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Sir f'oskiua Reynolds, pinvt.


OLIVER GOLDSMITH


1I  I r\ l




OLIVER
GOLDSMITH
BY
RICHARD ASHE KING
W.


WITH A PORTRAIT
*  -
METHUEN & CO. LTD.
36 ESSEX STREET W.C.
LONDON




First Published in Ig9o




TO
MY WIFE




I




CONTENTS
CHAP.                                   PAGE
INTRODUCTION... ix
I. SCHOOL DAYS....   I
II. COLLEGE DAYS.... 20
III. HOME FOR THE HOLIDAYS,.     ' 31
IV. EDINBURGH.... 45
V. A PHILOSOPHIC VAGABOND.       53
VI. LONDON...             66
VII. GRUB STREET...       75
VIII. "THERE'S FLESH ON HIS BONES YET". 88
IX. OUT OF EGYPT... I
X. "THE CHINESE LETTERS"... 112
XI. TOIL AND TEARS.... 120
XII. FRIENDSHIP WITH JOHNSON... 13I
XIII. "THE VICAR OF WAKEFIELD"'.
XIV. "THE TRAVELLER".... 55
XV. "THE GOOD-NATURED MAN".. 168
XVI. CHILDISH EXTRAVAGANCES... 183
XVII. "THE DESERTED VILLAGE"... 92
XVIII. GOLDSMITH'S TEMPERAMENT... 204
XIX. "THE HAUNCH OF VENISON".       215
Vii




viii     OLIVER GOLDSMITH
CHAP.                                   PAGE
XX. AT PLAY.... 225
XXI. "SHE STOOPS TO CONQUER".. 235
XXII. "As A HARE WHOM HOUNDS AND HORNS
PURSUE....      247
XXIII. "RETREAT FROM CARE THAT NEVER MUST
BE MINE"..... 257
XXIV. "RETALIATION.... 272
XXV. FROM MISERY FREED... 282
INDEX..... 291




INTRODUCTION


M Y chief and perhaps sole qualification for
undertaking this sketch of Goldsmith's life
is that of an Irishman who, through, long residence in
England, has come to understand how the " Poor
Poll" and " Inspired Idiot" idea of the poet became
current in his own day and survives still to-day.
There is no triter quotation from Boswell than
that of Goldsmith's retort to the ridicule by Johnson
of his contention that " It was difficult to make little
fishes in a fable talk in character." When Johnson
roared his ridicule, Goldsmith was nettled into the
retort: "Why, Mr Johnson, this is not so easy as you
seem to think; for if you were to make little fishes
talk, they would talk like WHALES.') Now, there is
the complementary difficulty of getting whales to
understand the prattle of little fishes, which explains
much of the social contempt of Goldsmith's English
contemporaries and biographers. No Irishman can
live long in England without an occasional, if not
continual, sense of his own colloquial frivolity. The
well-balanced and well-ballasted British intellect cannot always follow that cock-boat dancing on every
wave to every wind which an Irishman is pleased to
call his mind. The following image is in old Fuller,
ix




x


OLIVER GOLDSMITH


but I hope, if I venture to quote it, no Englishman
will solemnly charge me with making, for the Irish
intelligence, a claim of Shakespearian superiority.
"Many were the wit combats between Shakespeare
and Ben Jonson, which two I behold like a Spanish
great galleon and an English man-of-war. Master
Jonson, like the former, was built far higher in learning-solid but slow in his performances. Shakespeare, with the English man-of-war, lesser in bulk,
but lighter in sailing, could turn with all tides, tack
about and take advantage of all winds by the quickness of his wit and invention." Again, the average
Irishman is seldom in earnest and never on oath in
conversation, to the frequent bewilderment of the
average Englishman. Often, indeed, an Irishman's
ideas rush out of his mind like the inhabitants of a
house on fire-undressed, half-dressed, or grotesquely
dressed in the first garments to hand; tumbling, too,
one over another in their wild scurry: whereas the
ordinary Englishman's ideas issue forth from his mind
like a Presbyterian household on a Sabbath morn,
marching in due order and decorous dress solemnly
to the kirk. I might add that the house on fire
is often a tenement house packed to the roof with
heterogeneous tenants, interrelated through association only; while the Presbyterian household is all of
one family-small or large,
Thus the Irishman in England talks often too
much, too fast, too lightly, too figuratively and too
discursively; but such talk is never intended to be




INTRODUCTION


xi


taken seriously.  If you insist upon handling a
soap-bubble, its grace, lightness and iridescence
disappears, and Englishmen sometimes insist on
handling so conversational soap-bubbles. "Who are
those, Mahony?" a Bradford man asked an Irish
friend of mine, pointing to some sculptured heads
that adorned the newly-built warehouse of a not overreputable German Jew merchant. "If you ask me,"
replied Mahony, " I should say they were the forty
thieves." Whereupon the Bradford man, after a careful count of heads, objected, "Why, Mahony, as there
are only twenty-two heads they can't be the forty
thieves." "Oh, the rest are inside," rejoined Mahony.
In addressing once a West Riding audience I
happened to use in illustration the different marks
made by the woodman on the trees in a neighbouring
wood. "If you should go," I said, " through Courtney
Woods, you will find some trees marked with a white
ring, some marked with a red, and some blazed with
an axe, etc., etc." As the meeting dispersed a gentleman came up to me in great excitement to say, "You
ought to consider your words, sir, when you address
an audience like that!" "Why, so I did."  "How
then, sir, could you come to say to those people, 'If
you should go through Courtney Woods,' when you
know as well as I that they are not allowed to go
through Courtney Woods."
It will be said that such matter-of-fact folk may, of
course, be met with here and there in odd and out-ofthe-way corners of England, but that Goldsmith was




xii  OLIVER GOLDSMITH


little likely to meet them in the very centre of intellectual light in London. But Goldsmith did meet
with such matter-of-fact folk even there, and it is
to the absurdity of such folk that we owe, in part,
our idea of the absurdity of the poet. I shall take
the three who have done much, perhaps most, to discredit Goldsmith's conversation-Boswell, Mrs Thrale
and Cooke. Cooke, to be sure, was himself an Irishman, but a North of Ireland man, and therefore, to all
intents and purposes a Scotsman, as, indeed, the
following anecdote testifies. Sam Rogers, who knew
Cooke in his old age, asked him once, " Mr Cooke, you
were intimate with Goldsmith. What was your impression of him?" "Sir, he was a fool-he was a
fool! The right word never came to him. If he gave
you a shilling, and you handed it back to him saying,
'It was a bad one,' what do you think he would say,
sir? He would say, it's as good a shilling as ever
was born-born, sir, instead of coined; but 'coined,'
sir, never entered his head!" Cooke's instance of
Goldsmith's envy is no less inconsequent. "On
hearing a ballad-singer sing his favourite air of
' Sally Salisbury ' under the window of a room where
I," says Cooke, "and some ladies were assembled,
Goldsmith exclaimed with his usual vanity and
envy, ' How miserably that woman sings!' 'Pray,
doctor,' asked the lady of the house, 'could you
sing it better yourself?' 'Yes, madam,' he replied,
amidst a general titter of derision, 'and the company shall judge between us.' Hereupon," adds




INTRODUCTION


xiii
Xtll


Cooke, "he really did sing the song with so much
taste and expression as to win the universal suffrages of the company! "
Let me now give Mrs Thrale's conclusive instance
of Goldsmith's idiocy in conversation. "Poor Dr
Goldsmith said once, 'I would advise every young
fellow setting out in life to love gravy'-alleging for
it perfectly seriously this reason that 'a glutton once
disinherited his nephew because he disliked gravy!'"
If Mrs Thrale had come upon this advice where it
originally appeared-in Goldsmith's burlesque specimen of a magazine in miniature-it is possible that
she might have understood it to be a joke. But
Goldsmith had the unfortunate habit approved of, by
the way, by both Cicero and Shakespeare, of " uttering
a jest with a sad brow" to deepen the incongruity.
" I am sure," said the " Jessamy Bride," "that on many
occasions, from the peculiar manner of Goldsmith's
humour and assumed frown of countenance, what was
often uttered by him in jest was mistaken by those
who did not know him for earnest." To what does
the "Jessamy Bride" refer here? To a jest uttered
by Goldsmith "with a sad brow," which Boswell
stolidly comments upon thus: —" When accompanying two beautiful young ladies with their mother "i.e., the "Jessamy Bride," " Little Comedy" and their
mother-" on a tour in France, Goldsmith was
seriously angry that more attention was paid to them
than to him." But the " Jessamy Bride " herself, who
told the story again and again to the end of her long




xiv      OLIVER GOLDSMITH
life, never failed to add that Goldsmith was obviously
jesting. Was it even necessary to make this explanation to anyone except Boswell? Here is the story. The
" Jessamy Bride " and " Little Comedy," while standing
with Goldsmith on the balcony of a hotel in France,
excited the admiration of the officers of a passing
French regiment by their beauty. Goldsmith, with
the drollest affectation of jealousy, turned away,
saying, with a shrug, " I too have my admirers elsewhere!" This when passed through the mind of
Boswell, like gas subjected to tremendous pressure,
comes out solid: "Goldsmith was seriously angry
that more attention was paid to them than to
him."
It may be said that such preposterous misunderstandings were possible only in the case of a man
whose character and conversation generally lent
themselves to the misrepresentation-that Goldsmith
must have been notoriously the most envious and
least reticent of men to have such incredible outbreaks
of this base passion attributed to him. But even
Boswell has supplied an answer to such a suggestion.
Goldsmith, he says, was supposed to be the most
envious of men only because he was the least
reticent.
"In my opinion," he writes, "Goldsmith had
not more envy than other people have, but only
talked of it freely." The truth is an incontinence of
speech which in Ireland betokens mere lightness of
heart seems to Englishmen mere imbecility. Such




INTRODUCTION


XV


effervescence of geniality is specially distinctive of
Irishmen of the Goldsmith type, whose spirits are
always at either spring or neap tide. Gloomy when
by themselves, in congenial company they rattle
away, saying anything and everything that comes
uppermost; while much of what comes uppermost
is of no more substance than soda-water bubbles
-in themselves nothing, but enjoyable for the
exhilaration they indicate and diffuse.  Such talk
when served up in cold print might well taste like a
heel-tap of yesterday's soda-water, which I once heard
a waiter (who had drunk it in mistake for hock)
describe to a fellow-waiter as "the nothingest thing
he had ever tasted!" Now it is specially such specimens of Goldsmith's talk that Boswell, in his jealousy
\A of "Goldy's" favour with Johnson, is at pains to
collect and record. Though, however, he is almost
as eager to expose Goldsmith as to exalt Johnson,
he yet records so many bon mots of his rival in Johnson's affections as to suggest that Goldsmith's mistake
was the winnowing of his wheat in the face of his
company.   The other members of "The Club"
winnowed their wheat within, and what they produced, even if scanty, showed to more advantage
than Goldsmith's contribution, lost in its bushel of
chaff. If Goldsmith had had a Boswell always on
the look out to record only his hits, how different
would have been our conception of his talk!  A
Boswell "for the other side" makes all the difference
in the world. Yet even a Boswell "for the other
b




Xvi


OLIVER GOLDSMITH


side " admits that " Goldsmith was often very fortunate
in his witty contests, even when he entered the lists
with Johnson himself." Nor, again, does this Boswell
"for the other side " lend countenance to the " Poor
Poll" and "Inspired Idiot" exaggerations of Goldsmith's talk. "It has been generally circulated and
believed," writes Boswell, "that Goldsmith was a
mere fool in conversation; but, in truth, this has been
greatly exaggerated. He had no doubt a more than
common share of that hurry of ideas which we often
find in his countrymen and which sometimes produces a laughable confusion in expressing them."
The truth is fairly expressed in Paoli's fine image,
which, however, he applied to the works and not the
words of the poet:-" Monsieur Goldsmith est comme
la mer, qui jette des perles et beaucoup d'autres belles
choses sans s'en appercevoir." He may have been in his
talk as indiscriminating as the sea in what he flung out;
but among the random rack and rubbish were pearls
and other treasures of price; while, again, much that
would appear to Englishmen mere random rack and
rubbish, would be recognised by his fellow-countrymen for what it was-light jests " uttered with a
sad brow," or such a genial effervescence of animal
spirits as meant no more than the happy laughter of
a child.
Boswell, it will be said, and justly, echoes only
after all Johnson and the Club in his disparagement
of Goldsmith's talk, and the disparagement of
Johnson, Sir Joshua Reynolds and the Club gener



INTRODUCTION


XVll


-ally is not so easily to be disposed of. Let me
cite the trenchant summing up of Macaulay of the
overwhelming evidence for the silliness of the poet's
conversation.
"Whenever Goldsmith took part in conversation
he was an empty, noisy, blundering rattle, On this
point the evidence is overwhelming. So extraordinary
was the contrast between Goldsmith's published
works and the silly things he said that Horace
Walpole described him as 'an inspired idiot.'
'Noll,' said Garrick, 'wrote like an angel and
talked like Poor Poll.' Chamier declared that it
was a hard exercise of faith to believe that so foolish
a chatterer could have really written The Traveller.
Even Boswell could say with contemptuous compassion that ' he liked very well to hear honest
Goldsmith run on.' ' Yes, sir,' said Johnson, 'but
he should not like to hear himself."'
- Now Johnson, unlike Boswell, loved Goldsmith;
and Sir Joshua Reynolds, who also loved him, said, " I
have frequently heard Goldsmith talk warmly of the
pleasure of being liked, and observe how hard it
would be if literary excellence should preclude a
man from that satisfaction, which he perceived it
often did from the envy that attached to it; therefore I am convinced Goldsmith was often intentionally
absurd." In the face of such evidence, not impartial
merely, but partial-since both Johnson and Reynolds
loved Goldsmith-it would be absurd to deny that
Goldsmith showed to disadvantage in conversation




xviii  OLIVER GOLDSMITH


in the Club or in the society of Johnson. But it
must be remembered that Goldsmith always felt at
a disadvantage in the Club and in the society of
Johnson, and, again, that he was the most sensitive
and self-conscious of men. "Goldsmith," says Miss
Reynolds, " always appeared to be overawed by
Johnson-always as if impressed by the fear of
some disgrace"; and she adds, "and indeed well
he might," and I also, and more emphatically, add
" well he might!" One has only to realise what
kind of man Goldsmith was, what kind of man
Johnson was, and what kind was the conversation
of Johnson either in or out of the Club, to understand
how Goldsmith was disconcerted in Johnson's society.
Johnson came into every society as a knight rides
into the lists, expecting and meaning to fight, and
to fight, to the death, not always scrupulously. "If
Johnson's pistol misses fire," Goldsmith said, quoting
from Colley Cibber, "he knocks you down with the
butt end of it." Let us see for a moment what was
the kind of conversation in which Johnson revelled.
"Well, Sir Joshua," said Dunning, the lawyer, when
he was the first to arrive at one of Sir Joshua's
famous dinner-parties, where Burke, Johnson, etc.,
wrangled together, "well, Sir Joshua, and whom
have you got to dine with you to-day? The last
time I dined at your house the company was of
such a sort that by G —! I believe all the rest of the
world enjoyed peace for that afternoon!" This from
a lawyer, who is not usually averse to contention,




INTRODUCTION


xix


seeing that lawyers live in and by it, like gold-fish
in warm water. Again, one morning Johnson said
to Boswell, "We had good talk last night, sir."
"Yes, sir," replied Boswell, "you tossed and gored
a good many people! " If Goldsmith had been, as
he only too often was, one of the tossed and gored,
it is easy to understand how a man of his morbid
sensitiveness and self-consciousness would lose his
head and lose his feet and flounder and blunder.
An Irish judge told me that in the early part of
the last century a Tipperary man was on trial for
the manslaughter in a faction fight of a fellowcountryman in Nenagh fair. The skull of the man
he had slain was produced in ghastly evidence
against him, and when the judge asked him what
he had to say why sentence should not be passed
upon him, he pointed to the skull and said, "Yerra,
my lord, what business had a man wid a shkull as
thin as. that in Nenagh fair!" And a man with
a skin as thin as Goldsmith's had no business in
such a hurly-burly as a Johnson symposium.
"Goldsmith, sir," said Johnson, "should not be for
ever attempting to shine in conversation. He has
not the temper for it-he is so much mortified when
he fails."
Then, the kind of conversation in a Club dominated
by Johnson was not the kind in which Goldsmith
excelled,-if he excelled in any kind, as I hope
presently to show, or at least to suggest, that he did.
Indeed, it was a kind that Johnson could not away




xx   OLIVER GOLDSMITH


with. Let me take the a fortiori case of Edmund
Burke, who by universal admission, by the admission
of Johnson himself, was a supreme talker. "If
Burke," said Johnson, "took shelter under an archway with a drover and talked to the man for the
ten minutes the shower lasted, the drover would say,
'This is an extraordinary man!' Now, sir," added
Johnson, who was too great to be mock-modest, "no
one would say that of me." Again, when Johnson
once was out of sorts, he said, " If I were to see 'Mond
Burke now, it would kill me. That fellow calls forth
all my powers." Yet how small is the place Burke
fills in Boswell! Because, it will be said, Burke's
serious talk was as much above the appreciation of
Boswell as his great speeches were above the heads of
the House of Commons. But of Burke's lighter talk
what record is there in Boswell? Practically none;
because Johnson thought Burke's lighter talk beneath
contempt, and it was therefore considered negligible
by Boswell. "When Burke," said Johnson, "does
not descend to be merry his conversation is superior
indeed. There is no proportion between the powers
he shows in serious talk and in jocularity. When
he lets himself down to that he is in the kennel."
And in the kennel Boswell left him, because for him
there was no appeal from Johnson's judgment. But
there is for us. We may appeal to the judgment
of a man who, in Johnson's own opinion, was as
good a judge of conversation as any man in England
-to that of Sir Joshua Reynolds.   "Sir," said




INTRODUCTION


xxi


Johnson once to Boswell, "I know no man who
has passed through life with more observation than
Reynolds." And of this man, whom nothing escaped,
Johnson said on another occasion, " Reynolds was as
good a judge of talk as he was of painting." But
what is Sir Joshua's judgment of the jocularity which
in the opinion of Johnson lowered Burke into the
kennel? "I have often heard," says Sir Joshua,
"Burke say in the course of an evening ten good
things, any one of which would have served so-andso" (mentioning a noted wit, probably Wyndham)
"to live upon for a twelvemonth."
There was a kind of lighter talk in which Goldsmith
also excelled, when in congenial society, that Johnson
could not enjoy nor even endure. Even the unclubable knight, Sir John Hawkins, who disliked Goldsmith, and whose dislike was almost as much to the
credit of the poet as Johnson's and Reynolds' love,
admits grudgingly that even in the hard-headed
Scotch environment of Edinburgh Goldsmith was
a great social success. "He was famous there in
his student days," says Sir John, "for setting the
table on a roar, though," the worthy knight adds
in depreciation, "his motive was the unworthy one
of an inordinate desire for applause." "Any learned
celebrity he may have got in the schools," says
Mr Forster, "paled its uneffectual fire before his
amazing social success." And in a letter to Mr
Forster the Rev. Edward Mangin writes:-" You
rather intimate to my great gratification that you




x1xi


OLIVER GOLDSMITH


do not conceive Goldsmith to have been understood
by persons among whom he usually moved. I own I
always thought he was not, and that his ordinary deportment and powers of conversation are grossly misrepresented by several who have talked and scribbled
so flippantly about his peculiarities and blunders.
We had formerly at Upham's Library (once Bull's)
here in Bath an assistant in the establishment of
the name of Croot. He had filled the situation for
many years and was a clear-headed, observing old
man. He often amused me and others with anecdotes of the distinguished individuals known to him
as the frequenters of the library; and one day,
speaking of Goldsmith, he told me that the poet
was eagerly greeted on his entrance, and always
conversed so pleasantly that he had behind his chair
a crowd of respectful auditors and admirers."
One thing more I should like to say, that the supposed cause of Goldsmith's absurdity in conversation
is non-existent.  It is universally supposed that
Goldsmithwasmuddle-headedand unreadyand needed
time to get his ideas disentangled. As Macaulay putsit:-" Minds differ as rivers differ. There are transparent, and sparkling rivers from which it is delightful
to drink as they flow-to such rivers the minds of
such men as Burke and Johnson may be compared.
But there are rivers of which the water when first
drawn is turbid and noisome, but becomes pellucid as
crystal and delicious to the taste if it be suffered to
stand till it has deposited a sediment; and such a




INTRODUCTION


xxiii


river is a type of the mind of Goldsmith. His first
thoughts on every subject were confused even to
absurdity, but they required only a little time to work
themselves clear. When he wrote they had that
time, and therefore his readers pronounced him a
man of genius; but when he talked, he talked nonsense and made himself the laughing-stock of his
hearers."
This theory is easily disposed of. Goldsmith was
at once the clearest-headed and readiest-witted of
men. " Style," says Schopenhauer, " is the phlysiognomy of the mind and a safer index to character than
the face.... An obscure or bad style means a dull
-or confused brain." But Goldsmith's style? One of
its chief -distinctions is its limpidity. Are we then to
suppose that with Goldsmith alone his style was as
distinct from his mind as, say, the voice of a diva is
distinct from her artistic intelligence? No, you say;
but you are to suppose that Goldsmith's turbid mind
took some time to run itself clear. When it had run
itself clear, no doubt it was translucently clear, but
the operation took time. It never took it, for it never
got it, except in the composition of his poems, plays
and novel. The headlong haste in which all Goldsmith's other work was written is something well-nigh
incredible, when its ease, and order, and pellucid
clearness are considered. "Ah, Mr Craddock," he
said pathetically to an amateur author, who took
months to polish a few pages, " ah, Mr Craddock,
think of me that must write a volume every month! "




xxiv  OLIVER GOLDSMITH


Let me give a list, and that an imperfect list, of all
the work Goldsmith had in hand while he was writing
his History of England in a Series of Letters from a
Nobleman to his Son. Besides his journalistic work,
he edited The Lady's Magazine, translated a Life of
Christ and Lives of the Fathers for The Christian
Magazine, in addition to original contributions made
to it; revised a History of Mecklenburgh from the
First Settlement of the Vandals in that Country; compiled an Anthology under the title of an Art of
Poetry on a New Plan; epitomised many of Plutarch's
Lives; wrote a pamphlet on the Cock-lane Ghost;
wrote a Life of Beau Nash; revised and enlarged
Wonders of Nature and Art, a System of Natural
History and A Description of Millennium Hall; and
contributed largely to the Martial Review, or General
History of the Late War-all this while writing a
History of England in a Series of Letters from a
Nobleman to his Son.
And how were these extraordinarily popular
"Letters" themselves composed? Cooke tells you.
In the morning Goldsmith would study as much
history in Rapin, Kennett or Hume as would serve
for one Letter, noting the needful passages on a piece
of paper, adding remarks of his own. At night he
took up with him these books and notes to his bedroom and wrote the chapter with as much ease as
anyone might write a letter to a friend. And these,
I need not say, were far from the usual conditions
under which Goldsmith wrote. He put off everything




INTRODUCTION


XXV


to the last moment till, as his landlady in Green Arbour
Court tells you, the bookseller [i.e. publisher] had to
track him to his garret, lock there the door upon him
and stand menacingly over him till he had reeled off the
required amount of copy. Fancy any muddle-headed
or unready man writing under such conditions swiftly,
clearly and coherently! Yet under such conditions
Goldsmith wrote swiftly, clearly and coherentlywithout pause or break, blot or correction. "Goldsmith's style in prose," writes Bishop Percy,
"flowed from him with such felicity that in whole
quires of his Histories, Animated Nature, etc., etc.,
he had seldom occasion to correct or alter a single
word."
So much for the conditions of Goldsmith's hack
work; and as to its quality, it was such that on its
merits alone he was admitted to the rigidly exclusive
Club, and on its merits alone Johnson pronounced
him," One of the first men we have now as an author."
When Johnson allowed Goldsmith this reputation, and
when this reputation gained him admission to the
Club, the poet had not published poem, play or novel.
The truth is Goldsmith wrote, so to say, extemporeas fast as some men could speak extempore. And his
extempore speeches-for in his early days in London
he attended debating clubs-his extempore speeches
were most of all notable for this very quality of lucidity.
In the archives of " The Robin Hood Club "-a debating club of such distinction that there Burke himself
first made his mark in London as a speaker-in the




xxvi  OLIVER GOLDSMITH


archives of this club the following note was entered
upon Goldsmith long before he had earned fame as a
writer:-" A candid speaker with a clear head and an
honest heart —though coming but seldom to the
society."
Goldsmith, then, was neither muddle-headed nor
unready, but he was easily and often disconcerted, and,
when disconcerted, he lost his head. "Goldsmith,"
said Johnson, "is as irascible as a hornet," that is, he
was exquisitely and even morbidly sensitive, and this
morbid sensitiveness was played upon, or rather
trampled upon, only too often by men whom his very
sweetness of nature, which should have disarmed
them, encouraged to the attack. "Goldsmith forgave
injuries so readily," says Macaulay, "that he might be
said to invite them "-surely a sentiment that smacks
at once of servility and brutality! Brutes trample or
gore to death the weak or the wounded only because
they are weak or wounded, and slaves and cowards
strike only where they are sure the blow will not be
returned.
I must admit, then, that Goldsmith showed to disadvantage in conversation in the society in which he
found himself most often, and in which Boswell most
often met him, in London-in contentious society
where every word was a blow, and in matter-of-fact
society where every word was rung upon the counter
to see if it was as good a shilling as ever was borncoined, I mean. But in society, where conversation
was rather a game than a fight, and a game like Bad



INTRODUCTION


x v
XXVll


minton where the shuttlecock was light and feathered
and flew high, he showed to advantage till those evil
days came upon him when in his wretchedness he
was poor company for anyone and poorest company
of all for himself. While playing whist one evening
at Sir William Chambers' Goldsmith suddenly, at a
crisis of the game, sprang up, flung down his cards
and rushed from the room. On his return Sir William
cried irritably, " What the deuce is the matter, Goldsmith?" "It was that poor ballad-singer," replied
Goldsmith, " she could hardly sing for her sobs"; and
so he had hurried out to empty his purse for her relief.
It was Goldsmith's own case in the days when Boswell
met him most often.   "Goldsmith's debts," says
Cooke, "rendered him at times so melancholy and
dejected that I am sure he felt himself a very unhappy
man." "Goldsmith's disappointments," says Glover,
" made him at times peevish and sullen and he has
often left a party of convivial friends abruptly in the
evening to go home and brood over his misfortunes."
Misfortunes, you cry, brought on by himself, by his
own reckless extravagance and improvidence. That,
to be sure, is a soothing consciousness, when you have
remorse from within helping misery from without to
pull you down! No defeat is so certain as the defeat
of that man who is his own enemy, since that enemy
is always at the gate! And that enemy in these
days overtook Goldsmith, broke his heart, broke his
spirits, 'brought down his strength in his journey
and shortened his days, and made him, as I say




xxviii OLIVER GOLDSMITH


poor company for anyone and poorest of all for
himself.
To sum up then upon Goldsmith's social failurewhich I have put first because it occupies the first
place in nearly all English notices of the poet-it was
really rather national than personal. It was the
failure of an Irishman with an irrepressible, irresponsible, irreflective and fanciful tongue in contentious or matter-of-fact company. But, indeed,
almost all the other faults and virtues of Goldsmith
which to his English contemporaries and biographers
seem eccentricities or idiosyncrasies, appear to his
fellow-countrymen natural and national characteristics. What has been called " the eternal boyhood of
an Irishman " manifests itself in the superlative degree
in Goldsmith; and its superlative degree is childlikeness. He was child-like in his simplicity, in his
trustfulness, in his vanity, and in the naive expression
of his vanity; child-like in his sacrifice of the future to
the present, in his impulsiveness and improvidence;
in his "' knack at hoping" and in its complementary
abandonment to despair. Perhaps from the standpoint of hard common sense many of his virtues
leaned to failings' side; and Englishmen, being so
circumspect themselves at once in speech and action,
cannot readily sympathise with, nor even comprehend, child-like precipitancy of tongue and of hand.
But to Goldsmith's fellow-countrymen much that
seems silly in his talk and eccentric in his character
appears natural and even rational. Hence no Irish



INTRODUCTION                xxix
man looks down upon Goldsmith from the height of
a Mrs Thrale, of a Boswell, or even of a Prior, a
Forster or a Macaulay. Standing on the same plane
he sees his fellow-countryman nearer and knows him
better; sympathises with weaknesses he shares himself, and understands the benumbing effect of a chill
or uncongenial environment upon a singularly
sensitive and self-conscious temperament. Only an
Irishman long resident in England can understand
the full significance of a passage in a letter from
Goldsmith in London to his brother Henry in
Ireland:-" I have contracted a hesitating, disagreeable manner of speaking."




