for the work. Two or three of those from whom he expected most took no notice of his application, and verified the playful prediction | in one of his letters of this date, which distinctly prefigures Mr. Forster and Mr. Cunningham. "There will come a day, no doubt it will, when the Scaligers and Daciers will vindicate my character, give learned editions of my labors, and bless the times with copious comments on the text. You shall see how they will fish up the heavy scoundrels who disregard me now. How will they bewail the times that suffered so much genius to be neglected!" It is true that the experience which these "heavy scoundrels" had had of the use to which Oliver put pecuniary assistance was by no means encouraging, true that any rumors which reached them of his proceedings abroad could only have exhibited him as a thoughtless idler or a mendicant vagrant, true that any tidings of his London vicissitudes must have surrounded him with the suspicion which always attends upon a man who is everything by turns and nothing long; but they also knew that he was as generous as he was improvident; that, if the situations had been reversed, they would not in vain have asked for themselves what they denied to him; that he had supported himself now for four years "without one word of encouragement, or one act of assistance;" and what was most of all to the purpose, to invite subscriptions to a book was to give a practical proof that he was turning his talents to account. While Goldsmith was anxiously waiting for his Irish supplies he had to disburse ten pounds for the warrant of his appointment by the East India Company. To raise the money, he wrote articles for the "Critical Review," which was superintended by the genius Dr. Smollett. Two papers from Oliver's pen appeared in the number for January, 1795, but before they saw the light the warrant which was to make his fortune was withdrawn. The motive of this proceeding never transpired. That it arose from some cause which was mortifying to his vanity may be inferred from his always avoiding the subject, and from his assuring his brother Henry, in order to evade inconvenient explanations, that he had met with no disappointment in the business, though it was then three months since the warrant had been revoked. It was in November, 1758, that he was thus summarily set aside, and, lowering his ambition to his circumstances, the ex-physician to the Coromandel factory presented himself on the 21st of December before the examiners at Surgeon's Hall, to qualify for the office of an hospital mate. A single unlucky candidate of all who applied that day was too ignorant of the rudiments of surgical science to pass, and that one was Oliver Goldsmith, Bachelor of Medicine, and late practitioner of physic in Bankside, Southwark. Who is to tell, after this, what rare qualities of mind may coexist with stammering ignorance and a plebeian exterior? He His examination at Surgeons' Hall soon involved him in an additional misery. had no clothes in which he could venture to appear before a tribunal composed of the grandees of the profession. He opened a negotiation with his old master, Griffiths, who, in return for four articles contributed to the "Monthly Review" of December, became security to a tailor for the requisite suit, which was to be paid for, or returned, on a stated day. The stated day came, and found the clothes in pawn, and the four books which Griffiths had sent him to review in pledge to a friend. The occasion which reduced him to this breach of his work was the arrest of the landlord of his wretched lodging, to whom he was in arrear. The bookseller sent to demand the goods or their value, and, as Goldsmith could return neither, Griffiths wrote him word that he was a sharper and a villain." In an answer full of woe the miserable debtor begs to be consigned to a gaol. "I have seen it," he says, "inevitable these three or four weeks, and, by heavens! request it as a favor,—as a favor that may prevent somewhat more fatal." He denies the villany, but owns that he has been guilty of imprudence, and of "the meannesses which poverty unavoidably brings with it." The wrath of Griffiths was appeased by Goldsmith undertaking to furnish a "Life of Voltaire" for twenty pounds, from which the debt was to be subtracted. The memoir, which was finished in a month, he himself called "a catchpenny," and it is certainly unworthy both of the author and the subject. Here closed for ever his illstarred alliance with the bookseller, who was the first to start him in his literary career, and the first to make him feel the bitter bondage of the calling. Griffiths, Mr. Forster relates, retired from his business three or four years later, and ended by keeping two carriages, and attending regularly at the meeting-house. So prosperous and pious a gentleman little dreamt that he was to be known to posterity by his griping insolence to his pauper scribe. Goldsmith said of himself that he had " a knack of hoping," but the multiplied disas- | Thus in common things he was below medio ters which followed close upon one another had nearly reduced him to despair. "I have been for some years," he said, in the affecting letter to Griffiths, of January, 1759, "struggling with a wretched being, with all that contempt which indigence brings with it, and with all those strong passions which make contempt insupportable. What then has a gaol that is formidable? I shall at least have the society of wretches, and such is to me true society." "You scarcely can conceive," he wrote to his brother in the February following, "how much eight years of disappointment, anguish, and study