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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 into Green Arbour Court. He found it a small square of tall and miserable houses, the very intestines of which seemed turned inside out, to judge from the old garments and frippery that fluttered from every window. 'It ap'peared' he says, in his Tales of a Traveller, 'to be a 'region of washerwomen, and lines were stretched about 'the little square, on which clothes were dangling to dry.' The disputed right to a wash-tub was going on when he entered; heads in mob-caps were protruded from every window; and the loud clatter of vulgar tongues was assisted by the shrill pipes of swarming children, nestled and cradled in every procreant chamber of the hive. The whole scene, in short, was one of whose unchanged resemblance to the scenes of former days I have since found curious corroboration, in a magazine engraving of the place nigh half a century old. Here were the tall faded houses, with heads out of window at every story; the dirty neglected children; the bawling slipshod women; in one corner, clothes hanging to dry, and in another the cure of smoky chimneys announced. Without question, the same squalid, squalling colony, which it then was, it had been in Goldsmith's time. He would compromise with the children for occasional cessation of their noise, by a tune upon his flute, for which all

the court assembled; every night, he would risk his neck at those steep stone stairs; every day, for his clothes had become too ragged to submit to daylight scrutiny, he would keep within his dirty, naked, unfurnished room,

with its single wooden chair and window bench. And that was Goldsmith's home.

On a certain night in the beginning of November 1758, his ascent of 'Break-neck Steps' must have had unwonted gloom. He had learnt the failure of his new hope: the Coromandel appointment was his no longer. In what way this mischance so unexpectedly occurred, it would now be hopeless to enquire. No explanation could be had from the dying Doctor Milner; none was given by

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himself; he always afterward withheld allusion to it, with even studious care. The most likely supposition would possibly be, that failure in getting together means for his outfit with sufficient promptitude, was made convenient excuse for transferring the favour to another. That it was any failure of his own courage at the prospect of so long an exile, or that he never proposed more by his original scheme than a foreign flight for two or three years, has no other or better foundation than the Hodson letter: on which authority it would also follow, that he remained contented with what he already possessed, subdued his capricious wants, and turned to the friends, the esteem, the refined conversation, and all the conveniences of life, which awaited him in Green Arbour Court, with a new and virtuous resolve of quiet thankfulness.

Alas! far different were the feelings with which he now ascended Break-neck Steps; far different his mournful conviction, that but to flee from the misery that surrounded him, no office could be mean, no possible endurance hard. His determination was taken at once: probably grounded on the knowledge of some passages in the life of Smollett, and of his recent acquaintance Grainger. He would present himself at Surgeons' Hall for examination as a hospital mate: an appointment sufficiently undesirable, to be found of tolerably easy attainment by the duly qualified.

But he must have decent clothes to present himself in : the solitary suit in which he crept between the Court and the Coffee House, being only fit for service after nightfall.

He had no resource but to apply to Griffiths, with whom he had still some small existing relation, and from whom his recent acceptance at the Critical, increasing his value with a vulgar mind, might help in exacting aid. The bookseller, to whom the precise temporary purpose for which the clothes were wanted does not seem to have been told, consented to furnish them on certain conditions. Goldsmith was to write at once four articles (he had given three to the Critical) for the Monthly Review. Griffiths would then become security with a tailor for a new suit of clothes; which were either to be returned, or the debt for them discharged, within a given time. This pauper proposal acceded to, Goldsmith returned to Green Arbour Court with the four books under his arm.

They were: Some Enquiries Concerning the First Inhabitants of Europe, by Francis Wise the antiquarian, Thomas Warton's friend; Anselm Bayly's Introduction to Languages; the Pentalogia of Doctor Burton; and a new Translation of Cicero's Tusculan Disputations. The notices of them thus extorted made due appearance in the Monthly Review for December 1758; the tailor was then called in ; and the compact completed.

Equipped in his new suit, and with an anxious, hopeful, quaking heart, Goldsmith offered himself for examination at Surgeons' Hall on the 21st December. The beadle 'called my name,' says Roderick Random, when he found himself in similar condition at that place of torture, with 'a voice that made me tremble as much as if it had been

'the sound of the last trumpet: however there was no 'remedy: I was conducted into a large hall, where I saw ' about a dozen of grim faces sitting at a long table, one of 'whom bade me come forward in such an imperious tone, 'that I was actually for a minute or two bereft of my 'senses.' Whether the same process, conducted through a like memorable scene, bereft poor Goldsmith altogether of his, cannot now be ascertained. All that is known, is told in a dry extract from the books of the College of Surgeons. 'At a Court of Examiners held at the Theatre '21st December, 1758. Present' . . the names are not given, but there is a long list of the candidates who passed, in the midst of which these occur. . James Bernard, mate 'to an hospital. Oliver Goldsmith, found not qualified for 'ditto.' A rumour of this rejection long existed, and on a hint from Maton the king's physician, Mr. Prior succeeded in discovering it.

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Honour to that Court of Examiners, I say, to the end of time! They found him not qualified to be a surgeon's mate, and left him qualified to heal the wounds, and abridge the sufferings, of all the world. They found him querulous with adversity, given up to irresolute fears, too much blinded with failures and sorrows to see the divine uses to which they tended still: and from all this, their stern and awful decision drove him resolutely back. While the door of the Surgeons' Hall was shut upon him that day, the gate of the Beautiful Mountain was slowly opening. Much of the valley of the shadow he had still in