'who was seldom absent.. I respected him because he was ' always unassuming.. this' (the note is appended to a poem of Kelly's called Meditation), had I then known ' him to be the author of it, would have made me adore 'him.' The poem nevertheless is poor enough; and, though Kelly was certainly popular with his nearer friends, and had many kindly qualities, his unassumingness may be doubted. He had lately emerged to notoriety, out of a desperate and obscure struggle, by somewhat questionable arts. His youth had been passed in Dublin as a staymaker's apprentice, and making sudden flight from this uncongenial employment, he was obliged to resume it in London to save himself from starvation; but he succeeded afterwards in hiring himself as writer to an attorney, from this got promotion to Grub Street, and had laboured meanly, up to the present year, in hack work for the magazines and newspapers, when it occurred to him to make profit of Churchill's example and set up as a satirist and censor of the stage. This he did after the usual fashion of an imitator, and in his Thespis caricatured the Rosciad. Poor Mrs. Dancer he called a 'moon-eyed idiot;' talked of 'Clive's weak head and execrable heart;' libelled such men as Woodward and Moody; and lavished all his praise on the Hursts, Ackmans, and Bransbys. Yet though the manifest source of such inspiration was a public house 'within a few doors of Drury Lane Theatre,' where the fettered lions of the stage were always growling against their tamers, we find that the talents for satire displayed

in this work by Mr. Kelly, recommended him at once to 'the notice of Mr. Garrick.' What resulted from that notice will soon, with somewhat higher pretensions, reintroduce the object of it: and meanwhile he may be left with Mr. Ballantyne's praise, and with the remark of Johnson to counterbalance it; who made answer to Kelly's request for permission to converse with him, Sir, I never ' desire to converse with a man who has written more than ' he has read.'

Of the obscurer members of the Globe club our mention may be limited to a Mr. Gordon, who is remembered by Mr. Ballantyne in connection with the jovial and jocund song of Nottingham Ale. 'Mr. Gordon,' he says, ' the 'largest man I ever kept company with, usually sung this

song at the Globe club; and it always very much pleased 'Doctor Goldsmith, Doctor Glover, good Tom King the ' comedian, and myself, William Ballantyne.' Nor was the evening's amusement limited to songs, but had the variety of dramatic imitations, with occasional original epigram; and here was first heard the celebrated epitaph (Goldsmith had been reading Pope's and Swift's Miscellanies) on Edward Purdon.

Here lies poor Ned Purdon, from misery freed,

Who long was a bookseller's hack ;

He led such a damnable life in this world,

I don't think he 'll wish to come back.

It was in the April of the present year that Purdon fitly closed his luckless life by suddenly dropping down dead

in Smithfield; and as it was chiefly Goldsmith's pittance that had saved him thus long from starvation, it was well that the same friend should give him his solitary chance of escape from oblivion. Doctor Goldsmith made this epitaph,' says William Ballantyne, in his way from his 'chambers in the Temple to the Wednesday evening's club ' at the Globe. I think he will never come back, I believe he said. I was sitting by him, and he repeated it more 'than twice. I think he will never come back.' Ah! and not altogether as a jest, it may be, the second and the third time. There was something in Purdon's fate, from their first meeting in college to that incident in Smithfield, which had no very violent contrast to his own; and remembering what Glover has said of his frequent sudden descents from mirth to melancholy, some such fitful change of temper would here have been natural enough. 'His disappointments at these times,' Glover tells us, 'made him peevish and sullen; and he has often left his party of convivial friends abruptly in the evening, in ' order to go home and brood over his misfortunes.' But a better medicine for his grief than brooding over it, was a sudden start into the country to forget it; and it was probably with a feeling of this kind he had in the summer revisited Islington, to which, after this Wednesdays' club digression, we must now very briefly return.

He had one room in the turret of Canonbury House, which, since altered and subdivided, to within the last twenty years remained as it was in his time; a genuine

relic of Elizabeth's hunting seat. It was an old oak room on the first floor, with Gothic windows, panelled wainscot, and a recess in its eastern corner for a large press bedstead, which doubtless the poet occupied. Canonbury Tower was for many years let out in this way, and had been the frequent resort of men connected with literature: but if (as at times alleged) any of Goldsmith's poetry was written here, it was written in the present autumn, and could have been but the fragments or beginnings of a poem; for he did not return to the lodging. He now remained some weeks in it; and is said to have been often found, during the time, among a social party of his fellow-lodgers (publishers Robinson and Francis Newbery, printers Baker and Hamilton, editor Beaufort afterwards of the Town and Country Magazine, poets Woty and Huddlestone Wynne, and pamphleteering parsons Rider and Sellon), presiding at the festive board of the Crown tavern, in the Islington Lower Road, where they had formed a kind of temporary club. At the close of the year he had returned to the Temple, was in communication with Burke about his comedy, and was again pretty constant in his attendance at Gerrard Street.

He found political excitement raging. He might have wondered to see, among the first acts of the new administration, his countryman and friend Robert Nugent, the most furious upholder of colonial taxation, selected for a lordship of the Board of Trade, and raised to the rank of Baron Nugent and Viscount Clare; yet this was nothing

to the marvel of seeing emanate from Lord Chatham's

Chancellor of the Exchequer, a new project for taxation of America. The rest of their career had been only less disgraceful; nor is it possible, without some allusion to it, to exhibit properly the social or other influences of the time. Violating public faith in their attack on the East India Charter, they had sustained from its resolute exposure by Mr. O'Bourke (as pompous Beckford, Lord Chatham's tool in the matter, persisted in calling Edmund), a most damaging blow. They had suffered an ignominious defeat, without precedent since Walpole's fall, on the question of continuing the land tax at four shillings; which Dowdeswell succeeded in reducing to three, backed by all the country gentlemen, by the Bedfords and the Grenvilles, by the single partizan or so who still followed Newcastle, and by all the Rockinghams except Burke, who alone ('not having our number of acres,' said the top-booted gentlemen to each other) fell from his party on that question, and would not vote to lighten the land. They tasted as bitter humiliation in the later rejection of their overtures for help by the despised head of the last administration, who, manfully acting on Burke's warnings and suggestions, maintained, in the meeting with the Bedfords at Newcastle House, that the power of Lord Bute was still to be resisted; resolutely refused to sanction any arrangement which would again expose America to the mercies of George Grenville; and finally rejected the party combination which the old Duke of Newcastle, to get himself once more into office, had