I0
II




OLIVER GOLDSMITH
CHAPTER I
SCHOOL DAYS
JF you reverse the apt and just compliment of
Johnson's epitaph on Goldsmith you epitomise
the history of his early years:
"Qui nullum fere scribendi genus
non tetigit;
Nullum quod tetigit non ornavit."
There was hardly a profession which he did not
attempt; to none that he attempted did he attain.
He tried the Church; and failed. He tried the Law;
and failed. He tried Medicine; and failed. Strange
that a man who failed in all that he attempted in his
youth should have succeeded in all that he attempted
in his manhood. Stranger still, perhaps, that these
failures of his early years should be in a sense the
seeds of his later successes, and that because no
writer ever turned his successive discomfitures to
such fruitful and felicitous literary account as Goldsmith. All those years that seemed wasted, all those
lost opportunities, all those futile attempts to enter
profession after profession bore afterwards in his
works abundant and imperishable fruit. I remember
hearing Huxley in a lecture at Bradford explain that
"the better bed coal" of that neighbourhood was
I




2


OLIVER GOLDSMITH


wholly composed of seeds of a gigantic fern which
ages since and for ages had fallen seemingly wasted
to the earth; but which to-day, as coal, give light,
and heat, and comfort to thousands of homes.
Similarly all the seemingly waste years of Goldsmith's life have yielded the lambent light which
shines in his works. This, it might be said, is not
exclusively distinctive of Goldsmith, since every poet
and novelist-Burns or Byron, Fielding or Smollett,
say-has used up in his works the waste places and
pieces of his life. "Experience," says Guizot, " is a
torch that gives light only on the condition of
burning," or as Shelley has it, poets "learn in suffering what they teach in song." But it seems to me
more true of Goldsmith than of any other poet or
novelist, because, in his works, both as a poet and as
a novelist, he uses up, I might almost say, only his
own experiences. So true is this that, if you were
in doubt about the truth or falsehood of some of the
adventures he describes in his letters to his mother or
to his uncle, or in his conversations with his London
friends, you have but to see whether or not these
adventures are inwoven in one form or another in his
works. If they are, you may be assured of their
truth; if they are not, you may be no less assured of
their being but flights of fancy. When Goldsmith
was professedly romancing he is often telling you his
real adventures: when he is professedly telling his
real adventures, he is often romancing. Everything
that really happened to him-everything he really
thought, feltj did, or suffered-is assimilated in his
works. "No man," says Helps truly, "is so confidential as when he takes the whole world into his
confidence," and Goldsmith was far franker indirectly




SCHOOL DAYS


3


in his confidences to the whole world than he was
directly in his confidences to his mother, his uncle,
his brother-in-law or his friends. If, then, you wish
to find the real Goldsmith, you will find him more
faithfully reflected in his own works than in the
accounts of his contemporaries or in the biographies
of his biographers. And this Goldsmith of Goldsmith
himself is far indeed from being the poor, irreflective,
irresponsible creature of Boswell, Garrick, Mrs Thrale,
or Horace Walpole. A pretence to know Goldsmith
better than Mrs Thrale, Boswell or Garrick, who
knew him personally and intimately in all his moods
and in all his moments, may seem impudent; but
after all, to know a man personally and intimately
is the reverse of an advantage for judging him justlyif you dislike him. If you dislike a man, you will be
always and only on the lookout for what you dislike
in him; since hatred, like a wasp with a peach,
fastens always on the little pitted, damaged and
decayed spot-sees that only, settles only on that,
recurs to that with fretful persistence.
Hence the life of Goldsmith has at once a direct
interest in itself and a reflected interest through the
light it throws on his works; since all his experiences
were used and many of them were repeatedly used
as memoirespour servir, so to say, for his essays, his
poems, his comedies and his novel. Reciprocally his
works have a biographical interest, helping us to understand better how he came to be what he was than
the reminiscences of unsympathetic or unobservant
school-fellows, friends or relations. If, for instance,
you would know what Goldsmith was through his
father, both by heredity and by the instructions and
associations of his impressionable years, you have but




4


OLIVER GOLDSMITH


to turn to The Deserted Village, to The Vicar of
Wakefield and to A Citizen of the World, to find
different portraits of him " without whom he had not
been," and without whose precept and example he
had been. a far different Goldsmith from the most
lovable of all our poets. Let me give the Citizen of
the World portrait of his father, not only because it
is the least known of the three, but also because it is
more definite than that in The Deserted Village and
more faithful than that in The Vicar of Wakefield:" My father, the younger son of a good family, was
possessed of a small living in the Church. His education was above his fortune, and his generosity greater
than his education. Poor as he was, he had his
flatterers poorer than himself; for every dinner he
gave them they returned equivalent in praise; and this
was all he wanted. The same ambition that actuates
a monarch at the head of an army, influenced my
father at the head of his table. He told the story of
the ivy-tree and that was laughed at; he repeated
the jest of the two scholars and the one pair of
breeches, and the company laughed at that; but the
story of Taffy and the sedan chair was sure to set the
table in a roar. Thus his pleasures increased in proportion to the pleasure he gave; he loved all the
world and he fancied all the world loved him. As his
fortune was but small, he lived up to the very extent
of it. He had no intention of leaving his children
money, for that was dross; he resolved they should
have learning, for learning, he used to observe, was
better than silver and gold. For this purpose he
undertook to instruct us himself, and took as much
pains to form our morals as to improve our understanding. We were told that universal benevolence




SCHOOL DAYS


5


was what first cemented society; we were taught to
consider all the wants of mankind as our own; to
regard 'the human face divine' with affection and
esteem. He wound us up to be mere machines of
pity and rendered us incapable of withstanding the
slightest impulse made either by real or fictitious
distress. In a word, we were perfectly instructed in
the arts of giving away thousands before we were
taught the more necessary qualifications of getting a
farthing."
Thus both by blood and breeding Goldsmith was
formed to be Machiavelli's notion of a Christian-a
philanthropist whose principles rendered him up a
helpless prey to the unprincipled-or, to use an illustration of the poet's own-" he was thrust into the
world like one of those gladiators who were exposed
without armour in the amphitheatre of Rome." It
was also from his father that Oliver derived not only
undiscriminating generosity, but uncalculating improvidence. The Rev. Charles Goldsmith married Anne,
the daughter of his old schoolmaster, Oliver Jones, on
an income of forty pounds a year-a fortune which
they brought five children into the world to share.
The fifth of these was Oliver, born Ioth November
1728, in the village of Pallas, Co. Longford; but
before he was two his father's promotion to the
Rectory of Kilkenny West (and to an income of
~200 a-year) caused the migration of the family to
Lissoy, Co. Westmeath-the sweet Auburn where the
poet was brought up, the goal, as it was the startingplace, of all his day-dreams:"In all my wanderings round this world of care,
In all my griefs-and God has given my share



6


OLIVER GOLDSMITH


I still had hopes my latest hours to crown,
Amidst these humble bowers to lay me down
To husband out life's taper at the close,
And keep the flame from wasting by repose:
I still had hopes-for pride attends us stillAmidst the swains to show my book-learned skill,
Around my fire an evening group to draw,
And tell of all I felt and all I saw;
And, as a hare whom hounds and horns pursue,
Pants to the place from whence at first he flew,
I still had hopes, my long vexations past,
Here to return-and die at home at last."
An image Dryden uses for a life that has gone full
circle, and not, like Goldsmith's, but half the sad
round:"A hare in pastures or in plains is found,
Emblem of human life, who runs the round,
And after all his wandering ways are done,
His circle fills and ends as he begun."
No doubt Macaulay tells you and even Forster tells
you that in The Deserted Village Goldsmith is describing, not the home of his childhood, but some
English village with which he had no associations.
" Everything in The Deserted Village," says Forster,
"is English -the feeling, incidents, descriptions,
allusions; and this consideration may save us the
needless trouble in seeking to identify Auburna name he obtained from    Langton-with Lissoy."
"The village in its happy state," says Macaulay, "is
a true English village. The village in decay is an
Irish village. The felicity and the misery which
Goldsmith has brought together -belong to two
different countries and to two different stages in the
progress of society. He had assuredly never seen in
his native island such a rural paradise, such a seat of




SCHOOL DAYS


7


plenty, content and tranquillity as his Auburn. He
had assuredly never seen in England all the inhabitants of such a paradise turned out of their homes
in one day and forced to emigrate to America. The
hamlet he had probably seen in Kent: the ejectment he had probably seen in Munster; but by joining the two he has produced something that never
was and never will be seen in any part of the world."
Of course it matters no more to me than it does to
my readers whether the original of Auburn was an
English or Irish village-except for this, that I am
going throughout upon the assumption that Goldsmith
uses up in his works only his own experiences. As
in The Traveller he recalled his own experiences
when he tramped in his youth through Holland,
Switzerland, Italy and France, so in The Deserted
Village he goes back to the memories of his childhood. And, indeed, practically Macaulay and Forster
and the rest admit that Auburn was Lissoy-that its
village preacher, its schoolmaster, the villagers and
their sports were all memories of Goldsmith's childhood. Who was the village preacher described in
one of the noblest images in our poetry?
His ready smile a parent's warmth expressed,
Their welfare pleased him and their cares distressed.
To them his heart, his love, his griefs were given,
But all his serious thoughts had rest in heaven;
As some tall cliff that lifts its awful form,
Swells from the vale and midway- leaves the storm;
Though round its breast the rolling clouds are spread,
Eternal sunshine settles on its head."
That, as everyone admits, is a portrait of the poet's
father.  While again, it is indisputable that the




8


OLIVER GOLDSMITH


schoolmaster so humorously described was Oliver's
old pedagogue, Thomas Byrne:"There in his noisy mansion, skilled to rule,
The village master taught his little school.
A man severe he was and stern to view,
I knew him well and every truant knew;
Well had the boding tremblers learned to trace
The day's disasters in his morning face;
Full well they laughed with counterfeited glee
At all his jokes-and many a joke had he!
Full well the busy whisper circling round
Conveyed the dismal tidings when he frowned.
Yet he was kind, or, if severe in aught,
The love he bore to learning was in fault,
The village all declared how much he knew;
'Twas certain he could write and cipher too;
Lands he could measure; terms and tides presage;
And e'en the story ran that he could gauge!
In arguing, too, the parson owned his skill,
For e'en though vanquished, he could argue still!
While words of learned length and thundering sound
Amazed the gazing rustics ranged around;
And still they gazed, and still the wonder grew
That one small head could carry all he knew!"
Once more, the sports described were to be seen in
Ireland, and only in Ireland, in every village on every
holiday up to the year of the Great Famine; while it
was hardly to an English village, whose "name he
had obtained from Langton," that the poet longed
"to return and die at home at last." But if, as
Forster and Macaulay admit, all the personages and
all the incidents in The Deserted Village are personages and incidents which belong to the, Lissoy
of Goldsmith's childhood, what remains to be claimed
as English?   Only the prosperity of the village.
"The village in its happy days is a true English




SCHOOL DAYS


9


village," says Macaulay, leaving out of account what
to him was unintelligible, unimaginable, the aching
longing of an Irish exile who always sees the old
country transfigured through the mist and mirage of
his tears. There was a poor woman who, shovelled
out of Ireland after the famine, died soon after in a
Liverpool slum, and in dying, while her soul was
poised for flight to another world of which her priest
was speaking, she interrupted him to ask, " Father,
will my soul pass through Ireland?" That is the
nostalgia of an Irish exile. And here is Goldsmith,
an exile from Ireland, living in a garret in Grub
Street, and recalling there memories of old days in
the old country. Memory comes to him, as she comes
to all, a disembodied spirit, etherealised and idealised"Hergradual fingers steal,
And touch upon master-chord
Of all we felt and feel.
Old wishes, ghosts of broken plans,
And phantom hopes assemble;
And that child's heart within the man's
Begins to move and tremble.
Thro' many an hour of summer suns,
By many pleasant ways,
Against its fountain upwards runs
The current of our days."
And you expect this Irish exile and poet, looking
back from a London garret upon days " dear to him
as the ruddy drops that visited his sad heart," to see
their scenes with the eyes of Macaulay!
However, even Macaulay allows the village in its
depopulation and decay to be Irish, not disputing
Ireland's immemorial claim to wretchedness. " I
am a poor fellow, sir," says Autolycus to Camillo.




Io   OLIVER GOLDSMITH


"Why, be so still," retorts Camillo' "here's nobody
will steal that from thee! "
Those, then, -who to-day see nothing in Lissoy
which recalls Auburn, forget the moral of Tieck's
" Elves." It is not distance only that lends enchantment to the scenes of our childhood, nor only the
mirage that rises up in the desert of after years;
but also the ineffaceable vividness and delightfulness
of first impressions, and the irrecoverable happiness
of days when care brooded over us protectingly and
had not its beak in our heart.
To the memory of an Irish exile and poet Lissoy
and its people, bathed in the golden light of the
dawn of life, might well be transfigured into Auburn.
But while little Oliver was taking in these impressions of Lissoy which were one day to immortalise
it, what were the impressions which Lissoy took
in then of him? They are characteristic-of the
observers. The old lady, a Mrs Delap, who taught
him his letters at three, testifies, " Never was so dull a
boy; he seemed impenetrably stupid." How brilliant,
then, must have been the teacher who could teach an
impenetrably stupid infant of three to read! Why,
even Swift thought it to the credit of his precocious
cleverness that he was able to read at three. Like
Swift, too, Goldsmith at school and in College was
thought impenetrably stupid by observers of the
Delap kind. "Goldsmith's fellow-pupils," testifies
Dr Annesley Strean, "regarded him as a stupid,
heavy blockhead, little better than a fool, whom
everybody made fun of." Now, in the first place,
it must be remembered that these impressions of
Goldsmith's schoolmistress and schoolmates were
gathered years after his death, when the " Poor Poll"




SCHOOL DAYS


I I


paradox, being then on every lip, gave a lead to
such dim remembrances of the poet. In the second
place, the paradox itself-that the most exquisite
and versatile writer of his generation should be an
imbecile in ordinary intercourse-was doubly acceptable to " the general," both for its strangeness and for
its lowering invidious greatness to, or rather below,
the level of average littleness. But, in the third
place, and chiefly, everyone sees only what he has
an eye for seeing, and old ladies, whether in an infant
school or in a University, have a tendency to confound
the machinery of thought with thought, to confound
memory with understanding, and learning, which is
the mere fuel of wisdom, with the sacred fire itself,
which, by the way, in a University, it as often as not
overlays to extinction.
"The sheep," says Epictetus, "do not manifest to
the shepherd how much they have eaten by producing
fodder; but by producing, through the digestion of
their food, wool and milk"; but in infant schools
and sometimes even in Universities, the shepherds
look only for the reproduction of fodder. " When
a University," said Leslie Stephen to me once, "is
said to have produced a genius, it means only that
it has not succeeded in extinguishing him."
I should not, therefore, be disposed to attach much
weight to the testimony of Mrs Delap, nor to that of
any other grammar-monger, to Goldsmith's "impenetrable stupidity " in his childhood, even if there
were no other evidence extant of the promise of
these early years. But the evidence on the other
side is so conclusive that the importance attached
by Goldsmith's biographers to such testimony as
Mrs Delap's seems to me unaccountable. So far




12   OLIVER GOLDSMITH


from showing in his childhood no promise of after
distinction, such promise sufficed to overcome all
the objections and obstacles, which were many and
grave, to his being allowed the advantage of a
liberal education. "At the age of seven or eight,"
writes his sister, Mrs Hodson, "he discovered a
natural turn for rhyming, and often amused his
father and his friends by early poetical attempts.
When he could scarcely write legibly, he was always
scribbling verses which he burnt as he wrote them.
Observing his fondness for books and learning, his
mother, with whom he was always a favourite, pleaded
with his father to give him a liberal education; but
his own narrow income, the expense attending the
education of his eldest son, and his numerous family,
were strong objections." Oliver was intended, she
adds, for some mercantile employment, but the intention was given up because "he began at so early
a period to show signs of genius that he quickly
engaged the notice of all the friends of the family,
many of whom were in the Church."
By the way, Mrs Hodson's enumeration of the
causes which straitened her father's circumstances
is so far imperfect, that it omits the most seriousher own runaway marriage. As the rich man she
ran away with was in a higher social position than
her own, her father, out of a false family pride, insisted on levelling her up, so to say, with a dowry of
four hundred pounds, which could be raised only
by the sacrifice of his tithes and rented land and by
the sacrifice also of the interests of his other children.
The raising of this dowry in obedience to the Gospel
precept of giving to those who have by taking it
from those who want, so severely crippled his




SCHOOL DAYS


I3


father's resources that the promise shown by Oliver
must have been pronounced indeed to induce the
sacrifices which had to be made to give him a liberal
education. But, indeed, we have his own testimony
to the hopes he had excited-and disappointed-in
that transparent piece of autobiography, The Man in
Black:"The first opportunity my father had of finding
his expectations disappointed was in the middling
figure I made at the University. He had flattered
himself that he should soon see me rising into the
foremost rank in literary reputation, but was mortified
to find me utterly unnoticed and unknown."
When you come down from this general testimony
to the promise Goldsmith showed in his childhood
to the particular specimens which have been preserved of his conversation, they are certainly not
of the " Poor Poll" kind. That these two repartees
should have been preserved at all suggests of itself
that Oliver was regarded then rather as the wit than
as the dunce of the family. Here they are:An attack of small-pox at the age of eight had so
pitted a face already painfully plain that Oliver was
continually being jeered at by other boys for his ugliness. When, however, a grown-up cousin, who had
taken to disreputable courses taunted him, " Why, Noll,
you are become a fright! When do you mean to get
handsome again?" After a moment of miserable
silence-for Oliver had become painfully conscious
of his ugliness-the child retorted, "I mean to get
better, sir, when you do! "
To another jeer at his plainness he made at the
same age of nine a happier retort. At a party at
his uncle's house Oliver in the interval between two




I4       OLIVER GOLDSMITH
country dances jumped up to perform a hornpipe;
but his squat figure seemed to the fiddler so unsuited to the performance that he shouted derisively,
" Esop!" Hereupon the child stopping in the middle
of the room and of the dance retorted"Heralds! Proclaim aloud! All saying,
'See AEsop dancing and his monkey playing!"'
I am laying some stress upon this conflict of
evidence re Goldsmith's intelligence in his early years,
because it is continually recurring later, and you are
continually encountering Mrs Delaps amongst the
poet's friends and biographers. The men who read
much but assimilate little can never understand the
men who read little but assimilate much. I remember
an old nurse assuring me in my childhood that
swallows never ate and never rested, because she had
never seen them  alight and devour worms; and
Goldsmith's swallow-like and lifelong habit of feeding flying with a flight zigzag and desultory, and on
food out of sight of those far beneath him, was
similarly misinterpreted.  "He was impenetrably
stupid!" cried Mrs Delap; " He was a stupid heavy
blockhead, little better than a fool!" cried his schoolmates. "Now, blockhead!" was his college tutor's
usual address to him. "Sir, he knows nothing!"
roared Johnson of him to Boswell. Even in the days
of his boyhood, Goldsmith, like the swallows, fed high
up and flying. At the age of six he passed from the
charge of Mrs Delap to that of a retired old soldier,
Thomas Byrne, from whom he probably learned as
much in his own way as he was supposed to learn
little. Byrne, who had been educated for a schoolmaster, enlisted, fought under Marlborough, rose to




SCHOOL DAYS


I5


the rank of quartermaster, and at the return of peace,
retired to exercise at Lissoy his original profession of
pedagogue. But, if the old soldier now overlaid the
original profession of schoolmaster, underneath both
old soldier and schoolmaster lay the Irish peasant,
whose store of fairy tales was as unlimited as his
belief in "the good people," and whose conversance
with the histories of Irish robbers, rapparees, pirates,
smugglers and outlaws, was at once deeper and more
sympathetic than his knowledge of Agamemnon and
Achilles, Ulysses and AEneas.  According to his
biographers Oliver learned little from Byrne, because
the old soldier was more given to tell stories than to
hear lessons; but is it not possible that to a child of
Oliver's age and character the stories were more
educational than the lessons? What Goldsmith himself says of the unpalatable studies forced upon him
in the University is yet more true of studies forced
upon a child.   "Such studies," he says, "were
unsuited to a time when my imagination and memory,
yet unsatisfied, were more eager after new objects
than desirous of reasoning on those I knew."
For a poet certainly Johnson's advice, which is also
Emerson's and Carlyle's, is sound-" A man should
read as inclination leads him; what he reads. as a
task will do him little good." Or as Shakespeare
puts it:"The Mathematics and the Metaphysics
Fall to them as you find your stomach serves you;
No profit grows where is no pleasure ta'en;
In brief, sir, study what you most affect."
Probably Oliver profited more intellectually by
Byrne's stories of strange creatures and countries,




16   OLIVER GOLDSMITH


exploits and adventures than his fellow-pupils did by
the school lessons.
On the other hand, it is probable that Thomas
Byrne's traveller's tales tended to encourage Oliver's
natural Bohemianism; which, again, might well have
been confirmed by the continual transplantation of
the boy from school to school. The attack of confluent small-pox, which nearly cost Oliver his life, no
doubt had much to do with his removal from the
charge of Byrne, at the age of eight, to the care of the
Rev. Mr Griffin, master of Elphin School, County
Roscommon. With Mr Griffin he stayed from eight
to eleven, and was then transferred for two years to
the care of Mr Campbell of Athlone, passing from his
charge, at the age of thirteen, to that of the Rev.
Patrick Hughes of Edgeworthstown, with whom he
remained to the age of seventeen.  At all these
schools, except that of Mr Hughes, Oliver was well
thrashed as a blockhead, and as only blockheads in
those days of savage discipline were thrashed. I
think it is Thackeray who notes the dire significance
of the technical phrase for going to school in "the
good old times "-" he passed sub feruld of the Rev. Dr
Swishem." I find that ferula, i.e. "fennel-giant," was
the plant in the pith of which Prometheus preserved
the fire he stole from heaven, and schoolmasters in
those days presumably sought to communicate the
sacred flame ab extra to those who failed to absorb
it ab intra. Certainly the amount of flogging then
inflicted was so frightful, that the masters might have
said of the boys who were committed to them for
instruction what Majendie said of the dogs committed
to him for vivisection: " Vous saves, mon ami, que les
chiens ne s' amusentpas chez moi."




