1760. pretexts that availed for the spilling of blood, in the contest Et. 32. then raging between France and England. He inveighed 'against the laws which meted out, in so much gold or silver, the price of a wife's or daughter's honour. He ridiculed the prevailing nostrums current in that age of quacks; doubted the graces of such betailing and bepowdering fashions, as then made beauty hideous, and sent even lads cockedhatted and wigged to school; and had sense and courage to avow his contempt for that prevailing cant of connoissieurship (" your Raffaelles, Correggios, and Stuff") at which Reynolds shifted his trumpet. The abuses of church patronage did not escape him; any more than the tendency to "superstition and imposture" in the "bonzes "and priests of all religions." He thought it a fit theme for mirth, that holy men should be content to receive all the money, and let others do all the good; and that preferment to the most sacred and exalted duties should wait upon the whims of members of parliament, and the wants of younger branches of the nobility.* The incapacities and neglect thus engendered in the upper clergy, he also con'nected with that disregard of the lower, which left a reverend * I would refer the reader to George Selwyn's Correspondence if he would desire to study attentively one of the latest full-blown specimens of the breed of clergymen engendered by this system, and introduce himself to by no means one of the most objectionable of the smoking, reading, claret-drinking, toadying, gormandising, good-humoured parsons of the time when Goldsmith lived and wrote. He will find Doctor Warner quite an ornament to the Establishment throughout that book, and only cursing, flinging, stamping, or gnashing, when anything goes amiss with Selwyn. He will observe that the reverend doctor is ready to wager his best cassock against a dozen of claret any day; and that the holy man would quote you even texts with the most pious of his cloth, "if our friend the Countess "had not blasted them." In short, at whatever page he opens the Correspondence, he will find parson Warner in the highest possible spirits, whether quizzing "canting pot-bellied justices," contemplating with equanimity "a fine corpse at "Surgeons' Hall," or looking forward with hopeful vivacity to the time when he shall "be a fine grey-headed old jollocks of sixty-five." They who would hastily accuse Fielding of exaggeration in his portraitures taken from the church, should first Trulliber undisturbed among his pigs, and a parson Adams 1760. to his ale in Lady Booby's kitchen. Yet as little was he dis- Et. 32. posed to tolerate any false reaction from such indifference; and at the ascetic saints of the new religious sect, which had risen to put down cheerfulness, and could find its only music in a chorus of sighs and groans, he aimed the shafts of his wit as freely, as at the over-indulging, gormandising priests of the bishop's visitation-dinner, face to face with whom, gorged and groaning with excess, he brought the hungry beggar, faint with want, to ask of them the causes of his utter destitution, body and soul. Nor did he spare that other dignified profession, which, in embarrassing what it professed to make clear, in retarding with cumbrous impediments the steps of justice, in reserving as a luxury for the rich what it pretended to throw open to all, in fencing round property with a multiplicity of laws and exposing poverty without a guard to whatever threatened or assailed it, countenanced and practised no less a falsehood.* Almost alone in that age of indifference, the Citizen 666 contemplate this. Goldsmith is less severe in his exposure, but it is efficient, too; 66 666 *The simple notions of the Chinese citizen on this subject appear very alarming to his friend, who uses precisely the defensive argument with which the absurdity has been upheld ever since. "I see,' cries my friend, that you are for a speedy 1760. of the World raised his voice against the penal laws which Et. 32. then, with wanton severity, disgraced the statute book; insisted that the sole means of making death an efficient, was to make it an infrequent, punishment; and warned society of the crime of disregarding human life and the temptations of the miserable, by visiting petty thefts with penalties of blood.