every peasant was a better musician than I." Poverty, however, is ingenious in resources, so he gave up melody and took to disputations. He "disputed” for his dinner and a night's lodging at every university and convent, and, if we are to receive "the vagabond's" account as true, he often won bed and board and a small gratuity in money to boot. Thus he traversed Northern Italy from west to east; saw Florence and Milan, Verona, Mantua, and Pisa (where it is said he obtained a degree), and at last stood in the city of Venice. Then homelongings came upon him, and poverty grew more pinching; the generous hand of Uncle Contarine was closed in death, and there was none other to aid him, so the vagrant turned his steps towards Britain, and disputed and begged his way back through Italy, and over the Alps in winter, and was once more in festive France. There the flute and the song again sustain the wanderer, till at last, on the 1st of February, 1756, he stands on the quay of Dover. Well nigh two years have passed since, with a few pounds in his pocket and with little expectations of more, he had undertaken what in those days was a pilgrimage full of peril and difficulty. How irrepressible must have been his passion for knowledge, how brave his heart, how strong his courage! And as he stood there on the pier, alone, friendless, penniless, what thoughts may have swelled his heart with hope and conscious pride! Had not the idler at Ballymahon, the loiterer in college, the spendthrift at Edinburgh, done somewhat to redeem his misspent time, to educate himself in the knowledge of mankind, and to elevate himself in his intellectual position? Might he not now stand amongst the great men of his day, and yet hold his head as high as any of them? Ay, only let him have the opportunity to give to the world the treasures of thought that he had stored up within him. And where was this opportunity to be found but in the great mind-market of the world-LONDON ? So to London he turned his steps, and fought his way there, Heaven knows how, battling for very life through that terrible fortnight. At last he stands in the streets of London, face to face with all those horrors that surround the destitute stranger in that populous solitude, and make the heart sink with dismay. Into the deeps of that gloom and misery we may not penetrate if we would. Goldsmith himself seems always to have shrunk from any full revelations of them. There is a sanctity for the degradation of starving genius as there is for the dead within the grave. One cry, however, from those deeps he uttered, exceeding bitter but not unmanly. Many in such circumstances," he said, "would have had recourse to the friar's cord or the suicide's halter. But with all my follies I had principle to resist the one and resolution to combat the other." Let us pass the uncertain and unaccredited, and come to the reliable. After a thousand failures and repulses, the shy, ungainly, sensitive man, with threadbare garments and an Irish brogue (harmless in foreign lands, but damning within the sound of Bow-bells) finds employment from a chemist on

Ah! the poor fellow knew not what "Sleigh scarcely knew me," said he, "such is the tax the unfortunate pay

Fish Street Hill, partly as a charity and partly from his knowledge of chemistry, and that the man saw in him talents above his condition. This gave him a few months to take breath and rest. Then came an unexpected deliverance. One whose friendship he had gained in Edinburgh, the excellent and eminent Dr. Sleigh, happened to be in London. Sunday affords an hour or two of respite, even in a chemist's shop, so Oliver smartens himself up in his shabbygenteel suit, and pays the Doctor a visit. a change hard life had wrought in him. in describing the interview to a friend; to poverty. However, when he did recollect me, I found his heart as warm as ever, and he shared his purse of friendship with me during his continuance in London." Then Dr. Sleigh and apothecary Jacob put their heads together, and they start him as a physician in Bankside, Southwark, in a tarnished old suit of green and gold. His practice was not successful, and lay only amongst the poor. One of his patients, a journeyman printer, suggests that he should call on his master, and so Goldsmith turns "reader" to Samuel Richardson, corrects his press, and becomes acquainted with Dr. Edward Young, then past seventy, serene and imperturbably polite, who used to come up from Welwyn to see his bosom friend, the literary printer of Salisbury Court. But drudgery of printing office and prescribing could scarcely support his existence. All his ambition seemed now but to live, and he accepted an ushership at Dr. John Milner's school at Peckham, in Surrey. There are stories of his short stay here, which show how little trial and misery had changed him. Elastic as ever, his spirit rose the moment the pressure was removed from it; he was the same kind, merry, and generous being, playing off practical jokes and lavishing his scanty stipend, till kind Mrs. Milner suggested that she had better take care of his money as she did for the schoolboys. Still the life of a tutor was hateful to him, as he abundantly testified afterwards in his writings. So he took advantage of the acquaintance which he there formed with Griffiths, the bookseller of Paternoster Row, and engaged with him, in April, 1757, to write for the "Monthly Review" for one year, living with the bookseller and receiving a salary.

