how monstrous and impossible it was that of all men on earth Mr. Prior should ever venture on such a charge, or throw down such a challenge.

At page 13 of Mr. Prior's first volume, in giving several details of the childhood of the poet, he expresses his thanks to "the Rev. Dr. Strean, of Athlone, to whom I feel obliged for "the inquiries he has made." So at pages 22, 23, 110, and in other places (in the second volume, 255, &c). Yet the obligation was really incurred, not to Dr. Strean, but to an Essay only once very slightly and cursorily alluded to (102), containing (139–149) the whole of Dr. Strean's information, and published in 1808 by Mr. Mangin, who not without reason complained, on the appearance of Mr. Prior's book, that, though Dr. Strean had placed it in Mr. Prior's hands telling him it contained all he had to say about Goldsmith, he had "employed much of "what he found in the Essay without having the courtesy to "use marks of quotation." (Parlour Window Book, 4-5.)

At pp. 28-29, 45-47, 109, 118, 128, and in other parts of the description of Goldsmith's boyhood, all the characteristic anecdotes are given generally as on the authority of his sisters or friends; but any particular mention of the Percy Memoir, in which (5-6-7-9-13-14) they were first published, is studiously avoided. In like manner the account of his first adventures in Edinburgh, told with an original air at p. 134-135, the notice of Mr. Contarine at p. 50-51, and of Mr. Lawder at p. 130, are taken without acknowledgment from the same source (19-20, 17, and 18); and at p. 47 a little fact is described as from the communication of a reverend gentleman, who had already communicated it to all the world at a public meeting fifteen years before (Gent. Mag. xc. 620).

At p. 76, coupled with a previous intimation at p. 63, the reader is left to infer that Dr. Wilson's account of the college

riot in which Goldsmith took part is laid before him from unpublished letters, whereas all the facts, on the special authority of Dr. Wilson, are stated in the Percy Memoir (16-17), to which no allusion is made; and in like manner the characteristic expression in that memoir, that "one of his contempo"raries describes him as perpetually lounging about the college “gate” (15), is appropriated as a piece of original information at p. 92, and assigned to Dr. Wolfen.

p.

At 98 much is made of the loss of the formal registry proving Goldsmith to have taken his bachelor's degree (all which is in the Percy Memoir, 17, though Mr. Prior does not tell his readers so), and a self-glorifying announcement is made of the satisfactory settlement of that interesting question, even in the absence of so important a piece of proof, by the fact that "his name was first found by the present writer in the list of "such as had right of access to the college library, to which by "the rules graduates only are admissible." Yet Mr. Prior had before him Mr. Shaw Mason's Statistical Account or Survey, published nearly twenty years before, where, for satisfactory evidence that Goldsmith had taken his bachelor's degree, Mr. Mason expressly describes his name as "in the roll of "those qualified for admission to the college library” (iii. 358). At pp. 159-164, one of the best of all Goldsmith's letters is printed without the slightest hint that it had been printed in the Percy Memoir (27-32); and the same silence is preserved (138) in regard to a letter printed, though with less satisfactory completeness, at pp. 22-26 of the same most authentic narrative. Let me add, that though Dr. Percy omits some valuable points in this letter, Mr. Prior is not entitled to say that all copies of it hitherto printed have been taken from "imperfect "transcripts," saving only that which "has been submitted "to the present writer," &c., &c. In the 25th volume of the European Magazine (332-333) there is a copy, postscript and all, word for word the same as Mr. Prior's, except that the

close is more characteristic than his, of the writer's spirit in those boyish days.

At p. 169-170 there is much parade about certain discoveries in connection with Dr. Ellis, and we are told that "from "accounts given by this gentleman in conversation in various "societies in Dublin, it appears that, &c.;" but what appears is literally no more than had been told far more characteristically at p. 33-34 of the Percy Memoir, to which no allusion is made, either here or a few pages on (174), when one of the prettiest of all the stories of Goldsmith's improvidence is given on Dr. Ellis's authority, without a hint of the book (Percy Memoir, 33-34) in which it first appeared.

