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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 rose 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. But let not the reader imagine,' he said, 'we can find pleasure in thus exposing absurdities, which are too ludicrous for serious reproof. While we censure as critics we feel as men; and could sincerely 'wish that those whose greatest sin is perhaps the venial

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one of writing bad verses, would regard their failure in 'this respect as we do, not as faults but foibles: they may

be good and useful members of society, without being 'poets. For who that has a regard for the public, for the

literary honour of our country, for the figure we shall 'one day make among posterity, would not choose to see such humbled as are possessed only of talents that 'might have made good cobblers, had fortune turned 'them to trade? The regions of taste can be travelled

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only by a few, and even those often find indifferent

'accommodation by the way. Let such as have not got a 'passport from nature be content with happiness, and 'leave the poet the unrivalled possession of his misery, 'his garret, and his fame. We have of late seen the ' republic of letters crowded with some, who have no other 'pretensions to applause but industry, who have no other ' merit but that of reading many books and making long 'quotations: these we have heard extolled by sympathetic 'dunces, and have seen them carry off the rewards of genius while others, who should have been born in 'better days, felt all the wants of poverty, and the agonies ' of contempt.' 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, Fleet Street: between the Old Bailey and the site of Fleet Market: 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; its miserable wretchedness was replaced by the decent comfort of a stable. The houses, crumbling and tumbling in Goldsmith's day, were fairly rotted down some twelve or fifteen 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; he made good his toilsome way up into Green Arbour Court. He 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 ap'peared' 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 a tune upon his flute, for which all

the court assembled; 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,

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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

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himself; he always afterward withheld allusion to it, with even studious care. The most likely supposition would possibly 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 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 Coffee House, being only fit for service after nightfall.

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