And now, at last, Goldsmith begins to realise the life-long cravings of his heart to fulfil his destiny-to be an author. Mr. Forster has, with great power and vividness, described the condition of literature at that period in England, “when, deserted by the patron and not yet supported by the public, it was committed to the mercies of the bookseller." A more merciless being than Griffiths could not be found-save in the compound Griffiths man and wife. The matrimonial and trade firm worked their Grub Street hack, without intermission, from nine in the morning till two, and sometimes during the whole day and late into the night; and, to the personal discomforts of a penurious house

at home in Ireland, and the simple hearts fancied he was a rising genius, who could now give a friend a lift; and so brother Charles came over to share his good fortune, and found his address from George, the waiter at the Temple Exchange Coffee House. A rising genius high enough he found him, when he had scrambled up the stairs. Shocked and confounded, Charles expresses his sorrow. Oliver's heart was too proud to give way even before a brother. "All in good time, my dear bɔy," said he, with feigned hopefulness; "I shall be richer by-and-by. Besides, you see, I am not in positive want." Charles did not rely much on the present or the future of the poet; so, like a true Goldsmith, he disappeared to seek his fortune in the West Indies, and was not again heard of for thirty years. "Positive want" soon came, notwithstanding hackwriting and doctoring the poor, and he has to fall back for a space upon tutoring and Dr. Milner. But the love of literature still lurks in his heart, and he occupies his spare time in a work on Polite Literature, that he hopes yet to give to the world. Back again into that world he goes in August, 1758, to his garret and his hack-writing, now for the "Critical Review," and the preparation of his essay. At last, a long-promised medical appointment to one of the factories on the coast of Coromandel seems within his reach. He raises a few pounds for his outfit; but the appointment is not confirmed-why, has never been known. Then he endeavoured to gain the post of an hospital mate; presented himself before the Board of Examiners at Surgeons' Hall, and was rejected. So much the better for Oliver: so much the better for the world. He is drawn back, as by a fatality, into the troublous waters—as the wave draws back some wretch that would fain escape-to struggle, and buffet with, and, at last, to ride upon the billows. Back he goes to his miserable life in Green Arbour Court, up Breakneck Stairs, to toil again in the "Critical Review," and write for Griffiths, to whom he is indebted for clothes that he has pawned to relieve his landlord, and for books that he has deposited with a friend to save himself from starving. This debt was repaid by the "Memoir of Voltaire." At last, the essay iş ready, and in April, 1759, the "Enquiry into the Present State of Polite Literature in Europe" is published. It bears no author's name; but the author is well known. It is savagely attacked and highly praised. Lord Macaulay, in his ungenial memoir of Goldsmith, says it is of little or no value. This may well be questioned; but, whatever its value at the present, "it was," as Mr. Forster observes, "in advance of any similar effort in that day." "It possessed," says Washington Irving, "novelty in its views and wideness in its scope, and being endued with the peculiar charm of style inseparable from the author, it commanded public attention and a profitable sale." At all events, it made a reputation for Goldsmith, and was the turning-point of his literary life. Publishers now sought him. Wilkie engaged him to write a weekly paper called "The Bee," the first number of which appeared on Saturday, the 6th

October, 1759; but though it contained some charming articles, it had an existence of but eight weeks. At the same time, he was contributing to "The Busy Body," and to "The Ladies' Magazine.” Then John Newbery and Smollett enlisted him for "The British Magazine" and "The Public Ledger," in the latter of which appeared the papers afterwards published in a collected form as "The Citizen of the World." Goldsmith now ventured to migrate from his wretched lodging by Breakneck Stairs to a decenter habitation in Wine Office Court. Percy had befriended him; and the great autocrat of literature, Dr. Johnson, was not insensible to the praise of Goldsmith, and spoke handsomely of him in return. Nay, he even accompanied Percy to sup with him on the 31st of May, 1761-a white day in Goldsmith's life, from which may be dated a friendship that was only dissolved by death. In his new abode Goldsmith drudges away, still little better than a Grub Street hack, with visions, now and then, of going to distant lands, and making a fortune by discoveries. We care not to inquire minutely into that hack-work-essays, and sketches, and biographies, often written under the pressure of the moment, and in the hours of sickness-for we find that his health was not proof against the miasma of London garrets, and that he was obliged to go to Bath, where he fell in with Beau Nash, whom he made immortal by writing a very pleasant memoir of him for John Newbery. Next year he falls in with the wits that dropped daily into Tom Davies', the bookseller of Russell Street, Covent Garden; many of them to be more intimate associates, by-and-by, in the Literary Club. At the end of the year he took lodgings in Islington, where he made the acquaintance of Hogarth, who, with Reynolds, often spent a convivial evening with him ; after which he would retire to his bedroom, and write a chapter of a work for his neighbour, John Newbery. Pleasant and light writing he found it; and as pleasant reading it proved, and still proves, to the world. 'Twas a "History of England in a Series of Letters from a Nobleman to his Son," which was afterwards converted into the charming "History of England" in two volumes It was a great success, and the authorship was successively attributed to three literary noblemen. Oliver laughed at the mistake, and enjoyed the success; but Johnson and others knew who wrote the letters, and rejoiced with him too.

octavo.

And now was established that fellowship which contributed so largely to the happiness of Goldsmith's chequered life-that club, nameless at first, but which, after Goldsmith had passed away, was known as the "Literary Club.” Great names now rise before us, and fill every cell of memory with light. Many a brilliant pen has sketched the characters of the giants that were in those days. Let us look in on them, as they sat, on Monday evening, at the "Turk's Head," in Gerrard Street, Soho. It is their first year, while the number of the members was yet limited to nine. They have met some half a