to return to a fixed or settled residence in London. He 1760. furnished other booksellers with occasional compilation- Et. 32. prefaces; he compiled for Newbery, in four duodecimo * volumes, A Poetical Dictionary, or the Beauties of the English Poets alphabetically displayed; and he gave some papers (among them a Life of Christ and Lives of the Fathers, re-published with his name, in shilling pamphlets, a few months after his death) to a so-called Christian Magazine, undertaken by Newbery in connection with the macaroni parson Dodd, and conducted by that villainous pretender as an organ of fashionable divinity. It seems to follow as of course upon these engagements, that the room in Green Arbour Court should at last be exchanged for one of greater comfort. He had left that place in the later months of 1760, and gone into what were called respectable lodgings in Wine Office Court, Fleetstreet. The house belonged to a relative of Newbery's, and he occupied two rooms in it for nearly two years. * Of course these prefaces were always strictly task work. To seek to connect them in any way with the work prefaced, would be generally labour in vain. The moral of them is in a remark of Johnson's, when Boswell, admiring greatly his preface to Roll's Dictionary of Trade and Commerce, asked him whether he knew much of Rolt and of his work. "Sir," said Johnson, "I never saw the man, and 66 never read the book. The booksellers wanted a Preface to a Dictionary of Trade "and Commerce. I knew very well what such a Dictionary should be, and I wrote a Preface accordingly." Boswell, ii. 125. + Mr. Crossley possesses a copy of this selection, which is rare and very little known, and says of it (Notes and Queries, v. 534) that "the preface is evidently "written by Goldsmith, and with his usual elegance and spirit; and the selection "which follows is one of the best that has ever yet been made.' CHAPTER V. 1761. Æt. 33. FELLOWSHIP WITH JOHNSON. 1761-1762. A CIRCUMSTANCE occurred in the new abode of which Goldsmith had now taken possession in Wine Office Court, which must have endeared it always to his remembrance; but more deeply associated with the wretched habitation he had left behind him in Green Arbour Court, were days of a most forlorn misery as well as of a manly resolution, and, round that beggarly dwelling (" the shades," as he used to call it in the more prosperous aftertime), and all connected with it, there crowded to the last the kindest memories of his gentle and true nature. Thus, when bookseller Davies tells us, after his death, how tender and compassionate he was; how no unhappy person ever sued to him for relief without obtaining it, if he had anything to give; and how he would borrow, rather than not relieve the distressed, he adds that "the poor woman with whom he had lodged during his "obscurity, several years in Green Arbour Court, by his "death lost an excellent friend; for the Doctor often supplied her with food from his own table, and visited her frequently, with the sole purpose to be kind to her." * 66 As little, in connection with Wine Office Court, was he ever likely to forget that Johnson now first visited him there. 66 They had probably met before. I have shown how frequently the thoughts of Goldsmith vibrated to that great Grub-street figure of independence and manhood, which, in an age not remarkable for either, was undoubtedly presented in the person of the author of the English Dictionary. One of the last Chinese Letters had again alluded to the Johnsons and Smolletts" as veritable poets, though they might never have made a verse in their whole lives; and among the earliest greetings of the new essay-writer, I suspect that Johnson's would be found. The opinion expressed in his generous question of a few years later ("Is there a man, sir, now, who can pen an essay with such ease and elegance as "Goldsmith? "*) he was not the man to wait for the world to help him to. Himself connected with Newbery, and engaged in like occupation, the new adventurer wanted his helping word, and would be therefore sure to have it; nor, if it had not been a hearty one, is Mr. Percy likely to have busied himself to bring about the present meeting. It was arranged by that learned divine; and this was the first time, he says, he had seen them together. The day fixed was the 31st of May 1761, and Goldsmith gave a supper in Wine Office Court in honour of his visitor. Percy called to take up Johnson at Inner Temple Lane, and found him, to his great astonishment, in a marked condition of studied neatness; without his rusty brown suit or his soiled shirt, his loose knee-breeches, his unbuckled shoes, or his old little shrivelled unpowdered wig; and not at all * Doctor Farr was dining with Reynolds the year before Goldsmith's death, when, in answer to a sneer which had fallen from Mr. (afterwards Lord) Eliot, he heard Johnson fire up in defence of his absent friend, and use, among others, the expression in the text. Prior, i. 367. 