dunned for a milk-score he cannot pay. And age after age, the prosperous man comfortably contemplates it, decently regrets it, and is glad to think it no business of his; and in that year of grace and of Goldsmith's suffering, had doubtless adorned his dining-room with the Distrest Poet of the inimitable Mr. Hogarth,

and invited laughter from

easy guests at the garret and the milk-score. Yet could they, those worthy men, have known the danger to even their worldliest comforts then impending, perhaps they had not laughed so heartily. For were not these very citizens to be in

debted to Goldsmith in after years, for cheerful hours, and happy thoughts, and fancies that would smooth life's path to their children's children? And now, without a friend,

with hardly bread to eat, and uncheered by a hearty word or a smile to help him on, he sits in his melancholy garret, and such fancies die within him. It is but an accident now, that the good Vicar shall be born, that the Man in Black shall dispense his charities, that Croaker shall grieve, Tony Lumpkin laugh, or the sweet soft echo of the Deserted Village come for ever back upon the heart, in charity, and kindness, and sympathy with the poor. For despair is in the garret, and the poet, over-mastered by distress, seeks only the means of flight and exile. With a daydream to his old Irish playfellow, a sigh for the "heavy scoun"drels" who disregard him, and a wail for the age to which genius is a mark of mockery; he turns to that first avowed piece, which, being also his last, is to prove that "blockheads are not men O "wit, and yet that men of wit are actually blockheads."

A proposition which men of wit have laboured at from early times, have proved in theory, and worked out in practice. "How "many base men," shrieked one of them in Elizabeth's day, who felt that his wit had but made him the greater blockhead, "how many "base men, that want those parts I have, do enjoy content at will, "and have wealth at command! I call to mind a cobbler, that is "worth five hundred pounds; an hostler, that has built a goodly “inn; a carman in a leather pilche, that has whipt a thousand "pounds out of his horse's tail: and I ask if I have more than "these. Am I not better born? am I not better brought up ? 66 yea, and better favoured! And yet am I for ever to sit up late, "and rise early, and contend with the cold, and converse with 66 scarcity, and be a beggar? How am I crossed, or whence is this 66 curse, that a scrivener should be better paid than a scholar!" Poor Nash! he had not even Goldsmith's fortitude, and his doleful outcry for money was a lamentable exhibition, out of which no good could come. But the feeling in the miserable man's heart, struck at the root of a secret discontent which not the strongest man can resist altogether; and which Goldsmith did not affect to repress, when he found himself, as he says, "starving in those streets where "Butler and Otway starved before him."

The words are in a letter, written the day after that to Bryanton, bearing the same date of Temple-exchange Coffee-house, and sent to Mrs. Lawder, the Jane Contarine of his happy old Kilmore time, to whom he signs himself her "ever affectionate kinsman." Mr. Mills afterwards begged this letter of the Lawders, and from the friend to whom he gave it, Lord Carleton's nephew, it was copied for Bishop Percy by Edmond Malone. As in those already given, the style, with its simple air of authorship, is eminently good and happy. The assumption of a kind of sturdy independence, the playful admission of well-known faults, and the incidental slight confession of sorrows, have graceful relation to the person addressed, and the terms on which they stood of old. His uncle was now in a hopeless state of living death, from which, in a few months, the grave released him; and to this the letter affectingly refers.

If you should ask, why in an interval of so many years you never heard from me, permit me, madam, to ask the same question. I have the best excuse in recrimination. I wrote to Kilmore from Leyden in Holland, from Louvain in Flanders, and Rouen in France, but received no answer. To what could I attribute this silence but to displeasure or forgetfulness? Whether I was right in my conjecture I do not pretend to determine; but this I must ingenuously own, that I have a thousand times in my turn endeavoured to forget them, whom I could not but look upon as forgetting me. I have attempted to blot their names from my memory, and, I confess it, spent whole days in efforts to tear their image from my heart. Could I have succeeded, you had not now been troubled with this renewal of a discontinued corre

spondence; but, as every effort the restless make to procure sleep serves but to keep them waking, all my attempts contributed to impress what I would forget, deeper on my imagination. But this subject I would willingly turn from, and yet, for the soul of me,' I can't till I have said all.

