ļ

him for the rest of his life; and whose Poor Laws treatise is supposed to have received revision and improvement from him. Exactly below Goldsmith's were the chambers of Mr. Blackstone; and the rising lawyer, at this time finishing the fourth volume of his Commentaries, is reported to have made frequent complaint of the distracting social noises that went on above. A Mr. Children succeeded him, and made the same complaint.

The nature of the noises may be presumed from what is said on the authority of a worthy Irish merchant settled in London (Mr. Seguin), to two of whose children Goldsmith stood godfather; and whose intimacy with the poet descended as an heirloom to his family, by whom every tradition of it has been carefully cherished. They spoke to Mr. Prior of other Irish friends (Mr. Pollard, of Castle Pollard, and his wife) who visited London at this time, and were entertained by Goldsmith. They remembered dinners at which Johnson, Percy, and Bickerstaff, were guests. They talked of supper parties with younger people, as well in the London chambers as in suburban lodgings; preceded by blind-man's buff, forfeits, or games of cards; and where Goldsmith, festively entertaining them all, made frugal supper for himself off boiled milk. They related how he would sing all kinds of Irish songs; with what special enjoyment he gave the Scotch ballad of Johnny Armstrong (his old nurse's favourite); how cheerfully he would put the front of his wig behind, or contribute in any other way to the general amusement; and to what

accompaniment of uncontrollable laughter he danced a 'minuet with Mrs. Seguin.' Little of the self-satisfied importance which Boswell is most fond of connecting with him, is to be discovered in recollections like these.

And they are confirmed by Cooke's more precise account of scenes he witnessed at the Wednesday's club, where Goldsmith's more intimate associates seem now to have attempted to restrain the too great familiarity he permitted to the humbler members. An amusing instance is related. The fat man who sang songs had a friend in a certain Mr. B., described as a good sort of man and an eminent pig-butcher; who piqued himself very much on his good fellowship with the author of the Traveller, and whose constant manner of drinking to him was, 'Come, Noll, ' here's my service to you, old boy!' Repeating this one night after the comedy was played, and when there was a very full club, Glover went over to Goldsmith, and said in a whisper that he ought not to allow such liberties. 'Let ' him alone,' answered Goldsmith, and you'll see how 'civilly I'll let him down.' He waited a little; and on the next pause in the conversation, called out aloud, with a marked expression of politeness and courtesy, Mr. B., I ' have the honor of drinking your good health.' 'Thanke'e, 'thanke'e, Noll,' returned Mr. B., pulling the pipe out of his mouth, and answering with great briskness. 'Well, 'where's the advantage of your reproof?' asked Glover. 'In truth,' remarked Goldsmith, with an air of goodhumoured disappointment, intended to give greater force

to a stroke of meditated wit, 'I give it up; I ought to ' have known before now, there is no putting a pig in the ' right way.'

The same authority informs us of liberties not quite so harmless as Mr. B.'s, and wit quite as flat as Goldsmith's, practised now and then on the poet for more general amusement, by the choicer spirits of the Globe. For example, he had come into the club-room one night, eager and clamorous for his supper, having been out on some 'shooting party,' and taken nothing since the morning. The wags were still round the table, at which they had been enjoying themselves, when a dish of excellent mutton chops, ordered as he came in, was set before the famishing poet. Instantly one of the company rose, and went to another part of the room. A second pushed his chair away from the table. A third showed more decisive signs of distress, connecting it with the chops in a manner not to be mistaken. How the waiter could 'have dared to produce such a dish,' was at last the reluctant answer to Goldsmith's alarmed enquiries : 'the

chops were offensive; the fellow ought to be made to eat 'them himself.' Anxious for supper as he was, the plate was at once thrust from him; the waiter violently summoned into the room; and an angry order given that he should try to make his own repast of what he had so impudently set before a hungry man. The waiter, now conscious of a trick, complied with affected reluctance; and Goldsmith, more quickly appeased than enraged, as his wont was, ordered a fresh supper for himself, and a dram

'for the poor devil of a waiter, who might otherwise get 'sick from so nauseating a meal.'

Before I pass from these humble records of the Wednesday's club, it will be proper to mention Kelly's withdrawal from it. Alleged attacks by Goldsmith on his comedy having been repeated to him with exaggeration such as a remark, on being told of the contemplated foreign translations, that except for the booths of foreign fairs they were little likely to be required; and an impetuous refusal to write again for the stage, while such trash as False Delicacy continued to attract audiences: he resolved to resent the unfriendliness. What the exact character of their friendship had been, I cannot precisely ascertain; but though recent, it had probably for a time been intimate. Kelly succeeded Jones as editor of the Public Ledger, and the mutual connexion with Newbery must have brought them much together; nor is it difficult to believe the report of which I have found several traces, that but for Kelly's sensible remonstrance on the prudential score, his wife's sister, who lived in his house (as pretty and as poor as his wife, being simply as she had been, an expert and industrious needlewoman), would have been carried off and wedded by Goldsmith. Since their respective comedies they had not met; when, abruptly encountering each other one night in the Covent Garden green-room, Goldsmith stammered out awkward congratulations to Kelly on his recent success, to which the other, prepared for war, promptly replied that he could not thank him

because he could not believe him. From that hour they never spoke to one another:' and Kelly, reluctant that Goldsmith should be troubled to 'do anything more for him,' resigned the club. The latter allusion was (by way of satire) to a story he used to tell of the terms of Goldsmith's answer to the first dinner invitation he had given him. 'I would with pleasure accept your kind invitation,' so ran the whimsical and very pardonable speech, but to 'tell you the truth, my dear boy, my Traveller has found

me a home in so many places, that I am engaged, I 'believe, three days. Let me see: to-day I dine with 'Edmund Burke, to-morrow with Doctor Nugent' (again with Burke, that is, for he and his father-in-law then lived together), and the next day with Topham Beauclerc : but 'I'll tell you what I'll do for you, I'll dine with you on 'Saturday.' Now Kelly, though conceited and not very scrupulous, was not an ill-natured man, on the whole he wrote a novel called Louisa Mildmay, which, with some scenes of a questionable kind of warmth, an ill-natured man could not have written: but he was not justified in the tone he took during this quarrel, and after it. It was not for him to sneer at Goldsmith's follies, who was for nothing more celebrated than his unconscious imitations of them; who was so fond, in his little gleam of prosperity, of displaying on his sideboard the plate he possessed, that he added to it his spurs; and who, even as he laughed at his more famous countryman's Tyrian bloom and satin, was displaying his own corpulent little person at all public places