cloaths, and converses with the meanest company. Yet I do not believe there is one single writer, who has abilities to translate a French novel, that does not keep better company, wear finer cloaths, and live more genteelly, than. many who pride themselves for nothing else in Ireland. I confess it again, my dear Dan, that nothing but the wildest ambition could prevail on me to leave the enjoyment of the refined conversation which I am sometimes admitted to partake in, for uncertain fortune, and paltry shew. You cannot conceive how I am sometimes divided. To leave all that is dear to me gives me pain but when I consider, I may possibly acquire a genteel independence for life; when I think of that dignity which philosophy claims, to raise itself above contempt and ridicule; when I think thus, I eagerly long to embrace every opportunity of separating myself from the vulgar as much in my circumstances, as I am already in my sentiments. I am going to publish a book, for an account of which I refer you to a letter which I wrote to my brother Goldsmith. Circulate for me among your acquaintances a hundred proposals, which I have given orders may be sent to you and if, in pursuance of such circulation, you should receive any subscriptions, let them, when collected, be transmitted to Mr. Bradley, who will give a receipt for the same... I know not how my desire of seeing Ireland, which had so long slept, has again revived with so much ardour. So weak is my temper, and so unsteady, that I am frequently tempted, particularly when low-spirited, to return home and leave my fortune, though just beginning to look kinder. But it shall not be. In five or six years I hope to indulge these transports. I find I want constitution, and a strong steady disposition, which alone makes men great. I will however correct my faults, since I am conscious of them.

With such professions weakness continues to indulge itself, and faults are perpetuated. But some allowances are due. Of the Irish society he knew so well, and so often sarcastically painted, these Irish friends were clearly very notable specimens, with whom small indeed was his chance of decent consideration, if a garret, shabby clothes, and conversation with the meanest company, were set hopelessly forth as his inextricable doom. The error lay in giving faith of any kind to such external aid, and so weakening the help that rested in himself; for when the claim of ten pounds for his appointment-warrant came upon him, it found him less prepared because of vague expectations raised on these letters to Mills and the Lawders. But any delay might be fatal; and in that condition of extremity, whose "wants," alas, are anything but "capricious," he bethought him of the Critical Review, and went to its proprietor, Mr. Archibald Hamilton.

Soon after he left Griffiths he had written an article for his rival, which appeared in November 1757; and as his contributions then stopped where they began, I am disposed to connect both his joining at the time so suddenly, and as suddenly quitting, the Critical Review, with a letter which Smollett published in that same November number "To the Old Gentlewoman who directs "the Monthly.” For though Goldsmith might not object to avenge some part of his own quarrel under cover of that of Smollett, he would hardly have relished the too broad allusion in which

"goody" and gammer "Griffiths were reminded that " though 66 we never visited your garrets, we know what sort of Doctors "and authors you employ as journeymen in your manufacture. "Did you in your dotage mistake the application, by throwing "those epithets at us which so properly belong to your own "understrappers?" But, whatever may have caused his secession then, now he certainly applied again to Hamilton, a shrewd man, who had just made a large fortune out of Smollett's History, and, though not very liberal in his payments, already not unconscious of the value of Griffiths's discarded writer. The result of the interview was the publication, in the new-year number, of two more papers by Goldsmith, apparently in continuation of the first. All three had relation to a special subject; and, as connected with such a man's obscurest fortunes, have an interest hardly less than that of writings connected with his fame. An author is seen in the effulgence of established repute, or discovered by his cries of struggling distress. By both "you shall know him."

Ovid was the leading topic in all three. His Fasti, translated by a silly master of a Wandsworth boarding-school, named Massey; his Epistles, translated by a pedantic pedagogue named Barrett (a friend of Johnson and Cave); and an antidote to his Art of Love, in an Art of Pleasing by Mr. Marriott; were the matters taken in hand. The Art of Pleasing was treated with playful contempt, and Mr. Massey's Fasti fared still worse. Here Goldsmith closed a series of unsparing comparisons of the original with his translator, by asking leave "to remind Mr. Massey of the old Italian "proverb " (Il tradattores tradatore) "and to hope he will never "for the future traduce and injure any of those poor ancients who "never injured him, by thus pestering the world with such trans"lations as even his own schoolboys ought to be whipped for." Nor with less just severity was the last of these unhappy gentlemen rebuked. With lively power Goldsmith dissected the absurdities of Mr. Barrett's version of poor ill-treated Ovid's Epistles; showed that the translator was a bad critic, and no poet; and passed from lofty to low in his illustrations with amusing effect. Giving two or three instances of Mr. Barrett's skill in "parenthetically clapping one sentence within another," this, pursued Goldsmith, "contributes not a little to obscurity; and obscurity, 66 we all know, is nearly allied to admiration. Thus, when the "reader begins a sentence which he finds pregnant with another, "which still teems with a third, and so on, he feels the same "surprise which a countryman does at Bartholomew fair. Hocus "shows a bag, in appearance empty; slap, and out come a dozen 'new laid eggs; slap again, and the number is doubled; but "what is his amazement, when it swells with the hen that laid

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"them!" The poetry and criticism disposed of, the scholarship shared their fate. Mr. Barrett being master of the thriving grammar-school of Ashford in Kent, and having the consequence and pretension of a so-called learned man, we are not going, said Goldsmith, "to permit an ostentation of learning pass for merit, "nor to give a pedant quarter upon the score of his industry alone, t even though he took refuge behind Arabic, or powdered his hair "with Hieroglyphics."

