'Brownrigg! Brownrigg, by God!' and left the theatre. It may have been partizanship, but it was also very pardonable wit.

Nor, if partizanship may be justified at any time, was it here without its excuses. He had reason to think Colman embarked in a good work, and for which, whether knowingly or not, he had made an unexampled sacrifice. On the death of stingy old Lord Bath three years before, he had left his enormous wealth (upwards of £1,200,000) to an old brother he despised, with a sort of injunction that his nephew was to have part in its ultimate disposition; and the Covent Garden arrangements had not long been completed when General Pulteney died, leaving Colman a simple four hundred a-year. His connection with Miss Ford the actress, had been displeasing to the general; but the unpardonable offence was his having secretly turned manager of a theatre. Miss Ford was the mother of the younger Colman, now a child: yet old enough to retain and remember, when he wrote his Random Records, the impression at this time made upon him by Goldsmith's simple and playful manners; and by that love of children which had attended him through life, which was noted everywhere, and made itself felt at even pompous Hawkins's. 'I little thought what I should have to boast,' says Miss Hawkins, when Goldsmith taught me to play Jack and 'Gill by two bits of paper on his fingers.' This lady observed, too, a distinction between his and Garrick's way with children, which the younger Colman describes; how

the one played to please the boy, and the other as though to please himself: while not even Foote, with his knowing broad grin, his snuff-begrimed face, and his unvarying salutation of 'blow your nose child,' was half so humourous as Goldsmith. He would at any time, for amusement of the nursery, dance a mock minuet, sing a song, or play the flute; and thought little of even putting on his best wig the wrong side foremost. One of these childish Drinking

reminiscences will bear relating in detail.

coffee with Colman, on one of his first visits to Richmond, he took little George upon his knee to amuse him; and being rewarded for his pains by a spiteful attack upon the face, summary paternal punishment was inflicted by solitary confinement in an adjoining dark room. But here, when matters seemed desperate with the howling and screaming little prisoner, the door was unexpectedly unlocked and opened. 'It was the tender-hearted Doctor himself' pursues the teller of the story, with a lighted candle in 'his hand, and a smile upon his countenance, which was 'still partially red from the effects of my petulance. I 'sulked and sobbed, and he fondled and soothed, till I 'began to brighten: when Goldsmith, seizing the propitious moment of returning good humour, put down the 'candle and began to conjure. He placed three hats which happened to be in the room, upon the carpet, and a 'shilling under each. The shillings, he told me, were England, France, and Spain. Hey, presto, cockolorum !

'cried the Doctor; and lo! on uncovering the shillings,

'which had been dispersed each beneath a separate hat,

'awe, if the good nature of the man had not obviated 'my dread of the magician; but from that time, whenever the Doctor came to visit my father, we were always merry playfellows.' The little hero of the incident was a child of only five years old: but we have evidence in a letter of Garrick's to his father, that even a full year and a half before this he had entertained Mrs. Garrick with a whole 'budget' of stories and songs; had delivered the Chimney Sweep with exquisite taste as a solo; and, in the form of a duet with Garrick, Old Rose and Burn the Bellows.

But more serious affairs again claim Goldsmith's attention, and ours. His comedy cannot, in the most favourable expectation, appear before Christmas; and his necessities are hardly less pressing, meanwhile, than in his most destitute time. The utmost he received this year from the elder Newbery, for his usual task-work, would seem to have been about ten pounds for a compilation on a historical

subject. The concurrent advance of another ten pounds on his promissory note shows their friendly relations still subsisting; but the present illness of the publisher, from which he never recovered, had for some months interrupted the ordinary course of his business, and its management was gradually devolving on his nephew. No less a person than Tom Davies, however, came to Goldsmith's relief. Tom's business had thriven since he left the stage, and he determined to speculate in a history. The Letters from a Nobleman to his Son continued to sell; and still to excite curiosity, whether or not Lord Lyttelton had really written them. 'I 'asked Lord L. himself,' writes the learned Mrs. Carter to the less learned Mrs. Montagu, 'who assured me that he had never read them through, and moreover seemed to be very clearly of opinion that he did not write them. Seriously you may deny his being the author with the fullest certainty. It seems they were writ by Lord Cork.' All this sort of gossip (with no more foundation in the latter case than that Lord Cork and Orrery had addressed to his son a translation of Pliny's as well as other letters, and was no longer alive to contradict the rumour) was better known to Davies than to any one; and the sensible suggestion occurred to him of a History of Rome from the same hand, in the same easy, popular, unlearned manner. An agreement was accordingly drawn up, in which Goldsmith undertook to write such a book in two volumes, and if possible to complete it in two years, for the sum of two hundred and fifty guineas; an undertaking of a somewhat brighter complexion than has

yet appeared in these pages; rife with future promise in that respect, it may be; and certainly very creditable to Davies. It is alleged by Seward and Isaac Reed, that, shortly before this agreement, Goldsmith's necessities had induced him to apply for the Gresham lectureship on Civil Law; an office of small remuneration and smaller responsibility, which the death of a Mr. Mace had vacated and to which a Mr. Jeffries was elected; but his name does not seem to have been formally entered as a candidate, and it is more certain that shortly after the agreement with Davies he had again taken lodgings in his favourite Islington, and was busy writing there.

Goldsmith's resource, in the midst of labour, as in his brief intervals of leisure, was still the country-haunt, the club, and the theatre; nor should what was called his Wednesday's club fail to find commemoration here. The social dignities of Gerrard Street had not sufficed for his

clubable' propensities. Wholly at his ease there, he could not always be; and it will happen to even those who are greatest with their great friends, to find themselves pleasantest with their least. The very year before Doctor Johnson died he expressed his own strong sense of this, in founding the modest club to which he invited Reynolds (the terms are lax, and the expenses light: 'we meet thrice a week, and he who misses forfeits 'twopence'); and, if it were a want to Johnson to have occasional admixture of inferior intellects to be at ease with, how much more to Goldsmith! His shilling-rubber