all my friends off, but I use them no worse than myself; I take myself off.” "Gad so!" cried the malcontent, "that I should like to see:" upon which Foote took up his hat, and left the room.

Upon another occasion, Foote illustrated the eagerness of the public for personal satire, when he makes a publisher object to a poem full of praise: "Why, who the devil will give money to be told that Mr. Such-a-one is a wiser and better man than himself? No, no; 'tis quite and clean out of nature. A good sousing satire, now, well-powdered with personal pepper, and seasoned with the spirit of party, that demolishes a conspicuous character, and sinks him below our level--there, there, we are pleased; there we chuckle and grin, and toss the half-crown on the counter."

Foote had attacked some pretentious person for his characteristic foible. "Why do you attack my weakest part ?" asked the assailed. "Did I ever say anything about your head ?" replied Foote.

Hugh Kelly was mightily boasting of the power he had as a reviewer of distributing literary reputation to any extent. "Don't be too prodigal of it," Foote quietly interposed, "or you may have none for yourself.”

A conceited young fellow was attempting to say fine things before Foote, who seemed unusually grave. Why, Foote,' said the small man, "you are flat to-day-you don't seem to relish wit." 66 'Hang it, you have not tried me yet," was

the caustic reply.

Mrs. Macauley, who wrote a sensible and trustworthy History of England, was less fortunate in the title of a pamphlet which she also published, entitled Loose Thoughts. The infelicitous choice was objected to in the presence of Foote, who dryly observed that he did not himself see any objection to it, for that the sooner Mrs. Macauley got rid of her loose thoughts the better.

Why are you for ever humming that air ?" Foote asked a man without a sense of tune in him. "Because it haunts me." "No wonder," said Foote; "you are ever murdering it."

A well-beneficed Cornish rector was holding forth at the dinner-table upon the surprising profits of his living, much to the weariness of every one present, when happening to stretch over the table hands remarkable for their dirt, Foote struck in with, "Well, Doctor, I for one am not at all surprised at your profits, for I see you keep the glebe in your own hands." What exquisite humour is there in this boast of horseflesh:

"My horse, sir! Why, I'll wager it to stand still faster than yours can gallop!"

Dining at the house of a gentleman where the Bishop of

was present, Foote was in high spirits, and talked immoderately; when the Bishop being angry at the entire usurpation of the talk by Foote, after waiting with considerable impatience, said: "When will that player leave off preaching ?" "Oh! my Lord," replied Foote, "the moment I am made a bishop."

Having dined at Merchant-Taylors' Hall, he was so well pleased with the entertainment, that he sat till most of the company had left the dinner-table. At length, rising, he said, "Gentlemen, I wish you both very good night." "Both!" exclaimed one of the company, "why, you must be drunk, Foote; here are twenty of us.' "I have been counting you, and there are just eighteen; and as nine tailors make a man, I am right, I wish you both very good night."

The Duke of Cumberland, (the foolish Duke, came one night into the green-room of the Haymarket Theatre. "Well, Foote," said he, "here I am, ready as usual to swallow all your good things." "Really," replied Foote, "your Royal Highness must have an excellent digestion, for you never bring any up again."

Foote praising the hospitality of the Irish, after one of his trips to the sister kingdom, a gentleman asked him whether he had ever been at Cork. "No, sir," replied Foote; "but I have seen many drawings of it."

A charitable committee calling one day upon Foote, at his hotel in Paris, he cried out loudly to his servant, "Peter, don't let anybody come upstairs, without first acquainting them that there is a gentleman in the house ill of the smallpox. Immediately on hearing this, away went the committee without seeing the actor. This ruse is strangely at variance with Foote's usually charitable feeling.

Foote's earliest notices of me (says George Colman the younger,) were far from flattering; but though they had none of Goldsmith's tenderness, they had none of Johnson's ferocity; and when he accosted me with his usual salutation of 66 Blow your nose, child," there was a whimsical manner, and a broad grin upon his features which always made me laugh. Foote walking up and down the rooms at Bath, a gentleman with him asked a third a lady's name just then passing by them; to which he replied, "Brown, sir." "Ay," said Foote, staring at the lady, "a lovely Brown indeed."

Why learned men are to be found in rich men's houses, and rich men never to be seen in those of the learned, was once asked of Foote. Why," said he, "the first know what they want, but the latter do not."

66

1

"You

Having satirized the Scotch pretty severely, a gentleman asked Foote "Why he hated that nation so much." are mistaken," said Foote; "I don't hate the Scotch, neither do I hate frogs, but I would have everything keep to its native element.'

Mr. Forster has applied to Foote's humour the most comprehensive epithet: it was incompressible. No matter what the truth of any subject might be, or however strong the position of any adversary, he managed to get the laugh on his own side. It was not merely a quickness of fancy, a brilliance of witty resource, a ready and expert audacity of invention; but there was a fulness and invincibility of courage in the man, call it moral or immoral, which unfailingly warded off humiliation. "Foote," says Dr. Johnson, "is the most incompressible fellow that I ever knew; when you have driven him into a corner, and think you are sure of him, he runs through between your legs, or jumps over your head, and makes his escape.'