SCHOOL DAYS


17


If Oliver had more than his share of thrashing in
school from the masters, out of school he had more
than his share of persecution from the boys, who
never failed to ridicule his squat, awkward figure and
his ugly, pock-marked face. This quickened his
self-consciousness, and deepened almost into a disease
his self-distrust. What has been so often ridiculed as
Goldsmith's vanity was vanity inverted, so to saynot an eagerness to display powers of which he was
conscious, but an eagerness to reassure himself of
the possession of powers of which he was diffident.
Compare e.g. Boswell's vanity with Goldsmith's.
Boswell in conversation reminds you of a girl who is
self-complacently admiring herself in the glass;
Goldsmith of a girl who hurries nervously to the
glass to reassure herself that all is right. The distinction declares itself upon failure.  Whereas no
failure can disconcert Boswell, Goldsmith's discomfiture upon failure was, as everyone testifies, pitiable.
This tormenting self-distrust was undoubtedly
deepened in all the schools Oliver was sent to, except
the last, whose master, the Rev. Patrick Hughes,
treated him with a consideration which excited as
much the surprise as the envy of his fellow-pupils,
who could see only the lad's ugliness, awkwardness,
sensitiveness and shyness. But Mr Hughes seemed
to, have discerned with Oliver's own people his early
promise, perhaps even discerned that genius itself
"Inculto latet hoc sub corpore."
It was while on the way to Mr Hughes' school at
Edgeworthstown for his last term that the adventure
befell Oliver to which we owe the plot of the
delightful comedy, She Stoops to Conquer: or The
2




18   OLIVER GOLDSMITH


Mistakes of a Night. Oliver, now seventeen, set out
on horseback with a guinea in his purse, for Edgeworthstown. Being a born Bohemian and also bound
for school, Oliver lingered out his day of independence till night fell upon him many miles short and
wide of his destination, for he found himself in the
middle of the town of Ardagh. Full of the importance of seventeen, and of the possession of a horse
and of a guinea, Oliver called imperiously to a man
who was passing, and asked him with the air of a
benighted prince: "My good man, what is the best
house in this neighbourhood?" Fortunately, at least
for us, the man, Cornelius Kelly, late fencing-master
to the Marquis of Granby, was a wag, whose sense of
humour was tickled by the swagger of the youth.
" The best house in the place? I'll show your honour
the best house in the place," and accordingly he
directed him to Squire Featherstone's as to an inn.
Oliver rode up to the "inn," dismounted, flung the
reins of his horse to a groom, swaggered into the
dining-room, and ordered the amazed squire to
furnish forthwith the best dinner his house could
supply. Now the squire also was fortunately a wag,
and recognising not only the mistake, but the lad who
made it-for Oliver's father had been his college
mate-he at once threw himself into the part of an
obsequious landlord, and played it so deferentially
that the young gentleman unbent to put his host at
his ease, and even invited him and his wife and
daughter to partake of a bottle of their own wine
which he had ordered. Then he chatted with them
with a kind of patronising familiarity till bedtime,
when he ordered his candle and a hot-cake for
breakfast, and strutted off after his bowing host to




SCHOOL DAYS


I9


his room. Next morning, having had the hot-cake
for breakfast, he ordered his horse and his bill. It
was while he was nervously fingering his guinea,
wondering whether it would suffice to pay all tips
and charges, that the squire disclosed to him "The
Mistakes of a Night," to his overwhelming confusion.
This episode of Oliver's school-days is not the only
bit in She Stoops to Conquer which was borrowed
from his own character and experience. I think there
is no doubt that we have in this comedy the clue to
much that made Goldsmith show to disadvantage in
uncongenial companionship. He sat himself for part
of the portrait of Ton)y Lumpkin and also for part of
the portrait of young Marlow. Like Tony, he was at
home with his inferiors, and, like young Marlow, he
was ill at ease, awkward and blundering in the society
of grave, conventional or " superior " persons. In
each case a disconcerting self-consciousness and selfdistrust, which were quieted by appreciation and disquieted by inappreciation, explain Goldsmith's social
success or failure. His very swagger was self-distrust
made desperate, as shy folk often blunder desperately
into boldness "outfacing it," like Rosalind in her
mannish masquerade:" In my heart
Lie there what hidden woman's fear there willWe'll have a swashing and a martial outside,
As many other mannish cowards have
That do outface it with their semblances."




CHAPTER II


COLLEGE DAYS
M RS HODSON, as we have seen, ascribed the
straitened circumstances which made it difficult to give her brother, Oliver, a liberal education to
their father's " narrow income, numerous family and
the expense attending the education of his eldest
son," discreetly omitting all mention of " the expense
attending the marriage of his eldest daughter "-far
the severest strain of all upon the family resources. In
truth, the real family sacrifice was made, not to give
Oliver the University education he needed, but to
give his sister the dowry she did not need, and because
she did not need it. Because she had made a clandestine marriage with a rich man's son (while he was
her brother Henry's pupil), her father thought himself
bound in honour to provide her at the cost of his
small capital with a dowry of ~400. "The highest
sense of honour," says Prior, " inspired this sacrifice,"
but where was the sense of honour of the rich son-inlaw who accepted it? Noblesse oblige usually binds
the poor man who wishes to be thought noble; but
the noble, assured of his social standing, can afford
to be shabby. These rich Hodsons did nothing to
lighten the load which the Quixotic sacrifice they
accepted imposed upon the Goldsmiths.
The first to feel its weight was Oliver. He had
to enter Trinity College as a sizar, which in those
20




COLLEGE DAYS


2 1


days meant working his passage through the University before the mast. Prior, who admires so highly
the snobbish sacrifice which reduced Oliver to this
servitude, naturally admires also the servitude itself.
He describes the sizarship, as it then existed, as "one
of those judicious and considerate arrangements that
gives to the less opulent the opportunity of cultivating learning at a trifling expense." At the trifling
expense of self-respect. The sizar of those days,
clothed in a servant's dress, had to do the tasks of a
servant. He had in the morning to sweep the college
courts, and in the afternoon to carry up from the
kitchen the dinner of the dons and to wait upon them
at the meal. Thus an Alma Mater became the most
unbenign of stepmothers to the lad whose scholarship she honoured by pointing out the recipient of
the honour to the scorn of his fellow-students, and
whose scholarship she pretended to reward by an
abatement of the cost of the course, while exacting
for that abatement the uttermost farthing in menial
service.
The effect of such degradation and scorn on a lad
of Goldsmith's age and temperament may be imagined,
and need not be imagined or conjectured merely, since
the poet himself afterwards refers to it. Years after,
when in so forgiving a memory the bitterness must
have been much softened, Goldsmith writes thus to
his brother Henry to dissuade him from entering his
son as a sizar at Trinity:-" If he has ambition,
strong passions and an exquisite sensibility to contempt, do not send him there, unless you have no
other trade for him except your own."
Goldsmith himself held out against entering Trinity
as a sizar as long as it was possible for him to hold




22   OLIVER GOLDSMITH


out against his uncle, Contarine, whom all that love
Goldsmith should love. His faith in Oliver was more
surprising than the lack of faith in him of his schoolmasters and mates. Up to the date of this staunch
and generous uncle's death, Oliver had the most unbroken record of failures of any recounted in literary
history, yet neither the faith, nor the hope, nor, above
all, the charity of Uncle Contarine ever failed him. It
was this uncle who now persuaded Oliver to enter
Trinity as a sizar after the boy had held out doggedly
against the degradation for a year; and the argument
which prevailed was of the kind Achilles addressed
to Lycaon, when Lycaon was ill-bred enough to object
to being spitted on the spear of the son of Peleus.
The hero waved aside the impertinent objection with
the words, "I, too, am mortal! "-and there was no
more to be said. Similarly Uncle Contarine had to
say only, " I, myself, have been a sizar! " and Oliver
succumbed. On IIth June I745, he entered for the
sizarship, which he succeeded, but barely succeeded,
in getting, as he was the last of the eight candidates
who passed. Indeed his whole University career was
as little distinguished as that of Swift or of Burke,
and there is perhaps some significance in the fact
that the three most distinguished of the alumni of
the Dublin University were three of the least distinguished of its students. All three could probably have
said at the close of their course in Trinity College
what Montaigne said at the close of his course at the
most famous of all the French Colleges of his dayGuienne:-" h treize ans queje sortis du College, j'avois
acheve mon cours (qu'ils appellent) et, a la veritd, sans
aulcun fruict que je peusse a present mettre en
compte."




COLLEGE DAYS


23


As for Goldsmith, if he was none the better intellectually for his residence in Trinity College, morally
he was made much the worse, since the brutality of
his College tutor, the Rev. Theaker Wilder, intensified his natural sensitiveness, self-consciousness and
self-distrust. "Theaker Wilder," says the Percy
Memoir, "a man of the most morose and merciless
temper, thenceforth persecuted Goldsmith with
unremitting cruelty, especially at the quarterly
examinations, where he would insult him before his
fellow-students by sarcastic taunts and ironical applauses of the severest malignity." Thus Goldsmith,
the most sensitive of men at the most sensitive of ages,
was held up to the scorn of his fellow-students both
for his poverty and for his stupidity.
Theaker Wilder's brutality was perhaps in part
responsible for Goldsmith's rebellious attitude towards
the constituted authorities of the college, for he distinguished himself there by two scrapes, one of which
nearly caused his expulsion and the other his selfexpulsion from the University.
A bailiff, who had the audacity to arrest a student
within the sacred Alsatia of the College precincts, was
followed into the city by the captive's fellow-students,
who discovered and dragged the man back into the
precincts he had violated, where they stripped him
naked and pumped upon him, according to the unwritten, but unquestioned, law of the undergraduates.
Intoxicated by their victory the students rushed out
again to make an attack upon the Black Dog (the
Dublin Newgate) to set all its prisoners free. As
both they and their townsmen allies were unarmed,
they were, of course, repulsed by the armed garrison
of the gaol-not without loss of life. This tragic




24       OLIVER GOLDSMITH
ending of a students' frolic of course compelled an
investigation, and its result was the detection and
expulsion of five of the ringleaders, while five of the
others, amongst them Goldsmith, were publicly admonished, " Quod seditioni favissent and et tumultuantibus opem tulissent." It is supposed that Goldsmith's attempt to win a scholarship in the month
following the admonition was intended to wipe out
the disgrace; but it is hardly credible that even Goldsmith would go in for a scholarship after only a
month's preparation. Nor, again, is it probable that
he would run the risk within a few weeks of a
second disgrace-as he did-if he had felt the first
so keenly. For when, upon his failure to get the
scholarship, he was awarded an exhibition of the value
of thirty shillings, he must needs celebrate the triumph
by a party given in his rooms to both sexes-as gross
a breach of University discipline as could well be
committed. Theaker Wilder, hearing of this outrage
upon College decency, hurried up to his pupil's garret
rooms, burst in upon the orgy and knocked down the
host! The only romantic course for a hero so assaulted
is to rise and knock down his assailant in his turn;
but in romance the hero has always the advantage
of thews and sinews, whereas in this case the advantage of the thews and sinews was overpoweringly on
the side of the villain. It is recorded of Theaker
Wilder that upon receiving an accidental flick from a
coachman's whip, he sprang from the pavement to
the box of the moving coach and felled the offender
to the ground. Besides, in Goldsmith's case, this
ruffianly clergyman felt secure against retaliation,
since the raising a finger against a Fellow meant
expulsion and ruin to a student. By the way, it was




COLLEGE DAYS


25


perhaps this knock-down blow of Theaker Wilder's
that Johnson had in mind when, in referring to Goldsmith's encounter with the publisher, Evans, he said
rather ungenerously: "Why, sir, I believe it is the
first time he has beat; he may have been beaten
before"-a safe enough sneer from a giant like Johnson,
whose chances in any brute encounter of force would
be immeasurably greater than Goldsmith's. Where
-the sword made the chances more even, while calling
for more courage, Goldsmith, to Johnson's knowledge,
showed, himself the reverse of a coward. Goldsmith's
feelings upon being so brutally outraged before the
eyes of his guests may be -imagined. Feeling the
degradation of the blow -to be utter and irretrievable,
he resolved to quit, not the College only, but even the
country.
Here is the first of a succession of similar resolves
which followed invariably the same faltering and
ineffective course. Micawber himself had not such a
"knack at hoping," at prospecting, at taking the indispensable first practical step "of running down to
have a look at the Medway," as had Oliver Goldsmith. Having sold his clothes and books to provide
the means of getting to Cork and from thence to
America, he, at least, succeeded in crossing from the
University ihto the city of Dublin, where he lingered
till he had spent what money he had raised, down to
a single shilling. Now was the moment for starting
vid Cork for America. He set out accordingly, and
contrived to subsist for three days on the shilling.
After that he lived on the few pence he raised by
the sale of such clothes as he could spare from his
person. After that he starved.
Years afterwards he told Sir Joshua Reynolds that




26   OLIVER GOLDSMITH


the most delicious repast he had ever tasted was a
handful of grey peas given him by a girl at a wake
after he had fasted for four-and-twenty hours. With
the little strength that remained to him he staggered
on to Lissoy, where that brother to whom always
his "heart untravelled turned with ceaseless pain,"
poured oil and wine into his wounds, restored his
strength, revived his spirit, and sent him forth hopefully once more on life's journey. Taking him back
to Trinity College this brother Henry succeeded in
effecting a sort of reconciliation between him and
Theaker Wilder.
But Wilder had for Goldsmith the hatred the bully
has for a boy he has once taken to beating-not the
mere tyrant's "odisse quem Alaseris" antipathy, but
the brute instinct which makes a dog fall continually
and at sight upon a weaker dog it has worried once.
There is nothing in which increase of appetite grows
by what it feeds on more certainly than a habit of
bullying, till it becomes at last an absolute instinct
in the tormentor to fly upon his prey at sight. Thus
Goldsmith became the standing butt of this brute
Wilder's sneers and sarcasms, and of the sycophantic
ridicule of his fellow-students, until he got to believe
himself as incorrigibly stupid as his tutor considered
him. In truth, Goldsmith's self-respect to the very
end of his days never quite recovered the spring
which had been trampled out of it at school and in
College.
But outside the hall and class-room Goldsmith was
the mark also for scorn, but of a more vulgar kind.
"Nil habet infelix paupertas durius in se
Quam quod ridicules homines facit,"




COLLEGE DAYS


27


and Goldsmith was in continual and desperate straits
for money. Even during his father's lifetime the
supplies from home were scanty and intermittent;
but his father died a year and a half after Oliver
entered College, leaving him almost wholly dependent
upon the little his Uncle Contarine could spare him.
He eked out these scanty and precarious supplies
by composing street ballads, which he sold at five
shillings a-piece, and derived from them something
as precious to him even as the money-his first taste
of fame! He would steal out of the College at night
to hear his ballads sung, and to watch the effect of
the performance under the dim light of the street
oil-lamp upon the ragged audience. Strange "first
nights " compared with that of She Stoops to Conquer;
but everything is relative, and, as that handful of
grey peas was the most delicious repast he had ever
tasted, possibly the printing, the performance, and
the popular appreciation of his first ballad gave the
scorned sizar as exquisite a pleasure as any after
triumph. At all events, the five shillings it brought
him was more needed and more welcome than any
after honorarium.
In pitying Goldsmith's poverty, however, it is only
fair to remember that we are pitying no mere
accident, but something as essentially part of himself
as his kindliness. However prosperous his circumstances, he must always be needy. Indeed, the more
prosperous he grew, the needier he grew, since prosperity enabled him to get into debt, and he took
the fullest advantage of the privilege. He lived as
entirely in the present as a child, and, as he was a
child also in guilelessness, anyone could impose upon
his simplicity, while no one could out-weary his good



28   OLIVER GOLDSMITH


nature. However sore his own straits, be sure he
seldom brought home that five shillings unbroken to
his College garret; for he could no more pass a
beggar than a- greedy child could pass a sweet-stuff
shop without his money burning a hole in his pocket.
Here, e.g., is a characteristic story told of him by
a cousin and fellow-collegian of his, Edward Mills,
to whom Oliver often owed a shilling or a breakfast.
Mills called one morning to offer Oliver a breakfast,
when he was adjured in answer to his knock and in
a smothered voice to force open the door and enter.
When Mills and others had at last forced the bolted
door, they found Goldsmith so entangled in the ticking of his bed that he could not extricate himself
without help.  He explained that, as the night
before had been piercingly cold, he had given a
poor perishing woman with five children all his bedclothes. What could he do? He had nothing else,
not a penny, to give her? "It was a cold night, too,"
he added, "for I couldn't at first sleep till I thought
of ripping open the mattress to lie in the ticking."
Of course, such a man could never be anything
else but poor. But if poverty so caused is not to be
pitied as an accident, neither is it to be pitied as a
misfortune. I am sure few men have had happier
moments in his harassed life than Goldsmith, since
to such a man there is no pleasure like giving
pleasure. "This remark," he says, in The Vicar of
Wakefield, "will hold good through life-that the
poorer the guest the better pleased he is with being
treated-; and, as some men gaze with admiration at
the colours of a tulip, or the wing of a butterfly, so
I was by Nature an admirer of happy, human faces."
No man is to be pitied, or anything save envied,




COLLEGE DAYS


29


who gave so continually and unweariedly, even
though without return or gratitude, if it was so
much more blessed to him to give than to receive,
as it was to Goldsmith. The real trouble of his life
-and it was lifelong-was a never-satisfied craving
for sympathy and appreciation, of which he was
almost as much disappointed at the height of his
fame in London as in these days of obscurity and
scorn in Trinity College. If these College days were
the most wretched, it was because they were the
most humiliating of his life. He got done with them
at last. After taking an undistinguished degree on
27th February 1749, he left the place behind him for
ever.
Goldsmith, we are told, "was a lounger at the
College gate," at that gate where his statue stands
to-day; but the University which now honours him,
and claims him as an honour, did what it could
through the degradation of its "distinction" of a
sizarship, and through its representative Theaker
Wilder, to break or abase his spirit. It is characteristic of Goldsmith that he gibbets no one in his
works, though no one had had more provocation to
take such a revenge. Never was a man more exquisitely sensitive to snubs, slights and insults than
Goldsmith; never was a man more mercilessly
snubbed, slighted and insulted, but where in all his
works is his revenge? You have Dryden's ferocious
revenge in MacFlecknow; you have Pope's venomous revenge in The Dunciad. But Goldsmith, who
had given infinitely less and received infinitely
more provocation than either Dryden or Pope, is
magnanimously silent, or breaks silence magnanimously in such a poem as Retaliation, where his




30       OLIVER GOLDSMITH
sweet-natured humour plays about the faults and
follies and frailties of his friends, like moonlight upon
a ruin-showing indeed the gaps and rents and
breaches of decay, but softening even as it shows
them, and "smoothing the raven down of darkness
till it smiled."
Of the miseries and mortifications of these College
days, then, you have no record in his works and only
the gentlest reference to them. He never gibbets
this Theaker Wilder-who was killed, by the way, in
a dissolute brawl-and he refers to the degradation
of a sizarship only as a contradiction:-" That men
should be at once learning the liberal arts and at
the same time treated as slaves-at once studying
freedom and practising slavery." On the failure of
the University to evolve, to distinguish, or even to
recognise genius, he makes only in his Enquiry into
the Present State of Polite Learning, a mild reflection
-a reflection on the general dullness of its honour
men; while in one of his essays occurs the following
reference to the College career of Swift:-" Dean
Swift was long considered an incorrigible dunce, and
did not obtain his degree at the University but ex
specialigratid; yet when his powers began to unfold
he signalised himself by a very remarkable superiority
of genius. When a youth therefore appears dull of
apprehension and seems to derive no advantage from
study and instruction, the tutor must exercise his
sagacity in discovering whether the soil be absolutely
barren or sown with seed repugnant to his nature, or
of such a quality as requires repeated culture and
length of time to get its juices in fermentation."




CHAPTER III


HOME FOR THE HOLIDAYS
THE Prophet Isaiah mocks thus the idolaters of
his day. "You go into the forest," he says,
"select and cut down a cedar tree. You use the
strong limbs of it as pillars of your house, the finer
parts for your furniture, what is fit for neither pillars,
beams nor furniture you use for firewood; but of the
refuse, unfit even for firewood, you make a god!" I
fear that the divines of the days of Goldsmith were
made of similar stuff-as they are perhaps sometimes
made even to-day-of men who lack the stamina or
fire or force for the other professions"Olim truncus eram ficulnus, inutile lignum,
Quum faber incertus scamnum faceretne Priapum,
Maluit esse Deum. Deus inde ego."
I have little doubt that the qualifications for the
sacred ministry, which his relations one and all discerned in Goldsmith, were of this negative sort. As
he was not of the stuff of which lawyers, doctors or
business men were made, lacking the staying power
needed to get into or get on in any of these callings,
he was obviously intended by nature for the Church,
which was at once easy to enter and easeful when
entered. No doubt in the Levitical Law a young ass
was especially rejected as unfit for divine dedication,
but we are not now under the Mosaic Dispensation.
Oliver himself modestly and vehemently protested
3I




32   OLIVER GOLDSMITH


against this divine dedication; but two arguments
prevailed with him. In the first place, his loving and
beloved Uncle Contarine had given his vote for the
Church, and in the second place, there were two
entire years before he was eligible-at twenty-three
-for ordination. Oliver had at least one Christian
qualification-that of taking no more thought for the
morrow than the birds of the air, since sufficient unto
the day was the evil thereof. Never did anyone
abandon himself to the entire enjoyment of the
present without an after-thought of the future than
did Oliver. He was a boy all his life, and now he
was a boy who had left Dotheboys Hall and Mr
Squeers behind him for ever, while before him
stretched an apparently endless holiday of two whole
years. Every Irishman must smile at the following
solemn note by Mr Forster on the entry discovered
in an old- shop account-book, recording Oliver's
mother's indebtedness for groceries:-" Tea by Master
Noll." " I subjoin," writes Mr Forster, "a curious
passage from Mr Shaw Mason's volume already
quoted, in which what appears to be a misstatement
of dates is either to be explained by supposing that
the entries as to 'Master Noll' refer to a period
before the family had removed from Lissoy, or by
the suggestion that the young bachelor of arts still
ran the errands of his boyhood and retained his
familiar name." Why, in Ireland Lord Burleigh
himself would be called " Master William " by those
who had known him in boyhood, however ponderously he might shake his head in disapproval; while
even in London and even at the height of his fame,
Goldsmith was known as " Noll " to Dick, Tom and
Harry.




