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now, sir, this is an interesting matter; do favour us with 'it,' was the cry of every friend in turn. So, often was the story repeated. How the king had asked Johnson if he was then writing anything, and he had answered he was not, for he had pretty well told the world what he knew, and must now read to acquire more knowledge. How the king said he did not think Johnson borrowed much from anybody; and the other venturing to think he had done his part as a writer, was handsomely assured ‘I 'would have thought so too, if you had not written so well.' How his majesty next observed that he supposed he must already have read a great deal, to which Johnson replied that he thought more than he read, and for instance had not read much, compared with Doctor Warburton ; whereto the king rejoined that he heard Doctor Warburton was a man of such general knowledge that his learning resembled Garrick's acting in its universality. How his majesty afterwards asked if there were any other literary journals published in the kingdom, except the Monthly and Critical Review, and being told there was no other, enquired which of them was best; whereupon Johnson replied that the Monthly Review was done with most care, and the Critical upon the best principles, for that the authors of the Monthly were enemies to the church; which the king said he was sorry to hear. How his majesty talked of the university libraries, of Sir John Hill's veracity, and of Lord Lyttelton's history; and how he proposed that the literary biography of the country

should be undertaken by Johnson, who thereupon signified his readiness to comply with the royal wishes (of which he never heard another syllable). How, during the whole of the interview, to use the description given to Boswell by the librarian, Johnson talked to his majesty with profound respect, but still in his firm manly manner, with a sonorous voice, and never in that subdued tone which is commonly used at the levee and in the drawingAnd how, at the end of it, the flattered sage protested that the manners of the bucolic young sovereign, 'let them talk of them as they will,' were those of as fine a gentleman as Louis the Fourteenth or Charles the Second could have been. 'Ah!' said the charmed and charming Sévigné, when her king had danced with her, 'c'est le plus grand roi du monde !'

room.

And did you say nothing, sir,' asked one of the circle who stood round Johnson at Mr. Reynolds's when he detailed the interview there, to the king's high compliment on your writing?' 'No sir,' answered Johnson, with admirable taste. When the king had said it, it < was to be so. It was not for me to bandy civilities with my sovereign.' Highly characteristic of him was what he added as his opinion of the advantage of such an interview. I found,' he said, in answer to the frank and lively questioning of Joseph Warton, his majesty wished I 'should talk, and I made it my business to talk. I find ' it does a man good to be talked to by his sovereign. In the 'first place a man cannot be in a passion. . .' Here he

stopped; but he had said enough. The consciousness of his own too frequent habit of roaring down an adversary in conversation, from which such men as the Wartons as well as Goldsmith suffered, could hardly have been more amusingly confessed; and it is possible that Thomas Warton may have remembered it in the courteous severity of his retort, when Johnson so fiercely fell upon him at Reynolds's a few years later. Sir, I am not used to be 'contradicted.' 'Better for yourself and friends, sir, if Our admiration could not be increased, but our love might.'

you were.

One of the listeners standing near Johnson, when he began his narrative, had in the course of it silently retreated from the circle. 'Doctor Goldsmith,' says Boswell, 'remained 'unmoved upon a sofa at some distance, affecting not to 'join in the least in the eager curiosity of the company. 'He assigned as a reason for his gloom and seeming in' attention, that he apprehended Johnson had relinquished 'his purpose of furnishing him with a prologue to his play, 'with the hopes of which he had been flattered; but it I was strongly suspected that he was fretting with chagrin ' and envy at the singular honour Doctor Johnson had 'lately enjoyed. At length the frankness and simplicity ' of his natural character prevailed. He sprung from the

sofa, advanced to Johnson, and in a kind of flutter, 'from imagining himself in the situation which he had just 'been hearing described, exclaimed, "Well, you acquitted ""yourself in this conversation better than I should have

"done; for I should have bowed and stammered through ""the whole of it."'

Poor Goldsmith might have reason to be anxious about his prologue, for his play had brought him nothing but anxiety. 'In theatro sedet atra cura.' A letter lies before me from Horace Walpole's neighbour, Kitty Clive, who writes expressively though she spells ill (the great Mrs. Pritchard used to talk of her 'gownd '), assuring her friend Colman that 'vexation and fretting in a theater are the foundation ' of all Billous complaints. I speak by expeariance. I have 'been fretted by managers till my gaul has overflow'd like 'the river Nile;' and precisely thus it befel Goldsmith. His comedy completed, Kitty's 'billous' complaint began ; and there was soon an overflow of gall. Matters could not have fallen out worse for advantageous approach to Garrick, and the new dramatist's thoughts turned at first to Covent Garden. While the play was in progress it was undoubtedly intended for Beard. But Covent Garden theatre was in such confusion from Rich's death, and Beard's doubts and deafness, that Goldsmith resolved to make trial of Garrick. They do not seem to have met since their first luckless meeting, but Reynolds now interposed to bring them together; and at the painter's house in Leicester Square, Goldsmith placed in Garrick's hands the manuscript of the Good Natured Man. Tom Davies was afterward at some pains to describe what he conceived to have been the tone of their interview, and tells us that the manager, being at all times conscious of his own merit,

was perhaps more ostentatious of his abilities to serve a dramatic author than became a man of his prudence, while the poet, on his side, was as fully persuaded of his own importance and independent greatness. Mr. Garrick expected that the writer would esteem the patronage of 'his play as a favour, but Goldsmith rejected all ideas of 'kindness in a bargain that was intended to be of mutual 'advantage to both parties.' Both were in error, and providing cares and bitterness for each other; of which the heaviest portion fell naturally on the weakest shoulders. Mere pride must always be injurious to all men; but where it cannot itself afford that the very claim it sets up should succeed, deplorable indeed is its humiliation.

Let us admit that, in this matter of patronage, the poet might not improperly have consented at the first, to what with an ill grace he was driven to consent at last. He was possibly too eager to visit upon the actor his resentment of the want of another kind of patronage; and to interpose uneasy remembrances of a former quarrel, before what should have been a real sense of what was due to Garrick, and a proper concession of it. Johnson had no love of patronage, but would not have counselled this. Often, when most bitter on the same angry theme, and venting with the least scruple his rage at the actor's foppery, would he stop to remind himself of the consideration Garrick needed after all, and of how little in reality he assumed. For then, all generous and tolerant as at heart he was, not a merit or advantage of his fellow-townsman's