At p. 176, the same sort of parade is made about a lost letter of Goldsmith's descriptive of his travels " communicated to the "writer by &c. &c. &c. to whose father &c. &c."-the fact of the letter, as well as of the accident that destroyed it, having been published nearly half a century before by Dr. Campbell, in his Survey of the South of Ireland (286-289), and referred to not only at p. 37 of the Percy Memoir, but in a previous biographical sketch by Isaac Reed (xi-xii.).

At p. 209 an interesting notice of Goldsmith's obscurest days in London is set forth as "in the words put into his "mouth by a gentleman who knew him for several years," and the gentleman is elaborately described in a note as a "barrister and author of &c. &c.; " but the circumstance is carefully suppressed that "the words " are really quoted from a narrative printed nearly fifty years before in the European Magazine (xxiv. 91). In like manner, at p. 212-213, by far the most valuable and curious anecdote of those dark days, is reprinted verbatim from p. 39-40 of the Percy Memoir, without the most distant allusion to its having already appeared there. At p. 217-218 mention is made of one of Miss Milner's recollections of Goldsmith while an usher with her father, but no one could infer that this had been already quoted by

b

Mr. Mitford from Watkins's Literary Anecdotes (515), though certainly it was more pardonable in Mr. Prior thus to borrow without leave from one source, than to utterly omit, as he does, all mention of the most interesting details of those curious recollections to be found in other sources (in the European Magazine, liii. 373-375; and in the Gentleman's Magazine, lxxxvii. 277-278). At p. 220 the origin of Goldsmith's first connection with literature, and the peculiar engagement he entered into, are related without a hint of having been derived from p. 60 of the Percy Memoir.

At p. 244, the sudden and disconcerting visit of Charles Goldsmith to London is referred to his having heard of Oliver's great friends through a letter to Mrs. Lawder, although there is proof, but a few pages on (268), that Oliver could have written no such letter; and Mr. Prior had, in truth, simply copied the fact from Northcote's Life of Reynolds (i. 332-333). An original letter is given at pp. 246-251, full of interest and character, without anything to inform the reader that he might have found it at pp. 40-45 of the Percy Memoir; nor would it be very clear to him, even though Bishop Percy is mentioned in a note, that the letter at pp. 259-262 had been copied from the same source (50-52); still less that the long and characteristic fragment of a letter at pp. 275-278 is also but a verbatim copy from pp. 46-49 of the same ill-treated authority, and that the master-piece of all Goldsmith's epistolary writing, for the varied interest of its contents, has been bodily transferred without acknowledgment from pp. 53-59 of the one book to pp. 297-303 of the other.

At pp. 370-372, an anecdote is related as having been told by Goldsmith himself "with considerable humour;" but the story is ill-told, and with no mention of the printed authority from which it was derived (in the European Magazine, xxiv. 259-260). Precisely the same remark I have to repeat of the stories at pp. 422-424, and of the statement at p. 495 for

which an erroneous authority is given. These will be found in the European Magazine, xxiv. 92, 93, and 94. "The remem"brance of Bishop Percy" is invoked for another whimsical anecdote at p. 377, when the exact page of the memoir (62-63) which contains it, might with equal ease and more propriety have been named.

Thus far Mr. Prior's first volume; in which I have indicated scarcely any facts, for the use of which even as he had borrowed them himself, except that I never sought to put them forth as my own discoveries, I was not assailed and insulted by him. I now proceed in the same way, with all possible brevity, through the second volume of his book: merely premising, as a help to those who would have some clue to this perpetual and strange desire to represent as from oral or written communication facts derived from printed sources, that Mr. Prior took occasion in the course of his attack upon me expressly to lay down the doctrine, that what has been printed for any given number of years can no longer be held new, or regarded in the light of a discovery; and as, in his own esteem, he is nothing if not a discoverer, and by consequence a proprietor, of facts, there ought perhaps to be little to surprise the reader in the foregoing and following examples.

pp.

At 1-11 of the second volume there is a vast deal about Goldsmith's Oratorio of the Captivity, about the fact of two copies being still extant in his handwriting, and about Mr. Prior being enabled to print for the first time “from that "which appears the most correct transcript;" the reader being kept quite ignorant that already this poem had been printed, from a copy in Goldsmith's handwriting at the least as curious as Mr. Prior's, and certainly as correct (the one having been made for Newbery, and the other for Dodsley, and the latest