HOME FOR THE HOLIDAYS 33
On the very night after the success of The
Good-Natured Man, an eminent pig-butcher at the
Wednesday Club shouted across the table to him:
"Come, Noll, here's my service to you, old boy!"
This was too much for Goldsmith's friend, Glover,
who whispered to him: "Don't allow such a fellow
to take such liberties." "Let him alone," whispered
Goldsmith back, "you'll see how civilly I'll let him
down."  Having waited accordingly for the next
pause in the conversation, Goldsmith with his
haughtiest haut en bas stateliness addressed the pigbutcher in measured tones: " Mr B., I have the
honour of drinking your good health."
"Thankee, thankee, Noll," replied the pig-butcher
with an affable nod, as a hippopotamus might wag
his tail after having been agreeably tickled by a
charge of snipe-shot.
Of course, then, the "young bachelor of arts" was
"Master Noll" to the servants, to the shop-folk and
to the villagers generally of Ballymahon, and " Noll"
to the frequenters of a club he had established at the
village inn. In the daytime he assisted his brother
Henry, who was schoolmaster as well as vicar, in the
village school at Lissoy; but at night, according to
his cousin, Bob Bryanton, he had his hour of triumph
at the club. What seemed to have most struck this
cousin was the contrast between Goldsmith's dull
depression and even dejection in Trinity College and
his exhilaration at the club, where he was what Dick
Swiveller would call "a choice spirit," and the master
of the revels. Here he could not only tell the best
story and sing best the most popular song, but also,
says this cousin, make the most imposing display of
erudition; for he was great at Latin quotations. I
3




34


OLIVER GOLDSMITH


cannot help thinking he was laughing at his oldyoung self, as well as at Thomas Byrne, his old
schoolmaster, in describing the effect "on the gazing
rustics grouped around of words of learned length
and thundering sound." I am quite sure that his
club not only supplied him with the originals of some
of the company of the " Three Pigeons" in She Stoops
to Conquer, but also with some of the characteristics
of Tony Lumpkin, which were but exaggerations of
some of his own youthful characteristics.  It is,
indeed, noteworthy how long unconsidered trifles of
this kind lay tossing and rounding themselves, like
pebbles in the sea, in the mind of Goldsmith, before
they were thrown out at last in some essay, play or
poem. Only the other day an old peasant from
Goldsmith's native county told me in another form
-the form no doubt in which the poet himself
originally heard it-the precise trick which Tony
played on his mother, when he advised her to pretend
that the jewels were stolen, and then stole them himself. Still more noteworthy is the literary chemistry
with which Goldsmith distilled from all these coarse
club experiences and from his yet coarser Axe LaneLondon experiences, such exquisitely pure and
sweet humanity as he paints for us-as the most
exquisite dyes are distilled from tar. Even Macaulay,
the most unsympathetic of Goldsmith's biographers,
notes with wonder this art of his of "distilling honey
from the weed":-" About everything that he wrote,
serious or sportive, there was a certain natural grace
and decorum, hardly to be expected from a man, a
great part of whose life had been passed among
thieves and beggars, street - walkers and merryandrews, in those squalid dens which are the re



HOME FOR THE HOLIDAYS 35
proach of great capitals." Perhaps the Celtic strain
which Goldsmith must have had in him, accounts for
a touch so light and bright, and again so sweet and
pure.
But to whatever literary advantage he might turn
these club experiences, they were not-judging from
a letter to his brother-in-law, in which he described
them-of a kind, either to prepare him or to recommend him for Holy Orders. Perhaps they had even
something to do with his rejection by the bishop. I
am sure they had more to do with it than many of
the reasons assigned for it. That assigned by what
ought to be the best authority-his sister's-is the
worst, i.e., his youth, since he had waited and wasted
two years to be of the age prescribed for ordination,
twenty-three. The popular reason for his rejectionthat he presented himself for the examination dressed
in a pair of scarlet breeches-is hardly more probable. There is no "wedding garment" prescribed
to candidates for orders, and a scarlet pair of
breeches -then-presuming that Oliver wore suchwould be hardly more noticeable or objectionable
-than the pair of light trousers in which many a
candidate presents himself for examination to-day.
Less improbable is the suggestion that his old enemy
Theaker Wilder blocked his way by a report of his
College record to the bishop. Most probable of all
explanations of his failure is that of his ignorance of
theology. The bishop probably was as dissatisfied
with his papers as Dr Gregg, the Bishop of Cork, was
with a sermon of Dean Magee's (afterwards Arch-bishop of York), which he said "had not as much
Gospel in it as would save a rabbit."
At all events, Goldsmith was plucked and had to




36       OLIVER GOLDSMITH
take to the usual resource of such failures, tuition;
for in those days and even up to yesterday, it was the
failures of the professions that undertook to prepare
for the professions. Accordingly Goldsmith's good
genius, Uncle Contarine, broke his fall by procuring
him a tuition in the family of a neighbouring squire,
Mr Flinn. The sole record that survives of this
experience is that of the quarrel which terminated it
at the close of a year. Oliver charged one of the
family with cheating at cards, and as the charge led
to his resignation or dismissal, he returned home with
a good horse under him and ~30 in his purse.
When someone asked Sheridan Lefanu under similar
circumstances, " Why he did not return to his warm
home?" he answered, " I did; but I found it too hot
to hold me!" And this also was Goldsmith's experience. So warm was his reception that he once
more made up his mind to start vid Cork for
America.  Once more, however, he was "shortcircuited," to borrow an image from the electricians
(when the current is diverted and dissipated), for in
six weeks he returned home again, all his money
spent! His very horse was gone and replaced by a
sorry Rosinante he nicknamed "Fiddleback." - His
mother was furious, to the sad surprise of her faithful
son. " And now, my dear mother," he said to her in
plaintive remonstrance, "after my having struggled
so hard to come home to you, I wonder you are not
more rejoiced to see me!'" It must be admitted that
Goldsmith was given to overdoing this picturesque
part of the Prodigal Son. Started again by his
long-suffering Uncle Contarine with ~50 in his
pocket to take him to London and there enable him
to enter at the Temple for the study of the law, he




HOME FOR THE HOLIDAYS 37
got as far as Dublin, where he lost every farthing of
his money in a gambling-house, and was once more
returned penniless upon his family's hands. This
time, however, he was so far from expecting a
welcome that he dared not even write until he was
absolutely destitute and starving. Even then he
dared write only, penitently and piteously, and only
to his uncle, who frankly forgave him all.
This Uncle Contarine is notable not for his unwearied generosity only, but also for his singular
discernment. He seems to have seen the promisewhich not even Goldsmith's biographers, with the
light of his after performances to guide them, have
recognised-that he gave of coming greatness. May
I say for my own part that I cannot understand how
it has come to be accepted as indisputable that
Goldsmith's genius blossomed late and suddenly.
"Goldsmith was a plant that flowered late," says
Johnson of him to Boswell. "There appeared
nothing remarkable about him when he was young."
But, as a matter of fact, the one or two letters written
at this early period, which have come down to us, are
as perfect of their kind as any essay in The Citizen
of the World. Take, for example, the letter written
to his mother, giving a transparently fictitious and
facetious account of the adventures which cost him
that ~30 and a good horse. This letter some of his
biographers take seriously; while none of them
seems to see in it the conclusive contradiction to
the theory that his genius was of slow and late
development. So long a letter would, of course, not
be worth quoting for the amount of autobiography it
contains, as the proportion of fact to fancy in it is
probably about that of the proportion of soap to air




38       OLIVER GOLDSMITHin a soap-bubble. But I hope by quoting it at
length to convince my readers that the Goldsmith
of the Chinese Letters was even at this time in
evidence for those with any literary discernment.
"MY DEAR MOTHER,-If you will sit down and
calmly listen to what I say, you shall be fully
resolved in every one of those many questions you
have asked me. I went to Cork and converted
my horse, which you prize so much higher than
Fiddleback, into cash and took my passage in a ship
bound for America, and, at the same time, paid the
captain for my freight and all the other expenses of
the voyage. But it so happened that the wind did
not answer for three weeks; and, you know, mother,
that I could not command the elements. My misfortune was that, when the wind served, I happened
to be with a party in the country, and my friend, the
captain, never enquired after me, but set sail with as
much indifference as if I had been on board. The
remainder of my time I employed in the city and its
environs, viewing everything curious, and, you know,
no one can starve while he has money in his pocket.
"Reduced, however, to my last two guineas, I began
to think of my dear mother and friends whom I had
left behind me, and so bought that generous beast
Fiddleback, and bade adieu to Cork with only five
shillings in my pocket. This, to be sure, was but a
scanty allowance for man and horse towards a
journey of above a hundred miles; but I did not
despair, for I knew I must find friends on the road.
"I recollected particularly an old and faithful
acquaintance I made at College, who had often and
earnestly pressed me to spend a summer with him,




HOME FOR THE HOLIDAYS 39
and he lived but eight miles from Cork. This circumstance of vicinity he would expatiate on to me with
peculiar emphasis. 'We shall,' says he, 'enjoy the
delights of both city and country, and you shall
command my stable and my purse.' However, upon
the way, I met a poor woman all in tears, who told
me her husband had been arrested for a debt he was
not able to pay, and that his eight children must now
starve, bereaved as they were of his industry, which
had been their only support. I thought myself at
home being not far from my good friend's house, and
therefore parted with a moiety of all my store; and,
pray, mother, ought I not to have given her the other
half-crown, for what she got would be of little use to
her? However, I soon arrived at the mansion of my
affectionate friend, guarded by the vigilance of a huge
mastiff, who flew at me and would have torn me to
pieces but for the assistance of a woman, whose
countenance was not less grim than that of the dog;
yet she with great humanity relieved me from the
jaws of this Cerberus, and was prevailed on to carry
up my name to her master. Without suffering me
to wait long, my old friend, who was then recovering
from a severe fit of sickness, came down in his nightcap, night-gown, and slippers, and embraced me with
the most cordial welcome, showed me in, and after
giving me a history of his indisposition, assured me
that he considered himself peculiarly fortunate in
having under his roof the man he most loved on earth,
and whose stay with him must, above all things,
contribute to perfect his recovery. I now repented
sorely that I had not given the poor woman the other
half-crown, as I thought all my bills of humanity
would be punctually answered by this worthy man,




40       OLIVER GOLDSMITH
I revealed to him my whole soul; I opened to him all
my distresses; and freely owned that I had but one
half-crown in my pocket; but that now, like a ship
after weathering out the storm, I considered myself
secure in a safe and hospitable harbour. He made
no answer but walked about the room, rubbing his
hands as one in deep study. This I imputed to the
sympathetic feelings of a tender heart, which increased
my esteem for him, and, as that increased, I gave
the most favourable interpretation to his silence. I
construed it into delicacy of sentiment, as he dreaded
to wound my pride by expressing his commiseration
in words, leaving his generous conduct to speak for
itself.
" It now approached six o'clock in the evening; and
as I had eaten no breakfast, and as my spirits were
raised, my appetite for dinner grew uncommonly
keen. At length the old woman came into the room
with two plates, one spoon, and a dirty cloth, which
she laid upon the table. This appearance, without
increasing my spirits, did not diminish my appetite.
My protectress soon returned with a small bowl of
sago, a small porringer of sour milk, a loaf of stale
brown bread, and the heel of an old cheese all over
crawling with mites. My friend apologised that his
illness obliged him to live on slops, and that better
fare was not in the house; observing at the same
time, that a milk diet was certainly the most healthful; and at eight o'clock he again recommended a
regular life, declaring that for his part he would 'lie
down with the lamb, and rise with the lark.' My
hunger was at this time so exceeding sharp that I
wished for another slice of the loaf, but was obliged
to go to bed without even that refreshment.




HOME FOR THE HOLIDAYS 41
"This lenten entertainment I had received made
me resolve to depart as soon as possible. Accordingly, next morning when I spoke of going, he did
not oppose my resolution. He rather commended
my design, adding some very sage counsel upon the
occasion. 'To be sure,' said he, 'the longer you
stay away from your mother, the more you will
grieve her and your other friends; and possibly they
are already afflicted at hearing of this foolish expedition you have made.' Notwithstanding all this, and
without any hope of softening such a sordid heart, I
again renewed the tale of my distress, and, asking,
'How he thought I could travel above a hundred miles
upon one half-crown?' I begged to borrow a single
guinea, which I assured him would be repaid with
thanks. 'And you know, sir,' said I, 'it is no more
than I have done for you.' To which he firmly
answered, 'Why, look you, Mr Goldsmith, that is
neither here nor there. I have paid you all you
ever lent me, and this sickness of mine has left me
bare of cash. But I have bethought myself of a
conveyance for you. Sell your horse and I will
furnish you with a much better one to ride on.' I
readily grasped at this proposal, and begged to see
the nag; on which he led me to his bedchamber, and
from under the bed he pulled out a stout oak stick.
'Here he is,' said he, 'take this in your hand, and it
will carry you to your mother's with more safety than
such a horse as you ride.' I was in doubt, when I
got it into my hand, whether I should not, in the
first place, apply it to his pate; but a rap at the
street door made the wretch fly to it, and, when I
returned to the parlour, he introduced me, as if
nothing of the kind had happened, to the gentleman




42   OLIVER GOLDSMITH


who entered, as 'Mr Goldsmith, his most ingenious
and worthy friend, of whom he had so often heard him
speak with rapture.' I could scarcely compose myself, and must have betrayed indignation in my mien
to the stranger, who was a counsellor-at-law in the
neighbourhood, a man of engaging aspect and polite
address.
"After spending an hour, he asked my friend
and me to dine with him at his house. This I
declined at first, as I wished to have no farther
communication with my hospitable friend; but at
the solicitation of both I at last consented, determined as I was by two motives-one, that I was
prejudiced in favour of the looks and manner of the
counsellor; and the other, that I stood in need of a
comfortable dinner.  And there, indeed, I found
everything that I could wish, abundance without
profusion, and elegance without affectation. In the
evening, when my old friend, who had eaten very
plentifully at his neighbour's table, but talked again
of lying down with the lamb, made' a motion to
me for retiring, our generous host requested I
should take a bed with him, upon which I plainly
told my old friend that he might go home and take
care of the horse he had given me, but that I should
never re-enter his doors. He went away with a laugh,
leaving me to add this to the other little things the
counsellor already knew of his plausible neighbour.
" And, now, my dear mother, I found sufficient to
reconcile me to all my follies; for here I spent three
whole days. The counsellor had two sweet girls to
his daughters, who played enchantingly on the
harpsichord; and yet it was but a melancholy
pleasure I felt the first time I heard themr; for that




HOME FOR THE HOLIDAYS 43
being the first time also that either of them had
touched the instrument since their mother's death, I
saw tears in silence trickle down their father's cheeks.
I every day endeavoured to go away, but every day
was pressed and obliged to stay. On my going, the
counsellor offered me his purse, with a horse and
servant to convey me home; but the latter I declined,
and only took a guinea to bear my necessary expenses
on the road.             OLIVER GOLDSMITH.
"To Mrs ANNE GOLDSMITH,
' BALLYMAHON."
The passage from The Enquiry into the Present
State of Polite Learning, which has been quoted so
often in support of the theory that Goldsmith himself
was conscious of the slow and late development of
his genius, refers only to the distracting and disturbing effects of the passions upon the mind of youth.
"I forget," he says in The Enquiry, "whether the
simile has been used before, but I would compare
the man whose youth has been passed in the tranquillity of dispassionate prudence to liquors that
never ferment and consequently continue always
muddy. Passions may raise a commotion in the
youthful breast, but they disturb only to refine it.
However this may be, mean talents are often rewarded in College with an easy subsistence." The
image had been used before, and in the sense in
which his biographers have, I think mistakenly,
applied it to Goldsmith. "Wines," says Fuller, "the
stronger they be, the more lees they have when they
are new. Many boys are muddy-headed till they
be clarified with age, and such afterwards prove
the best. Bristol diamonds are both bright and




44       OLIVER GOLDSMITH
squared and pointed by nature, and yet are soft and
worthless; whereas orient ones in India are rough
and rugged naturally. Hard, rugged and dull natures
of youth acquit themselves afterwards the jewels of
the country." But this was not Goldsmith's use of the
simile, nor does it, I think, apply to him in this sense.
The genius which won Goldsmith distinction in later
life was discernible by those who had eyes for it in
his earlier years. There was no market for genius
of that sort in College, and it was of no more account
in the eyes of men like Theaker Wilder than the
pearl " richer than all his tribe " was of value to " the
base Indian."




CHAPTER IV


EDINBURGH
QLIVER, having at last exhausted his welcomes
at his mother's and at his brother's homes,
was fain to fall back upon a hearth and heart whose
welcome he had always found, and would never cease
to find, cordial. He took up his abode with his
Uncle Contarine and there let life for a time glide
insensibly away with him in literary converse with
his host and in yet pleasanter intercourse with his
old playmate and cousin, Jane Contarine. It was
here and then that a word spoken by another cousin,
Dean Goldsmith, decided the course and current of
his life to its close. May I say, in passing, that a
reference Goldsmith made once to this dean has
discredited him with readers of Boswell. "When
Goldsmith began to rise into notice," says Boswell,
" he said he had a brother who was Dean of Durham
-a fiction so easily detected that it is wonderful
how he should have been so inconsiderate as to
hazard it." Wonderful indeed, as in those days the
Deanery of Durham was a richer prize than most
bishoprics, and the dean of the day was as well
known as the primate of the day to any dignitary of
the Church; yet it was to a dignitary of the Church
that Goldsmith was supposed to have made the boast.
However, Boswell has the candour to append the
following note, which transfers the reader's wonder to
himself. "I am willing to hope that there may have
45




46   OLIVER GOLDSMITH


been some mistake about this boast of Goldsmith's,
though I had the anecdote from a dignitary of the
Church. Dr Isaac Goldsmith, his near relation, was
Dean of Cloyne."
It was this dignitary who discovered, when on a
visit with Uncle Contarine, that Goldsmith's true
calling was that of a physician, having, I presume,
arrived at this conclusion by a process of exhaustion.
As Oliver had failed to enter the Church and even
to reach the Temple, it followed that; if he was
destined for any\ of the three learned professions,
it must be that of physic. While the worthy dean
called the tune which Oliver was to dance to next,
of course it was the much-enduring Uncle Contarine
who had to pay the piper. He refitted him for his
third voyage, this time to Edinburgh for the study
there of medicine. In Edinburgh Goldsmith at least
studied chemistry, a science for which he had always
a taste; but he was, as I have already noted, chiefly
distinguished for his social success. It was to this
he owed his engagement-probably as a tutor-at
the Duke of Hamilton's, and because he owed it
solely to this he resigned it. "I have spent," he
writes to Uncle Contarine, "more than a fortnight
every second day at the Duke of Hamilton's, but it
seems they like me more as a jester than as a companion, so I disdained so servile an employment."
For his social success in Edinburgh we have the
unimpeachable evidence of that unsociable knight,
Sir John Hawkins, whom his only friend in the club,
Dr Johnson, thus defends to Dr Burney: —" Sir John,
sir, is a very unclubable man. Yet I really believe
him to be an honest man at bottom; though to be
sure he is rather penurious and he is somewhat mean,




EDINBURGH


47


and, it must be owned, he has some degree of brutality,
and is not without a tendency to savageness that
cannot well be defended." But this genial Sir John
admits, however grudgingly, Goldsmith's social
success in Edinburgh, which ought to count, if his
convivial supremacy in the Ballymahon club goes
for nothing.  And perhaps the success of his
Ballymahon's sallies should no more count than
Hamlet's madness, according to the sexton, would
count in England, for " there the men are as mad as
he." But Scotland is socially the antipodes of
Ireland, and therefore Goldsmith's social success both
in Ireland and Scotland suggests that he ought to
have been a social success everywhere. It is just
possible that his failure in the club and in Johnson's
society is evidence, not against his sociability, -but
against that of such companies. The club was
probably as sociable a place as a witness-box, where
your wits-on your oath-are set against your crossexaminer's, to the enjoyment of the Court. In such
a situation a nervous or diffident man will stultify
himself repeatedly, in spite of his being ordinarily
the reverse of a fool. Surely in an ideally sociable
company everyone should be at his ease and no one
on his oath; and the mind, like a boy let loose from
school, should be at play, and the games should be
won or lost as games, and not as battles. Goldsmith
probably owed his " Poor Poll " reputation less to his
failure to consider his speeches sufficiently than to
his failure to consider sufficiently his audience.
But Goldsmith's inconsiderateness in all ways was
more Irish than the Irish themselves. On the day
of his arrival in Edinburgh, he left his luggage in
some lodgings in some street, and then set out to




48       OLIVER GOLDSMITH
explore the city, without a thought of noting eithernumber or name of street. When it occurred to him
to return home, he was as helpless as was De Quincey
under similar circumstances in the same city. By
the merest good luck, however, he happened to
meet and recognise the porter who had carried his
luggage to the lodgings, and from him he learned
where he lived. Yet more characteristic was his
challenge to some Edinburgh fellow-students to draw
lots with any one of them to decide which of the
two should treat the entire party to the theatre on
the first night of a new play. He had no sooner
made the offer than he remembered that he was
almost penniless, and that, if the lot had fallen to
him, he must pawn his clothes to raise the requisite
sum. Dire was his trepidation until the reckless
challenge was declined all round.
This may perhaps suggest to my readers that
Goldsmith had taken again to the gambling habit
at his Uncle Contarine's expense. On the contrary,
it must be recorded to his credit that he took so
much to heart the expense he had hitherto been to
his generous uncle, that he drew upon him now only
for incredibly small sums. In a postscript to his
first letter to his uncle he writes:-" I draw this
time"- 8th May-" for ~6, and will draw next
October for ~4, as I was obliged to buy everything
since I came to Scotland-shirts not even excepted.
I am a little more early the first year than I shall
be for the future, for I absolutely will not trouble
you before the time hereafter." This works out at
about one pound a month. How he contrived to
live upon it, even in Edinburgh, is a mystery.
It was not, however, poverty which now, or hereto



EDINBURGH


49


fore or hereafter embittered Goldsmith's life, but
an ever-tormenting personal distrust, which poverty
of course aggravated. Four months after his arrival
in Edinburgh he writes at the close of a charming
letter to his old chum, Bob Bryanton: "But how
ill, my Bob, does it become me to ridicule women
with whom I have scarce any correspondence. There
are, 'tis certain, handsome women here; and 'tis
certain there are handsome men to keep them
company. An ugly and a poor man is society for
himself, and such society the world lets me enjoy
in great abundance. Fortune has given you circumstances, and nature a person to look charming in
the eyes of the fair world. Nor do I envy my dear
Bob such blessings, while I may sit down and laugh
at the world and at myself, the most ridiculous
object in it."
Here you have the real Goldsmith, very different
from the Boswellian and popular conception of him
as a kind of ridiculous Bottom, eager to play every
part and, confident of playing all well.  On the
contrary, he was continually and acutely conscious
of his personal and other disadvantages, and his very
extravagance of dress was itself an evidence, not of
conceit, but of its opposite. "Every extravagance
in dress," he writes in his third Letter from a
Citizen of the World, " proceeds from a desire of
becoming more beautiful than nature made us, and
this is so harmless a vanity that I not only pardon
but approve of it."
In spite of his bitter poverty, Goldsmith was
probably as happy in Edinburgh as he would have
been anywhere, and, if he quitted it within two years
it was less because it was Edinburgh than because
4




50       OLIVER GOLDSMITH
it was not some other place.   He was a born
Arab,
"Impelled with steps unceasing to pursue
Some fleeting good that mocks me with the view;
That, like the circle bounding earth and skies,
Allures from far, yet, as I follow, flies;
My fortune leads to traverse realms alone,
And find no spot of all the world my own."
He may, however, have persuaded himself, as he
tries in the following letter to persuade his uncle,
that it was not restlessness, but an insatiable thirst
for medical knowledge, which the limited therapeutical lore of Edinburgh had only whetted, that
drove him to Paris-this and the discovery that
the Paris professors spoke French, and not, as in
other Continental Universities, Latin.
" MY DEAR UNCLE,-After having spent two
winters at Edinburgh, I now prepare to go to France
the ioth of next February. I have seen all that
this country can exhibit in the medical way, and
therefore intend to visit Paris, where the great
Mr Farhein, Petit, and Du Hammel de Monceau
instruct their pupils in all the branches of Medicine.
They speak French, and consequently I shall have
much the advantage of most of my countrymen, as
I am perfectly acquainted with that language, and
few who leave Ireland are so."
But he hopes to exhaust even the medical lore
of Paris, and having drawn dry that Alma Mater,
to perfect his study at Leyden.
"Since I am on- so pleasing a topic as selfapplause," he continues, "give me leave to say
that the circle of science which I have run
through before I undertook the study of physic,




EDINBURGH


5I


is not only useful, but absolutely necessary to
the making of a skilful physician. Such sciences
enlarge our understanding and sharpen our sagacity;
and what is a practitioner without both but an
empiric, for never yet was a disorder found entirely
the same in two patients.   A quack, unable to
distinguish the particularities in each disease, prescribes at a venture. If he finds such a disorder
may be called by the general name of fever, for
instance, he has a set of remedies which he applies
to cure it; nor does he desist till his medicines run
out, or his patient has lost his life. But the skilful
physician distinguishes the symptoms; manures
the sterility of nature, or prunes her luxuriance;
nor does he depend so much upon the efficacy of
medicines as upon their proper application. I shall
spend this spring and summer in Paris, and, at the
beginning of next winter, go to Leyden. The great
Albinus is still alive there, and 'twill be proper to
go, though only to have it said that we have studied
in so famous an University."
I must admit that this letter sounds something like
the prospectus of a Mexican mine, describing the rich
results and the richer promise of the workings so far
for the beguilement of the unwary investor. Nor is
the essential point of such a prospectus-the amount
of capital needed for the exploitation of the minelacking:-" As I shall not have another opportunity
of receiving money from your bounty till my return
to Ireland, so I have drawn from the last sum that I
hope I shall ever trouble you for; 'tis twenty pounds."
Here, however, it is only fair to remember two things
about Goldsmith-that he was the most sanguine of




52       OLIVER GOLDSMITH
prospectors, and that no one took him in-and he was
for ever being taken in-more often or more completely than himself. He had persuaded himself of
what he here sought to persuade his uncle, that nothing
gathers more moss than a rolling stone.
Unlike most wastrels too, Goldsmith was grateful
-grateful even to the point of ceasing to be a burden
to his benefactor! This ~20 was the last penny he
ever asked or received from his uncle, for he endured
the most poignant privations sooner than apply to him
again. The gratitude he expresses at the close of this
letter was not for favours to come:-" And now, dear
sir, let me here acknowledge the humility of the station
in which you found me; let me tell you how I was
despised by most and hateful to myself. Poverty, hopeless poverty was my lot, and melancholy was beginning to make me her own when you-but I stop
here!"




