"Your last letter, I repeat it, was too short; you should have given me your opinion of the design of the heroi-comical poem which I sent you. You remember I intended to introduce the hero of the poem as lying in a paltry ale-house. You may take the following specimen of the manner, which I flatter myself is quite original. The room in which he lies may be described somewhat in this way:

"The window, patched with paper, lent a ray

That feebly show'd the state in which he lay;
The sanded floor that grits beneath the tread,
The humid wall with paltry pictures spread;
The game of goose was there exposed to view,
And the twelve rules the royal martyr drew;
The Seasons, framed with listing, found a place,
And Prussia's monarch show'd his lamp-black face.
The morn was cold: he views with keen desire
A rusty grate unconscious of a fire;

An unpaid reckoning on the frieze was scored,
And five crack'd tea-cups dress'd the chimney-board.'

"And now imagine, after his soliloquy the, landlord to make his appearance in order to dun him for the reckoning:

"Not with that face, so servile and so gay, That welcomes every stranger that can pay: With sulky eye he smoked the patient man, Then pull'd his breeches tight, and thus began,' &c.* "All this is taken, you see, from nature. a good remark of Montaigne's, that the wisest men often have friends with whom they do not care how much they play the fool. Take my

It is

*The projected poem, of which the above were specimens, appears never to have been completed.

present follies as instances of my regard. Poetry is a much easier and more agreeable species of composition than prose; and, could a man live by it, it were not unpleasant employment to be a poet. I am resolved to leave no space, though I should fill it up only by telling you, what you very well know already, I mean that I am your most affectionate friend and brother,

"OLIVER GOLDSMITH."

The "Life of Voltaire," alluded to in the latter part of the preceding letter, was the literary job undertaken to satisfy the demands of Griffiths. It was to have preceded a translation of the " Henriade," by Ned Purdon, Goldsmith's old schoolmate, now a Grub-Street writer, who starved rather than lived by the exercise of his pen, and often tasked Goldsmith's scanty means to relieve his hunger. His miserable career was summed up by our poet in the following lines written some years after the time we are treating of, on hearing that he had suddenly dropped dead in Smithfield:

"Here lies poor Ned Purdon, from misery freed,

Who long was a bookseller's hack;

He led such a damnable life in this world,

I don't think he 'll wish to come back."

The memoir and translation, though advertised to form a volume, were not published together, but appeared separately in a magazine.

As to the heroi-comical poem, also, cited in the foregoing letter, it appears to have perished in embryo. Had it been brought to maturity, we

should have had further traits of autobiography; the room already described was probably his own squalid quarters in Green Arbor Court; and in a subsequent morsel of the poem we have the poet himself, under the euphonious name of Scroggin :

"Where the Red Lion peering o'er the way,

Invites each passing stranger that can pay;

Where Calvert's butt and Parson's black champaigne
Regale the drabs and bloods of Drury Lane:

There, in a lonely room, from bailiffs snug,

The muse found Scroggin stretch'd beneath a rug;
A nightcap deck'd his brows instead of bay,
A cap by night, a stocking all the day!"

It is to be regretted that this poetical conception was not carried out; like the author's other writings, it might have abounded with pictures of life and touches of nature drawn from his own observation and experience, and mellowed by his own humane and tolerant spirit; and might have been a worthy companion or rather contrast to his "Traveller" and "Deserted Village," and have remained in the language a first-rate specimen of the mock-heroic.

CHAPTER XI.

Publication of "The Inquiry."— Attack by Griffiths' Review. Kenrick the Literary Ishmaelite. - Periodical Literature. Goldsmith's Essays. Garrick as a Manager. - Smollett and his Schemes.-Change of Lodgings. The Robin Hood Club.

WOWARDS the end of March, 1759, the treatise on which Goldsmith had laid so much stress, on which he at one time had calculated to defray the expenses of his outfit to India, and to which he had adverted in his correspondence with Griffiths, made its appearance. It was published by the Dodsleys, and entitled "An Inquiry into the Present State of Polite Learning in Europe."

In the present day, when the whole field of contemporary literature is so widely surveyed and amply discussed, and when the current productions of every country are constantly collated and ably criticised, a treatise like that of Goldsmith would be considered as extremely limited and unsatisfactory; but at that time it possessed novelty in its views and wideness in its scope, and being indued with the peculiar charm of style inseparable from the author, it commanded public attention and a profitable sale. As it was the most important production that had yet come from Goldsmith's pen, he was anxious to have the credit of it; yet it

appeared without his name on the title-page. The authorship, however, was well known throughout the world of letters, and the author had now grown into sufficient literary importance to become an object of hostility to the underlings of the press. One of the most virulent attacks upon him was in a criticism on this treatise, and appeared in the "Monthly Review" to which he himself had been recently a contributor. It slandered him as a man while it decried him as an author, and accused him, by innuendo, of "laboring under the infamy of having, by the vilest and meanest actions, forfeited all pretensions to honor and honesty," and of practising "those acts which bring the sharper to the cart's tail or the pillory."

It will be remembered that the Review was owned by Griffiths the bookseller, with whom Goldsmith had recently had a misunderstanding. The criticism, therefore, was no doubt dictated by the lingerings of resentment; and the imputations upon Goldsmith's character for honor and honesty, and the vile and mean actions hinted at, could only allude to the unfortunate pawning of the clothes. All this, too, was after Griffiths had received the affecting letter from Goldsmith, drawing a picture of his poverty and perplexities, and after the latter had made him a literary compensation. Griffiths, in fact, was sensible of the falsehood and extravagance of the attack, and tried to exonerate himself by declaring that the criticism was written by a person in his employ ; but we see no difference in atrocity between him who wields the knife and him who hires the cut