I was, madam, when I discontinued writing to Kilmore, in such circumstances, that all my endeavours to continue your regards might be attributed to wrong motives. My letters might be looked upon as the petitions of a beggar, and not the offerings of a friend; while all my professions, instead of being considered as the result of disinterested esteem, might be ascribed to venal insincerity. I believe indeed you had too much generosity to place them in such a light, but I could not bear even the shadow of such a suspicion. The most delicate friendships are always most sensible of the slightest invasion, and the strongest jealousy is ever attendant on the warmest regard. I could not -I own I could not-continue a correspondence; for every acknowledgment for past favours might be considered as an indirect request for future ones, and where it might be thought I gave my heart from a motive of gratitude alone, when I was conscious of having bestowed it on much more disinterested principles.

It is true, this conduct might have been simple enough, but yourself must confess it was in character. Those who know me at all know that I have always been actuated by different principles from the rest of mankind, and while none regarded the interest of his friend more, no man on earth regarded his own less. I have often affected bluntness to avoid the imputation of flattery, have frequently seemed to overlook those merits too obvious to escape notice, and pretended disregard to those instances of good nature and good sense which I could not fail tacitly to applaud; and all this lest I should be ranked amongst the grinning tribe, who say 'very true' to all that is said, who fill a vacant chair at a tea-table, whose narrow souls never moved in a wider circle than the circumference of a guinea, and who had rather be reckoning the money in your pocket than the virtue of your breast. All this, I say, I have done, and a thousand other very silly though very disinterested things in my time, and for all which no soul cares a farthing about me. God's curse, madam! is it to be wondered that he should once in his life forget you, who has been all his life forgetting himself?

I

However, it is probable you may one of those days see me turned into a perfect hunks, and as dark and intricate as a mouse-hole. I have already given my landlady orders for an entire reform in the state of my finances. declaim against hot suppers, drink less sugar in my tea, and check my grate with brickbats. Instead of hanging my room with pictures, I intend to adorn it with maxims of frugality. Those will make pretty furniture enough, and won't be a bit too expensive; for I shall draw them all out with my own hands, and my landlady's daughter shall frame them with the parings of my black waistcoat. Each maxim is to be inscribed on a sheet of clean paper, and wrote with my best pen: of which the following will serve as a specimen. Look sharp: Mind the main chance; Money is money now; If you have a thousand pounds you can put your hands by your sides, and say you are worth a thousand pounds every day of the year: Take a farthing from a hundred, and it will be a hundred no longer. Thus, which way soever I turn my eyes, they are sure to meet one of those friendly monitors; and as we are told of an actor who hung his room round with looking-glass to correct the defects of his person, my apartment shall be furnished in a peculiar manner, to correct the errors of my mind.

Faith! Madam, I heartily wish to be rich, if it were only for this reason, to say without a blush how much I esteem you; but, alas! I have many a fatigue to encounter before that happy time comes, when your poor old simple friend may again give a loose to the luxuriance of his nature, sitting by Kilmore

fire-side, recount the various adventures of a hard-fought life, laugh over the follies of the day, join his flute to your harpsichord, and forget that ever he starved in those streets where Butler and Otway starved before him.

And now I mention those great names-My uncle !-he is no more that soul of fire as when once I knew him. Newton and Swift grew dim with age as well as he. But what shall I say?-his mind was too active an inhabitant not to disorder the feeble mansion of its abode; for the richest jewels soonest wear their settings. Yet who but the fool would lament his condition! He now forgets the calamities of life. Perhaps indulgent heaven has given him a foretaste of that tranquillity here, which he so well deserves hereafter.

