperous, and many of whose copyrights had already passed to Cadell, gives us the reason of their adverse decision. He says that though they had a very good opinion of the Doctor's abilities, yet they were startled at the bulk, importance, and expense of so great an undertaking, the fate of which was to depend upon the industry of a man with whose indolence of temper, and method of procrastination, they had long been acquainted. He adds, in further justification of the refusal, that upon every emergency half-a-dozen projects would present themselves to Goldsmith's mind, which, straightway communicated to the men they were to enrich, at once obtained him money on the mere faith of his great reputation but the money was generally spent long before the new work was half finished, perhaps before it was begun; and hence arose continual expostulation and reproach on the one side, and much anger and vehemence on the other. Johnson described the same transactions, after all were over, in one of his emphatic sentences. "He “had raised money and squandered it, by every artifice of acqui"sition and folly of expense. But let not his frailties be remem"bered he was a very great man." CHAPTER XVIII. 1773. Et. 45. THE CLOUDS STILL GATHERING. 1773. THE cherished project, then, of the Popular Dictionary of Arts and Sciences, the scheme on which Goldsmith had built so much, was an utter and quite hopeless failure; and, under the immediate pang of feeling this, the alteration of his fisrt comedy for Garrick, even upon Garrick's own conditions, would seem to have suddenly presented itself as one of those "artifices of acquisition" which Johnson alleges against him. He wrote to the manager of Drury-lane. The letter has by chance survived, is obligingly communicated to me by its present possessor, and of the scanty collection so preserved is probably the worst composed and the worst written. As well in the manner as in the matter of it, the writer's distress is very painfully visible. It has every appearance, even to the wafer hastily thrust into it, of having been the sudden suggestion of necessity; it is addressed, without date of time or place, to the Adelphi (where Garrick had lately purchased the centre house of the newly built terrace); nor is it unlikely to have been delivered there by the messenger of a sponging-house. A fac-simile of its signature, which may be compared with Goldsmith's ordinary hand-writing in a previous page, will show the writer's agitation, and perhaps account for the vague distraction of his grammar. MY DEAR SIR, Your saying you would play my Good-natured Man makes me wish it. The money you advanced me upon Newbery's note I have the mortification to find is not yet paid, but he says he will in two or three days. What I mean by this letter is to lend me sixty pound for which I will give you Newbery's note, so that the whole of my debt will be an hundred for which you shall have Newbery's note as a security. This may be paid either from my alteration if my benefit should come to so much, but at any rate I will take care you shall not be a loser. I will give you a new character in my comedy and knock out Lofty which does not do, and will make such alterations as you direct. I am "Gold The letter is indorsed in Garrick's handwriting as "smith's parlaver." But though it would thus appear to have inspired little sympathy or confidence, and the sacrifice of Lofty had come too late and been too reluctant, Garrick's answer, begged so earnestly, was not unfavourable. He evaded the altered comedy; spoke of the new one already mentioned between them; and offered the money required on Goldsmith's own acceptance. The small worth of the security of one of Newbery's notes (though the publisher, with his experience of the comedy in hand, would doubtless gladly have taken his chance of the renovated comedy), he had some time proved. Poor Goldsmith was enthusiastic in acknowledgment. Nor let it be thought he is acting unfairly to Newbery, in the advice he sends with his thanks. The publisher had frankly accepted the chances of a certain copyright, and had no right to wait the issue of those chances before he assumed the liability they imposed. The present note exhibits such manifest improvement in the writing as a sudden removal of a sore anxiety might occasion; but the writer's usual epistolary neatness is still absent from it. It is hastily folded up in three-corner'd shape, is also sealed with wafer, and also indorsed by Garrick “Goldsmith's "parlaver." MY DEAR FRIEND, I thank you! I wish I could do something to serve you. I shall have a comedy for you in a season or two at furthest that I believe will be worth your acceptance, for I fancy I will make it a fine thing. You shall have the refusal. I wish you would not take up Newbery's note but let Waller [probably a mistake for Wallis, Garrick's solicitor] tease him, without however coming to extremities; let him haggle after him and he will get it. He owes it and will pay it. I'm sorry you are ill. I will draw upon you one month after date for sixty pound and your acceptance will be ready money, part of which I want to go down to Barton with. May God preserve my honest little man, for he has my heart. Ever, OLIVER GOLDSMITH. Barton was a gleam of sunshine in his darkest days. There, if no where else, he could still strive to be, as in his younger time, "well when he was not ill, and pleased when he was not angry." It was the precious maxim of Reynolds, as it had been the selectest wisdom of Sir William Temple, Reynolds himself, too, their temporary disagreement forgotten, gave him much of his society on his return: observing, as he said afterwards, the change in his manner; seeing how greatly he now seemed to need the escape from his own thoughts, and with what a look of distress he would suddenly start from the midst of social scenes he continued still passionately fond of, to go home and brood over his misfortunes. Only two more pictures really gay or bright remain in the life of Goldsmith. The last but one is of himself and Sir Joshua at Vauxhall. And not the least memorable figures in that sauntering crowd, though it numbered princes and ambassadors then,—and on its tide and torrent of fashion, floated all the beauty of the time, and through its lighted avenues of trees, glided cabinet ministers and their daughters, royal dukes and their wives, agreeable "young ladies and gentlemen of eighty-two," and all the red-heeled macaronies,- -were those of the President, and the ancient history Professor, of the Royal Academy. A little later we trace Goldsmith from Vauxhall to the theatre, but any gaiety or enjoyment there is not so certain. Kelly had tried a fourth comedy (The School for Wives), under a feigned name, and with somewhat better success than its two immediate predecessors, though it lived but a few brief nights; and Beauclerc, who writes to tell Lord Charlemont of the round of pleasures Goldsmith and Joshua had been getting into, and which had prevented their attending the club, G G |