* He who does not read for amusement only, may also find in these delightful letters, thus published from week to week, a comment of special worth on casual incidents of the time. There was in this year a city-campaign of peculiar cruelty. A mob has indiscriminate tastes for blood, 46 6 "administration of justice; but all the world will grant, that the more time there * Could anything be better reasoned than this, which indeed anticipates the closest arguments of Bentham ? "When a law, enacted to make theft punishable "with death, happens to be equitably executed, it can at best only guard our "possessions; but when, by favour or ignorance, justice pronounces a wrong "verdict, it then attacks our lives, since in such a case the whole community "suffers with the innocent victim if, therefore, in order to secure the effects of one man, I should make a law which may take away the life of another, in such a case, to attain a smaller good, I am guilty of a greater evil; to secure society "in the possession of a bauble, I render a real and valuable possession precarious. ". . . Since punishments are sometimes necessary, let them at least be rendered terrible, by being executed but seldom, and let Justice lift her sword rather to "terrify than revenge." Letter lxxx. 66 and after hunting an admiral Byng to death will as eagerly 1760. run down a dog. On a groundless cry of hydrophobia, dogs Et. 32. were slaughtered wholesale, and their bodies literally blocked up the streets. "The dear, good-natured, honest, sensible "creatures!" exclaimed Horace Walpole. "Christ! How "can anybody hurt them?" But what Horace said' only to his friend, Goldsmith said to everybody: publicly denouncing the cruelty, in a series of witty stories ridiculing the motives alleged for it, and pleading with eloquent warmth for the honest associate of man.* Nor was this the only mad-dogcry of the year. The yell of a Grub-street mob as fierce, on a false report of the death of Voltaire, brought Goldsmith as warmly to the rescue. With eager admiration, he asserted the claims of the philosopher and wit; told the world it was its lusts of war and sycophancy which unfitted it to receive such a friend; set forth the independence of his life, in a country of Pompadours and an age of venal oppression; declared (this was before the Calas family) the tenderness and humanity of his nature; and claimed freedom of religious thought for him and all men. "I am "not displeased with my brother because he happens to "ask our father for favours in a different manner from "me." As we read the Chinese Letters with this comment of the time, those actual days come vividly back to us. * It is pleasant to quote his most kindly speech. "Of all the beasts that graze "the lawn, or hunt the forest, a dog is the only animal that, leaving his fellows, attempts to cultivate the friendship of man; to man he looks in all his necessities "with a speaking eye for assistance; exerts for him all the little service in his "power with cheerfulness and pleasure; for him bears famine and fatigue with patience and resignation; no injuries can abate his fidelity, no distress induce "him to forsake his benefactor; studious to please, and fearing to offend, he is "still an humble stedfast dependant; and in him alone fawning is not flattery. How unkind, then, to torture this faithful creature, who has left the forest to "claim the protection of man! how ungrateful a return to the trusty animal for "all his services!" Letter lxix. 46 1760. Earl Ferrers glides through them again, with his horrible Et. 32. passion and yet more ghastly composure. The theatres again contend with their Pollys and Macheaths, and tire the town with perpetual Beggars' Operas. Merry and fashionable crowds repeople White Conduit and Vauxhall. We get occasional glimpses of even the stately commoner and his unstately ducal associate. Old George the Second dies, and young George the Third ascends the throne. Churchill makes his hit with the Rosciad; and Sterne, having startled the town with the humour and extravagance of his Tristram Shandy, comes up from country quiet to enjoy popularity. How sudden and decisive it was, need not be related. No one was so talked of in London this year, and no one so admired, as that tall, thin, hectic-looking Yorkshire parson. He who was to die within eight years, unheeded and untended, in a common lodging-house, was everywhere the honoured guest of the rich and noble. His book had become a fashion, and east and west were moved alike. Mr. Dodsley offered him 650l. for a second edition and two more volumes; Lord Falconberg gave him a curacy of 150l. a-year; Mr. Reynolds painted his portrait; and Warburton, not having yet pronounced him an “irre"coverable scoundrel," went round to the bishops and told them he was the English Rabelais. "They had never "heard of such a writer," adds the sly narrator of the incident.* "One is invited to dinner where he dines," said Gray, "a fortnight beforehand:" and he was boasting, * Walpole's Coll. Lett. iv. 39. + Letter to Wharton, 22d April, 1760. Works, iii. 241. In another letter to Wharton, two months later, he writes, with his usual manly appreciation of all that is good and original "there is much good fun in Tristram, and humour some"times hit, and sometimes missed. I agree with your opinion of it, and shall see |