1758. Æt. 30. though we never visited your garrets, we know what sort "of Doctors and authors you employ as journeymen in 66 68 your manufacture. Did you in your dotage mistake the application, by throwing those epithets at us which so properly belong to your own understrappers ?"* But, whatever may have caused his secession then, now he certainly applied again to Hamilton, a shrewd man, who had just made a large fortune out of Smollett's History, and, though not very liberal in his payments,t already not unconscious of the value of Griffiths's discarded writer. The result of the interview was the publication, in the new-year number, of two more papers by Goldsmith, apparently in continuation of the first. All three had relation to a special subject; and, as connected with such a man's obscurest fortunes, have an interest hardly less than that of writings connected with his fame. An author is seen in the effulgence of established repute, or discovered by his cries of struggling distress. By both you shall know him." Ovid was the leading topic in all three. His Fasti, translated by a silly master of a Wandsworth boardingschool, named Massey; his Epistles, translated by a pedantic pedagogue named Barrett (a friend of Johnson and Cave); and an antidote to his Art of Love, in an Art of Pleasing by Mr. Marriott; were the matters taken in hand. The Art of Pleasing was treated with playful contempt, and Mr. Massey's Fasti fared still worse. Here Goldsmith closed a series of most unsparing comparisons of the original with his translator, by asking leave "to remind Mr. Massey of the old Italian "proverb" (Il tradattores tradatore) "and to hope he will * Critical Review, iv. 469-71, Nov. 1757. See Percival Stockdale's Memoirs (1809), ii. 57. + Critical Review, vii. 26-30, Jan. 1759. 66 1758. never for the future traduce* and injure any of those poor "ancients who never injured him, by thus pestering the Et. 30. "world with such translations as even his own schoolboys ought to be whipped for." Nor with less just severity was the last of these unhappy gentlemen rebuked. With very lively power Goldsmith dissected the absurdities of Mr. Barrett's version of poor ill-treated Ovid's Epistles; a classic to all appearance doomed, he humorously interposed, "to "successive Metamorphoses: being sometimes transposed by 66 66 66 schoolmasters unacquainted with English, and sometimes "transversed by ladies who knew no Latin: thus he has "alternately worn the dress of a pedant or a rake; either crawling in humble prose or having his hints explained "into unbashful meaning." He showed that Mr. Barrettwas a bad critic, and no poet; and he passed. from lofty to low in his illustrations with amusing effect. Giving two or three instances of the translator's skill in "parenthetically clapping one sentence within another," this, pursued Goldsmith, "contributes not a little to obscurity; " and obscurity, we all know, is nearly allied to admiration. "Thus, when the reader begins a sentence which he finds pregnant with another, which still teems with a third, and so on, he feels the same surprise which a countryman does 66 at Bartholomew fair. Hocus shows a bag, in appearance empty; slap, and out come a dozen new laid eggs; slap again, and the number is doubled; but what is his amaze 66 66 66 66 ment, when it swells with the hen that laid them!" The poetry and criticism disposed of, the scholarship shared their fate. Mr. Barrett being master of the thriving grammar * Goldsmith's remark may remind us of the French lady, who, being complimented on her English, and asked in what manner she had contrived to speak it so well, replied, "I began by traducing." + Critical Review, iv. 409, November 1757. 1758. school of Ashford in Kent,* and having the consequence and Et. 30 pretension of a so-called learned man, we are not going, said Goldsmith, "to permit an ostentation of learning pass for "merit, nor to give a pedant quarter on the score of his "industry alone, even though he took refuge behind Arabic, or powdered his head with Hieroglyphics."+ 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 arose 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 *The second title of his translation runs thus: "Being part of a poetical or "oratorical lecture, read in the grammar-school of Ashford, in the county of "Kent; and calculated to initiate youth in the first rudiments of taste." + Critical Review, vii. 38, January 1759. I am glad to record that, amid many heresies that forbid me to claim the merit of a sound or deep critical faculty for Goldsmith, he had a well-grounded and steady admiration for Dryden, which he often justified in language worthy of it. "The English tongue," he said, in the eighth number of the Bee, "is greatly his "debtor. It was his pen that formed the Congreves, the Priors, and the Addisons, who succeeded him; and had it not been for Dryden, we never "should have known a Pope, at least in the meridian lustre he now displays. "But Dryden's excellencies, as a writer, were not confined to poetry alone. There "is, in his prose writings, an ease and elegance that have never yet been so well "united in works of taste or criticism." 66 66 66 men, and could sincerely wish that those whose greatest 1758. 'sin is, perhaps, the venial one of writing bad verses, would Et. 30. regard their failure in this respect as we do, not as faults "but foibles: they may be good and useful members of 66 "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.* Who, then, that Critical Review, vii. 37-8, January 1759. Let me add an admirable passage from a later essay (Citizen of the World, letter xciii) in which Goldsmith speaks out for the profession of the writer: "For my own part, were I to buy a hat, I would not have it from a stocking-maker, but a hatter; were "I to buy shoes, I should not go to the tailor's for that purpose. It is just so with regard to wit: did I, for my life, desire to be well served, I would "apply only to those who made it their trade, and lived by it. You smile "at the oddity of my opinion; but be assured, my friend, that wit is in 66 some measure mechanical, and that a man long habituated to catch at even "its resemblance, will at last be happy enough to possess the substance. By 66 a long habit of writing he acquires a justness of thinking, and a mastery "of manner, which holiday writers, even with ten times his genius, may vainly 66 attempt to equal. How then are they deceived, who expect from title, dignity, and exterior circumstances, an excellence, which is in some measure acquired by habit, and sharpened by necessity! You have seen, like me, "many literary reputations promoted by the influence of fashion, which have "scarcely survived the possessor; you have seen the poor hardly earn the "little reputation they acquired, and their merit only acknowledged when "they were incapable of enjoying the pleasures of popularity: such, how'ever, is the reputation worth possessing; that which is hardly earned is M "has a regard for the public, for the literary honour of our 66 66 66 country, for the figure we shall one day make among posterity, that 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?" 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; and of its miserable wretchedness, for a little time replaced by the more decent comforts of a stable, not a vestige remains. The houses, crumbling and tumbling in Goldsmith's day, were fairly rotted down some nineteen 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 "hardly lost." Most true. He lived long enough himself to have some foretaste of this in his own case; we all of us now know it more completely. Let me not quit this subject without saying that Johnson held much the same opinion as Goldsmith about interlopers in literature. Boswell one day was full of regrets that some learned judge had left no literary monument of himself. 'Alas, sir," cried Johnson, what a mass of confusion should we have, if every bishop, and every "judge, every lawyer, physician, and divine, were to write books !" Life, vi. 327. 66 66 |