have worn me down. I can now neither partake of the pleasure of a revel, nor contribute to raise its jollity. I can neither laugh nor drink; have contracted a hesitating, disagreeable manner of speaking, and a visage that looks ill-nature itself. In short, I have thought myself into a settled melancholy, and an utter disgust of all that life brings with it." It was through the very excess of the darkness which had gathered around him that he worked his way into day. He ceased to indulge in the tantalizing expectations which had balked him so often, and, without further distractions, sullenly resigned himself to the only business for which he was fitted. If he had succeeded in entering the Church, he would soon have sunk in the eyes of the parishioners to the level of his clerk. If he had satisfied the examiners at Surgeons' Hall that he could set a bone, he would still, we may be sure, have been a bungling operator, and the tormentor of his patients. He once threatened, when Mrs. Sidebotham rejected his advice, and adopted that of her apothecary, to leave off prescribing for his friends. "Do so, my dear Doctor," replied Beauclerk; "whenever you undertake to kill, let it be only your enemies." This was one of the true words which are spoken in jest. Johnson summed up the case when he said that his genius was great, but his knowledge was small. "No man,' he remarked again, was wiser when he had a pen in his hand, or more foolish when he had not." He had never been a student, and he had not that aptitude for facts, and that tenacity of memory, which enables many desultory readers to furnish their minds without steady toil. The materials for this charming compilations were hastily gathered for the occasion, and, being merely transplanted, as Johnson said, from one place to another without settling in his mind, he was ignorant of the contents of his own books. crity, and he was driven to be either a literary genius or nothing. He was never any judge of his own qualifications. He volunteered to take a journey to copy the inscriptions on the Written Mountains, which had baffled every traveller, though he was not acquainted with a single letter of any oriental language living or dead; and he memorialized Lord Bute to send him out to investigate the arts and sciences of the East, for the purpose of importing the improvements into England, though Dr. Johnson exclaimed that he was utterly ignorant of the subject, and would have brought home "a grinding barrow that was to be seen in all the streets of London, and fancy he had furnished a wonderful improvement." Just before his discomfiture in Surgeons' Hall he had removed to a lodging in a pentup little square, now levelled with the ground, which, embosomed in a mass of buildings between Fleet Street and the Old Bailey, seemed named in mockery "Green Arbor Court," and which was approached by a steep flight of stone stairs called Break-neck Steps." The houses were tall and tumbling, the inhabitants poor and filthy, the children over-many and over-noisy-in Mr. Forster's phrase, "a squalid and squalling colony." In this retreat he was visited by Percy, the well known editor of the "Reliques," and afterwards Bishop of Dromore. Goldsmith had been introduced to him at the Temple Exchange Coffee-house, by Dr. Grainger, the author of the "Sugar cane," and one of the contributors to Mr. Griffiths' "Monthly Review," and Percy had detected sufficient merit beneath the unpromising appearance of his new-made acquaintance to think him worth a call. He found him, at the beginning of March, 1759, engaged upon his "Enquiry, in a dirty room, with only a single chair, which he gave up to his visitor, while he sat himself in the window. As the conversation was proceeding, a ragged little girl appeared at the door, and, dropping a curtsy to Goldsmith, said, "My mamma sends her compliments, and begs the favor of you to lend her a chamber-pot full of coals.' A volume of description would not convey a more vivid impression of the society of "Green Arbor Court" than this single trait; and ludicrous as is the incident, the respectful address of the messenger is yet a pleasing proof of the homage which was paid him by the ordinary inhabitants of the square. The most complete picture which, perhaps, we possess of Grub-street life has come down to us in connection with Goldsmith. | plausible argument. The fact is, that he put The majority of distressed authors were too his private life into his books beyond any obscure to find a biographer. Those of the other genius whom we can call to mind, and greater pretentions had either started from a he had not derived his doctrines from a surrespectable position, or had quickly reached vey of Europe, but from his personal expea higher eminence. A single unwieldy rience of Mr. Griffiths' establishment. It is figure, in the person of Johnson, was seen this, in conjunction with the pleasing style, moving for years among the crowd of ill- and some scattered observations of a lively dressed, ill-fed, badly-lodged, and insulted truth, which gives an interest to the work, in tribe who provided the ephemeral literature spite of its imperfections as a critical and and party pamphlets of the day, but main- philosophic disquisition. He had seen that taining in the midst of his poverty such un- the praise and blame of the "Monthly Reshaken fortitude, such lofty principles, and view" were dispensed in accordance with the such rugged independence, that the charac- mercantile interests and vindictive passions of teristics of the class were very imperfectly Griffiths. He had become acquainted with shadowed forth in him. The portrait drawn the