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his place, as he afterwards proved his right to sit among the highest, by the strength of his affectionate sympathies with the nature common to all. And so sustained through the scenes of wretchedness he passed, he had done more, though with little consciousness of his own, to achieve his destiny, than if, transcending the worldly plans of wise Irish friends, he had even clambered to the bishop's bench, or out-practised the whole college of physicians.

The time is at hand in his history, when all this becomes clear. Outside the garret-window of Mr. Griffiths, by the light which the miserable labour of the Monthly Review will let in upon the heart-sick labourer, it may soon be seen. Stores of observation, of feeling, and experience, hidden from himself at present, are by that light to be revealed. It is a thought to carry us through this new scene of suffering, with new and unaccustomed hope.

Goldsmith never publicly avowed what he had written in the Monthly Review; any more than the Roman poet talked of the millstone he turned in his days of hunger. Men who have been at the galleys, though for no crime of their own committing, are not wise to brag of the work they performed there. All he stated was, that all he wrote was tampered with by Griffiths or his wife. Smollett has depicted this lady in his Antiquated Female Critic; and when 'illiterate, bookselling Griffiths' declared unequal war against that potent antagonist; protesting that the Monthly was not written by 'physicians

'without practice, authors without learning, men without 'decency, or writers without judgment;' Smollett retorted in a few broad unscrupulous lines on the whole party of the rival Review. The Critical is certainly not written,' he said, by a parcel of obscure hirelings, under the 'restraint of a bookseller and his wife, who presume to 'revise, alter, and amend the articles. The principal 'writers in the Critical are unconnected with booksellers, 'unawed by old women, and independent of each other.' Commanded by a bookseller, awed by an old woman, and miserably dependant, one of these obscure hirelings desired and resolved, as far as it was possible, to remain in his obscurity; but a copy of the Monthly, which belonged to Griffiths and in which he had privately marked the authorship of most of the articles, withdraws the veil. It is for no purpose that Goldsmith could have disapproved, or I should scorn to assist in calling to memory

what he would himself have committed to neglect. The best writers can spare much; it is only the worst who have nothing to spare.

The first subject taken from the bookseller's stores

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was probably the least common-place of all they contained. This was the year (1757) in which, after six centuries of neglect, the great, dark, wonderful field of Northern Fiction began to be explored. Professor Mallet of Copenhagen had translated the Edda, and directed attention to the 'remains' of Scandinavian Poetry and Mythology and Goldsmith's first effort in the Monthly Review was to describe the fruits of these researches, to point out resemblances to the inspiration of the East, and to note the picturesqueness and sublimity of the fierce old Norse imagination. The learned on this side 'the Alps,' he began (I quote from Mr. Prior's collection of these articles, in his last careful edition of the Miscellaneous Works), have long laboured at the anti'quities of Greece and Rome, but almost totally neglected 'their own; like conquerors, who, while they have made 'inroads into the territories of their neighbours, have left 'their own natural dominions to desolation.' This was a lively interruption to the ordinary Monthly dulness, and perhaps the Percys, and intelligent subscribers of that sort, opened eyes a little wider at it. It was not long after, indeed, that Percy first began to dabble in Runic Verses from the Icelandic; before eight years were passed he had published his famous Reliques; and in five years more, during intimacy with the writer of this notice of Mallet, he produced his translation of Mallet's Northern Antiquities. In all this there was probably no connection; yet it is wonderful what a word in season from a man of genius

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may do; even when the genius is hireling and obscure, and labouring only for the bread it eats.

More common-place was the respectable-looking thin duodecimo, with which Mr. Griffiths's workman began his next month's labour; but a duodecimo making noise enough for every octavo, quarto, and folio in the shop. This was Douglas, a Tragedy, as it is acted at the Theatre Royal, in Covent Garden. It was not acted at the Theatre Royal in Drury Lane, because Garrick, who so complacently exhibited himself next year in Agis, in the Siege of Aquileia, and other ineffable dulness from the same hand (wherein his quick suspicious glance detected no Lady Randolphs), would have nothing to do with the character of Douglas. What would come with danger from the full strength of Mrs. Cibber, might be safely left to the enfeebled powers of Mrs. Woffington: he had no one to fear but Barry, at the rival house. But alike despairing of Covent Garden, to the North had good parson Home returned, and not till eight months were gone, sent back his play endorsed by the Scottish capital. There it had been acted; and from the beginning of the world, from the beginning of Edinburgh, the like of that play had not been known. The Poker Club made its ecstacies felt from Hunter Square to Grub Street and St. James's, for no rise in the price of claret had yet imperilled the life of that excellent society. Without stint or measure to their warmth the cooling beverage flowed; and bottle after bottle (at eighteen pence a piece) disappeared in honour of the

Scottish Shakspeare, whom the most illustrious of the Pokers at once pronounced better than the English, because free from 'unhappy barbarism.' Yes, refined from the unhappy barbarism of our southern Shakspeare, and purged of the licentiousness of our poor London-starved Otway. It was veritably David Hume's opinion, and still stands in the dedication to the Four Dissertations he was bringing out at the time, that 'Johnny Home' had all the theatric genius of these two poets so refined and purged. But little was even a Philosopher's exaltation, to the persecution of a Presbytery. No man better than Hume knew that. The first volume of his History had lain hopelessly on Millar's shelves, after sale of forty-five copies in a twelvemonth, when on inquisitorial proceedings of the General Assembly against Lord Kames and himself, the public in turn became inquisitive, and began to buy. And, surely as the History of Hume, must even puffery of Home have languished, but for that resolve of the Presbytery to eject from his pulpit a parson who had written a play. It carried Douglas to London; secured a nine nights' reasonable wonder; and the noise of the carriages on their way to Covent Garden to see the Norval of silver-tongued Barry, were now giving sudden headaches to David Garrick, and strange comparisons of silver tongues to the hooting of owls.

But out of reach of every influence to raise or to depress, unless it be a passing thought now and then to his own tragic fragments, sits the critic with the thin

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