In the garret of Griffiths, he would hardly have conceded so much; and since then, the world had not been teaching him literary charity. These Ovid translations had not unnaturally turned his thoughts upon the master of the art; on him who was the father of authorship by profession; and the melancholy image which arose to a mind so strongly disposed to entertain it then, of great "Dryden ever poor," and obliged by his miseries to suffer fleeting performances to be "quartered on the lasting merit of his “name,” did not the more entitle to any mercy which truth could not challenge for them, these gentlemen of a more thriving profession who had thrust themselves uninvited and unqualified on the barren land of authorship. "They may be good and useful "members of society," he said, "without being poets. The regions

“of taste can be travelled only by a few, and even those often find "indifferent accommodation by the way. Let such as have not got

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a passport from nature be content with happiness, and leave the poet the unrivalled possession of his misery, his garret, and his "fame." So will truth force its way, when out of Irish hearing. The friends, the esteem, and the conveniences, of the poet's life, are briefly summed up here. His misery, his garret, and his fame.

With part of the money received from Hamilton he moved into new lodgings: took "unrivalled possession" of a fresh garret, on a first floor. The house was number twelve, Green Arbour-court, Old Bailey, between the Old Bailey and the site of Fleetmarket and stood in the right hand corner of the court, as the wayfarer approached it from Farringdon-street by an appropriate access of "Break-neck-steps." Green Arbour-court is now gone for ever; and of its miserable wretchedness, for a little time replaced by the more decent comforts of the stabling and lofts of a waggon office, not a vestige remains. The houses, crumbling and tumbling in Goldsmith's day, were fairly rotted down some twenty years since; and it became necessary, for safety sake, to remove what time had spared. But Mr. Washington Irving saw them first, and with reverence had described them, for Goldsmith's sake. Through alleys, courts, and blind passages; traversing Fleet-market, and thence turning along a narrow street to the bottom of a long steep flight of stone steps;

H

He

he made good his toilsome way up into Green Arbour-court. found it a small square of tall and miserable houses, the very intestines of which seemed turned inside out, to judge from the old garments and frippery that fluttered from every window. "It "appeared," he says in his Tales of a Traveller, "to be a region "of washerwomen, and lines were stretched about the little square, "on which clothes were dangling to dry." The disputed right to a wash-tub was going on when he entered; heads in mob-caps were protruded from every window; and the loud clatter of vulgar tongues was assisted by the shrill pipes of swarming children, nestled and cradled in every procreant chamber of the hive.

The

whole scene, in short, was one of whose unchanged resemblance to the scenes of former days I have since found curious corroboration, in a magazine engraving of the place nigh half a century old. Here were the tall faded houses, with heads out of window at every story; the dirty neglected children; the bawling slipshod women; in one corner, clothes hanging to dry, and in another the cure of smoky chimneys announced. Without question, the same squalid, squalling colony, which it then was, it had been in Goldsmith's time. He would compromise with the children for occasional cessation of their noise, by occasional cakes or sweetmeats, or by a tune upon his flute, for which all the court assembled ; he would talk pleasantly with the poorest of his neighbours, and was long recollected to have greatly enjoyed the

talk of a working watchmaker in the court; every night, he would risk his neck at those steep stone stairs; every day, for his clothes had become too ragged to submit to daylight scrutiny, he would keep within his dirty, naked, unfurnished room, with its single wooden chair and window bench. And that was Goldsmith's home. On a certain night in the beginning of November 1758, his ascent of Break-neck-steps must have had unwonted gloom. He had learnt the failure of his new hope: the Coromandel appointment was his no longer. In what way this mischance so unexpectedly occurred, it would now be hopeless to enquire; no explanation could be had from the dying Doctor Milner; none was given by himself; and he always afterwards withheld allusion to it, with even studious care. It is quite possible, though no authority exists for the assertion, that doubts may have arisen of his competence to discharge the duties of the appointment, and what followed a few months later will be seen to give warrant for such a surmise; but even supposing this to have been the real motive, there is no ground for suspecting that such a motive was alleged. The most likely supposition would probably be, that failure in getting together means for his outfit with sufficient promptitude, was made convenient excuse for transferring the favour to another. That it was any failure of his own courage at the prospect of so long an exile, or that he never proposed more by his original scheme than a foreign flight for two or three years, has no other or better foundation than the Hodson letter: on which authority it would also follow, that he remained contented with what he already possessed, subdued his capricious wants, and turned to the friends, the esteem, the refined conversation, and all the conveniences of life, which awaited him in Green Arbour-court, with a new and virtuous resolve of quiet thankfulness.

Alas! far different were the feelings with which he now ascended Break-neck-steps; far different his mournful conviction, that, but to flee from the misery that surrounded him, no office could be mean, no possible endurance hard. His determination was taken at once probably grounded on the knowledge of some passages in the life of Smollett, and of his recent acquaintance Grainger. He would present himself at Surgeons' Hall for examination as a hospital mate: an appointment sufficiently undesirable, to be found always of tolerably easy attainment by the duly qualified.

But he must have decent clothes to present himself in the solitary suit in which he crept between the court and the coffeehouse, being only fit for service after nightfall. He had no resource but to apply to Griffiths, with whom he had still some small existing connection, and from whom his recent acceptance at the Critical, increasing his value with a vulgar mind, might help