CHAPTER V


A PHILOSOPHIC VAGABOND
OLDSMITH'S        biographers have been much
exercised about the strange tale he tells his
Uncle Contarine in his next letter. They would fain
believe that it had at least some foundation in fact.
For my own part, 1 cannot help thinking the letter
"All lies frae end to end." If, however, it is not all
true or true at all, its autobiographic value is still great
-even greater perhaps than if it was an absolutely
veracious account of what befell him; since what a
man is matters more autobiographically, than what
he does, or what he suffers. I fear the tale is from
end to end an ingenious invention to account for the
loss of all his money and the change of all his plans.
The truth seems to be that the pitiable shifts and
subterfuges of poverty had naturally and almost
necessarily demoralised Goldsmith. Extreme poverty,
or rather say, absolute destitution, through losing a
man the respect of others, often costs him the loss of
his own. He finds he must either bend or break;
then, if he lives and bends, and can live only through
bending, his self-respect suffers.  Mr Forster is
shocked by Goldsmith's confession to his brother-inlaw-" There is hardly a kingdom in Europe in which
I am not a debtor." But, in the first place, Mr
Forster omits, I cannot imagine why, the mitigating
context of this confession.  "I have already dis53




54       OLIVER GOLDSMITH
charged my most threatening and pressing demands,
for we must be just before we can be gratefuL" And,
in the second place, Mr Forster fails to make in
imagination due allowance for the demoralisation of
Goldsmith's circumstances.
"Ye see your state wi' theirs compared,
And shudder at the niffer,
But cast a moment's fair regard,
What makes the mighty differ? "
The real wonder is that Goldsmith's nature was
-not so much-but so little "subdued to what it
worked in." To spend the greater part of your life in
such desperate straits and amongst such demoralising
associates, and keep yet so pure in heart, so guileless in spirit, so gentle, generous and chivalrous in
character-that is the real wonder.
But to run such a gauntlet without scars being left
on your character would be almost impossible, and
Goldsmith did not pass through it unscathed. If,
therefore, the following account is from end to end an
invention, devised to account for the loss of his money
and the change of his plans, it probably was because the
truth was too like that old Dublin gambling escapade
to be told to his uncle without insupportable shame.
" DEAR SIR,-I suppose by this time I am accused
of either neglect or ingratitude and my silence imputed
to my usual slowness of writing. But, believe me,
sir, when I say that till now I had not an opportunity
of sitting down with that ease of mind which writing
required. You may see by the top of the letter that
I am at Leyden; but of my journey hither you must
be informed. Sometime after the receipt of your last
I embarked for Bourdeaux on board a Scotch ship




A PHILOSOPHIC VAGABOND 55
called the St Andrews, Captain John Wall, master.
The ship made a tolerable appearance, and, as another
inducement, I was let to know that six agreeable
passengers were to be my companions. Well, we were
but two days at sea when a storm drove us into a city
of England called Newcastle-on-Tyne. We all went
ashore to refresh us after the fatigues of our voyage.
Seven men and I were one day on shore, and, on the
following evening, as we were all very merry, the room
door bursts open; enters a sergeant and twelve grenadiers with their bayonets screwed, and puts us all
under the King's arrest. It seems my company were
Scotchmen in the French service, and had been in
Scotland to enlist soldiers for the French army. I
endeavoured all I could to prove my innocence;
however, I remained in prison with the rest a fortnight, and with difficulty got off even then. Dear sir,
keep this still a secret, or at least say it was for debt;
for, if it were once known at the University, I should
hardly get a degree.  But hear how Providence
interposed in my favour. The ship was gone on
to Bourdeaux before I got from prison, and was
wrecked at the mouth of the Garonne and every one of
the crew drowned. It happened the last great storm.
There was ship at that time ready for Holland; I
embarked and, in nine days, thank my God, I arrived
safely at Rotterdam, whence I travelled by land to
Leyden, and whence I now write."
Here also, I think, Goldsmith's biography is to be
found written rather in his fiction than in his "facts"
-in the " History of a Philosophic Vagabond" in
The Vicar of Wakefield, rather than in this account
by the Philosophic Vagabond of his adventures to




56       OLIVER GOLDSMITH
his uncle. Goldsmith admitted more than once at
Reynolds' dinner-table that the "Wanderings of a
Philosophic Vagabond " was a transcript,often accurate
down to the minutest details, of his own adventures.
Conversely it is to me absolutely certain that, if the
stirring adventures he describes in this letter had
really occurred to him, they would have found their
place in the Philosophic Vagabond's narrative in
The Vicar of Wakefield. What does find a place
there is so much more in keeping with Goldsmith's
character and with probability, that I quote it here as
approximately if not literally autobiographic.
" I fairly therefore divided my last half-guinea, onehalf of which went to be added to his thirty thousand
pounds, and with the other half I resolved to go to
the next tavern, to be there more happy than he.
As I was going out with that resolution, I was metat the door by the captain of a ship, with whom I
had formerly some little acquaintance, and he agreed
to be my companion over a bowl of punch. As I
never chose to make a secret of my circumstances, he
assured me that I was upon the very point of ruin, in
listening to the office-keeper's promises; for that he
only designed to sell me to the plantations. 'But,'
continued he, 'I fancy you might by a much shorter
voyage be very easily put into a genteel way of bread.
Take my advice.   My ship sails to-morrow  for
Amsterdam; what if you go in her -as a passenger?
The moment you land, all you have to do is to teach
the Dutchmen English, and I'll warrant you'll get
pupils and money enough. I suppose you understand
English,' added he, 'by this time, or the deuce is in
it.' I confidently assured him of that; but expressed
a doubt whether the Dutch would be willing to learn




A PHILOSOPHIC VAGABOND 57
English. He affirmed with an oath that they were
fond of it to distraction; and upon that affirmation
I agreed with his proposal and embarked the next
day to teach the Dutch English in Holland. The
wind was fair, our voyage short, and, after having
paid my passage with half my moveables, I found
myself fallen, as from the skies, a stranger in one of
the principal streets of Amsterdam. In this situation
I was unwilling to let any time pass unemployed in
teaching. I addressed myself therefore to two or
three of those I met, whose appearance seemed most
promising; but it was impossible to make ourselves
mutually understood.  It was not till this very
moment I recollected that, in order to teach Dutchmen English, it was necessary that they should teach
me Dutch. How I came to overlook so obvious an
objection is to me amazing; but certain it is I overlooked it."
No one will doubt at least that this practical bullof going to Holland to teach the Dutch English without reflecting that they must first teach him Dutchwas really made by Goldsmith himself. After all,
the idea is not so absurd as it sounds; since as every
schoolboy knows, no foreign teacher in any country
need know its language thoroughly in order to impart
to its natives a thorough knowledge of his own. As
a matter of fact, indeed, Goldsmith did contrive to
keep body and soul together in Leyden by teaching
the natives English. It was about all that he succeeded
in doing there, and perhaps all that he cared much
to do there. He took all things easy and his medical
studies easiest of all. He characteristically threw
away a happy chance he once had of prosecuting
these medical studies to a successful close.




58       OLIVER GOLDSMITH
"One morning," says the " Percy Memoir," he came
to a fellow-student of his, Dr Ellis, afterwards clerk to
the Irish House of Commons, "one morning Goldsmith came to him with his pockets literally full of
money, and with exultation counted out to him a
large sum which he had won the preceding evening.
Dr Ellis earnestly pressed him to play no more, but
to secure his present gains as a fund for completing
his medical studies. Oliver, who could always see
what was right, though he could not, always pursue
it, highly approved this advice, and declared it his
firm resolution to make it the rule of his future
conduct. But the seductions of the gaming table
were irresistible, and he was soon after stripped of
every shilling."
Whence some of Goldsmith's biographers have
inferred that he was a confirmed gambler, and no
doubt, he had that faith in fortune which a man with
"a knack at hoping" always has; but he was no
more a confirmed gambler than he was a confirmed
anything else. He was as mere a creature of impulse
and of the moment as any child. The only thing
certain about such gambling gains was that they
must be spent forthwith; but whether they would
be gambled or given away was as uncertain as a
throw of the dice. You need go no further than
Dr Ellis' account of Goldsmith's final farewell to
Leyden to be assured of this; for before he had
been a year in the place, his Arab instinct drove
him afield again, and he quitted the University, so
far as progress in his medical studies was concerned,
pretty much as he entered it. His new idea was
nothing less than a tramp on foot through Europe;
and to equip himself for the adventure he borrowed




A PHILOSOPHIC VAGABOND 59
a small sum of money from Dr Ellis. As usual,
however, most of the money was gone before the
journey was begun. He had not gone many steps
from Dr Ellis' door when the sight of some tulip
bulbs in a florist's garden reminded him of his Uncle
Contarine's love of flowers, and he then and there
spent all but a few shillings of what he had just
borrowed for his European tour in the purchase and
despatch to Ireland of the roots!  As the tulip
mania was then at its height in Holland, the money
thus spent would probably have taken him well on
his way to Paris, but the pleasure the present would
give his kindly uncle was to Goldsmith well worth
the cost of all the privations of his penniless journey.
But what put into Goldsmith's head this wild idea
of a tramp through Europe? Here, as ever, we
find the answer, not directly in his letters, but indirectly in his works. About a fourth of the fifth
chapter of his Enquiry into the Present State of
Polite Learning is most disproportionately taken
up with a sympathetic account of the career of the
Norwegian author, Baron Holberg.  Holbetg, the
son of a private soldier, educated himself in childhood
by begging bread and learning from school to school,
and, in manhood, by begging bread and gathering
knowledge in a tramp through Europe. If you will
compare the account of Holberg's enterprise in
Goldsmith's Enquiry with the account in The
Vicar of Wakefield of the wanderings of the
Philosophic Vagabond, you will recognise where he
got and how closely he followed his model. The
two passages are well worth mutual comparison,
if only in illustration of Goldsmith's habit of using
up his own experiences in his works.




60   OLIVER GOLDSMITH


"But his ambition," he says of Baron Holberg
in his Enquiry, "was not to be restrained, or his
thirst for knowledge satisfied until he had seen the
world. Without money, recommendations, or friends,
he undertook to set out upon his travels and make
the tour of Europe on foot. A good voice and a
trifling skill in music were the only finances he had
to support an undertaking so extensive; so he
travelled by day and at night sung at the door of
peasants' houses to get himself a lodging. In this
manner, while yet very young, Holberg passed through
France, Germany, and Holland; and coming over
to England took up his residence for two years in
the University of Oxford."
Let us now listen to the Philosophic Vagabond's
account of his tramp:-" I was now too far from
home to think of returning, so I resolved to go
forward. I had some knowledge of music, with a
tolerable voice, and now turned what was once my
amusement into a present means of subsistence. I
passed among the harmless peasants of Flanders,
and among such of the French as were poor enough
to be very merry; for I ever found them sprightly
in proportion to their wants. Whenever I approached
a peasant's house toward nightfall, I played one of
my most merry tunes, and that procured me not only
a lodging, but subsistence for the next day."
"Ieverfound them sprightly in proportion to their
wants" should be underlined for those readers who
cannot bear to think of the many and poignantand they were many and poignant-privations of
Goldsmith throughout this pilgrimage. Often the
man "that no revenue hath but his good spirits,"
owes his good spirits to his lack of revenue, to his




A PHILOSOPHIC VAGABOND 6i
lack at least of what goes with a revenue-care and
envy. For the poor man does not envy the rich
so much as the rich man envies the richer-at all
events in England where, as Max O'Rell used to
say, "everyone is equal to his superior and superior
to -his equal." The eastern apologue of the unhappy
emperor who was promised happiness when he found
a happy man and wore his shirt, and who, when he
come at last upon an absolutely happy man, found
him shirtless, would apply especially to Goldsmith.
He was far happier in these days, when he knew
as little as the bird on the bough where to-morrow's
breakfast would come from, than he was in the days
described by Glover, when, in spite of the big income
he was earning, he would spring up to quit the most
congenial company to go home and brood by himself
over his troubles.  In these tramp days he had
still his knack at hoping that to-morrow would be
as to-day and much more abundant. -Speaking of
himself in these days he says: "No person ever
had a better knack at hoping than I. The less
kind I found fortune at one time, the more I expected
from her at another; and, being now at the bottom
of her wheel, every new revolution might lift but
could not depress me. I proceeded, therefore, towards London, no way uneasy about to-morrow,
but cheerful as the birds that carolled by the road."
And here, again, is his description in retrospect to
Cooke: " He frequently," says Cooke, "used to talk
of his distresses on the Continent-such as living
on the hospitalities of the friars in convents, sleeping
in barns, and picking up a kind of mendicant livelihood by the German flute-with much pleasantry."
Living in one word, on hope, which, says Bacon,




62   OLIVER GOLDSMITH


" is a good breakfast, but a bad supper." But in the
prosperous days of which Glover spoke, he had it
for supper, or rather he had it not at all. "What
makes old age so sad," says the Persian poet, Jami,
"is not that our joys, but that our hopes cease";
and in this, as well as in many other respects Goldsmith, in his prosperous days, was a prematurely old
man. But in his youth certainly Goldsmith had the
secret of that slave he saw at Antwerp and described
in The Bee:-" He was maimed, deformed, and
chained; obliged to toil from the appearance of day
till nightfall, and condemned to this for life; yet
with all these circumstances of apparent wretchedness
he sang, would have danced, but that he wanted a
leg, and appeared the merriest, happiest man of all
the garrison."'
Even Goldsmith's philosophy, however, even in
these buoyant days, was not proof against one experience of his during his Continental tour-bearleading-probably because of the extreme mutual
incompatibility between the bear and his keeper.
A miser and a prodigal could hardly hit it off together, and the following autobiographic passage
suggests that two more mutually antipathetic young
men than Goldsmith and his charge were never
paired together:
" I was employed as a travelling tutor by a gentleman who brought his ward to Paris in order to set
him forward on a tour through Europe. I was to be
the young gentleman's governor, but with a proviso
that he should always be permitted to govern
himself. My pupil, in fact, understood the art of
guiding in money concerns much better than I. He
was heir to a fortune of two hundred thousand




A PHILOSOPHIC VAGABOND 63
pounds, left him by an uncle in the West Indies;
and his guardian, to qualify him for the management
of it, had bound him apprentice to an attorney.
Thus avarice was his prevailing passion; all his
questions on the road were, how much money might
be saved; which was the least expensive course of
travelling; whether anything could be bought that
would turn to account when disposed of again in
London. Such curiosities on the way as could be
seen for nothing, he was ready enough to look at;
but, if the sight of them was to be paid for, he
usually asserted that he had been told they were not
worth seeing. He never paid a bill that he would
not observe how amazingly expensive travelling was!
And all this though he was not yet twenty-one!
When arrived at Leghorn, as we took a walk to look
at the port and shipping, he enquired the expense of
a passage by sea home to England. This, he was
informed, was but a trifle compared to his returning
by land; he was, therefore, unable to withstand the
temptation. So paying me the small part of my
salary that was due, he took leave, and embarked
with only one attendant for London."
Besides begging and bear - leading, Goldsmith
mentions a third resource, which E3oswell wittily
describes as " disputing his passage through Europe."
" I now therefore," that is after his young hopeful had
left him stranded at Leghorn, "'was left once more
upon the world at large; but then it was a thing I
was used to. However, my skill in music could
avail me nothing in a country where every peasant
was a better musician than I; but by this time I had
acquired another talent which answered my purpose
as well, and this was a skill in disputation. In all




64       OLIVER GOLDSMITH
the foreign universities and convents there are upon
certain days philosophical theses maintained against
every adventitious disputant; for which, if the
champion opposes with any dexterity, he can claim
a gratuity in money, a dinner and a bed for night.
In this manner, therefore, I fought my way towards
England; walked along from city to city; examined
mankind more nearly; and, if I may so express it,
saw both sides of the picture."
Upon this autobiographic passage I should like to
be allowed to make two remarks in correction of the
popular estimate of Goldsmith as muddle-headed,
unready, irreflective and unobservant. He could not
have been the muddle-headed and unready creature
suggested by Macaulay's " muddy river  simile, if
he could thus "dispute his passage through Europe";
nor, again, could he have been as irreflective and
unobservant as Macaulay describes him in another
passage, and as, indeed, he is popularly supposed to
be, if in this tramp he really did "examine mankind
more nearly " to some purpose. " He had seen much
of the world," says Macaulay, "but he had noticed
and retained little more of what he had seen than
some grotesque incidents and characters which had
happened to strike his fancy." Is that so? Where
in our literature will you find the national characteristics of the French, Italians, Swiss or Dutch hit
off in a few felicitous phrases so accurately and
so admirably as in The Traveller?   Are these
pictures of the peoples, painted from what he saw
in tramping through their countries for a few weeks,
the work of a man " who noticed little more of what
he had seen than some grotesque incidents and characters which had happened to strike his fancy "?




A PHILOSOPHIC VAGABOND 65
Was it a man without observation or reflection who,
from what he saw in a tramp through France, predicted the French Revolution a whole generation
before its outburst? "The French," he writes in his
Chinese Letters, "are imperceptibly vindicating themselves into freedom. When I consider that those
parliaments (the members of which are all created
by the court, the presidents of which can only act
by immediate direction) presume even to mention
privileges and freedom, who, till late, received
directions from the throne with implicit humility;
when this is considered, I cannot help fancying that
the genius of freedom has entered that kingdom in
disguise. If they have but three weak monarchs
more successively on the throne, the mask will be
laid aside, and the country will once more be free."
The truth is, as this and other passages from his
essays prove, Goldsmith was so far from being
unobservant and irreflective, that he was one of the
most observant, reflective, far-sighted and sagacious
men of his day.
t


5




CHAPTER VI


LONDON
GOLDSMITH'S Grand Tour, which took him a
year, gave him probably a truer education
than any university could have imparted in five. In
February I755 he quitted Leyden and on ist
February I756 he landed at Dover. His straits never
seemed truly desperate till now. He had not a
penny. Neither his music nor his scholarship could
get him a supper in any house in England; while his
being a foreigner was as much against him in this
country as abroad it was in his favour; for though
Goldsmith, the poet, is English, Goldsmith, the tramp,
was Irish, and in those days an Irishman was the
least popular of foreigners. In writing of this period
to his brother-in law he says: "You may easily
imagine what difficulties I had to encounter, left as
I was without friends, money or impudence, and
that in a country where being born an Irishman was
sufficient to keep me unemployed."
In that single fortnight's weary trudge from Dover
to London, Goldsmith was probably subjected to
more hardship and humiliation than in his year's
tramp abroad. In the after days of his prosperity
he did not shrink from recalling and from recounting humiliations so abject as his "living among the
beggars of Axe Lane"; but of the miseries and
mortifications of this tramp to London he never
66




LONDON


67


spoke. Perhaps its least humiliating incident is embalmed in the " History of a Philosophic Vagabond,"
whose final resource, it will be remembered,
was a strolling- stage.  While, however, the
" Philosophic  Vagabond"  made  his appearance
as Horatio, Goldsmith's real part according to
tradition and to probability was that of a low
comedian.
But he reached Lon-don at last, at night, destitute
and in despair:
"Homeless near a thousand homes he stood
And near a thousand tables pined and wanted food."
Some as great have starved in London; but none
as kindly; and it is a pain to think that the man who
gave his bed-clothes on a bitter night to a beggar,
should be without shelter, food, a friend, or a hope in
that appalling city. We hardly know more of these
terrible days than that he "went under," to use a
phrase of dread significance.  He sank in deep
waters where no ground was, getting his head now
and again above the surface for a moment, only to
disappear again into those desperate depths. At
these emerging moments we see him now usher at
a school, so wretched that he taught in it under a
feigned name; now trudging from one apothecary's
shop to another, seeking the work of an assistant,
of an office-boy, of a mere messenger, and seeking
it in vain. At last a kindly chemist, named Jacob,,
out of sheer pity for his destitution, employed him
as an assistant; an employment which kept him-at
least alive until an -old Edinburgh fellow-student, a
Quaker doctor, Sleigh, lent a hand with Jacob's to
launch him as a physician in the humblest way
amongst the poorest people.




68   OLIVER GOLDSMITH


I have sometimes thought upon seeing statues to
famous men supported by allegorical figures, how
much more instructive and striking would be the
figures of those who were their real supporters at crises
of their lives. It is only after death, and in bronze
or marble that the Muses support their children;
and I should be glad to see these picturesque
pretenders replaced by figures, however homely, of
the men who were their real supports in life.
Supporting figures of Uncle Contarine, of Henry
Goldsmith, of the kindly chemist, Jacob, and of the
yet kindlier doctor, Sleigh, would be more to the
purpose at the base of a statue of Goldsmith, than
all the nine Muses together.
Uncle Contarine is now sunk in senile imbecility,
Henry Goldsmith, "passing rich on forty pounds a
year," is not rich enough to help; Oliver's brotherin-law Hodson, who because he was rich was
dowered with the portions of the poor, also because
he was rich declined to give any help. "It is not
want, but abundance," says Montaigne, "that creates
avarice."  Hence it is to strangers we owe it that
Oliver Goldsmith did not die of starvation in the
streets of London. The kind chemist, Jacob, drew
him out of the depths with one hand, and with the
other helped Dr Sleigh to establish him in a pauper
practice in Southwark. Though it was but two years
since Sleigh knew Goldsmith well in Edinburgh,
and though the poet took care to present himself
to his old fellow-student dressed in his best Sunday
apparel, he was not recognised. "Notwithstanding
it was Sunday," Goldsmith said afterwards, "and it
is to be supposed I was in my best clothes, Sleigh
did not know me. Such is the tax the unfortunate




LONDON


69


pay to poverty." "However," he added, "when he
did make me out, I found his heart as warm as ever,
and he shared his purse and friendship with me
during his continuance in London."
But even with the help of Sleigh and Jacob and
of the title and costume of a physician, Goldsmith
did not prosper. A doctor to prosper must seem
prosperous, what Carlyle called "gigmanity" is the
secret of medical success and, according to an old
Irish school-fellow, Beatty, Goldsmith failed here.
When he met Beatty casually in the street he
assured him jauntily, "I am doing very well as
a doctor," but all the evidences of success were
absent-his suit of green and gold was tarnished
and threadbare, and it was obviously weeks since
his linen had been to the laundry. At the same
time it is well to remember what the poet's
biographers seem to forget, that such a man as
Goldsmith practising amongst the very poor must
himself continue very poor, let his practice be wide
as it would. Goldsmith would certainly take no fee
from anyone poor as himself, while no less certainly
he would share with those poorer than himself the
last farthing he had earned as fees from the more
prosperous.
Beatty would probably have found him more
presentably dressed if another extravagance had not
been dearer to Goldsmith than the love of fine
clothes-the luxury of doing good. I could never
read the famous story of the courteous contest
between himself and a patient about the hat which
the poor doctor kept pressed close and closer to his
breast-to conceal a patch-while the polite patient
in vain attempted to relieve him of it-I never could




70       OLIVER GOLDSMITH
read this comic-tragic story without feeling that
the heart which beat beneath the patch accounted
for the shameful shabbiness.  There are tears in
that story for those who look beneath the worn
coat to the worn heart, as sensitive to feel for suffering as to suffer.
It was to his worn face or dress or both that Goldsmith owed his first lowly step upon the ladder of
letters. A poor printer patient whom he was
attending, struck by the contrast between Goldsmith's miserable appearance and his literary taste
and talk, ventured to say to him: "If I were you,
doctor, I would go see my master, Mr Richardson.
He is a kind man and is very kind in helping clever
men. There's Mr Johnson now whom he released
from a sponging-house. I am sure he would do
anything he could to help you on." Upon this hint
Goldsmith called upon the printer's master, Samuel
Richardson, the author of perhaps the most entrancing novel ever written, Clarissa.  It was not,
however, to Richardson, the author, that Goldsmith
applied for work, but to Richardson, the printer,
a business which the novelist carried on in Salisbury
Court, and the application resulted in the poet's
appointment as reader and corrector of the press.
In Richardson's parlour Goldsmith had the advantage
of which he speaks in his history of a Philosophic
Vagabond, apropos those disputations by which he
earned bread and board: —"With the members of
these establishments I could converse on topics of
literature, and then I always forgot the meanness
of my circumstances." This advantage he also
enjoyed occasionally in Richardson's parlour, where
he met and conversed with Young, the poet, and




LONDON


7'


other men of literary light and leading, till he caught,
of course, the infection of authorship.
His first essay in literature was, I need hardly say,
a tragedy; since young poets write tragedies as
young curates preach about death and as little
children revel in Bluebeard tales, because of the
tremendous appeal to the imagination of which
youth is all compact. But if Goldsmith's first literary
attempt was what you would expect from youth,
it was made without the usual assurance of youth.
I note this, because of the popular impression of
Goldsmith as vain and vainglorious. As a matter
of fact, he was, as the following account of him
given by another old Edinburgh fellow-student,
Dr Farr, suggests, the most diffident of men.
"He called upon me," says this Dr Farr, "one
morning before I was up, and, on entering the room,
I recognised my old acquaintance dressed in a
rusty full-trimmed black suit, with his pockets full
of papers, which instantly reminded me of the poet
in Garrick's farce of Lethe. After we had finished
our breakfast he drew from his pocket a part of
a tragedy, which he said he had brought for my
correction. In vain I pleaded inability when he
began to read, and every part on which I expressed
a doubt as to the propriety was immediately blotted
out. I then more earnestly pressed him not to trust
to my judgment, but to the opinions of persons better
qualified to decide on- dramatic composition, on which
he told me he had submitted his production, as far
as he had written, to Mr Richardson, the author of
Clarissa, on which I peremptorily declined offering
another criticism on the performance. The name
and subject of the tragedy have unfortunately




72       OLIVER GOLDSMITH
escaped my memory, neither do I recollect with
exactness how much he had written, though I am
inclined to believe that he had not completed the
third act.  I never heard whether he afterwards
finished it. In this visit I remember his relating
a strange quixotic scheme of his he had in contemplation of going to decipher the inscriptions on
the Written Mountains, though he was altogether
ignorant of Arabic, or the language in which they
might be supposed to be written. The salary of
three hundred pounds per annum which had been
left for the purpose was the temptation."
And also, I think, Goldsmith's Arab eagerness to
be again on the march. He never could settle down
for any time to anything. What but this restlessness
and fickleness could have made him exchange his
comparatively congenial employment in Richardson's
printing-office for the odious drudgery of Peckham
School? No one had better or more bitter experience of the miseries of an usher. " I have been,"
says the Philosophic Vagabond's cousin to him, "an
usher at a boarding-school myself, and may I die
by an anodyne necklace but I had rather be underturnkey at Newgate. I was up early and late; I
was browbeat by the master, hated for my ugly
face by the mistress, worried by the boys." Nevertheless his restlessness drove him from the printingoffice to Peckham School, where he endured what he
has described with a bitterness unprecedented from
him in the sixth number of The Bee. Of "this poor
needy animal," the usher, he says there, "he is the
laughing-stock of the school. Every trick is played
upon him; the oddity of his manners, his dress, or
his language is a fund of eternal ridicule; the master




LONDON


73


himself now and then cannot avoid joining in the
laugh, and the poor wretch, eternally resenting this
ill-usage, seems to live in a state of war with all
the family." Indeed, he endured such miseries and
mortification at this Peckham school, that he winced
as from a whip-lash at any reference to the place.
Cooke says, " He would tell many stories of his own
distresses, but the little story of Peckham school
he always carefully avoided." At the very name
of Peckham he would start in after years as at
the throb of an old wound. When a friend once
happened to use the proverbial phrase, "a holiday at
Peckham," Goldsmith turned hotly upon him and
asked "if he meant to insult him?"  For those
who can recall their school - days Goldsmith's
wretchedness at Peckham Academy is explained
by his gentleness, for the abject Bengali proverb,
"lHe that gives blows is a master; he that gives
none is a dog," is the code and creed of schoolboys.
"He was very good-natured," testifies of Goldsmith
the daughter of the Peckham Principal, Miss Milner,
" he told entertaining stories, amused everybody with
his flute, and spent his small salary on the day he
received it in relieving beggars and buying sweets
for the younger class." Can you wonder, then, that
one of these youngsters, to whom he was recommending the study of music as a gentlemanly accomplishment, asked with a sneer, "Do you call yourself a
gentleman?"
From Peckham Academy it was an escape even
to become a bookseller's hack, and that bookseller,
Griffiths. Griffiths, struck at Mr Milner's dinnertable by Goldsmith's conversation, asked the usher
to become a contributor to his Mffonth/y Review,




74   OLIVER GOLDSMITH


for the remuneration of a small, fixed salary, and his
board and lodging. He must indeed have touched
bottom at Peckham, if Paternoster Row was an
improvement upon it. Here Griffiths bullied him
with coarse brutality, Mrs Griffiths starved him,
and both did him the insupportable wrong of
mutilating and emending his contributions to the
Month&y. Ten years later when his old College
chum, Ned Purdon, dropped dead in Smithfield,
Goldsmith in adapting from Swift the epitaph which
Swift had adapted from the French, repeated the last
line three times:
"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."
Surely the threefold repetition expressed what it
expresses in Hebrew-the superlative-and Goldsmith was recalling Griffiths.




