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' each of them had his three thousand a-year and his three 'thousand bottles of claret and champagne,' were insensate and reckless of disgrace. The language of Walpole is not to be adopted to its full extent, it may be true, any more than that of the more terrible assailant who was now (with such signatures as Mnemon, Lucius, and Atticus) sharpening his nameless weapons for more fatal and enduring aim; but in neither case is the desperate bitterness to be condemned as uncalled-for, simply because it involved individual injustice. The time had come when, even at the expense of individual suffering, it was well that such things should be thought and said; and when it was fitting that public men, privately not unamiable or dishonest, should at length be made bitterly responsible for public wrongs, whether sanctioned or committed. Lord Chatham was no worshipper of the mob, but this year roused him from his apathy, and replumed his popular fame. He saw much of what at last was impending. In 'timber-merchants,' who began now to contest seats in the large cities against the Selwyns and men of the aristocratic families, he saw something more than 'd-d carpenters' who (according to Lord Carlisle) should be 'kept in their saw-pits.' A new power was about to make itself felt, and it found Chatham prepared. He withdrew his name from the Ministry, already reeling under the storm of Wilkes; Shelburne soon after followed him; Camden was not long in following Shelburne; the poor Duke of Newcastle, inapt for new notions, sank into the grave with his old ones; and young Charles James Fox,

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for the first time, heard Mr. Burke' much talked about at his father's table. The latter incident may mark what the great families found it now no longer possible to ignore ; though it is just as likely that the purchase of an estate induced the talk, as certain late fiery speeches in the house. Burke became this year a landed proprietor. With money bequeathed him by his father and brother, and with large help from Lord Rockingham (at once intended to requite service and render it more effective), he purchased an estate in Buckinghamshire called Gregories or Butlers Court, about a mile from the market town of Beaconsfield, and subsequently known by the latter name. Assisted as he was, the effort must have straitened his means; for in the following year he asks a loan of a thousand pounds from Garrick, which his dear David,' his dearest Garrick,' at once accords. The estate was twenty-four miles from London; and within a hundred yards of the house were the ruins of what had once been Waller's home. Gregories itself has since become a ruin, having been consumed by fire; but nobler memories than the old poet's are those that now linger round what once was the home of Edmund Burke, and Goldsmith has his share in them.

Exciting news at the Edgeware Cottage that Beaconsfield purchase must at least have been, though even the noise of Wilkes had failed to force an entrance there. In October, Goldsmith was again in the Temple, and is to be traced at his old haunts, and in the theatres. Somewhat later in the season that now began, Garrick brought out a

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new tragedy, by Home; but so hateful had Wilkes again made the Scotch, that its author's name had to be suppressed, its own name anglicized, and a young English gentleman brought up from Oxford to the rehearsals, to personate the author. Goldsmith discovered the trick, and is said by Davies to have proposed a hostile party against the play; but this was the transient thought of a giddy man, who would as heartily have joined a party to sup'port the piece.' It was probably renewed spleen at Garrick; whose recent patronage of Kenrick, for no apparent reason than his means of mischief and his continued abuse of more successful men, had not tended to oblivion of older offences. Kenrick's latest form of malice was the epigram; but the wit was less apparent than the venom, of connecting Goldsmith's with other names just now rife in the playbills.

What are your Britons, Romans, Grecians,
Compared with thorough-bred Milesians?
Step into Griffin's shop, he 'll tell you,

Of Goldsmith, Bickerstaff, and Kelly. . .
And take one Irish evidence for t'other,

Ev'n Homer's self is but their foster-brother.

The last allusion was to a story the humbler wits were now telling against Goldsmith. Bickerstaff had invited a party to his house to hear one of his dramatic pieces read; and among the company were Goldsmith and one Paul Hiffernan, already mentioned as one of his Grub Street protégés, of the Purdon and Pilkington class. He was an eccentric, drunken, idle, Irish creature; educated for a

physician, and not without talents and even scholarship; but a continual victim to what he called impecuniosity, and so unprovided with self-help against the disease, that he lived altogether upon the help of other people. Where he lived, however, nobody could ever find out he gave his address at the Bedford; and beyond that, curiosity was baffled, though many and most amusing were its attempts to discover more: nor was it till after his death that his whereabout was found, in one of the wretched little courts out of St. Martin's Lane. He wrote newspaper paragraphs in the morning; foraged for his dinner; slept out the early part of the night in one of the theatres; and, in return for certain critical and convivial displays which made his company attractive after play-hours, was always sure of a closing entertainment at the Black Lion in Russell Street, or the Cyder Cellar in Maiden Lane. Latterly, he had taken altogether to dramatic criticism, for which he had some talent (his earliest Irish efforts in that line, when he ought to have been practising his profession, had been thought mighty pleasant by Burke, then a lad at Dublin College); and this, with its usual effect upon the Drury Lane manager, had lately obtained him a sort of pension from Garrick. It was the great actor's worst weakness to involve himself thus with the meaner newspaper men; and it was only this very year he was warned by a letter from Foote, of its danger in the case of Hiffernan. Upon the whole,' wrote that master in the art of literary libel (there is nothing like the voice of a Gracchus

for a good complaint against sedition), 'it is, I think, worthy of consideration, whether there is not something 'immoral, as well as impolitic, in encouraging a fellow, 'who, without parts, principles, property, or profession, has subsisted for these twenty years by the qualities of a ' literary footpad.' Precisely that newspaper jobbery it was, however, to whose success the absence of parts, principles, property, and profession is essential, which had procured Hiffernan his invitation to the reading of Bickerstaff's play. A good dinner preluded the reading; and much justice was done to this, and to the glass which circulated for half an hour afterward, by 'Hiff:' but his judgment, and enjoyment, of the play, were much less clearly evinced; and when the first batch of opinions were collected at the end of the first act, Very well, by —, very well!' was all that could be got from him. Alas for what followed! 'About the middle of the second act,' says the teller of the anecdote, 'he began to nod; and in a little time afterwards 'to snore so loud that the author could scarcely be heard. 'Bickerstaff felt a little embarrassed; but raising his voice, 'went on. Hiffernan's tones, however, increased; till at last 'Goldsmith could hold out no longer, but cried out, "Never ""mind the brute, Bick! go on. So he would have served "Homer if he was here, and reading his own works.""

Nothing so easy for Kenrick as to turn this into a comparison of Bickerstaff to Homer; and no laugh was heartier than Garrick's at the new proof of Goldsmith's folly. But for his countenance of the libeller he was doomed to be

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