1757. Such were a few of the examples that, if the least liberty Æt. 29. of choice had been his, might have raised or depressed the sanguine heart of Oliver Goldsmith, when, under the watchful eye of Mr. and Mrs. Griffiths, now providers of his bed and board, he sat down in the bookseller's parlour in Paternoster Row somewhat sarcastically faced with the sign of The Dunciad, to begin his engagement on the Monthly Review. END OF BOOK THE FIRST. BOOK THE SECOND. CHAPTER I. REVIEWING FOR MR. AND MRS. GRIFFITHS. 1757. 1757. THE means of existence, long sought, seemed thus to be found, when, in his twenty-ninth year, Oliver Goldsmith sat Et. 29. down to the precarious task-work of Author by Profession. He had exerted no control over the circumstances in which he took up the pen: nor had any friendly external aid, in an impulse of kindness, offered it to his hand. To be swaddled, rocked, and dandled into authorship is the lot of more fortunate men: it was with Goldsmith the stern and last resource of his struggle with adversity. As in the country-barn he would have played Scrub or Richard; as he prescribed for the poorer than himself at Bankside, until worse than their necessities drove him to herd with the beggars in Axe Lane; as in Salisbury Court he corrected. the press among Mr. Richardson's workmen, on Tower Hill doled out physic over Mr. Jacob's counter, and at Peckham dispensed the more nauseating dose to young gentlemen of Doctor Milner's academy: he had here entered into Mr. Griffiths's service, and put on the livery of the Monthly Review. 1757. Æt. 29. He was man-of-letters, then, at last; but had gratified no passion, and attained no object of ambition. The hope of greatness and distinction, day-star of his wanderings and his privations, was at this hour, more than it had ever been, dim, distant, cold. A practical scheme of literary life had as yet struck no root in his mind; and the assertion of later years, that he was past thirty before he was really attached to literature and sensible that he had found his vocation in it; is no doubt true. What the conditions of his present employment were, he knew well: that if he had dared to indulge any hopes of finer texture, if he had shown the fragments of his poem, if he had produced the acts of the tragedy read to Richardson, Mr. and Mrs. Griffiths must have taken immediate counsel on the expenses of his board. He was there, as he had been in other places of servitude, because the dogs of hunger were at his heels.* * In a paper full of eloquence and humour which Mr. De Quincey wrote upon the subject of this biography in the North British Review, so different an opinion is formed from that which I offer of this Griffiths-agreement, as well as of my contrast between the position of the man-of-letters in Goldsmith's day and that of the men of Queen Anne, while the grounds of difference are so amusingly expressed, that the reader will probably thank me for quoting the passage. I should premise that Smart's agreement, alluded to in the outset, will be found described, post, Book iii. Chap. x. "The pauperised (or Grub Street) section of the literary body, at the date of "Goldsmith's taking service amongst it, was (in Mr. Forster's estimate) at its very "lowest point of depression. And one comic presumption in favour of that notion "we ourselves remember; viz., that Smart, the prose translator of Horace, and a "well-built scholar, actually let himself out to a monthly journal on a regular "lease of ninety-nine years. What could move the rapacious publisher to draw "the lease for this monstrous term of years, we cannot conjecture. Surely the villain "might have been content with three score years and ten. But think, reader, of 'poor Smart two years after, upon another publisher's applying to him vainly for "contributions, and angrily demanding what possible objection could be made to "offers so liberal, being reduced to answer 'no objection, sir, whatever, except "an unexpired term of ninety-seven years yet to run.' The bookseller saw that "he must not apply again in that century; and, in fact, Smart could no longer let "himself, but must be sublet (if let at all) by the original lessee. Query nowwas Smart entitled to vote as a freeholder, and Smart's children (if any were "born during the currency of the lease) would they be serfs, and ascripti "prelo? Goldsmith's own terms of self-conveyance to Griffiths the terms we |