CHAPTER VII


GRUB STREET
DISPROPORTIONATE stress has been laid by
Macaulay and others upon the effect of patronage on the literature of the days of Queen Anne.
Even the half dozen writers paraded as prot4gis would
have been neglected had literature been their sole
recommendation to their powerful patrons; while, as
The Dunciad shows, Grub Street was then as poor,
as populous, as despised and almost as despicable as
at any other epoch. It was not, however, quite so
despicable as in the days in which that " water-fly,"
Horace Walpole, expressed his amazement that
"' Young Mr Burke should not have worn off his authorism yet. He thinks there is nothing so charming as
writers and to be one. He will know better one of
these days." It does not seem to have occurred to
this superfine fribble that his own father was chiefly
responsible for the degradation of letters at which he
sneers. Sir Robert Walpole, like an Eastern wellpoisoner, had throughout his long reign poisoned
every fount of honour accessible to him; and had
spent in the corruption of men of letters alone, over
~50,ooo.  The result was that when Goldsmith
entered Grub Street its pens were as venal as the
votes of the House of Commons. "An author," says
Fielding, writing of this time and state of things, " in
a country where there is no public provision for
75




76       OLIVER GOLDSMITH
men of genius, is not obliged to be a more disinterested
patriot than any other. Why is he whose livelihood
is in his pen, a greater monster in using it to serve
himself than he who uses his tongue for the same
purpose?" Mr Forster, in commenting upon this
passage, lays the stress on its complaint of the national
neglect of men of genius; but surely the significance
of Fielding's cynical pleading lies in its revelation of
universal corruption?
Now these Grub Street pens were at the mercenary
service, not only of political partisanship, but also of
personal malignity. Pens, like the daggers of Italian
bravoes, were on hire to anyone who wished to stab
an enemy anonymously in the press; and these
daggers were poisoned when the victim" happened to
be the object of the unsuccessful writer's envious and
venomous detestation-the author who had arrived.
This, then, was Goldsmith's Grub Street environment; and I would ask those who have been taught
to think of him as " poor Goldy," a creature whose
very kindliness was a form of weakness, to consider
the moral stand he took and stoutly kept in circumstances of such overwhelming temptation.
In the first place, if Goldsmith with his shrinking
sensitiveness was a creature of this feeble moral fibre,
he must have been spiteful. Weakness of this sort is
always spiteful, as the bite of an insect is always
poisoned. Yet, though no man was ever more continually and venomously attacked, and though no
man ever felt these attacks more sensitively, there is
not to be found in all his works one single retort
envenomed by vindictiveness.  In Retaliation he
calls himself derisively " magnanimous Goldsmith"
but Retaliation itself shows him magnanimous




GRUB STREET


77


beyond any author who had such power and such
provocation. Those who know anything of the Grub
Street of that day, and especially of the scandalous
scurrility and savagery of its attacks on Goldsmith,
and who, again, realise his quivering sensitiveness to
such attacks, will be reminded by his sunny disregard
in his writings of the pelting of this pitiless storm of
his own fine image of the cliff which,
"Swells from the vale and midway leaves the storm,
Though round its breast the rolling clouds are spread,
Eternal sunshine settles on its head."
" The insults," says Thackeray, "to which Goldsmith
had to submit are shocking to read of-slander, contumely, vulgar satire, brutal malignity perverting his
commonest motives and actions; he had his share of
these and one's anger is roused at reading of them,
as it is at seeing a woman insulted or a child assaulted,
at the notion that a creature so very gentle and weak
and full of love should have to suffer so." But Goldsmith, let me add, is not to be pitied merely or merely
loved for his gentle sufferance, but to be admired also
and perhaps above all-to be admired for the magnanimity with which he disdained to revenge himself. If
Goldsmith had been a man of the feeble, febrile moral
fibre he is popularly supposed to have been, he would
have been womanish in his spitefulness as he certainly
was womanly in his sensitiveness.
Now let us look, in the second place, at the moral
strength with which he resisted another infection of
Grub Street-its venality. As Goldsmith borrowed
and accepted money freely from friends-though be
it remembered, nothing like so freely as he gave or
lent money to anyone and everyone in need, whether




78   OLIVER GOLDSMITH


friend or stranger-it has been presumed, as Mr
Forster expresses it, that " he was strangely indifferent
to such obligations." But, to begin with, may I say
that a man, who makes infinitely less of the obligations he confers, than of the obligations he receives, is
not fairly judged by a County Court standard. Again,
Goldsmith with his "knack at hoping " always expected
that to-morrow would enable him to pay the debts of
to-day. Lastly, he showed himself the reverse of indifferent to moral obligations when he was deliberately
confronted with them. When the Rev. Dr Scott was
sent with a carte blanche from the ministry to secure the
support of Goldsmith's pen, the divine was at once
amazed and indignant at the poet's proud refusal. " I
found him," says Dr Scott, "in a miserable set of
chambers in the Temple. I told him my authority; I
told him that I was empowered to pay most liberally for
his exertions; and, would you believe it! he was so
absurd as to say,'I can earn as much as will supply
my wants without writing for any party; the assistance you offer is therefore unnecessary to me.' And
so I left him in his garret!"
The rev. doctor could not contain his contempt for
the poet's imbecility, and it is contempt of this kind
from men of this kind that has done much to spread
the "poor Goldy " idea of the poet-of men
' Of whom to be dispraised were no small praise."
There is a third respect in which Goldsmith showed
himself unaffected by his environment and independent of his contemporaries that is worth noting, because
it also and above all contradicts the popular conception of the poet. The popular conception of
Goldsmith is that of a man weak and impression



GRUB STREET


79


able as water-impressionable as the surface of a
lake, clouded by every passing cloud, ruffled by every
passing breeze, never itself for a moment, but always
a reflection of the sky above it, or the hills around it,
of the boat upon its surface, or the cattle about its
brink. That is the popular conception of Goldsmith,
the man. But Goldsmith, the writer, is he as a wave
of the sea tossed this way and that by every wind,
carried to and fro by every tide, coloured by the
cloud above, or by the sand or shingle, rock, or seaweed underneath? On the contrary, he stood up
alone against the taste of his day, against its sickly
sentiment, against its sickening grossness.  I think
this contrast is extraordinary, between Goldsmith, the
man, who seemed so shallow, weak, impressionable,
and dependent to his contemporaries, and, Goldsmith,
the writer, who took a line of his own, wrote a style
of his own, thought, and thought profoundly for himself, and in all his works-in his essays, in his poems,
in his plays, and in his novel -made a deliberate
and determined stand against the taste of the day.
Take his style. Boswell says he modelled his style
on that of Johnson! What, of Johnson of whom he
said that if he had to make little fishes talk he'd make
them talk like whales! In the introduction to The
Bee, again I have no doubt-though it has escaped
notice-that he ridicules Johnson's Gargantuan style
under the parable of the man who made a monstrous
goitre the fashion in an Alpine district.  Passing
from the manner to the matter of Goldsmith's work,
in his plays he consciously courted failure, and in
The Good-Natured Man not only courted but almost
encountered failure by his, deliberate stand against
the taste of the day for sentiment. Contrast again,




8o   OLIVER GOLDSMITH


the divine purity of The Vicar of Wakefield with the
grossness, the foulness, or the pruriency of contemporary novelists. One has to palliate Richardson's
sickly and sickening sentiment, Fielding's grossness,
Smollett's foulness, the pruriency and impurity of
Sterne, by the plea of the demoralisation of their
environment. Was the environment of Goldsmith
less demoralising? Let me contrast him here for a
moment with Sterne, because each has written but
one novel, and also because I have the precedent of
Thackeray for taking them together. Suppose you
read their two novels, Tristram Shandy and The
Vicar of Wakefield, and knew nothing of either
author but what you might infer from his work.
Would you not then have inferred that Sterne's experience must have been Goldsmith's, and Goldsmith's
Sterne's? Would you not have thought that Goldsmith all his life must have been secluded in Sterne's
Yorkshire vicarage, out of reach, out of sight and
sound of the world's wickedness; and that Sterne
must have been exposed to Goldsmith's degrading
Grub Street and tramp experiences? For in The
Vicar of Wakefield, while goodness and all the sweet
influences that radiate from goodness seem drawn to
the life and from the life, its improbable wickedness
might seem the invention of an imagination innocent of evil as a girl's. The Vicar of Wakefield, in
fact, shows against contemporary novels like a violet
among the coarse growths of the hedgerow, " Fair as a
star when only one is shining in the sky."
A Goldsmith who made and kept so stout and
consistent a stand against the venality, the scurrility,
the ferocity of the Grub Street of his day, and who
deliberately courted and almost encountered failure




GRUB STREET


8i


in his plays and in his novel by declining to pander
to contemporary taste for sickly sentiment or sickening grossness, is certainly not the shallow, feeble, impressionable creature of the popular imagination.
Yet Goldsmith's experiences of Grub Street were
sufficiently embittering and debasing, and sufficiently
humiliating also to break any spirit. Griffiths bullied
him brutally, Mrs Griffiths starved him systematically,
while from both he had to submit to the more intolerable grievance of the amendment, mutilation,
and even, so to say, the adulteration of his work for
the Monthly Review; since not Griffiths only but
Mrs Griffiths insisted upon the interpolation of
purple passages of their own in his articles. Griffiths'
scorn for Goldsmith at this time may be inferred
from his contemptuous references to him in the
Review immediately after the poet's death, when his
name was on every other lip as the man "who had
left hardly any species of writing untouched, and
who had touched nothing that he did not adorn."
"Superintend  the Monthly Review!" exclaimed
Griffiths in derisive allusion to the report that Gol-dsmith had had something to do with the management
of that periodical. "The doctor," admits Griffiths
magnanimously, "had his merits as a man of letters;
but, alas! those who knew him must smile at the
idea of such a superintendent of a concern which
most obviously required some degree of prudence as
well as a competent acquaintance with the world. It
is, however, true that he had for a while a seat at our
board; and that, so far as his knowledge of books extended, he was not an unuseful assistant." If Griffiths
could speak of Goldsmith in this tone of contemptuous
patronage as  "a not unuseful assistant "-when
6




82   OLIVER GOLDSMITH


the poet's fame -was universally and reverentiallyacknowledged, his scorn of him as bookseller's hack
in these days of his Grub Street obscurity -must have
been biting and bitter indeed.
The inevitable rupture came and Goldsmith went
under once more. For months after the breach with
Griffiths he seems to have got little or nothing to do,
and we catch a glimpse of him in these dire straits
through the disillusioned eyes of his brother Charles.
Charles, having heard of his brother Oliver's engagement to the great Griffiths, of his contributions to the
famous Monthly Review and of his association with
the literary lions of the day, thought he had nothing
to do but to come to London to be put by his
prosperous brother in the way of making an immediate fortune. He came to London accordingly
to find Oliver in a garret in Salisbury Square. As
the boy looked round the room, bare of all furniture,
with wide eyes and gaping mouth, Oliver cried
cheerily: "All in good time, my boy, all in good
time! I shall be richer by and by. Addison, let me
tell you, wrote his poem of the Campaign in a
garret in the Haymarket, three stories high; and you
see, I have not come to that yet, for I have only got
to the second storey." Charles, however, probably
thinking that if it took his brother so many years to
reach a second-floor garret like this, his progress to
the ground floor would not be worth waiting for,
decided to quit London and to seek his fortune in
Jamaica.
To this visit of Charles' we owe an interesting letter
of Oliver's to his brother-in-law, Hodson. Charles
told his brother that Hodson had tried but failed to
get up a family subscription four years before to




GRUB STREET


83


relieve Oliver's pressing distresses. Though Hodson's
zeal in the cause could not have been fervent, since
he, the only rich connection of the. family, gave
nothing himself, and left Oliver's distressful letter
unanswered, yet the poet thus thanks him with a
gratitude so disproportionate as to seem almost
sarcastic for this vain effort to be vicariously
charitable
"DEAR SIR,-It may be four years since my last
letters went to Ireland, and to you in particular. I
received no answer; probably because you never
wrote to me. My brother, Charles, however, informs
me of the fatigue you were at in soliciting a subscription to assist me, not only among my friends and
relations, but acquaintances in general. Though my
pride might feel some repugnance at being thus
relieved, yet my gratitude can suffer no diminution.
How much am I obliged to you-to them-for such
generosity, or (why should not your virtues have their
proper name) for such charity to me at that juncture.
Sure I am born to ill-fortune to be so much a debtor
and unable to repay. But to say no more of this;
too many professions of gratitude are often considered as indirect petitions for future favours. Let
me only add that my not receiving that supply was
the cause of my present establishment in London."
This disproportionate gratitude sounds sarcastic,
but was fervently sincere. The man who makes
least of the favour he confers, makes most of the
favour he receives; while no one expects more than
he from whom nothing is to be expected. "The
selfish man," says Swift, "complains most of the
selfishness of others-just as the fat man in a crowd




84       OLIVER GOLDSMITH
complains most of the crush to which he contributes
most." On the other hand the little man who is used
to being shoved aside, is grateful when he is not
crushed in the crowd to death. Then, again, Goldsmith when he wrote this grateful letter was so
destitute and desolate that the thought of any kindness, however unsubstantial, touched him deeply.
The description he proceeds to give of his circumstances is roseate compared with the reality:" I suppose you desire to know my present situation. As there is nothing in it at which I should
blush, or whi"ch mankind could censure, I see no
reason for making it a secret. In short, by a very
little practice as a physician, and a very little reputation as a poet, I make a shift to live. Nothing is
more apt to introduce us to the gates of the Muses
than poverty, but it were well if it only left us at the
door. The mischief is, it sometimes chooses to give
us its company at the entertainment; and Want,
instead of being gentleman-usher, often turns master
of the ceremonies. Thus upon hearing I write, no
doubt you imagine I starve; and the name of an
author naturally reminds you of a garret. In this
particular I do not think proper to undeceive my
friends. But, whether I eat or starve, live in a first
floor, or four pairs of stairs high, I still remember
them with ardour; nay, my very country comes in
for a share of my affection."
This is not an absolutely encouraging account of
his circumstances, but compared with the reality it
was roseate. At this time Goldsmith made as little
by his practice as a physician as he made by his




GRUB STREET


85


reputation as a poet, which was far from being an
article negotiable for bread.
Goldsmith closes the letter with a contrast between
the real Ireland as he knew it and the Ireland of his
London day-dreams, a contrast worth noting by those
who- doubt that Lissoy could have been sublimated
by the heat of a poet's imagination into Auburn:
" Unaccountable fondness for the country, this
Maladie du Pays, as the French call it! Unaccountable that he should still have an affection for
a place who never received when in it above common
civility; who never brought anything out of it except
his brogue and his blunders. Surely my affection is
equally ridiculous with the Scotchman's, who refused
to be cured of the itch, because it made him unco
thoughtful of his wife and bonny Inverary. But to
be serious; let me ask myself what gives me a wish
to see Ireland again? The country is a fine one,
perhaps? No. The conversation there is generally
made up of a smutty toast or a bawdy song; the
vivacity supported by some humble cousin who had
just folly enough to earn his dinner. Then, perhaps,
there is more wit and learning among the Irish?
Oh, Lord, no! There has been more money spent
in encouragement of the Padareen Mare there one
season than given in rewards to learned men since
the time of Ussher. All their productions in learning
amount to perhaps a translation or a few tracts in
divinity; and all their productions in wit to just
nothing at all. Why the plague, then, so fond of
Ireland? Then all at once, because you, my dear
friend, and a few more, who are exceptions to the
general picture, have a residence there. This it is




86   OLIVER GOLDSMITH


that gives me all the pangs I feel in separation. I
confess I carry this spirit sometimes to the souring
the pleasures I at present possess. If I go to the
opera where Signora Columba pours out all the
mazes of melody, I sit and sigh for Lissoy fireside,
and 'Johnny Armstrong's Last Good-night,' from
Peggy Golden. If I climb Hampstead Hill, than
where Nature never exhibited a more magnificent
prospect, I confess it fine; but then I had rather be
placed on the little mount before Lissoy gate and there
take in to me the most pleasing horizon in Nature."
At the very close of the letter he expresses a hope
to be able to revisit Ireland in the following yeara " retreat from care that never would be his."
That is a brave and cheery letter considering the
circumstances under which it was written, for they
were so desperate that Goldsmith soon after had
to return to the Peckham Academy. He had now
resigned all hope of making a livelihood or a reputation by writing, and the only work-a translation
from the French-which he could dispose of to
Griffiths, he published pseudonymously. 'Here, then,
at the age of thirty, he stands, if he only knew it, at
the parting of the ways. He strained every exertion
of his own and every influence of his friends to be
put upon the wrong road; but fortunately at this
crisis, his medical incapacity was to do literature a
greater service than his literary capacity had done it
hitherto.
Dr Milner, the Principal of Peckham Academy,
secured for him the nomination of medical officer to a
factory on the coast of Coromandel; but after Goldsmith had made, with feverish energy and excitement,




GRUB STREET


87


every provision and preparation in his power to equip
him for the appointment, the nomination was cancelled. It was cancelled, beyond a doubt, because of
Goldsmith's medical incompetence, while that incompetence itself was no less indubitable. For, when he
presented himself shortly afterwards for examination
as a hospital mate-the last resource of the dregs of
the Faculty-the only candidates who were rejected
out of a crowd were Goldsmith and another.
If, however, literature owes much to the defeat of
this forlorn hope, it owes also something to the hope
itself; since the Enquiry into the State of Polite
Learning was written to provide funds for his
appointment warrant and for his outfit. "The Ugly
Duckling," in a desperate effort to escape death by
a short flight, discovered and disclosed its swan's
pinions; and Goldsmith's Enquiry, written only to
secure the means of escape from literature, London
and starvation, was a revelation both to himself and
to the world of unsuspected powers of sustained flight.
Eventus stultorum magister; and under that master's
guidance it is easy now to recognise in the letters
written to his Irish relations about the Enquiry, the
easy grace and genial charm of that work. The
gentlemen, however, to whom they were written,
were so far from discerning in these letters even-a
promise of success, that one and all left them
unanswered. But it must be admitted that Goldsmith's endless and hopeless failures might shake any
faith in any success for him; while the literary success
promised by his letters in those days seems to mean
" Toil, envy, want, the patron and the gaol."




CHAPTER VIII


"THERE'S FLESH ON HIS BONES YET"
MONG these unacknowledged letters written to
his relatives to get Irish subscriptions to the
Enquiry (in order to meet thereby the expenses of
his expected Coromandel appointment), was the
following to his brother-in-law, Hodson. It illustrates Southey's saying: "Letters often tell more of
the character of the man they are to be read by, than
of him who writes them."
"I suppose you have heard of my intention of
going to the East Indies. The place of my destination is one of the factories on the coast of Coromandel, and I go in quality of physician and surgeon,
for which the Company has signed my warrant, which
has already cost me ten pounds. I must also pay
fifty pounds for my passage, and ten pounds for my
sea stores; and the other incidental expenses of
my equipment will amount to ~60 or ~70 more.
The salary is but trifling, namely, XIoo per
annum; but the other advantages, if a person be
prudent, are considerable.  The practice of the
place, if I am rightly informed, generally amounts
to not less than one thousand pounds per annum, for
which the appointed physician has an exclusive
privilege. This, with the advantages resulting from
trade, and the high interest which money bears,
viz., ~20 per cent., are the inducements which
88 -



"FLESH ON HIS BONES YET" 89.
persuade me to undergo the fatigues of the sea, the
dangers of war, and the still greater dangers of the
climate; which induce me to leave a place where I
am every day gaining friends and esteem, and where
I might enjoy all the conveniences of life. I am
certainly wrong not to be contented with what I
already possess, trifling as it is; for should I ask
myself one serious question-' What is it I want?'what can I answer? My desires are as capricious as
the big-bellied woman's who longed for a piece of her
husband's nose. I have no certainty it is true; but
why cannot I do as some men of more merit, who
have lived on more precarious terms? Scarron used
jestingly to call himself the Marquis of Quenault,
which was the name of the bookseller who employed
him; and why may not I assert my -privilege and
quality on the same pretensions? Yet, upon deliberation, whatever airs I give myself on this side of the
water, my dignity, I fancy, would be evaporated
before I reached the other. I know you have in
Ireland a very indifferent idea ofthe man who writes
for bread; though Swift and Steele did so in the
earliest part of their lives. You imagine, I suppose,
that -every author by profession lives in a garret,
wears shabby clothes and converses with the meanest
company. Yet I do not believe there is one single
writer, who has abilities to translate a French novel,
that does not keep better company, wear finer clothes,
and live more genteelly than many who pride themselves for nothing else in Ireland. I confess it again,
my dear Dan, that nothing but the wildest ambition
could prevail on me to leave the enjoyment of the
refined conversation which I am sometimes permitted
to partake in, fof uncertain fortune and a paltry show.




90   OLIVER GOLDSMITH


You cannot conceive how I am sometimes divided.
To leave all that is dear to me gives me pain; but
when I consider I may possibly acquire a genteel
independence for life, when I think of that dignity
which philosophy claims to raise itself above contempt
and ridicule; when I think thus, I eagerly long to
embrace every opportunity of separating myself from
the vulgar as much in my circumstances, as I am
already in my sentiments."
This letter recalls the glowing accounts Chatterton
wrote home of the prospect before him when the only
prospect before him was suicide. Contrast it with
the letter written at the same time and with the same
object to his cousin, Jane Lawder, daughter of his
earliest and stanchest benefactor, Uncle Contarine,
a letter in which he speaks of having "starved in
those streets where Butler- and Otway starved before
him," and you will see that Goldsmith, in writing,
had to calculate the special consideration likely to
weigh with each correspondent. Such men as Mills
and Hodson, like Johnson's patron, offer help to a
drowning man only when he has struggled to bank.
Goldsmith's pride too, no less than his prudence,
made him, in his letters to such men, deride as preposterously Irish the idea that " every author by
profession lives in a garret and wears shabby
clothes"; at a time when he was himself absolutely
starving in such a garret and in clothes so shabby
that he could issue forth in them only at nightfall.
Indeed, when the Coromandel appointment fell
through and left him so destitute and desperate that
he tried for the squalid situation of hospital mate, he
had to pledge his brains to Griffiths to secure a decent




"FLESH ON HIS BONES YET" 91
suit of clothes in which to present himself for the examination. On the condition, of Goldsmith's writing
four reviews for the Monthly, Griffiths became security
to the tailor for this suit, which was either to be returned or paid for within a set time. But by that
time the clothes were- pledged to a pawnbroker and
the books (sent for review) to a friend!
Four days after the failure of his last hope-the
hospital mate appointment - his landlady burst
weeping into Goldsmith's garret to say that her
husband had been dragged off to gaol for debt. At
once and of course Goldsmith stripped himself of the
new suit, resumed his rags and hurried off to a pawnbroker's to raise as much upon the clothes as would
release his landlord from gaol. A week later, under
pressure of absolute starvation, he borrowed from a
friend, upon the security of the volumes he had just
reviewed for the Monthly, enough money to keep
him alive for a few days. These two unfortunate
transactions probably came to Mrs Griffiths' knowledge, for hard upon the deposit of the volumes, came
a letter from Griffiths demanding,at once either the
return of the clothes and of the books, or immediate
payment for both. Goldsmith wrote appealingly to
implore some days' grace, which Griffiths refused in
a rejoinder bristling with the most brutal insults and
with threats of prosecution.
Nothing in Goldsmith's pathetic history is more
piteous than his reply to this ruffianly letter. Mr
Forster, who possessed the original, says the very
writing is pathetic, it so betrays the wretched writer's
agitation. It is the 'letter of a broken man, broken
physically and mentally by despair. Since he had
lost his last hope of the appointment as hospital




92       OLIVER GOLDSMITH
mate, he had literally starved; for now even the
forlorn resource of the Peckham Academy was closed
to him through the death of Dr Milner. With mind
and body thus weakened, he broke down under the
lash of Griffiths' ruffianly insolence; for it must
always be remembered about Goldsmith that his
heart was as sensitive to suffer as to feel for suffering.
The pathos of this incident, and indeed of Goldsmith's
life, lies in this-that he could not resist the sight of
suffering, but must at all costs relieve it, but the cost
of relieving it was often yet more poignant suffering
to himself. Here is the letter:
"SIR,-I know of no misery but a gaol to which
my own imprudences and your letter seem to point.
I have seen it inevitable these three or four weeks,
and, by Heaven! request it as a favour, as a favour
that may prevent somewhat more fatal. I have been
some years struggling with a wretched being, with all
that contempt which indigence brings with it, 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. I tell you again and again I
am now neither able nor willing to pay you a farthing,
but I will be punctual to any appointment you or the
taylor shall make; thus far at least I do not act the
sharper, since, unable to pay my debts one way, I
would willingly give some security another. No, sir,
had I been a sharper, had I been possessed of less
good-nature and native generosity, I might now have
been in better circumstances. I am guilty, I own, of
meannesses which poverty unavoidably brings with it;
my reflections are filled with repentance for my