But I must come to business; for business, as one of my maxims tells me, must be minded or lost. I am going to publish in London, a book entitled The Present State of Taste and Literature in Europe. The booksellers in Ireland republish every performance there without making the author any consideration. I would, in this respect, disappoint their avarice, and have all the profits of my labour to myself. I must therefore request Mr. Lawder to circulate among his friends and acquaintances a hundred of my proposals, which I have given the bookseller, Mr. Bradley in Dame-street, directions to send to him. . . . I would be the last man on earth to have my labours go a-begging; but if I know Mr. Lawder (and sure I ought to know him), he will accept the employment with pleasure. All I can say—if he writes a book, I will get him two hundred subscribers, and those of the best wits in Europe,

In none of these letters, it will be observed, is allusion made to the expected appointment. To make jesting boast of a visionary influence with two hundred of the best wits in Europe, was pleasanter than to make grave confession of himself as a wit taking sudden flight from the scene of defeat and failure. It was the old besetting weakness. But shortly after the date of the last letter, the appointment was received. It was that of medical officer to one of the factories on the coast of Coromandel; was forwarded by Doctor Milner's friend Mr. Jones, the East India director; and the worthy schoolmaster did not outlive more than a few weeks this honest redemption of his promise. The desired escape was at last effected, and the booksellers might look around them for another drudge more patient and obedient than Oliver Goldsmith.

CHAPTER IV.

ESCAPE PREVENTED. 1758.

1758.

It was now absolutely necessary that the proposed change in Goldsmith's life should be broken to his Irish friends; and he wrote to his brother Henry. The letter (which con- Et. 30. tained also the design of a heroi-comical poem at which he had been occasionally working) is lost; but some passages of one of nearly the same date to Mr. Hodson, have had a better fortune.

It began with obvious allusion to some staid and rather gratuitous reproach from the prosperous brother-in-law.

You cannot expect regularity in one who is regular in nothing. Nay, were I forced to love you by rule, I dare venture to say that I could never do it sincerely. Take me, then, with all my faults. Let me write when I please, for you see I say what I please, and am only thinking aloud when writing to you. I suppose you have heard of my intention of going to the East Indies. The place of my destination is one of the factories on the coast of Coromandel, and I go in quality of physician and surgeon; for which the company has signed my warrant, which has already cost me ten pounds. I must also pay 501. for my passage, and ten pounds for my sea stores: and the other incidental expenses of my equipment will amount to 607. or 70l. more. The salary is but trifling, namely 100l. per annum; but the other advantages, if a person be prudent, are considerable. The practice of the place, if I am rightly informed, generally amounts to not less than one thousand pounds per annum, for which the appointed physician has an exclusive privilege. This, with the advantages resulting from trade, and the high interest which money bears, viz. 201. per cent, are the inducements which persuade me to undergo the fatigues of sea, the dangers of war, and the still greater dangers of the climate; which induce me to leave a place where I am every day gaining friends and esteem, aud where I might enjoy all the conveniences of life.

Of

The same weakness which indulged itself with fine clothes when the opportunity offered, is that which prompts these fine words in an hour of such dire extremity. Of the "friends and esteem " he was gaining, of the "conveniences of life" that were awaiting him to enjoy, these pages have told, and have more to tell: but why, in the confident hope of brighter days, dwell on the darkness of the past, or show the squalor that still surrounded him? already sufficiently low esteem were wit and intellect in Ireland, to give purse-fed ignorance another triumph over them, or again needlessly invite to himself the contempts and sneers of old. Yet, though the sadness he almost wholly suppressed while the appointment was but in expectation, there was at this moment less reason to indulge, he found it a far from successful effort to seem other than he was, even thus; and it marked with a somewhat painful distraction of feeling and phrase this letter to Mr. Hodson.

I am certainly wrong not to be contented with what I already possess, trifling as it is; for should I ask myself one serious question, -What is it I want?-What can I answer? My desires are as capricious as the big-bellied woman's, who longed for a piece of her husband's nose. I have no certainty, it is true; but why cannot I do as some men of more merit, who have lived on more precarious terms? Scarron used jestingly to call himself the marquis of Quenault, which was the name of the bookseller that employed him; and why may not I assert my privilege and quality on the same pretensions? Yet upon deliberation, whatever airs I give myself on this side of the water, my dignity, I fancy, would be evaporated before I reached the other. I know you have in Ireland a very indifferent idea of a man who writes for bread; though Swift and Steele did so in the earliest part of their lives. You imagine, I suppose, that every author by profession lives in a garret, wears shabby