living in a garret might have been wit in the last age, but continues such no longer.'

The quiet composure of this passage exhibits the healthiest aspect of his mind. Bookseller and public are confronted calmly, and the consequences fairly challenged. It is indeed very obvious, at the close of this first year of the Public Ledger, that increasing opportunities of employment (to say nothing of the constant robbery of his writings by pirate magazine-men) were really teaching him his value, and suggesting hopes he had not earlier dared to entertain. He resumed his connection with the Lady's Magazine, and became its editor: publishing in it, among other writings known and unknown, what he had written of his Life of Voltaire; and retiring from its editorship at the close of a year, when he had raised its circulation (if Mr. Wilkie's advertisements are to be believed) to three thousand three hundred. He continued his contributions, meanwhile, to the British Magazine; from which he was not wholly separated till two months before poor Smollett, pining for the loss of his only daughter, went upon the continent (in 1763) never to return to a fixed or settled residence in London. He furnished other booksellers with occasional compilation-prefaces; 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 villanous

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, Fleet Street. The house belonged to a relative of Newbery's, and he occupied two rooms in it for nearly two years.

A circumstance occurred in this new abode which must have endeared it always to his remembrance; but more deeply associated with the wretched habitation he had left, were days of a most forlorn misery as well as of a manly resolution, and round that beggarly dwelling, 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.' As little, in connection with Wine Office Court, could he forget that Johnson first visited him there.

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 Doctor Percy likely to have busied himself to bring about the present meeting. It was arranged by that grave divine. It 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 cleanliness and 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 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 so dissimilar from his usual habits, that I could not resist the impulse of inquiring the cause of such rigid regard in him to 'exterior 66 appearance. Why, sir," he answered, "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.

'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 representative 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 dependant 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 till great men came to feed them. Whatever the call that Newbery or any other bookseller made, then, he was there to answer it. He had the comfort of remembering that the patron had himself patrons; that something of their higher influence had been attracted to his Chinese Letters; and that he was not slaving altogether without hope.

His first undertaking in 1762 was a pamphlet on the Cock Lane Ghost, for which Newbery paid him three guineas but whether, with Johnson, he thought the impudent imposture worth grave enquiry; or, with Hogarth, turned it to wise purposes of satire; or only laughed at it as Churchill did; the pamphlet has not survived to inform us. His next labour was the revision of a History of Mechlenburg from the first settlement of the Vandals