1761. Æt. 33, 1761. Æt. 33. likely, as Miss Reynolds tells us his fashion in these days was, to be mistaken for a beggarman. He had been seen in no such respectable garb since he appeared behind Garrick's scenes on the first of the nine nights of Irene, in a scarlet gold-laced waistcoat, and rich gold-laced hat. In fact, says Percy," he had on a new suit of clothes, a new wig nicely "powdered, and everything about him so perfectly dissimilar "from his usual habits and appearance, that his companion "could not help enquiring the cause of this singular trans"formation. "Why, sir,' said Johnson, I hear that Goldsmith, who is a very great sloven, justifies his disregard ' of cleanliness and decency by quoting my practice; and I am desirous this night to show him a better example.' The example was not lost, as extracts from tailors' bills will shortly show; and the anecdote, which offers pleasant proof of the interest already felt by Johnson for his new acquaintance, is our only record connected with that memorable supper. It had no Boswell-historian, and is gone into oblivion. But the friendship which dates from it will never pass away. 66 6 แ 66 6 66 6 * Percy Memoir, 62, 63. Campbell, writing to Percy about this anecdote when arranging the Memoir, says, "The anecdote of Johnson I had recollected, but had "forgot that it was at Goldsmith's you were to sup. The story of the Valet de "Chambre will, as Lord Bristol says, fill the basket of his absurdities; and "really we may have a hamper full of them." Nichols's Illustrations, vii. 780. Unfortunately the anecdote of the Valet de Chambre has not emerged. To another anecdote, also unluckily lost, Campbell refers in a previous letter to Percy (Ibid, 779). " One thing, however, I could wish, if it met your approbation, that “I had before me some hints respecting the affair of Goldsmith and Perrot: it may, without giving offence, be related; at least so as to embellish the work, "by showing more of Goldsmith's character, which he himself has fairly drawn: "'fond of enjoying the present, careless of the future, his sentiments those of a man of sense, his actions those of a fool; of fortitude able to stand unmoved "at the bursting of an earthquake, yet of sensibility to be affected by the breaking of a tea-cup.' To which, in a later letter (781) this is added: "Your "sketch of Sir Richard Perrot will come in as an episode towards the conclusion, “with good effect; but there, neither that nor anything that can sully, shall appear as coming from you." So the Perrot anecdote is also lost, and the basket of absurdities by no means full! 666 "Farewell," says Milton, at the close of one of his early letters to his friend Gill, "and on Tuesday next expect me "in London among the booksellers."* The booksellers were of little mark in Milton's days; but the presence of such men among them began a social change important to both, and not ill expressed in an incident of the days I am describing, when Horace Walpole met the wealthy represen tative of the profits of Paradise Lost at a great party at the Speaker's, while Johnson was appealing to public charity for the last destitute descendant of Milton. But from the now existing compact between trade and letters, the popular element could not wholly be excluded; and, to even the weariest drudge, hope was a part of it. From the loopholes of Paternoster Row, he could catch glimpses of the world. Churchill had emerged, and Sterne, for a few brief years; and but that Johnson had sunk into idleness, he might have been reaping a harvest more continuous than theirs, and yet less dependent on the trade. Drudgery is not good, but flattery and falsehood are worse; and it had become plain to Goldsmith, even since the days of the Enquiry, how much better it was for men of letters to live by the labour of their hands till more original labour became popular with trading patrons, than to wait with their hands across, as Johnson contemptuously described it, till great men came to feed them.t Whatever the call that Newbery or any other * Todd's Milton, vii. 176-7. And see Aubrey's Letters and Lives, ii. 285, 440. Gill is the "infamous Gill" whose "railing rhymes " against himself Ben Jonson with so much reason bitterly abuses. See them in Wood's Athena Oxonienses (ed. 1813) ii, 597-8; but incorrectly attributed to Gill's father, whom he succeeded as master of St. Paul's. + Occasions for observing with what cheerful acquiescence Goldsmith hereafter accepted these relations of author and bookseller, will frequently occur. According to his friend Cooke, indeed, it seems to have been a favourite topic with him to "tell pleasant stories of Mr. Newbery, who, he said, was the patron of more "distressed authors than any man of his time." Europ. Mag. xxiv. 92. 1761. Et. 33. |