THE means of existence, long sought, seemed thus to be found, when, in his twenty-ninth

year, Oliver Goldsmith sat

down to the precarious task

work of Author by Profession. He

had exerted no control over the circumstances in which he took up the pen : nor had any friendly external aid, in an impulse of kindness, offered it to his hand. To be swaddled, rocked, and dandled into Authorship is the lot of more fortunate men: it was with Goldsmith the stern and last resource of his struggle with Adversity. As

in the country-barn he would have played Scrub or Richard; as he prescribed for the poorer than himself at Bankside, until worse than their necessities drove him to herd with the beggars in Axe Lane; as in

Salisbury Court he corrected the press among Mr. Richardson's workmen, on Tower Hill doled out physic over Mr. Jacob's counter, and at Peckham dispensed the more nauseating dose to young gentlemen of Doctor Milner's academy: he had here entered into Mr. Griffiths' service, and put on the livery of the Monthly Review.

The

He was man-of-letters, then, at last; but had gratified no passion, and attained no object of ambition. hope of greatness and distinction, day-star of his wanderings and his privations, was at this hour, more than it had ever been, dim, distant, cold. A practical scheme of literary life had as yet struck no root in his mind; and the assertion of later years, that he was past thirty before he was really attached to literature and sensible that he had found his vocation, is no doubt true. What the conditions of his present employment were, he knew well : that if he had dared to indulge any hopes of finer texture, if he had shewn the fragments of his poem, if he had produced the acts of the tragedy read to Richardson, Mr. and Mrs. Griffiths must have taken immediate counsel on

the expenses of his board. He was there, as he had been in other places of servitude, because the dogs of hunger were at his heels. He was not a strong man, as I have said; but neither was his weakness such, that he shrank from the responsibilities it brought. When suffering came, in whatever form, he met it with a quiet, manful endurance: no gnashing of the teeth, or wringing of the hands. Among the lowest of human beings he could take

his place, as he afterwards proved his right to sit among the highest, by the strength of his affectionate sympathies with the nature common to all. And so sustained through the scenes of wretchedness he passed, he had done more, though with little consciousness of his own, to achieve his destiny, than if, transcending the worldly plans of wise Irish friends, he had even clambered to the bishop's bench, or out-practised the whole college of physicians.

The time is at hand in his history, when all this becomes clear. Outside the garret-window of Mr. Griffiths, by the light which the miserable labour of the Monthly Review will let in upon the heart-sick labourer, it may soon be seen. Stores of observation, of feeling, and experience, hidden from himself at present, are by that light to be revealed. It is a thought to carry us through this new scene of suffering, with new and unaccustomed hope.

Goldsmith never publicly avowed what he had written in the Monthly Review; any more than the Roman poet talked of the millstone he turned in his days of hunger. Men who have been at the galleys, though for no crime of their own committing, are not wise to brag of the work they performed there. All he stated was, that all he wrote was tampered with by Griffiths or his wife. Smollett has depicted this lady in his Antiquated Female Critic; and when 'illiterate, bookselling Griffiths' declared unequal war against that potent antagonist; protesting that the Monthly was not written by physicians

'without practice, authors without learning, men without 'decency, or writers without judgment;' Smollett retorted in a few broad unscrupulous lines on the whole party of the rival Review. The Critical is certainly not written,' he said, by a parcel of obscure hirelings, under the ' restraint of a bookseller and his wife, who presume to 'revise, alter, and amend the articles. The principal 'writers in the Critical are unconnected with booksellers, 'unawed by old women, and independent of each other.' Commanded by a bookseller, awed by an old woman, and miserably dependant, one of these obscure hirelings desired and resolved, as far as it was possible, to remain in his obscurity; but a copy of the Monthly, which belonged to Griffiths and in which he had privately marked the authorship of most of the articles, withdraws the veil. It is for no purpose that Goldsmith could have disapproved, or I should scorn to assist in calling to memory

what he would himself have committed to neglect. The best writers can spare much; it is only the worst who have nothing to spare.

The first subject taken from the bookseller's stores