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Enquiry, of the manly tendency, and freedom from personal spleen, apparent in the structure of the appeal which was built upon it.

"No nation gives greater encouragements to learning than we do; yet none are so injudicious in the application . . All our magnificent endowments of colleges are erroneous; and at best, more frequently enrich the prudent than reward the ingenious. . Every encouragement given to stupidity, when known to be such, is a negative insult to genius. This appears in nothing more evident than the undistinguished success of those who solicit subscriptions. We see the latter made a resource of indigence, and requested, not as rewards of merit, but as a relief of distress. If tradesmen happen to want skill in conducting their own business, yet they are able to write a book: if mechanics want money, or ladies shame, they write books and solicit subscriptions. Scarcely a morning passes, that proposals of this nature are not thrust into the half opening doors of the rich; with perhaps a paltry petition, showing the author's wants but not his merits. . . What then are the proper encouragements of genius? I answer, subsistence and respect."

This is not the language of one who would have had Literature again subsist, as of old, on servile adulation and vulgar charity. Goldsmith, indeed, seems rather to have thought with an earnest man of genius in our own day, that grants of money are by no means the chief things wanted for proper organisation of the literary class. 'To give our men of letters,' says Mr. Carlyle, 'stipends, endowments, and all furtherance of cash, will 'do little toward the business. On the whole, one is

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weary of hearing about the omnipotence of money. I 'will say rather, that, for a genuine man, it is no evil to 'be poor. Money, in truth, can do much, but it cannot 'do all. We must know the province of it, and confine it 'there; and even spurn it back, when it wishes to get 'farther.' One of the lively illustrations of the Enquiry is not very opposite to this. The beneficed divine,' says Goldsmith, whose wants are only imaginary, expostulates 'as bitterly as the poorest author that ever snuffed his 'candle with finger and thumb. Should interest or good 'fortune advance the divine to a bishopric, or the poor son ' of Parnassus into that place which the other has resigned, 'both are authors no longer. The one goes to prayers 'once a day, kneels upon cushions of velvet, and thanks gracious heaven for having made the circumstances of all 'mankind so extremely happy; the other battens on all 'the delicacies of life, enjoys his wife and his easy chair, ' and sometimes, for the sake of conversation, deplores the 'luxury of these degenerate days. All encouragements 'to merit are misapplied, which make the author too 'rich to continue his profession.'

But he would not therefore starve him, or to the mercies of blind chance altogether surrender him. He recals a time he would wish to see revived; when, with little of wealth or worldly luxury, the writer could yet command esteem for himself and reverence for the claims of his calling; and he dwells upon the contrast of existing times, in language which will hereafter connect

itself with the deliberate dislike of Walpole, and the uneasy jealousy of Garrick.

"This link," he exclaims, now seems entirely broken. Since the days of a certain prime-minister of inglorious memory, the learned have been kept pretty much at a distance. A jockey, or a laced player, supplies the place of the scholar, the poet, or the man of virtue... Wit, when thus neglected by the great, is generally despised by the vulgar. Those who are unacquainted with the world are apt to fancy the man of wit as leading a very agreeable life. They conclude, perhaps, that he is attended to with silent admiration, and dictates to the rest of mankind with all the eloquence of conscious superiority. Very different is his present situation. He is called an author, and all know that an author is a thing only to be laughed at. His person, not his jest, becomes the mirth of the company. At his approach, the most fat unthinking face brightens into malicious meaning. Even aldermen laugh, and avenge on him the ridicule which was lavished on their forefathers."

Etiam victis redit in præcordia virtus
Victoresque cadunt.

The poet's poverty, continued Goldsmith, "is a standing topic of contempt. His writing for bread is an unpardonable offence. Perhaps of all mankind an author in these times is used most hardly. We keep him poor, and yet revile his poverty. Like angry parents, who correct their children till they cry and then correct them for crying, we reproach him for living by his wit, and yet allow him no other means to live. His taking refuge in garrets and cellars has of late been violently objected to him, and that by men who, I dare hope, are more apt to pity than insult his distress. Is poverty the writer's fault? No doubt he knows how to prefer a bottle of champagne to the nectar of the neighbouring alehouse, or a venison pasty

to a plate of potatoes. Want of delicacy is not in him, but in those who deny him the opportunity of making an elegant choice. Wit certainly is the property of those who have it, nor should we be displeased if it is the only property a man sometimes has. We must not underrate him who uses it for subsistence, and flies from the ingratitude of the age even to a bookseller for redress. If the profession of an author is to be laughed at by the stupid, it is certainly better to be contemptibly rich than contemptibly poor. For all the wit that ever adorned the human mind, will, at present, no more shield the author's poverty from ridicule, than his hightopped gloves conceal the unavoidable omissions of his laundress. To be more serious, new fashions, follies, and vices, make new monitors necessary in every age. An author may be considered as a merciful substitute to the legislature. He acts not by punishing crimes, but by preventing them. However virtuous the present age, there may be still growing employment for ridicule or reproof, for persuasion or satire. If the author be therefore still necessary among us, let us treat him with proper consideration as a child of the public, not a rent-charge on the community. And indeed a child of the public he is in all respects; for while so well able to direct others, how incapable is he frequently found of guiding himself! His simplicity exposes him to all the insidious approaches of cunning; his sensibility, to the slightest invasions of contempt. Though possessed of fortitude to stand unmoved the expected bursts of an earthquake, yet of feelings so exquisitely poignant as to agonise under the slightest disappointment. Broken rest, tasteless meals, and causeless anxieties, shorten his life, or render it unfit for active employment; prolonged vigils and intense application still farther contract his span, and make his time glide insensibly away. Let us not, then, aggravate those natural inconveniences by neglect: we have had sufficient instances of this kind already. Sale and Moore will suffice for one age at least. But they are dead, and their

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sorrows are over. The neglected author of the Persian Eclogues which, however inaccurate, excel any in our language, is still alive : happy, if insensible of our neglect, not raging at our ingratitude! It is enough that the age has already produced instances of men pressing foremost in the lists of fame, and worthy of better times; schooled by continued adversity into a hatred of their kind; flying from thought to drunkenness; yielding to the united pressure of labour, penury, and sorrow; sinking unheeded, without one friend to drop a tear on their unattended obsequies; and indebted to Charity for a grave."

These words had been written but a very few years, when the hand that traced them was itself cold; and, yielding to that united pressure of labour, penury, and sorrow, with a frame exhausted by unremitting and illrewarded drudgery, Goldsmith was indebted to the forbearance of creditors for a peaceful burial. It is not, then, in the early death of learned Sale, driven mad with those fruitless schemes of a Society for Encouragement of Learning, which he carried, it may be hoped, to a kinder world than this; it is not from the grave of Edward Moore, with melancholy playfulness anticipating, in his last unsuccessful project, the very day on which his death would fall; it is not even at the shrieks of poor distracted Collins, heard through the melancholy cathedral cloister where he played in childhood: but it is in this Life, Adventures, and Death of Oliver Goldsmith, that the mournful and instructive moral speaks its warning to us

now.

I know of none more deeply impressive, or of wider

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