"FLESH ON HIS BONES YET" 93
imprudence, but not with remorse for being a villain.
That may be a character you unjustly charge me
with. Your books I can assure you are neither
pawned nor sold, but in the custody of a friend from
whom my necessities obliged me to borrow some
money; whatever becomes of my person, you shall
have them in a month. It is very possible both the
reports you have heard and your own suggestions
may have brought you false information with respect
to my character; it is very possible that the man
whom you now regard with detestation may inwardly
burn with grateful resentment; it is very possible
that upon a second perusal of the letter I sent you,
you may see the workings of a mind strongly agitated
with gratitude and jealousy. If such circumstances
should appear, at least spare invective till my book
with Mr Dodsley shall be published, and then
perhaps you may see the bright side of a mind, when
my professions shall not seem the dictates of necessity
but of choice. You seem to think Dr Milner knew
me not. Perhaps so; but he was a man I shall ever
honour. But I have friendship only with the dead!
I ask pardon for taking up so much time. Nor shall
I add to it by any other professions than that I am,
sir, your humble servant,  OLIVER GOLDSMITH.
" P.S.-I shall expect impatiently the result of your
resolutions."
The result was an offer of ~20 for a life of
Voltaire to be prefixed to a translation of The
]enriade, from which was to be deducted the price
of the clothes. Griffiths, like that contemporary
bookseller, who said of a hack-writer, not yet quite
worn out in his service, "There's flesh on his bones




94       OLIVER GOLDSMITH
yet," felt that Goldsmith would be more serviceable
to him out of than in a gaol.
Literally there was little flesh on Goldsmith's
bones in these days when he was often absolutely
starving; and there is no doubt at all that the privations of this Grub Street apprenticeship shortened
his life. In a letter written to his brother Henry,
about this time, he says:
"Though I never had a day's sickness since
I saw you, yet I am not that strong and active
man you once knew me. You scarcely can conceive how much eight years of disappointment,
anguish and study have worn me down.     If I
remember right, you are seven or eight years older
than me, yet I dare venture to say that, if a stranger
saw us both, he would pay me the honours of
seniority. Imagine to yourself a pale, melancholy
visage, with two great wrinkles between the eyebrows, with an eye disgustingly severe and a big
wig; and you may have a perfect picture of my
present appearance. On the other hand, I conceive
you as perfectly sleek and healthy, passing many a
happy day among your own children or those who
knew you as a child. Since I knew what it was to
be a man, this is a pleasure I have not known. I
have passed my days among a parcel of cool designing beings, and I have contracted all their suspicious
manner in my behaviour. I should actually be as
unfit for the society of my friends at home as I detest
that which I am obliged to partake of here. I can
now neither partake of the pleasure of 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



"FLESH ON HIS BONES YET" 95
nature itself. In short I have thought myself into
a settled melancholy and an utter disgust of all that
life brings with it."
Of this suspicion, moroseness and settled souring
of the soul what trace is there in his writings? It
was in such circumstances and in such brutalising
company that Goldsmith wrote the humanest novel
in all literature. I remember once saying to Sir
Leslie Stephen, Thackeray's son-in-law, that Vanity
Fair left rather a bitter taste in my mouth. "Ah,"
he said, "you little know what Thackeray went
through when he wrote that novel." No doubt when
Thackeray wrote that novel he was passing through
deep and bitter waters; but they were sweet and
they were shallow compared with the waters
Goldsmith sank in when he wrote a novel that seems
woven out of threads spun from the Sermon on the
Mount. See how it shines out against these clouds
of gloom and storm with the sweet benignant light of
the rainbow! Or, to borrow an apter image from
The Deserted  Village, "Sweet as the primrose
peeps beneath the thorn."   Boswell speaks of
Goldsmith's envy and Johnson himself speaks of
Goldsmith's malice. Discussing during the poet's
life the subject of his own biography, Johnson said:
"Goldsmith, sir, would do it best, but the malice
of the dog against me would come out." Goldsmith's
envy and malice! And these were men who knew him
personally and intimately in all his moods and in all
his moments I No! the motto of Goldsmith's works
might be the motto of that Venetian sun-dial which so
charmed Hazlitt:-" Horas non numero nisi serenas."
If the hardships and privations of these years leave




96   OLIVER GOLDSMITH


no trace of bitterness in his works, they left a deep
trace on his constitution and shortened his life.
They were in the balance and turned the balance on
that day when in the very prime of life he succumbed
to a mild attack of fever.  At the same time, it
would be unfair to forget that, as there are lean kine
whom all the food in the world would not fatten, so
there are improvident folk whom all the wealth in
the world would not enrich. In that letter to his
brother from which I have just quoted, Goldsmith
says:
"Teach, then, my dear sir, to your son thrift
and economy.   Let his poor wandering uncle's
example be placed before his eyes. I had learned
from books to be disinterested and generous before I
was taught from experience the necessity of being
prudent. I had contracted the habits and notions
of a philosopher, while I was exposing myself to
the insidious approaches of cunning; and often by
being, even with my narrow finances charitable in
excess, I forgot the rules of justice, and placed myself
in the very situation of the wretch who thanked me
for my bounty."
In truth, Goldsmith was afflicted with a congenital
and incurable marasmus of poverty which no riches
could arrest. When he could get credit he tried
Falstaff's remedy, to find, as Jack found, the disease
incurable.  "I can get no remedy against this
consumption of the purse; borrowing only lingers
and lingers it out;- but the disease is incurable."
Hence it is unfair to charge to anyone but himself the
difficulties of the days of his prosperity, since what




"FLESH ON HIS BONES YET" 97
Johnson said of him in these days is incontestable:"He had raised money and squandered it by every
artifice of acquisition and folly of expense "; but the
absolute privations of his Grub Street days were due
to the sweating of such Egyptian slave-drivers as
this Griffiths.  If these privations were in themselves a disgrace, as Bishop Percy characteristically suggests in the following snobbish passage,
the disgrace was not Goldsmith's. By the way,
it is amusing to note the magnanimity with which
the bishop condones the guilt of Goldsmith's
squalid circumstances in these days in consideration of his subsequent prosperity:" A friend of his " —i.e., the bishop himself-" paying
him a visit at the beginning of March 1759, found him
in lodgings there so poor and uncomfortable that he
should not think it proper to mention' the circumstance if he did not consider it as the highest
proof of the splendour of Dr Goldsmith's genius and
talents that, by the bare exertion of their powers,
under every disadvantage of person and fortune, he
could gradually emerge from such obscurity to the
enjoyment of all the comforts and even luxuries of
life and admission into the best society of London.
The doctor was writing his Enquiry, etc., in a
wretched dirty room in which there was but one chair,
and when he from civility offered it to his visitant,
himself was obliged to sit in the window. While they
were conversing, some one gently rapped at the door,
and, being desired to come in, a poor ragged little
girl of very decent behaviour entered, who, dropping
a curtsey, said: 'My mamma sends her compliments,
and begs the favour of you to lend her a chamber-potfull of coals."'
7




98       OLIVER GOLDSMITH
The child's coal-measure and the bishop's measure
of "the splendour of Dr Goldsmith's genius" seem
equally vulgar. If "the highest proof of genius" is
the attainment to comfort, luxury and the best society,
one need waste no pity on those impostors whom
FranSois Maynard commiserates:"Malherbe, en cet age brutal
Pdgase est un cheval qui porte
Les grands hommes a l'h6pital."
But the very work of Goldsmith's to which the
bishop here refers, The Enquiry, lays the disgrace
of this indigence at the right door:"The poet's poverty is a standing topic of contempt.
His writing for bread is an unpardonable offence.
Perhaps of all mankind an author in these times is
used most hardly. We keep him poor and yet revile
his poverty.  Like angry parents who correct their
children till they cry, and then correct them for
crying, we reproach him for living by his wit, and
yet allow him no other means to live. His taking
refuge in garrets and cellars has of late been violently
objected to him, and that by men who, I dare hope,
are more apt to pity than insult his distress. Is
poverty the writer's fault? No doubt he knows how
to prefer a bottle of champagne to the nectar of the
neighbouring ale-house, or a venison-pasty to a plate
of potatoes. Want of delicacy is not in him, but in
us, who deny him the opportunity of making an
elegant choice."
Towards the close of this chapter he describes
with a pen dipped in his heart's blood his own exquisite suffering and sensitiveness to suffering, and
foresees the early grave to which they will bring
him:



"FLESH ON HIS BONES YET" 99
' If the author be, therefore, still so necessary
among us, let us treat him with proper consideration
as a child of the public, not a rent-charge on the
community. And indeed a child of the public he is
in all respects; for, while so well able to direct
others, how incapable is he frequently found of guiding himself! His simplicity exposes him to all the
insidious approaches of cunning; his sensibility to
the slightest invasions of contempt. Though possessed of fortitude to stand unmoved the expected
bursts of an earthquake, yet of feeling so exquisitely
poignant as to agonise under the slightest disappointment. Broken rest, tasteless meals, and causeless
anxiety shorten his life or make it unfit for active
employment; prolonged vigils and intense application still farther contract his span, and make his
time glide insensibly away. Let us not, then, aggravate these natural inconveniences by neglect; we have
had sufficient instances of this kind already. Sale
and Moore will suffice for one age at least. But they
are dead and their sorrows are over. The neglected
author of the Persian Eclogues, which, however inaccurate, excel any in our language, is still alive.
Happy if insensible of our neglect, not raging at our
ingratitude.' It is enough that the age has already
produced instances of men pressing foremost in the
lists of fame, and worthy of better times; schooled
by continued adversity into hatred of their kind, flying from thought to drunkenness, yielding to the
united pressure of labour, penury and sorrow, sinking
unheeded, without one friend to drop a tear on their
unattended obsequies and indebted to charity for a
grave."
I The allusion is to Collins, then insane,




i00oo    OLIVER GOLDSMITH
What is not true of Oliver Goldsmith in this
description only deepens our pity for what is but too
true. Was ever man so little " schooled by continued
adversity into hatred of his kind "? What heart that
suffered so and felt suffering so, ever remained so unembittered? Nothing that the craft and cruelty of
man could do made him crafty or cruel, or less of a
child in his simplicity, gentleness and kindliness than
he was in his childhood. More singular even than
his natural sunny sweetness of nature is its incorruptibility. It could no more be soiled than It could
be soured through an environment that was as polluting as it was embittering. It passes through these
clouds and pollutions of all kinds, pure, bright and
warm as it had entered them, " Ut lux; etsi per immundos transeat, non inquinatur "-to borrow a noble
image from St Augustine.




CHAPTER IX


OUT OF EGYPT
AW    ITH the appearance of An Enquiry into the
Present State of Polite Learning in Europe,
Goldsmith at the age of thirty-one emerged at last
from Grub Street. But the book in winning him a
name won him also many enemies, whose malice has
affected his name to this day. Trace back the prejudice which nicknamed Goldsmith " Poor Poll" and
" Inspired Idiot" to its source, and you will find' it in
passages reflecting on Garrick's profession and on
Walpole's father in the Enquiry. Horace Walpole
-never forgave Goldsmith the following reflection in
that work upon his father:-" But this link between
patronage and learning now seems entirely broken.
Since the days of a certain Prime Minister of inglorious memory, the learned have been kept pretty much
at a distance. A jockey or a laced player supplies
the place of a scholar, poet, or man of letters."
Garrick with more reason and with more bitterness
resented the chapter " Of the Stage," as being levelled
point-blank at himself. It is not likely that so vain
a man as Garrick would forget or forgive such a passage
as this:-" I have no particular spleen against the fellow
who sweeps the stage with the besom, or the hero who
brushes it with his train. It were a matter of indifference to me whether our heroines are chaste or our
candle-snuffers burn their fingers, did not such make
a great part of public care and polite conversation.
IOI




102


OLIVER GOLDSMITH


Our actors assume all that state off the stage which
they do on it; and to use an expression borrowed
from the green-room, everyone is uAp in his part. I
am sorry to say It, they seem to forget their real
characters."
We are not left merely to conjecture Garrick's
resentment of this chapter in the Enquiry as a
purely personal attack upon himself. When Goldsmith applied to him as a member of the Society of
Arts to support by his vote and influence the poet's
application for the Secretaryship, Garrick taxed him
with the attack made personally upon himself in the
Enquiry. Goldsmith manfully replied that he wrote
what he believed to be the truth in the public
interest without any intention of a personal application; and, as he declined to apologise, he lost whatever chance he had of the appointment. - Vanity,
implying as it does some lack of self-respect, is never
magnanimous, and Garrick was so vain as to be even
spiteful; and though, in deference to his sensitiveness,
all the objectionable passages were omitted in subsequent editions of the Enquiry, Garrick still remembered
them against their author when the opportunity of
revenge presented itself. The nickname "Poor Poll"
was one of his many reprisals.
But the Enquiry itself was a rash challenge to a
host of a sensitive author's worst enemies, the critics.
Bentley says finely: " It is a maxim with me that no
man was ever written out of reputation but by himself," which of course is true of permanent reputation;
but critics can always retard if they cannot arrest
a writer's recognition. Now Goldsmith at the outset
of his harassed career threw down the gauntlet to the
critics in the Enquiry, whose very mottoes, Greek and




OUT OF EGYPT


I63


Latin, suggested that critics were to authors as sophists
to -philosophers, and as wreckers to ship-builders.
This was a rash and even reckless stand to take in
days when critics were all that Swift represented
them in his Tale of a Tub, and by a man who, unlike
Swift, was exquisitely sensitive to the brazen bray of
these Scythian asses, to the venomous vomit of these
Indian serpents. And Goldsmith, not satisfied with
his general contention "that criticism is the destroyer
of polite learning, and that an increase of criticism
has always portended its decay"'; comes down to
particulars and has the courage even to adduce in
illustration the two leading Reviews, Griffiths' and
Smollett's- The Monthly and The Critical.
"We have two leading Reviews in London, with
critical newspapers and magazines without number.
The compilers of these resemble the commoners of
Rome-they are all for levelling property not by
increasing their own, but by diminishing that of
others. The man who has any good-nature in his
disposition must, however, be somewhat displeased
to see distinguished reputations often the sport of
ignorance, to see by one false pleasantry the future
peace of a worthy man's life disturbed, and this only
because he has unsuccessfully attempted to instruct
or amuse us. Though ill-nature is far from being
wit, yet it is generally laughed at as such. The critic
enjoys the triumph and ascribes to his parts what is
only due to his effrontery. I fire with indignation
when I see persons wholly destitute of education and
genius indent to the press and thus turn book-makers,
adding to the sin of criticism the sin of ignorance
also; Whose trade is a bad one and who are bad
workmen in the trade,..    Were these Monthly




1o4


OLIVER GOLDSMITH


Reviews and Magazines frothy, pert or absurd, they
might find some pardon; but to be dull and dronish
is an encroachment on the prerogative of a folio."
To this attack Smollett in the Critical only and
mildly objected because it classed his Review with
Griffiths' -" Confounding a work undertaken from
public spirit with one supported for the sordid purposes of a bookseller." But Griffiths in the Monthly
let loose upon his former hack that noisome ferret,
Kenrick: —
"Notwithstanding our author talks so familiarly of
us-the great-and affects to be thought in the rank
of Patrons, we cannot help thinking that in more
places than one he has betrayed in himself the man
he so severely condemns for drawing a quill to take
a purse. We are even so firmly convinced of this
that we dare put the question home to his conscience,
whether he never experienced the unhappy situation
he so feelingly describes in that of a literary Understrapper? His remarking him as coming down from
his garret to rummage the bookseller's shop for
materials to work upon, and the knowledge he displays of his minutest labours give great reason to
suspect he may himself have had concerns in the bad
trade of book-making. 'Fronti nulla fides.' We have
heard of many a writer who, patronised only by his
bookseller, has nevertheless affected the Gentleman
in print, and talked full as cavalierly as our author
himself. We have even known one hardy enough
publicly to stigmatise men of the first rank in literature for their immoralities, while conscious himself of
labouring under the infamy of having by the vilest
and meanest actions forfeited all pretensions to
honour and honesty. If such men as these, boasting




OUT OF EGYPT


105


a liberal education and pretending to genius, practise
at the same time those arts which bring the Sharper
to the cart's-tail or the pillory, need our author
wonder that 'Learning partakes the contempt of its
professors'?"
Kenrick emphasises this venomous reference to
the clothes-pawning transaction by one of those
disavowals of a personal application designed to
insure its being personally applied. Griffiths' disavowal of the virulent attack was less artistic. Having
not only hired his bravo but also charged the pistol
with this special bullet, he considered it an adequate
defence to plead that he had not himself fired the
shot. It needed a stronger man than Goldsmith is
popularly supposed to have been-depending as he
did for his bitter bread upon such employers-to
expose thus both them and their hacks-to kick over
the stone which hid such crawling creatures and let
the light in on them and on the dung which bred them.
But Goldsmith had the higher courage to attack
higher game in the Enquiry; for he was the first
to denounce the Gargantuan Johnsonese then in
universal vogue:"It were to be wished, therefore, that we no longer
found pleasure with the inflated style that has for
some years been looked upon as fine writing, and
which every young writer is now obliged to adopt
if he chooses to be read. We should now dispense
with loaded epithet and dressing up trifles with
dignity. For, to use an obvious instance, it is not
those who make the greatest noise with their wares
in the streets that have most to sell. Let us, instead
of writing finely, try to write naturally; not hunt
after lofty expressions to deliver mean ideas, nor




io6


OLIVER GOLDSMITH


be for ever gaping when we only mean to deliver
a whisper."
Yet Boswell suggests that Goldsmith formed his
style on that of The Rambler!
But, to say the truth, the sublimest instance of
Goldsmith's courage was the Enquiry itself. He
was about as competently equipped for traversing
all the ground An Enquiry into the Present State
of Polite Learning in Europe purported to cover,
as he had been for traversing Europe itself with no
other resources than his flute, his voice and his skill
in disputation. At whom if not at himself was he
smiling when he describes the hack-critic "coming
down at stated intervals to rummage the bookseller's
counter for materials to work upon." In truth, like
the fairy in- the child's tale, who wove a lovely robe
out of picked up odds and ends of silk thread, he
made a singularly fine book out of casual, scanty
and fragmentary materials. If its learning was not
profound, its wisdom was; and yet, though wise
enough to be entitled to the folio's prerogative of
dullness, it exhibited to perfection an art distinctively
Goldsmith's of"Wearing his wisdom lightly; like the fruit
Which in our winter woodland, looks a flower."
As, however, popularly wisdom is as much associated
with ponderousness as judicial sagacity with a judge's
voluminous wig, Goldsmith's airy lightness of style
suggests to " the general " superficiality. By an odd
paradox the natural always commends itself least to
the uncultured and most to the cultured. "He the
best player I " cried Partridge in Tom Jones of
Garrick in Hamlet. "He the best player! Why I




OUT OF EGYPT


I0o7


could act as well myself. I am sure if I had seen
a ghost, I should have looked in the very same
manner, and done just as he did. The King for
my money! He speaks all his words distinctly and
half as loud again as the other." Johnsonese and all
the other styles which speak " half as loud again " as
nature charm " naturals," using that word in its original
sense of uncultivatable intellects. Indeed, Johnson
himself in one of his Ramblers explains at once
his adoption of this style and the reason of its
popularity with " the general." " It has been observed,"
he says in this Rambler, "by Boileau that 'a mean
or common thought, expressed in pompous diction,
generally pleases more than a new or noble sentiment
delivered in low or vulgar language; because the
number is greater of those whom custom has enabled
to judge of words, than of those whom study has
qualified to examine things.'  And Johnson proceeds
to illustrate from Shakespeare the vulgarisation of
" a new or noble sentiment through its being delivered
in low language," taking as his text "a speech of
Macbeth's," which, by the way, Macbeth never uttered!
This probably helps to explain the failure of Goldsmith's next venture, The Bee. The Bee was a
Saturday threepenny journal started by a Mr Wilkie
shortly after the appearance of the Enquiry had
given Goldsmith literary standing.  It had but a
short life, probably, as I say, because it was written
in the reverse of that "inflated style that has for
some years been looked upon as fine writing, and
which every young writer is now obliged to adopt,
if he chooses to be read." Johnson's style was by
this thoroughly established in the public favour, for
use has much to do with taste. The eye which has




1o8


OLIVER GOLDSMITH


long been used to the crinoline gets to think, not it,
but the lack of it, a deformity; and the crinoline
style of Johnson had similarly distorted the taste
of that generation. Indeed, Goldsmith in the introduction to The Bee prepares himself and his
readers for the failure of the periodical in his parable
(to which I have already alluded) of the man who
in a country where every inhabitant had each a large
excrescence depending from the chin, was universally
laughed at for the lack of this adornment. "Good
folks," said he at last, "I perceive that I am the
unfortunate cause of all this good-humour. It is
true I may have faults in abundance; but I shall
never be induced to reckon my want of a swelled
face among the number."
If, however, Goldsmith could not away with
Johnsonese; for Johnson himself, and even for The
Rambler he had a due and deep admiration. In
another number of The Bee he pays "the Great
Cham " a compliment, which probably helped Goldsmith to the fastest of all his London friendships,
excepting that with Sir Joshua Reynolds. In his
description in this number of The Bee of the
passengers in his Coach of Fame, Johnson figures
thus:" This was a very grave personage, whom at some
distance I took for one of the most reserved and even
disagreeable figures I had ever seen. But, as he
approached, his appearance improved, and, when I
could distinguish him thoroughly, I perceived that,
in spite of the severity of his brow, he had one of
the most good-natured countenances that could be
imagined. Upon coming to open the stage door,
he lifted a parcel of folios into the seat before him,




OUT OF EGYPT


I09


but our inquisitorial Coachman at once shoved them
out again. 'What! Not take in my Dictionary?'
exclaimed the other in a rage. 'Be patient, sir,'
replied the Coachman, 'I have drove a coach, man
and boy, these two thousand years; but I do not
remember to have carried above one dictionary during
the whole time. That little book which I perceive
peeping from one of your pockets, may I presume
to ask what it contains?' 'A  mere trifle,' replied
the author, ' it is called The Rambler.'  ' The
Rambler!' says the   Coachman.   ' I beg, Sir,
you'll take your place; I have heard our ladies in
the Court of Apollo frequently mention it with
rapture; and Clio, who happens to be a little grave,
has been heard to prefer it to The Spectator;
though others have observed that the reflections by
being refined, sometimes become minute."'
This compliment probably helped to secure
Goldsmith the favourable introduction to Johnson
that began their intimacy-an intimacy of which we
have chiefly, I might almost say solely, Boswell's
record. As the main object of my little book is to
counteract the prejudiced impression of Goldsmith
left on the mind of the readers of Boswell's Johnson,
I hope I may be pardoned if I reiterate, even perhaps
ad nauseam my contention that this impression was
prejudiced. Boswell's jealousy of Goldsmith was
such that he not only noted eagerly everything
Johnson said to the poet's disadvantage; but again
and again provoked his idol into hasty disparagement
of his rival in that idol's good graces. Boswell's
fascinating biography is, perhaps, as honest a book
as ever was written; but the very indisputableness
of its honesty is unfortunate for Goldsmith. Boswell




I 10


OLIVER GOLDSMITH


himself cuts such a figure again and again in the book
that you are inclined to say of him what M. RoyardCollard said-of course of a friend'-' He is not an
ass, he is THE ass!" Thus you get an a fortiori
conviction of the candour of the rest of his portraiture.
But, in the first place, Boswell was what the Arabs
call " a compound imbecile "-i e., a man who is too
foolish to know himself a fool. He wrote himself
down an ass in the complacent confidence that he
was giving you the opposite impression. In the
second place, the most candid and careful observer
sees only what he is on the look-out for, and Boswell
was ever on the look-out for what he considered
the absurdities of his rival, Goldsmith. In the, third
place, what he considered Goldsmith's absurdities
were often passing jests taken seriously-drops which
in the sun look a rainbow, but fallen on earth only
ditch-water.
This, of course, would not matter so much if Boswell
gave you only his own impression of Goldsmith, but
he succeeds also in suggesting to you that this
contemptuous impression was shared by Johnson.
No one can read Boswell without getting it gradually
ground into his mind that Goldsmith was a very
small man, not in Boswell's opinion only, or only in
the opinion of Garrick or of Horace Walpole or of
the members of the Club, but also in the judgment
of Johnson himself. But, if you want Johnson's real
judgment of Goldsmith, you must not infer it from
his hasty outbursts against the poet, often designedly
provoked by Boswell, but from more deliberate
verdicts.  I shall say nothing  of the famous
Westminster Abbey epitaph composed by Johnson,
since epitaphs are the single exception to the rule




OUT OF EGYPT                 III
Les absents ont toujours tort," only perhaps because
they are a reaction from it-an attempt to make up
for injustice done a friend in life by doing him more
than justice after death. As, in Goldsmith's case,
there was a large indemnity of this kind due from
"The Club," the epitaph might well be suspected of
extravagance. But Johnson in a letter to Bennet
Langton, after an incidental and unemotional
reference to Goldsmith's recent death and a severe
censure of his extravagance, adds: "Let not his
frailties be remembered: He was a very great man."




