a sheet. This payment, with what has before been mentioned, and an addition of five guineas for the assignment and republication of the Chinese Letters (to which Newbery assented reluctantly, and only because Goldsmith would else have printed them for the author'), are all the profits of his drudgery which can be traced to him in the present year. It needed to have a cheerful disposition to bear him through; nor was nature chary to him now of that choicest of her gifts. He had some bow of promise shining through his dullest weather. It is supposed that he memorialised Lord Bute, soon after Johnson's pension, with the scheme we have seen him throw out hints of in his review of Van Egmont's Asia; and nothing is more probable than that the notion might have revived with him, on hearing Johnson's remark to Langton in connection with his pension. 'Had this happened twenty years 'ago, I should have gone to Constantinople to learn 'Arabic as Pocock did.' But what with Samuel Johnson might be 'noble ambition,' with little Goldy was but theme for a jest; and nothing so raised the laugh against him, a few years later, as Johnson's notice of the old favourite project he was still at that time clinging to, that sometime or other, 'when his circumstances should be easier,' he would like to go to Aleppo, and bring home such arts peculiar to the East as he might be able to find there. Sir,' said Johnson, he would bring home a grinding 'barrow, which you see in every street in London, and ' think that he had furnished a wonderful improvement.' But brighter than these visionary fancies were shining for him now. There is little doubt, from allusions which would most naturally have arisen at the close of the present year, that, in moments snatched from his thankless and ill-rewarded toil for Newbery, he was at last secretly indulging in a labour, which, whatever its effect might be upon his fortunes, was its own thanks and its own reward. He had begun the Vicar of Wakefield. Without encouragement or favour in its progress, and with little hope. of welcome at the close of it; earning meanwhile, apart from it, his bread for the day by a full day's labour at the desk; it is his 'shame in crowds, his solitary pride' to seize and give shape to its fancies of happiness and home, before they pass for ever. Most affecting, yet also most cheering! With everything before him in his hard life that the poet has placed at the Gates of Hell, Pallentesque habitant Morbi, tristisque Senectus, he is content, for himself, to undergo the chances of them all, that for others he may open the neighbouring Elysian Gate. Nor could the effort fail to bring strength of its own, and self-sustained resource. In all else he might be weak and helpless, dependant on other's judgment and doubtful of his own; but, there, it was not He took his own course in that. It was not for Mr. Newbery he was writing then. Even the poetical fragments which began in Switzerland are lying still in his desk so. untouched. They are not to tell for so many pitiful items in the drudgery for existence. They are to catch the 'heart, and strike for honest fame.' He thought poorly, with exceptions already named in this narrative, of the poetry of the day. He regarded Churchill's astonishing success as a mere proof of the rage of faction; and did not hesitate to call his satires lampoons, and his force turbulence. Fawkes and Woty were now compiling their Poetical Calendar, and through Johnson, who contributed, they asked if he would contribute; but he declined. Between himself and Fawkes, who was rector of a small Kentish village he had occasionally visited, civilities had passed; but he shrunk from the Fawkes and Woty poetical school, and did not hesitate to say so. He dined at the close of the year at Davies's, in company with Robert Dodsley, where the matter came into discussion. This is not a poetical 'age,' said Goldsmith; 'there is no poetry produced 'in it.' 'Nay,' returned Dodsley, 'have you seen my 'Collection. You may not be able to find palaces in 'it, like Dryden's Ode, but you have villages composed 'of very pretty houses, such as the Spleen.' Johnson was not present; but when the conversation was reported to him, he remarked that Dodsley had said the same thing as Goldsmith, only in a softer manner. Another guest, beside Dodsley, was present at Davies's dinner-table that day. A youth of two-and-twenty, the son of a Scottish judge and respectable old whig Laird, urged to enter the law but eager to bestow himself on the army, had come up at the end of the year from Edinburgh to see Johnson and the London wits, and not a little anxious that Johnson and the London wits should see him. Attending Sheridan's summer lectures in the northern city, he had heard wonderful things from the lecturer about the solemn and ponderous lexicographer; what he said, and what he did, and how he would talk over his port wine and his tea until three or four o'clock in the morning. It was in the nature of this new admirer that port wine and late hours should throw a new halo over any object of his admiration; and it was with desperate resolve to accomplish an introduction which he had tried and failed in two years before, that he was now again in London. But he had again been baffled. Johnson's sneer at Sheridan's pension having brought coolness between the old friends, that way there was no access; and though Davies had arranged this dinner with the hope of getting his great friend to come, his great friend had found other matters to attend to. James Boswell was not yet to see Samuel Johnson. He saw only Oliver Goldsmith, and was doubtless much disappointed. Perhaps the feeling was mutual, if Oliver gave a thought to this new acquaintance; and strange enough the dinner must have been. As Goldsmith discussed poetry with Dodsley, Davies, mouthing his words and rolling his head at Boswell, delighted that eager and social gentleman with imitations of Johnson; while, as the bottle emptied LL itself more freely, sudden loquacity, conceited coxcombry, and officious airs of consequence, came as freely pouring forth from the youthful Scot. He had to tell them all he had seen in London, and all that had seen him. How Wilkes had said 'how d'ye do' to him, and Churchill had shaken hands with him (Scotchman though he was); how he had been to the Bedford to see that comical fellow Foote, and heard him dashing away at everybody and everything ('have you had good success in Dublin, 'Mr. Foote?' 'Poh! Damn 'em! There was not a 'shilling in the country, except what the Duke of 'Bedford, and I, and Mr. Rigby have brought away'); how he had seen Garrick in the new farce of the Farmer's Return, and gone and peeped over Hogarth's shoulder as he sketched little David in the Farmer; and how, above all, he had on another night attracted general attention and given prodigious entertainment in the Drury-lane pit, by extempore imitations of the lowing of a cow. 'universal cry of the galleries,' said he, gravely describing the incident some few years afterward, 'was, encore the cow! 'encore the cow! In the pride of my heart I attempted 'imitations of some other animals, but with very inferior 'effect.' A Scotch friend was with him, and gave sensible advice. Stick to the cow, mon,' he said; and the advice was not lost altogether. He stuck afterwards to his cow (in other words, to what he could best achieve) pretty closely; though Goldsmith, among others, had no small reason to regret, that he should also, doing the cow so well, 'The |