'case will deserve our pity: too antique to please one party, ' and too modern for the other, he is deserted by both, read 'by few, and soon forgotten by all, except his enemies.' Perhaps if his friends had forgotten him, the Doctor might have profited. The Epigoniad,' continued Goldsmith, 'seems to be one of those new old performances; 'a work that would no more have pleased a peripatetic of 'the Academic grove, than it will captivate the unlettered 'subscriber to one of our circulating libraries.' Nevertheless the Scottish clique made a stand for their rough Homeric Doctor. Smith, Robertson, and Home were vehement in laudation; Charles Townshend (who,' writes Hume to Adam Smith, 'passes for the cleverest fellow in England') said aye to all their praises; and when, some months afterward, Hume came up to London to bring out the Tudor volumes of his History, he published puffs of Wilkie under assumed signatures, in various magazines, and reported progress to the Edinburgh circle. It was remarkably 'uphill work,' he said; and broadly hinted that the verdict of the Monthly Review (vulgarly interpolated, I should mention, by Griffiths himself) would have upon the whole to stand. However,' he adds, in one of his letters to Robertson, 'if you want a little flattery for the ' author, which I own is very refreshing to an author, you 'may tell him that Lord Chesterfield said to me he was a 'great poet. I imagine that Wilkie will be very much 'elevated by praise from an English Earl, and a Knight 'of the Garter, and an Ambassador, and a Secretary of

'State.' It is to be hoped he was, and proportionately forgetful of low abuse from obscure hirelings in booksellers' garrets.

'An Irish gentleman,' Hume proceeded to tell his friends, 'wrote lately a very pretty treatise on the Sub'lime.' This Irish gentleman had indeed written so pretty a treatise on the Sublime, that the task-work of our critic became work of praise. When I was begin'ning the world,' said Johnson in his old age to Fanny Burney, and was nothing and nobody, the joy of my life 'was to fire at all the established wits.' Perhaps it is a natural infirmity when one is nothing and nobody, and when Goldsmith became something and somebody, his friends still charged it upon him. A critic of the profounder sort he never was: criticism of that order was not known in his day but it is less the want of depth, than the presence of envy, which it has been the fashion. to urge against him. It will become us therefore in fairness to observe, that here, in the garret of Griffiths, he is tolerably free from it. Whether it is to seize him in the drawing-room of Reynolds, will be matter of later inquiry. He has no pretension yet to enter himself brother or craftsman of the Guild of Literature, and we find him in his censures just and temperate, and liberal as well as candid in his praise; glad to give added fame to established wits, as even the youths Bonnell Thornton and George Colman were already beginning to be esteemed; and ready, in such a case as Burke's, to help

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that the wit should be established. In the same number of the Review, he noticed the collection into four small volumes of the Connoisseur and the appearance in its three-shilling pamphlet of A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. The Connoisseur he honoured with the title of Friend of Society, wherein reference was possibly intended to the defective side of that Lectureship of Society, to which the serious and resolute author of the Rambler had been lately self-appointed perpetual professor. He rather converses,' said Goldsmith, 'with the ease of a cheerful companion, 'than dictates, as other writers in this class have done, 'with the affected superiority of an author. He is the 'first writer since Bickerstaff who has been perfectly 'satirical yet perfectly goodnatured; and who never, for 'the sake of declamation, represents simple folly as abso'lutely criminal.' Our author by compulsion seemed here to anticipate his authorship by choice, and with indistinct yet hopeful glance beyond The Dunciad and its deities, perhaps turned with better faith to Burke's essay on The Beautiful. His criticism was elaborate and excellent; he objected to many parts of the theory, and especially to the materialism on which it founded the connection of objects of pleasure with a necessary relaxation of the nerves; but these objections, discreet and well considered, gave strength and relish to its praise; and Burke spoke to many of his friends of the pleasure it had given him.

And now appeared, in three large quarto volumes,

followed within six months by a fourth, the Complete History of England, deduced from the Descent of Julius Cæsar to the Treaty of Aix la Chapelle in 1748. Containing the Transactions of One Thousand Eight Hundred and Three Years. By T. Smollett, M.D. The wonder of this performance had been its incredibly rapid production: the author of Random and Pickle having in the space of fourteen months scoured through those eighteen centuries. It was a scheme of the London booksellers to thwart the success of Hume, which promised just then to be too considerable for an undertaking in which The Craft had no concern. The Commonwealth volume, profiting by religious outcry against its author, was selling vigorously; people were inquiring for the preceding Stuart volume; and Paternoster Row, alarmed for its rights and properties in Standard History Books, resolved to take the field before the promised Tudor volumes could be brought to market. They backed their best man, and succeeded. The Complete History, we are told, 'had a very disagree ́able effect on Mr. Hume's performance.' It had also, it would appear, a very disagreeable effect on Mr. Hume's temper. 'A Frenchman came to me,' he writes to Robertson, and spoke of translating my new volume of 'history but as he also mentioned his intention of trans'lating Smollett, I gave him no encouragement to proceed.' It had beside, it may be added, a very disagreeable effect on the tempers of other people. Warburton heard of its swift sale while his own Divine Legation lay heavy and

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quiet at his publisher's; and the Vagabond Scot who 'writes nonsense', was the character vouchsafed to Smollett by the vehement proud priest. But it is again incumbent on me to say that Goldsmith keeps his temper: that, in this as in former instances, there is no disposition to carp at a great success or quarrel with a celebrated name. His notice has evident marks of the interpolation of Griffiths, though that worthy's more deadly hostility to Smollett had not yet begun; but even as it stands, in the Review which had so many points of personal and political opposition to the subject of it, it is manly and kind. The weak places were pointed out with gentleness, while Goldsmith strongly seized on what he felt to be the strength of Smollett. 'The Style of this historian,' he said, 'is clear, nervous, and flowing. It is impossible for 'a reader of taste not to be pleased with the perspicuity ' and elegance of his style.'

For the critic's handling in lighter matters, I will mention what he said of a book by Jonas Hanway. This was the Jonas of whom Doctor Johnson affirmed, that he acquired some reputation by travelling abroad, but lost it all by travelling at home: not a witticism, but a sober truth. His book about Persia was excellent, and his book about Portsmouth indifferent. But though an eccentric, he was a very benevolent and earnest man. He made the common mistake of thinking himself even more wise than he was good, but he had too much reason to complain, which he was always doing, of a general want of earnestness