Not even the presence of royalty could keep under his wit. When Foote was under a cloud, George the Third commanded the performances, and a new play, the Contract, taken by Dr. Thomas Franklin from the Triple Marriage of Destouches, was played after one of Foote's comedies. When Foote lighted the King to his chair, his Majesty asked who the piece was written by? "By one of your Majesty's chaplains," said Foote, unable to suppress his wit; "and dull enough to have been written by a bishop."

THE OLD HAYMARKET GREEN-ROOM.

Theodore Hook, in his Gilbert Gurney, has left this ludicrous picture of the green-room of the old Haymarket Theatre: "It was literally a green-room, into which light was admitted by a thing like a cucumber-frame at one end of it. It was matted, and round the walls ran a bench covered with faded green stuff, whereupon the dramatis personæ deposited themselves until called to go on the stage; a lookingglass under the skylight, and a large bottle of water and a tumbler on the chimney-piece, completed the furniture of this classic apartment."

OLIVER GOLDSMITH.

THE GOLDSMITH FAMILY.

THE family of Goldsmith, Goldsmyth, or, as it was occasionally written, Gouldsmith, is of considerable standing in Ireland, and seems always to have held a respectable station in society. Its origin is English, supposed to be derived from that which was long settled at Crayford, in Kent.-(Prior's Life of Goldsmith.)

Oliver's father, great-grandfather, and great-great-grandfather were clergymen; and two of them married clergymen's daughters.

The first ascertained ancestor was his great-great-grandfather, the Rev. John Goldsmith, rector of Borrishoull, in the county of Mayo, who narrowly escaped perishing in the Popish massacre of 1641. He, with the other clergy, and the Bishop of Killala, witnessed the shocking scene at Castlebar. They fled to the residence of Viscount Bourke, a Roman Catholic peer, who had married a Protestant lady, upon whom Mr. Goldsmith remained in attendance; the rest of the party set out for Galway, and himself accompanied them part of the way thither; but so soon as he left them they were set upon, and the Bishop and almost all his train murdered.* The services and losses of this rector of Borrishoull procured a small grant of land and considerable promotion in the church for his eldest son, who died in 1722, Dean of Elphin. His second son, Robert, the poet's grandfather, obtained also a beneficial lease of some crown land, and lived on it as a gentleman farmer. Charles Goldsmith, the poet's father, was Robert's second son, one of a family of thirteen children; he was of Trinity College, Dublin, took orders on leaving it, and immediately married the daughter of the Rev. Oliver Jones, master of a school at Elphin, where he had

*

* History of the Irish Rebellion, by Sir John Temple, 1698.

received his preliminary education and formed this attachment. The young couple married against the will of both their families, and without having any means of support at their own command; but Mr. Green, an uncle of the bride, who was rector of Kilkenny-West, provided them a farmhouse in his parish to live in, and by-and-bye her mother, Mrs. Jones, made over to them fifty acres of land, procured at a nominal rent.* Of this tenure the following is related:

The Rev. Oliver Jones had held these and other lands on a life-rent lease from Mr. Conolly, one of the Lords Justices. His wife, on his death, found that Mr. Conolly was not disposed to grant a renewal, and determined to try the effect of a personal application. She mounted on horseback behind her only son, and travelled straight to Dublin. Mr. Conolly persisted in his refusal, until the old lady drew out a bag, and showered its contents, one hundred guineas, upon the table. This was a temptation not to be resisted; the landlord immediately granted a fresh lease of half the lands on the same easy terms as before-and she used afterwards to say that she wished she had taken another hundred with her, and so secured the whole. An accident on this journey cost the spirited dame the life of her son: she returned home, as the old song says, "Sitting single on her saddle;" and, in the mercy of sorrow, handed over the hard-earned lease to her rash daughter and son-in-law.

OLIVER GOLDSMITH BORN.

The farmhouse in which the Goldsmith family found shelter was that of Pallismore, or Pallas, the property of the Edgeworths of Edgeworthstown ;—and here they continued to live for about twelve years, on the scanty income of Mr. Conolly's fifty acres, which it adjoined. Five children were born to them at Pallismore, the last being Oliver, who, according to the first leaf of the family-bible, saw the light (while Swift was yet alive,) on the 10th of November, 1728, three years earlier than the date on his monument in Westminster Abbey. He had one brother, Henry, six years his senior, two younger brothers, and three sisters; but before all these came into the world, the father succeeded to the living of Kilkenny-West, then worth 150l. to 2007. a year, and removed to a good house at Lissoy, in that parish.

A century and a quarter ago, when Goldsmith was born, Pallas was a rude place, and bore scarcely any evidence of having been adapted to the wants of man. "Even at this

day," says Lord Macaulay, "those enthusiasts who venture to make a pilgrimage to the birthplace of the poet, are

* Abridged from the Quarterly Review, No. 114: Prior's Life and Works of Goldsmith, 1836.