ignorance of the starving scribblers who by Mr. Forster of the moral heroism and hung about the shop, eager, for the sake of robust benevolence of this illustrious man is a job, to do the bidding of their master, and one of the most attractive episodes in his who, when left to their own discretion, misbook. Goldsmith, on the contrary, had the took railing for wit. He had witnessed the habits and tastes of the class. After he had pain which their censures inflicted, and the acquired celebrity, and was admitted to the injury done to books by their oracular abuse. society of men like Burke, Fox, Reynolds, No man, nevertheless, was ever written down and Beauclerk, he looked back with regret except by himself, and the worst that the upon his former haunts. "In truth," he said ablest and most wrong headed critic can effect to Mr. Cooke, "one sacrifices something for is to retard for a little space a reputation the sake of good company, for here I'm shut which is not fully formed, or to shorten the out of several places where I used to play existence of some flimsy publication which if the fool very agreeably." He did not per- left to itself would die a natural death. severe long in resisting his inclinations out He dwelt with equal emphasis upon the of regard to appearances, nor did he ever wrongs of authors,-complained of the conget clear of the shifts and expedients which tempt which was shown to them,-pointed attended his earlier struggles. He was out the evils of their bondage to booksellers, merely destined to exhibit in his single per--and asked the great to renew the patronson, as he rose, all the gradations in the lot of a bookseller's dependant, from the poorest to the best-esteemed. At the commencement of April appeared the "Enquiry into the Present State of Polite Learning in Europe," upon which Percy had found him engaged in the preceding month. If the work were to be judged by the promise held out in the title, a more superficial and unsatisfactory production has seldom issued from the press. Though he had travelled through Italy, Germany, and Holland, his account of the literature in these countries, to which he devoted distinct chapters, was so extremely meagre that it really conveyed no information at all. He enlarged but a very little more on the books and authors of England and France. He took up the paradox that the decay of learning had in every age been produced by criticism, and stated that the chief design of his Essay was to pursuade people to write what they thought, regardless of reviewers. Yet the bulk of his treaties had no relation to this position, which he has not supported by any age of the preceding generation, when a dinner with Lord Somers, procured invitations to Young the poet for the rest of the week. These opinions were natural to one who judged of booksellers from Griffiths,— of the respect paid to authors from the treatment experienced by the ragged tenant in "Green Arbor Court,"-and of the advantage to be derived from the countenance of the nobility by the number of feasts which he hoped would accrue to men who were suffering, like himself, from hunger and neglect. But it is not now, nor, probably, was it then, in the power of any Mr. Griffiths to keep an author from fame who had the talent to deserve it; and as for a system of patronizing dinners, it has two fatal objections,—that it is not the needy, the obscure, and the struggling who would receive the invitations; and that any companionship of the kind which does not come about naturally from personal likings or sympathy of tastes, is a degradation instead of an honor. "The Enquiry" attracted little attention. None of his other productions in the first nine months of 1759 have been identified, except | is an exceptional gift, and as justly prized as a few contributions to the "Critical Review;" it is rare. The fault, or rather the misfor but in October he is found exerting himself | tune, of Goldsmith, is, that his necessities with unwonted diligence, furnishing essays to seldom allowed him to take care enough— that incongruous words, careless phrases, and weak and slovenly sentences, blot his beautiful prose. On the 1st of January, 1760, appeared the opening number of the "British Magasub-zine," a monthly publication, edited by Dr. Smollett; and on the 12th the "Public Ledger," a daily newspaper, which was started by Mr. Newberry, the bookseller. Goldsmith was invited to contribute to both. He furnished about twenty essays to the magazine, and for the newspaper he wrote his well-known " Citizen of the World." He usually provided two letters a week, and for these he was paid a guinea apiece. They soon attracted a certain degree of attention; but we infer from his own later language on the little notice which his essays obtained, that their popularity was not great. "Whenever I write anything," he ludicrously said to Johnson at some period which preceded the publication of "The Traveller," "the public make a point to know nothing about it." The plan which Goldsmith adopted in "The Citizen of the World" of introducing an Oriental, commenting upon manners so different from his own had been frequently tried, and in the case of Montesquieu with distinguished success. The absurdity of usages which only appear rational because they are familiar, becomes strikingly apparent when they are described by a stranger with the wonder of novelty. This happy artifice comes to nothing in the hands of Goldsmith. His Chinese is, to all intents and purposes, an Englishman; and, whenever he attempts to make him speak in character, the failure is complete. It is simply as a collection of light papers upon