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club at the Devil Tavern (scene of that earliest club for which Ben Jonson wrote his Latin rules), has been already named; and he frequented another of the same modest pretension, in the parlour of the Bedford in Covent Garden. But what most consoled him for the surrendered haunts of his obscurer days, was a minor club (known afterward by his own name) at the Globe Tavern in Fleet Street; where he attended every Wednesday as regularly as on the Fridays in Gerrard Street, and seems to have played the 'fool' as agreeably as when he had no reputation to be damaged by the folly. Songs sung by the members were the leading attraction at this club; and I derive my principal knowledge of it from a collection of songs and poems of the time which belonged to one of the members. This worthy William Ballantyne' had solaced his old age with manuscript notes on the amusements of his youth; and the book, so annotated, passed into the possession of my friend Mr. Bolton Corney.

Among the least obscure members were King the comedian (whose reputation Lord Ogleby had established); little Hugh Kelly, a young Irishman of eight-and-twenty, who had lately shown some variety of cleverness and superficial talent, and now occupied chambers near Goldsmith's, in the Temple; Edward Thompson, whom Garrick assisted with his interest to a command in the navy, and who is still remembered for his songs and his edition of Andrew Marvel; and another Irishman, named Glover, who had been bred a doctor, figured afterwards as an actor, and now

earned a scanty subsistence as a sort of Grub Street Galen. The anecdotes of Goldsmith which appeared on his death in the Annual Register (with the signature G.), which reappeared in the Dublin edition (1777) of his poems by Malone, and were adopted into the memoirs by Evans and Percy, were written by this Glover; who was one of the many humble Irish clients whom Goldsmith's fame drew around him, and who profited by every scantiest gleam of his prosperity. It is he who says (and none had better cause to say it), Our Doctor,' as Goldsmith was now universally called, had a constant levee of his distressed countrymen, 'whose wants, as far as he was able, he always relieved; " I and he has been often known to leave himself even with' out a guinea, in order to supply the necessities of others.' It is to be added of Glover, however, who was notorious for his songs and imitations, that he was given to practical jokes; and often rewarded his patron's generosity with very impudent betrayal of his simplicity. It was he who, in one of his Hampstead rambles, took Goldsmith into a cottage at West End of whose inhabitants he knew nothing, and, to the poet's awkward horror and mal-address, when he saw the trick, imposed himself on the party assembled as a pretended old acquaintance, and coolly sat down to tea with them.

Hugh Kelly seems to have been a greater favourite with good Mr. Ballantyne. Much,' says one of his notes, ' as I esteemed Mr. Kelly, when a member of the Wednes

'day club, at the Globe in Fleet Street, called Goldsmith's,

'who was seldom absent.. I respected him because he was ' always unassuming.. this' (the note is appended to a poem of Kelly's called Meditation), had I then known

him to be the author of it, would have made me adore 'him.' The poem nevertheless is poor enough; and, though Kelly was certainly popular with his nearer friends, and had many kindly qualities, his unassumingness may be doubted. He had lately emerged to notoriety, out of a desperate and obscure struggle, by somewhat questionable arts. His youth had been passed in Dublin as a staymaker's apprentice, and making sudden flight from this uncongenial employment, he was obliged to resume it in London to save himself from starvation; but he succeeded afterwards in hiring himself as writer to an attorney, from this got promotion to Grub Street, and had laboured meanly, up to the present year, in hack work for the magazines and newspapers, when it occurred to him to make profit of Churchill's example and set up as a satirist and censor of the stage. This he did after the usual fashion of an imitator, and in his Thespis caricatured the Rosciad. Poor Mrs. Dancer he called a 'moon-eyed idiot;' talked of 'Clive's weak head and execrable heart;' libelled such men as Woodward and Moody; and lavished all his praise on the Hursts, Ackmans, and Bransbys. Yet though the manifest source of such inspiration was a public house 'within a few doors of Drury Lane Theatre,' where the fettered lions of the stage were always growling against their tamers, we find that the talents for satire displayed

' in this work by Mr. Kelly, recommended him at once to 'the notice of Mr. Garrick.' What resulted from that notice will soon, with somewhat higher pretensions, reintroduce the object of it: and meanwhile he may be left with Mr. Ballantyne's praise, and with the remark of Johnson to counterbalance it; who made answer to Kelly's request for permission to converse with him, Sir, I never 'desire to converse with a man who has written more than 'he has read.'

Of the obscurer members of the Globe club our mention may be limited to a Mr. Gordon, who is remembered by Mr. Ballantyne in connection with the jovial and jocund song of Nottingham Ale. Mr. Gordon,' he says, 'the 'largest man I ever kept company with, usually sung this

song at the Globe club; and it always very much pleased 'Doctor Goldsmith, Doctor Glover, good Tom King the 'comedian, and myself, William Ballantyne.' Nor was the evening's amusement limited to songs, but had the variety of dramatic imitations, with occasional original epigram; and here was first heard the celebrated epitaph (Goldsmith had been reading Pope's and Swift's Miscellanies) on Edward Purdon.

Here lies poor Ned Purdon, from misery freed,

Who long was a bookseller's hack;

He led such a damnable life in this world,

I don't think he 'll wish to come back.

It was in the April of the present year that Purdon fitly closed his luckless life by suddenly dropping down dead

in Smithfield; and as it was chiefly Goldsmith's pittance that had saved him thus long from starvation, it was well that the same friend should give him his solitary chance of escape from oblivion. Doctor Goldsmith made this epitaph,' says William Ballantyne, in his way from his 'chambers in the Temple to the Wednesday evening's club ' at the Globe. I think he will never come back, I believe ' he said. I was sitting by him, and he repeated it more 'than twice. I think he will never come back. Ah! and not altogether as a jest, it may be, the second and the third time. There was something in Purdon's fate, from their first meeting in college to that incident in Smithfield, which had no very violent contrast to his own; and remembering what Glover has said of his frequent sudden descents from mirth to melancholy, some such fitful change of temper would here have been natural enough. 'His disappointments at these times,' Glover tells us, 'made him peevish and sullen; and he has often left his 'party of convivial friends abruptly in the evening, in 'order to go home and brood over his misfortunes.' But a better medicine for his grief than brooding over it, was a sudden start into the country to forget it; and it was probably with a feeling of this kind he had in the summer revisited Islington, to which, after this Wednesdays' club digression, we must now very briefly return.

He had one room in the turret of Canonbury House, which, since altered and subdivided, to within the last twenty years remained as it was in his time; a genuine