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himself the contempts and sneers of old. Yet, though the sadness he almost wholly suppressed while the appointment was but in expectation, there was now less reason to indulge; to seem other than he was, even thus, was an effort far from successful, and marked with a somewhat painful distraction of feeling and phrase this letter to Mr. Hodson.

"I am certainly wrong," he continues, "not to be contented with what I already possess, trifling as it is; for should I ask myself one serious question, what is it I want? what can I answer. My desires are as capricious as the big-bellied woman's, who longed for a piece of her husband's nose. I have no certainty, it is true; but why cannot I do as some men of more merit, who have lived on more precarious terms? Scarron used jestingly to call himself the Marquis of Quenault, which was the name of the bookseller who employed him; and why may not I assert my privilege and quality on the same pretensions? Yet, upon deliberation, whatever airs I give myself on this side of the water, my dignity, I fancy, would be evaporated before I reached the other. I know you have in Ireland a very indifferent idea of a man who writes for bread, though Swift and Steele did so in the earliest part of their lives. You imagine, I suppose, that every author by profession lives in a garret, wears shabby clothes, and converses with the meanest company. Yet I do not believe there is one single writer who has abilities to translate a French novel, that does not keep better company, wear finer cloths, and live more genteelly, than many who pride themselves for nothing else in Ireland. I confess it again, my dear Dan, that nothing but the wildest ambition could prevail on me to leave the enjoyment of the refined conversation which I am sometimes permitted to partake in, for uncertain fortune and paltry show.

You cannot conceive how I am sometimes divided. To leave all that is dear to me gives me pain; but when I consider I may possibly acquire a genteel independance for life; when I think of that dignity which philosophy claims, to raise itself above contempt and ridicule; when I think thus, I eagerly long to embrace every opportunity of separating myself from the vulgar, as much in my circumstances as I am already in my sentiments. I am going to publish a book, for an account of which I refer you to a letter which I wrote to my brother Goldsmith. Circulate for me among your acquaintances a hundred proposals, which I have given orders may be sent to you; and if, in pursuance of such circulation, you should receive any subscriptions, let them, when collected, be transmitted to Mr. Bradley, who will give you a receipt for the same. I know not how my desire of seeing Ireland, which had so long slept, has again revived with so much ardour. So weak is my temper, and so unsteady, that I am frequently tempted, particularly when low spirited, to return home and leave my fortune, though just beginning to look kinder. But it shall not be. In five or six years I expect to indulge these transports. I find I want constitution, and a strong steady disposition, which alone makes men great. I will, however, correct my faults, since I am conscious of them."

With such professions weakness continues to indulge itself, and faults are perpetuated. But great allowances are due. Of the state of Irish society, which he knew so well and so often sarcastically painted, these Irish friends, and the circle he addressed through them, were clearly very notable specimens: his prosperous brother-in-law, for whom his youth had been embittered with loss and worldly disadvantage, and whose most solid repayment of help came in shape of a prudent maxim or news of an abortive

subscription, being perhaps the best of them. The rest, careless, yet suspicious; vain, whether rich or poor; extravagant in everything but honourable action; pretending, vulgar; and priding themselves on nothing so much as the keeping better company, wearing finer clothes, and living more genteely, than their neighbours. Among such there was little chance of decent consideration, truly, if a garret, shabby clothes, and conversation with the meanest company, were set seriously and hopelessly forth as his only and inextricable doom. The real error lay in the giving faith of any kind to this external aid; since it weakened the help that rested in himself. When the claim of ten pounds for his appointment-warrant came upon him, it found him less prepared because of vague expectations raised on these letters to Mills and the Lauders. But any delay might be fatal; and in that condition of extremity, whose 'wants,' alas, are anything but 'capricious,' he bethought him of the Critical Review, saw promise in its rivalry to Griffiths, and went to its proprietor Mr. Archibald Hamilton.

The bookseller, who had just made a large fortune out of Smollett's History, was a shrewd man, and perhaps already conscious of the value of Griffiths' discarded writer. He made him a small advance, and received three papers for the Critical. One appeared before the close of the year, and the others were in the new year number. All three had relation to a special subject; and, as connected with such a man's obscurest fortunes,

have an interest hardly less than that of writings connected with his fame. An author is seen in the effulgence of established repute, or discovered by the cries of struggling distress. By both 'you shall know 'him.'

Ovid was the leading topic in all three. His Fasti, translated by a silly schoolmaster named Massey; his Epistles, translated by a pedantic pedagogue named Barrett; and an antidote to his Art of Love, in an Art of Pleasing by Mr. Marriott; were the matters taken in hand. The Art of Pleasing so far suggested comparison with the Roman poet, that as one performance of Ovid was styled Tristia from the subject, Mr. Marriott's pro'duction should be styled Tristia from the execution; while the English Fasti induced not only hearty sorrow

that our poor friend, Ovid, should send his Sacred 'Calendar to us by the hands of Mr. William Massey, 'who, like an ignorant footman, has entirely forgot his 'master's message, and substituted another in its room " very unlike it,' but a hope not less hearty that the said Mr. Massey would not for the future injure those poor 'ancients who never injured him, by pestering the world 'with translations that even his own schoolboys should 'be whipped for.' Nor with less just severity was the last of these unhappy gentlemen rebuked. With very lively power he dissected the absurdities of the English version of his poor classical friend's Epistles: a classic to all appearance, doomed, he humorously interposed, 'to success

' in Metamorphoses: being sometimes transposed by 'schoolmasters unacquainted with English, and sometimes 'transversed by ladies unacquainted with Latin: alter'nately wearing the dress of a pedant or a rake, and ' either crawling in humble prose or having hints ex'plained into unbashful meaning. He shewed that Mr. Barrett was a bad critic, and no poet; and he passed from lofty to low in his illustrations, with very amusing effect. 'Parenthetically clapping one sentence within another,' seemed Mr. Barrett's great accomplishment; and this, said Goldsmith, 'contributes not a little to obscurity; and 'obscurity, we all know, is nearly allied to admiration. 'Thus, when the reader begins a sentence which he finds pregnant with another, which still teems with a third, and so on, he feels the same surprise which a countryman does at Bartholomew fair. Hocus shows a bag, in appearance empty; slap, and out come a dozen new laid eggs; slap again, and the number is doubled; but what ' is his amazement, when it swells with the hen that laid ' them!' The poetry and scholarship shared their fate. of the thriving grammar-school of Ashford in Kent, and having the consequence and pretension of a so-called learned man, 'we are not going,' said Goldsmith, 'to 'permit an ostentation of learning to pass for merit, nor 'to give a pedant quarter on the score of his industry,

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criticism disposed of, the

Mr. Barrett being master

' even though he took refuge behind Arabic, and pow ́dered his hair with Hieroglyphics.'

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