the vices and follies of the day that the work must be regarded. As in all his speculations, there is much that is commonplace; but he skims pleasantly over the surface of things, gives picturesque sketches of the men he met and the haunts he frequented, and interminglest observations which, whether grave or gay, bear the stamp of his kindly nature. series, consisting of one hundred and twentythree letters, was brought to a conclusion about the middle of 1761, and was republished in two small volumes at the beginning of 1762. The In the gracefully told story of the "Man in Black," which derives additional interest from its being in the main an epitome of the life of the essayist himself, he talks of his improvident generosity, and his discovery that the way to assist the needy was first to secure independence. "My immediate care, therefore," he says, was to leave my present habitation, and make an entire reformation in my conduct and behavior." He removed, accordingly, towards the close of 1760, into better lodgings in Wine Office Court, Fleet Street, but the reformation in his conduct did not ensue. In every thing which he wrote at this period, he dwells upon the superiority of economy and justice over the misplaced liberality which puts the donor into the indigent circumstances of the person he relieves, for he had been smarting from the effects of discharging the debts of others with the money which should have gone to defray his own. In furtherance of his design, he boasted that he had exchanged his free and open manner for a close, suspicious air, and that he was now on his guard against the needy sharpers who, instead of picking his pockets, prevailed on him to empty them of his own accord into their hands. But he rightly called himself a mere machine of pity, incapable of withstanding the slightest exhibition of real or fictitious distress, and, however knowing his looks, his power to see through the clumsiest fraud was on a par with his firmness. He seems to have smiled at his own impotent resolutions in the moment of forming them. "One of the most heroic actions I ever performed," says the Man in Black, "and for which I shall praise myself as long as I live, was the refusing half-a-crown to an old acquaintance at the time when he wanted it and I had it to spare." This does not promise much constancy in the course, and no indication ever appeared that he had left his improvidence or his simplicity in his Green Arbor Court lodging. Among other good deeds, he remembered the landlady to the day of his death, supplied her from time to time with food from his table, and frequently returned to the scene of his old one chaired apartment to cheer and assist her. In evidence of his progress in detecting imposition, we are told that one Pilkington, who had long preyed upon the easiness of his nature, and had exasperated him by his conduct, burst into his room in ecstacies of joy. He apologized for the liberty, but his fortune was made, and he could not resist hurrying to impart the glad tidings to his best and earliest benefactor. The Duchess of Manchester had a mania for white mice. She possessed a pair, and for years had been 66 Pil offering enormous sums for a second. kington had commissioned a friend in India to send him two from the East; they were now in the river on board the good ship "Earl of Chatham," and, in proof of his story, he pulled out the letter advising him of their despatch. Nothing stood between him and independence except the want of a suitable cage in which to present them, and he could no more raise the two guineas for the purpose than pay off the national debt. Goldsmith protested that a single half-guinea was all he had in the world. Ay," says Pilkington, "but you have a watch if you could let me have that, I could pawn it across the way for two guineas, and be able to repay you with heart-felt gratitude in a few days. Pilkington must have resolved to have his jest as well as his guineas, when he made poor Oliver the dupe of so gross a hoax. Two years elapsed, when he suddenly reäppeared in a state of semi-intoxication at Goldsmith's rooms, and greeted him in the language of familiar friendship, at the unlucky moment when Topham Beauclerk and General Oglethorpe were honoring him with their company, and he was ashamed to seem intimate with the vulgar and disreputable importer of white mice. Pilkington had come to pay, not the guineas, but the "heart-felt gratitude." "Here, my dear friend," he suddenly exclaimed, as he pulled a couple of little parcels out of his pocket, "is a quarter of a pound of tea and half a pound of sugar, for, though it is not in my power at present to return you the two guineas, you nor any man else shall ever have it to say that I want gratitude.' Oliver, roused to anger, bid him begone, and he departed, carrying his tea and sugar with him. They never met again; but when Pilkington was dying, a messenger took, says Mr. Forster, "to the poor starving creature's death-bed a guinea from Mr. Goldsmith." Mr. Cooke, who relates the anecdote of the white mice, has coupled with it another illustration of the extreme credulity of his friend. He appeared late and hungry at a club, and, having eaten no dinner, ordered a dish of mutton chops for supper. His companions, to balk his eager appetite, drew their chairs from the table on the appearance of the dish, and gave sundry symptoms of disgust. Goldsmith asked anxiously if anything was the matter with the chops; but they evaded the question, and it was only with much pressing that they were brought to tell him that the smell was offensive. He rang the bell, covered the waiter, who quickly |