may live a couple of hundred years longer, only to see the day: when the Scaligers and Daciers will vindicate my character, give learned editions of my labours, and bless the times with copious comments on the text. You shall see how they will fish up the heavy scoundrels who disregard me now, or will then offer to cavil at my productions. How will they bewail the times that suffered so much genius to lie neglected! If ever my works find their way to Tartary or China, I know the consequence. Suppose one of your Chinese Owanowitzers instructing one of your Tartarian Chianobacchhi. You see I use Chinese names to show my own erudition, as I shall soon make our Chinese talk like an Englishman to show

his. This may be the subject of the lecture: [Oliver Goldsmith flourished in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He lived to be an hundred and three years old..... age may justly be styled the sun of. ..... and the Confucius of Europe.. learned world, were anonymous, and have probably been lost, because united with those of others. The first avowed piece the world has of his, is entitled an 'Essay on the Present State of Taste and Literature in Europe;' a work well worth its weight in diamonds. In this he profoundly explains what learning is, and what learning is not. In this he proves that blockheads are not men of wit, and yet that men of wit are actually blockheads. But as I choose neither to tire my Chinese Philosopher, nor you, nor myself, I must discontinue the oration, in order to give you a good pause for admiration; and I find myself most violently disposed to admire too. Let me, then, stop my fancy to take a view of my future self; and, as the boys say, light down to see myself on horseback. Well, now I am down, where the devil is I? OH GODS! GODS! HEre in a garret,

WRITING FOR BREAD, AND EXPECTING TO BE DUNNED FOR A MILKSCORE ! However, dear Bob, whether in penury or affluence, serious or gay, I am ever wholly thine, OLIVER GOLDSMITH. Give my; no, not compliments neither; but something... most warm and

sincere wish that you can conceive, to your mother Mrs. Bryanton, to Miss Bryanton, to yourself; and if there be a favourite dog in the family, let me be remembered to it."

IN A GARRET, WRITING FOR BREAD, AND EXPECTING TO BE DUNNED FOR A MILK-SCORE. The ordinary fate of Letters in that age. There had been a Christian religion extant for now seventeen hundred and fifty-seven years; for so long a time had the world been acquainted with its spiritual responsibilities and necessities; yet here, in the middle of the eighteenth century, was the one common eminence conceded to the spiritual teacher, the man who comes upon the earth to lift his fellow-men above its miry ways. Up in a garret, writing for bread he cannot get, and dunned for a milk-score he cannot pay. And age after age, the comfortable prosperous man sees it; and calls for water and washes his hands of it; and is glad to think it no business of his; and in that year of grace and of Goldsmith's suffering, had doubtless adorned his diningroom with the Distrest Poet of the inimitable Mr. Hogarth, and invited laughter from easy guests at the garret and the milk-score. Yet could they have known the danger to even their worldliest comforts, then impending, perhaps they had not laughed so heartily. For were not those very citizens to be indebted to Goldsmith in after years: for cheerful hours, and happy thoughts, and fancies that would smooth life's path to their children's children? And now, without a friend, with hardly bread to eat, and uncheered by a hearty word or a smile to help him on, he sits in his

melancholy garret, and those fancies die within him. It is but an accident now, that the good Vicar shall be born; that the Gentleman in Black shall dispense his charities; that Croaker shall grieve; Tony Lumpkin laugh; or the

sweet soft echo of the Deserted Village come

always back upon the heart, in charity, and

kindness, and sympathy

For,

Despair is in the garret;

and the poet, overmastered by distress, seeks

only the means of flight and exile. With a

day-dream to his old Irish playfellow, a sigh for the 'heavy scoundrels' who disregard him, and a wail for the age to which genius is a mark of mockery; he turns to that first avowed piece, which, being also his last, is to prove that 'blockheads are not men of wit, and yet that 'men of wit are actually blockheads.'

R

A proposition which men of wit have laboured at from early times; have proved in theory and worked out in practice. 'How many base men,' shrieked one of them in Elizabeth's day, who felt that his wit had but made him the greater blockhead; 'how many base men that want 'those parts I have, do enjoy content at will, and have 'wealth at command! I call to mind a cobbler, that is 'worth five hundred pounds; an hostler, that has built a goodly inn; a carman in a leather pilche, that has 'whipt a thousand pounds out of his horse's tail and I 'ask if I have more than these. Am I not better born?

am I not better brought up? yea, and better favoured! 'And yet am I for ever to sit up late, and rise early, and 'contend with the cold, and converse with scarcity, and 'be a beggar? How am I crossed, or whence is this curse, that a scrivener should be better paid than a 'scholar!' Poor Nash! he had not even Goldsmith's fortitude, and his doleful outcry for money was a lamentable exhibition, out of which no good could come. the feeling in the miserable man's heart, struck at the root of a secret discontent which not the strongest men can resist altogether; and which Goldsmith did not affect to repress, when he found himself, as he says, starving in those streets where Butler and Otway starved 'before him.'

But

The words are in a letter, written the day after that to Bryanton, bearing the same date of Temple Exchange Coffee House, and sent to Mrs. Lauder; the Jane Contarine

of his happy old Kilmore time. Mr. Mills afterward begged this letter of the Lauders, and from the friend to whom he gave it, Lord Carleton's nephew, it was copied for Bishop Percy by Edmond Malone. As in those already given, the style, with its simple air of authorship, is eminently good and happy. The assumption of a kind of sturdy independence, the playful admission of wellknown faults, and the incidental slight confession of sorrows; have graceful relation to the person addressed, and the terms on which they stood of old. His uncle was now in a hopeless state of living death, from which, in a few months, the grave released him; and to this the letter affectingly refers.

"If you should ask," it began, "why, in an interval of so many years, you never heard from me, permit me, Madam, to ask the same question. I have the best excuse in recrimination. I wrote to Kilmore from Leyden in Holland, from Louvain in Flanders, and Rouen in France, but received no answer. To what could I attribute this silence but to displeasure or forgetfulness? Whether I was right in my conjecture I do not pretend to determine; but this I must ingenuously own, that I have a thousand times in my turn endeavoured to forget them, whom I could not but look upon as forgetting me. I have attempted to blot their names from my memory, and, I confess it, spent whole days in efforts to tear their image from my heart. Could I have succeeded, you had not now been troubled with this renewal of a discontinued correspondence; but, as every effort the restless make to procure sleep serves but to keep them waking, all my attempts contributed to impress what I would forget deeper on my imagination. But this subject I would willingly turn from, and