CHAPTER X


"THE CHINESE LETTERS"
EVEN already Goldsmith's
" Name was growing great
In mouths of wisest censure."
Immediately upon the death of The Bee, after
a two months' hopeless struggle with catchpenny
rivals, Goldsmith was waited upon by both Smollett,
the novelist, and Newbery, the bookseller, to ask
the help of his pen for their respective literary
ventures.  Goldsmith  agreed  to  support both
ventures-Smollett's British Magazine, or Monthly
Repository for Gentlemen and Ladies (a title
suggestive of an old-clothes shop or a Pantechnicon) and Newbery's daily newspaper, The
Public Ledger.
Some of the essays he contributed to The
Monthly Repository for Gentlemen and Ladies are
delightfully humorous; yet it was not until they
had been pirated and reprinted sixteen times and
claimed by other writers, that Goldsmith at last
republished them under his own name. He ventures
to justify their issue for his own advantage by the
parallel case "of that fat man whom I have somewhere read of in a shipwreck, who, when the sailors,
pressed by famine, were taking slices off him to
satisfy their hunger, insisted, with great justice, on
having the first cut for himself."
112




"THE CHINESE LETTERS" I 13
He held these essays cheap because they cost him
little. Most of them were thrown off hurriedly under
the hustling pressure of the printer's devil. Putting
aside altogether-and it is a good deal to put asideGoldsmith's inveterate procrastination, which brought
him last to every party and kept him late with every
publisher-leaving this out of calculation, and taking
only into account the immense and even amazing
amount of pot-boiling work he did in these years,
you are left in no doubt that much of it must have
been extemporised. Goldsmith detested the drudgery
of the pen and was ingenious in devising excuses for
evading it as long as possible. Hence publishers
had at times to treat him as you must always treat
(whenever you have the luck to meet with it) the
Irish fairy called a Leprechaun. As long as you
hold him fast and under your eye, he will spin gold
for you; but, if you are seduced for a moment to
take your hand and eye off him-and his ingenuity in
inventing pretexts to divert you is diabolical-then
you lose your chance of gold.
If there was any truth in the " muddy river " theory
of Goldsmith's mind, essays written in such peremptory and perfunctory haste would be obscure and
confused.  Are they?  They are clear with the
lucidity of a pen lightly held and lightly running.
"Is there a man now, sir," cried Johnson, in answer
to a stupid sneer of Ellis', "is there a man now, sir,
who can pen an essay with such ease and elegance
as Goldsmith?" With the swiftness, ease and brightness, it will be said of a shallow stream"For shallow streams run dimpling all the way."
Is that so? Take The Chinese Letters, as they
8




II4


OLIVER GOLDSMITH


were then called, pot-boiling essays contributed twice
a week to Newbery's Public Ledger, representing
but a small part of Goldsmith's work, and that a part
which was usually postponed to the last moment.
Might not their motto be the Horatian, "Scribendi
recte sapere esi et pricipium et fons?"  They are
profoundly and even prophetically wise essays. In
them he foresaw the French Revolution: he foresaw
the successful secession of the American Colonies: he
foresaw the portentous rise of Russia, and all that
Russia would mean to the West and to the world.
At home he foresaw what some of our profound
politicians assure us is going on to-day under our
eyes in England-the declension of our colonial and
continental trade unaccompanied and uncompensated
by any declension in our extravagance. Perhaps the
letter on this subject is worth quoting for its opportuneness, and therefore for its effectiveness as a
popular illustration of the wisdom of these casual
essays. In the letter, " Lao," is England, and " Tartary" her colonies:"Between these colonies and the mother-country
a very advantageous traffic was at first carried on.
The republic sent their colonies large quantities of
the manufactures of the country, and they, in turn,
provided the republic with an equivalent in ivory
and ginseng. By this means the inhabitants became immensely rich, and this produced an equal
degree of voluptuousness; for men who have much
money will ever find some fantastical means of
enjoyment. How shall I mark the steps by which
they declined? Every colony in process of time
spreads over the whole country where it was first
planted. As it grows more populous, it becomes




"THE CHINESE LETTERS" 1I5
more polite; and those manufactures, for which it
was in the beginning obliged to others, it learns to
dress up for itself.  Such was the case with the
colonies of Lao.  They, in less than a century,
became a powerful and polite people; and the more
polite they grew, the less advantageous was the
commerce which still subsisted between them and
others.  By this means the mother-country, being
abridged in its commerce, grew poorer, but not less
luxurious.  Their former wealth had introduced
luxury; and wherever luxury once fixes, no art can
either lessen or remove it. Their commerce with
their neighbours was totally destroyed, and that with
their colonies was every day naturally and necessarily
declining. They still, however, preserved the insolence of wealth, without a power to support it, and
persevered in being luxurious, while contemptible
from poverty. In short, the State resembled one of
those bodies bloated with disease, whose bulk is only
a symptom of wretchedness. Their former opulence
only rendered them more impotent, as those individuals who are reduced from riches to poverty
are, of all men, the most unfortunate and helpless.
They had imagined because their colonies tended to
make them rich upon the first acquisition, they would
still continue to do so. They now found, however,
that on themselves alone they should have depended
for support; that colonies ever afforded but temporary
affluence, and when cultivated and polite are no
longer useful. From such a concurrence of circumstances they soon became contemptible. The Emperor, Honti, invaded them with a powerful army.
Historians do not say whether their colonies were
too remote to lend assistance, or else were desirous




OLIVER GOLDSMITH


of shaking off their dependence, but certain it is, they
scarcely made any resistance; their walls were now
found a weak defence, and they at length were
obliged to acknowledge subjection to the Empire of
China. Happy, very happy, might they have been
had they known when to bound their riches and their
glory; had they known that extending empire is
often diminishing power; that countries are -ever
strongest which are internally powerful; that colonies,
by draining away the brave and enterprising, leave
the country in the hands of the timid and avaricious;
that walls give little protection, unless manned with
resolution; that too much commerce may injure a
nation as well as too little, and that there is a wide
difference between a conquering and a flourishing
empire."
Again-, there was hardly an abuse in Church, State
or Society, however sacred in those days, that Goldsmith did not -deride or denounce in his essays;
while he alone cried aloud against the vindictive
ferocity of the laws. It was a day in which that
worthy magistrate, Sir John Hawkins, lamented that
there were absolutely still fourteen cases where it
was possible to cheat the gallows, and in which it
needed all a magistrate's expert knowledge and all
the worthy knight's minute and malevolentingenuity
to discover fourteen such cases. The following case,
which occurred a whole generation nearer our own
humane time than Goldsmith's day, was certainly
not one of them. A young woman with a baby at
her breast, whose husband and sole support had been
torn from her by a press-gang, reduced thus at last
to absolute starvation, went into a shop in Ludgate
Hill, took up' a piece of calico from the counter, was




"THE CHINESE LETTERS" I 7
seen, and seeing that she was seen, put it down again.
For this offence she was tried, found guilty, was
sentenced and was hanged! Such was the law in
Goldsmith's day, and for an entire generation after
his day. He alone cried out against it, not on the
mere ground of humanity, which would most of all
appeal to him, but on the high statesmanlike ground
that life was incommensurably more valuable than
property, if only because it was irreplaceable. "If,
therefore, in order to secure the effects of one man, I
should make a law which takes away the life of
another, in such a case to attain a smaller good I
am guilty of a greater evil; to secure another in the
possession of a bauble, I render a real and valuable
possession precarious."
Another reform to which we ourselves are only just
awaking Goldsmith pleads for through a telling parable:" It was a fine saying of the Nangfu, the emperor,
who, being told that his enemies had raised an insurrection in one of the distant provinces, 'Come, then,
my friends,' said he, 'follow me and I promise you
that we shall quickly destroy them.' He marched
forward and the rebels submitted upon his approach.
All now thought that he would take the most signal
revenge, but were surprised to see the captives treated
with mildness and humanity. ' How,' cried his first
minister, 'is this the manner in which you fulfil your
promise? Your royal word was given that your
enemies should be destroyed, and, behold! you have
pardoned all and even caressed some! ' ' I promised,'
replied the emperor with a generous air, 'to destroy
my enemies. I have fulfilled my word, for see, they
are enemies no longer. I have made friends of them.'




I 8


OLIVER GOLDSMITH


" This, could it always succeed, were the true method
of destroying the enemies of the state. Well it were
if rewards and mercy alone could regulate the commonwealth; but since punishments are sometimes necessary, let them at least be rendered terrible by being
executed but seldom; and let Justice lift her sword
rather to terrify than revenge."
In these Chinese Letters, which were Goldsmith's
chief contributions to the Public Ledger, making the
success of that journal, there is, I venture to say, profounder criticism, not of the mere fashions, foibles
and follies of English society only, but of Church,
of State, of the character of the people, of the laws
of the country and of the policy of the empire, than
can be found in the essays of Steele, Addison or
Johnson. These Chinese Letters alone ought to dispose of the popular notion that Goldsmith's single
faculty was the skill of a shop-window dresser, whose
natural taste and deft manipulation make a specious
display of a stock at once scanty and ill-assorted.
They should also, I think, dispose of the notion that
Goldsmith's thoughts were born aborted and needed
as much nursing as an infant kangaroo to be made
presentable. Since they were written, and had to be
written, as cursory current literature, Goldsmith had
not the time either to mature his thoughts or to
order them-to clear either them or their expression.
If he did not need the time in writing so hurriedly
for the press, neither did he need it in ordering or
expressing his thoughts in congenial company. Only
in disconcerting company could he have seemed an
addle-pated "Poor Poll." I remember with what
unconscious humour a formal and freezing Yorkshireman complained once to me of the dulness of an Irish




"THE CHINESE LETTERS" I i
clergyman, who had the just reputation of being the
most genial and jovial of men: (' I sat with him for
two hours," said my dreary Yorkshire friend, " and he
didn't seem cheerful the whole timeI"  It never did,
for it never could, occur to him, that he himself would
freeze the genial current of any soul. " I can only
say he never shone when I was present," as the extinguisher said of the candle. The poor player in
one of the Chinese Letters who had had a triumphal
progress from county town to county town was at
last frozen into failure by "the lady who had been
nine months in London." All the county folk looked
at her, instead of at him, while she sat in her box,
chill and chilling as an iceberg; and the discouragement so discomposed the poor player that he became
at last the failure her face from the first pronounced him.
In the fourth of these Letters Goldsmith writes:
"The gayest conversation of the English have something too wise for innocent relaxation; though in
company you are seldom disgusted with the absurdity
of a fool, you are seldom lifted into rapture by those
strokes of vivacity which give instant though not
permanent pleasure." And in an essay on Clubs he
describes the discomfiture of a frivolous attempt of
his own to break through such solid ice.




CHAPTER XI


TOIL AND TEARS
THE improvement in his circumstances and in
his prospects justified Goldsmith in flitting
from his garret in Green Arbour Court into the more
comfortable rooms in the more respectable neighbourhood of Wine Office Court, Fleet Street. Here he
lived for the next two years-years of astonishing
fertility of invention and facility of work. The amount,
excellence and variety of work done in these years
are all the more amazing when his habit of procrastination and his frequent illnesses are considered;
while he had, besides, to weigh upon him the dispiriting sense that he was paying for eaten bread. He
discounted the future, lived on advances and in almost
all his present work was doing the most depressing
of duties to the improvident-paying a debt. Oddly
enough the men who contract debts with the greatest
pleasure are always the men who pay them with the
greatest pain-wherein a French wit compares all
debts to that greatest of all debts-children. But
the most unpleasant of the debts of improvidence is that payable through the brain; since, while
merely mechanical work serves as a distraction to
care and worry, care and worry distract brainwork.
Hence the conditions under which Goldsmith
worked in these years, and indeed during his entire
I20




TOIL AND TEARS


121


literary life, were the reverse of favourable to excellence, yet how excellent is even his most casual and
perfunctory work! Even the prefaces and introductions which he supplied to order to works he had not
read, on subjects he had not studied, are admirably
to the purpose. Whether such prefaces and inttoductions to unread books of every kind and of every
degree of merit are morally defensible, I must leave
to the judgment of that robust moralist, Dr Johnson,
who was himself a kind of Universal Provider of such
wares. "Did you know, sir, much of Rolt, or of
trade or commerce, when you wrote your admirable
preface to Rolt's Dictionary of Trade and Commerce?"
asked the ingenuous Boswell. " Sir," replied the sage,
"' I never saw the man and never read the book. The
booksellers wanted a preface to a Dictionary of Trade
and Commerce, and I wrote a preface accordingly."
Yet this Rolt was a gross literary impostor I But
in those days a preface seemed about of the value
of a doctor's certificate to-day; or perhaps the closest
modern analogy to it is the introduction which an
impecunious peeress offers in advertisements for cash
down to any social aspirant, however humble or
homely. This analogy might also be made to apply
to Goldsmith's History of England in a Series of
Letters from a Nobleman to his Son, where the fathering of the work upon a nobleman unquestionably
conduced to its success in days when a wit among
lords was considered a lord among wits. At the
same time it is only fair to say that the special lords
to whom the Letters were popularly attributedOrrery, Chesterfield or Lyttleton-were of sufficient
literary eminence to suggest that the intrinsic merit
of the work was appreciated.




122


OLIVER GOLDSMITH


To this period also belongs Goldsmith's Life of
Beau Nash, a life excellent in itself, but interesting
also in that it is not a biography only, but in a sense
an autobiography. It really resembles those confessions in old-fashioned novels made by some penitent
under the thin disguise of telling another's story.
Under the guise of a defence of the follies, foibles
and "failings that lean to virtue's side" of Beau
Nash, it is in some degree Goldsmith's apologia pro
vitd eed.
While writing a Life of Beau Nash he was writing
also a Life of Christ, Lives of the Fathers, epitomising
Plutarch's Lives, and, at the same time, revising a
History of Mecklenburgh, compiling an anthology, and
a work on Natural History, and contributing to a
General History of the Late War. This versatility of
Goldsmith's pen has done something to damage his
literary reputation. Only in an epitaph is it allowed
to anyone that " Nullum fere scribendi genus non
tetigit; nullum quod tetigit non ornavit."  The gate of
fame is as strait as that of heaven-and more crowded;
while the crush and crowds increase incalculably from
generation to generation. Hence a competitor, to
squeeze through, must be as lightly equipped as
possible, and is fortunate to carry with him a single
work of any kind, or even a single specimen of
that work.   Even when, not posthumous fame,
but contemporary reputation, is in question, there is
nothing more difficult than for a man who has made
a name in one walk to get credit for success in
another. For the popular mind is even more strait
of access than heaven itself. No proverb is more
deeply rooted in it than, "A Jack of all trades is
master of none "; since, being itself, so to say, of one




TOIL AND TEARS


123


dimension, it cannot conceive a mind of two or of three
dimensions, no more than it can conceive a fourth
dimension of space. Hence if a man happens to have
many reputations, these reputations are so far from
adding to each other that they detract from each other.
A single feather in one's cap is more highly valued
popularly than a whole plume of feathers. In The
Second Mrs Tanqueray a milliner holds up a bonnet
rich in flowers, feathers, lace and velvet, and says,
" There! the price of that as it stands is two guineas."
Then she plucks away half its glories and says,
" Now its price is four guineas." Having still further
denuded it, she still further enhances its pricelike that of the Sybilline Books-" Now it is six
guineas." And when she has finally plucked it
almost bald as an egg, leaving it but a single feather
and hardly more than a single straw, she cries
triumphantly, "Now, its price is ten guineas!"
Similarly a single feather in your cap is of more
value in the popular estimation than a whole plume
of feathers.
No doubt, then, Goldsmith would stand higher in
popular esteem if he had written only The Vicar of
Wl/akefield, The Traveller and The Deserted Village,
but for these three works together he got about 1 I 70 -hardly a maintenance for life, even in a Green Arbour
Court garret. In order to write these works he had to
live, and in order to live he had to extemporise on any
and every subject that the booksellers thought would
sell. When Lord Lisburn at the Academy dinner
asked if he was writing a new poem, Goldsmith
answered: " I cannot afford to court the draggle-tail
Muses, my lord, they would let me starve; but by my
other labours I can make shift to eat and drink and




124


OLIVER GOLDSMITH


have good clothes." Or, as he expressed it pathetically in The Deserted Village:"And thou sweet Poetry, thou loveliest maid,
Still first to fly where sensual joys invade;
Unfit in these degenerate times of shame,
To catch the heart, or strike for honest fame;
Dear charming nymph, neglected and decried,
My shame in crowds, my solitary pride;
Thou source of all my bliss and all my woe,
Thou found'st me poor at first and keep'st me so;
Thou guide by which the nobler arts excel,
Thou nurse of every virtue, fare thee well! "
Hence to keep himself alive Goldsmith had, as he
said to Cradock pathetically, " to write a volume every
month i" And this effort to keep alive threatened to
defeat itself, since Goldsmith often broke down under
the stress and strain of incessant work.   When
writing, e.g., a volume a month of the abridgment of
Plutarch's Lives, ordered and paid for in advance by
Newbery, he broke down in the middle of Volume V.,
and writes thus to implore the publisher's consent to
its being finished by another pen:"DEAR SIR,-As I have been out of order for some
time past, and am still not quite recovered, the fifth
volume of Plutarch's Lives remains unfinished. I fear
I shall not be able to do it, unless there be an actual
necessity and that none else can be found. If, therefore, you would send it to Mr Collier I should esteem
it a kindness, and will pay for whatever it may come to.
"N.B.-I received twelve guineas for the two
volumes.-I am, sir, your obliged humble servant,
"OLIVER GOLDSMITH.
"Pray let me have an answer."




TOIL AND TEARS


125


As Newbery in answer insisted upon Goldsmith's
doing himself what he had contracted to do, and had
been paid in advance six guineas a volume for doing
so, the poet rejoined with an irritability due to illness
and worry:"SIR,-One volume is done, namely, the fourth.
When I said I should be glad Mr Collier would do
the fifth for me, I only demanded it as a favour, but,
if he cannot conveniently do it, tho' I have kept my
chamber these three weeks and am not yet quite
recovered, yet I will do it. I send it per bearer, and,
if the affair puts you to the least inconvenience,
return it, and it shall be done immediately.-I am,
etc.                                  O. G.
"The printer has the copy for the rest."
These are specimens of the kind of letters which
Goldsmith through illness, or procrastination or improvidence, was for ever writing to his publishers, and they
suggest the trouble which embittered and shortened his
life. He was always heavily discounting to-morrow,
paying for an hour in the present by a year in the
future, " borrowing joy at usury of pain."
One thing more-and more to his credit —kept
Goldsmith dragging after him an ever-lengthening
chain of debt-his softness of head and heart in
the matter of being imposed upon by a host of
hangers-on. What Thackeray says of every successful Irishman in London that he has always a host
of ragged retainers hanging on to him, was certainly
true of Goldsmith. Here is a characteristic and
amusing story, to suggest that much of Goldsmith's
improvidence was due to his playing Providence




I 26


O-6LIVER GOLDSMITH


to poorer fellow-countrymen. One of these Irish
hangers-on, Jack Pilkington, son of Swift's notorious
protdg/e, Lactitia, called one day on Goldsmith in
Green Arbour Court, not apparently after his usual
fashion, to beg, but to brag. He was in such wild
spirits that he could not sit down and could hardly
speak. His fortune was at last made! It seems
that a certain duchess had a mania for white mice,
of which she had been able up to. this to procure
but two-in spite of her offer of any sum and of
a search throughout the world. Here Jack saw his
certainty of a competence for life; for he had long
ago commissioned a friend bound for India to
procure him there, if possible, two white mice, and
they had come! They were actually in the river!in an East Indiaman now in the docks! All that
was needed now was such a cage for the priceless
treasures as could be presented to a duchess, and a
cage sufficiently handsome could be procured for the
paltry sum of two guineas. But even this wretched
sum Jack at that moment had not at command,
and he came therefore to borrow it for a few hours
from his true and generous friend, Goldsmith. Even
Goldsmith, says Cooke, to whom the poet afterwards
told' the story, was staggered by this preposterous
tale and rallied his friend upon its absurdity. But
Jack, prepared for this, immediately produced a
letter from his Indian friend, advising him of the
shipping of the white mice, and describing their
size and beauty.  Goldsmith at last convinced,
asked: "How much did you say a suitable cage
would cost?" "About two guineas," replied Jack
eagerly. "Phew! Two guineas! My dear Jack,
you are out of luck, for I have but half a guinea in




TOIL AND TEARS


I 27


the world!" "But, dear doctor, there's your watch
If you would let me have your watch I could pawn
it over the way for a couple of guineas. I am
ashamed to ask such a thing, and I shouldn't dare
to ask it from any- other friend in the world than
you, or for any other occasion than this, when I
am absolutely sure to be able to release it and
return it in -two days." Goldsmith, in spite of his
having been taken in by Jack a hundred times before,
gave him the watch. He never saw or heard again
of Jack nor of his white mice, till the poor starving
wretch was on his death-bed, when Goldsmith sent
him a guinea.
To take the rather rank taste of Jack Pilkington
out of the reader's mouth, I should like to be allowed
for more than one reason to tell, or rather to allow
Goldsmith's beneficiary to tell, a tale to their mutual
credit.
"I was then about eighteen," said Dr M'Veagh
M'Donnell, recalling years after his first fortunate
meeting with Goldsmith. " I was then- about
eighteen, and possessed neither friends nor money,
not even the means of getting to Ireland, of which
or of England I knew scarcely anything from having
so long resided in France. In- this situation I had
strolled about for two or three days, considering
what to do, but unable to come to any determination,
when Providence directed me to the Temple Gardens.
I threw myself on a seat, and, willing to forget my
miseries for a moment, drew out a book-a volume
of Boileau.  I had not been there long when a
gentleman strolling about passed near me and,
observing perhaps something Irish or foreign in my
garb or countenance, addressed me: 'Sir, you seem




I 28


OLIVER GOLDSMITH


studious; I hope you find this a favourable place
to pursue it.' A good deal of conversation then
ensued. I told him part of my history, and he, in
turn, gave his address in the Temple, desiring me
to call soon; and from the address to my infinite
surprise and satisfaction I found that the person who
thus seemed to take an interest in my fate, was my
countryman and a distinguished ornament of letters.
I did not fail to keep the appointment and was then
received in the kindest manner.  He told me
smilingly that he was not rich; that he could do
little for me in direct pecuniary aid, but would
endeavour to put me in the way of doing something
for myself; observing that he could at least furnish
me with advice not wholly useless to a young man
placed in the heart of the great metropolis. 'In
London,' he continued, 'nothing is to be got for
nothing. You must work, and no man who chooses
to be industrious need be under obligations to
another, for here labour of every kind commands its
reward. - If you think proper to assist me occasionally
-as amanuensis, I shall be obliged, and you will be
placed under no obligation, until something more
permanent can be secured for you.'. This employment, which I pursued for some time, was to
translate passages from Buffon, which was abridged
or altered, according to circumstances, for his Natural
History."
Dr M'Donnell added that it pained him deeply to
see his kind patron so often plunged into fits of
depression, hunted down continually by printers and
booksellers, to whom he had sold his future; and
that, when he heard afterwards of the poet's death,
he " cried bitterly and a blank came over his heart."




TOIL AND TEARS


I29


This reminiscence of Dr M'Veagh M'Donnell is
worth quoting for the picture it gives of Goldsmith,
ever on the lookout to do a kindness, working on
manfully-"here labour of every kind commands
its reward"-but working desperately, plunged in
profound depths of despondency at the hopelessness
of the struggle. He had mortgaged his life to the
booksellers and foreclosure was imminent.
And here it should, I think, be noted to Goldsmith's credit and to the quickening of our sympathy
with his ever-increasing and ever-deepening moods
and moments of despair, that these moods and
moments disqualify him from ranking with Elia's
"Great Race"-the race of the born borrowers.
"Observe," says Elia in this delightful essay, "observe
who have been the greatest borrowers of all agesAlcibiades, Falstaff, Sir Richard Steele, our late
incomparable Brinsley-what a family likeness in all
four! What a careless, even deportment hath your
borrower! what rosy gills! what a beautiful reliance
on Providence doth he manifest, taking no more
thought than the lilies! What contempt for money;
accounting it (yours and mine especially) no better
than dross!" Dick Steele, "our own incomparable
Brinsley," and many other of Goldsmith's countrymen
certainly belonged to the Great Race in right of their
sublime indifference to their obligations.  When
Dumas, the Prince of the Great Race, was about to
sign his name on the stamp of a bill for three months,
he said airily, with pen poised above the paper,
"That stamp is now worth one franc; and now," as
he signed his name across it, "nothing!" There is
the Great Race at its greatest!
But Goldsmith was so far from belonging to the
9




130      OLIVER GOLDSMITH
Great Race that his 'debts made him moody and
miserable, unsociable even in congenial society and
yet more unhappy alone. He had himself only to
blame for it, you say; but no one knew that better
than himself, and the reflection was not consolatory.
" You forgive that man everything who forgives
himself nothing," says the Buddhist text; and you
should forgive it all the more when, as in Goldsmith's
case, he paid the uttermost farthing in endless and
hopeless toil, in abject and bitter slavery to the booksellers, in remorseful misery and in an early grave.




CHAPTER XII


FRIENDSHIP WITH JOHNSON
O far Goldsmith's published work was the merest
pot-boiling hack work, which was never better
described than by the Italian poet, Count Gaspare
Gozzi, whom I quote, because not his life only,
but his shiftless character was like the Irish
poet's:" I had to pledge my brain and let it out for hire to
the grasping booksellers, daily giving them their
portion. Just as an old woman slowly spins flax,
thread by thread, from the distaff, in order that
Saturday may bring payment for all her late toil, so
must I spin out my brain, fibre by fibre, down to its
lowest cells, toiling in drudgery and misery at dull
work that brings no glory, and is death to a man and
his good name."
Now, however, Goldsmith was about to break
covert, so to say, to have henceforth the dogs of envy
and detraction in full cry after him, and to suffer what
Byron calls "the martyrdom of fame." In the case
of Goldsmith's fame, this martyrdom was not only
life-long, but posthumous, owing to that very friendship with Johnson which helped him to an early recognition. " Goldsmith, sir," said Boswell to Johnson,
"is much indebted to you for getting so high in the
public estimation." "Why, sir," Johnson replied, "he
has perhaps got sooner to it by his intimacy with me."
131




132


OLIVER GOLDSMITH


But this intimacy, which was no doubt a direct
advantage to the fame of Goldsmith during his life,
has indirectly since his death helped to prejudice it
through the distorted portrait of him, drawn by the
jealousy of Boswell in the most widely-read of all
biographies.
This, however, was not the fault of Johnson, to
whom Goldsmith owed only unwearied kindness. The
first recorded notice of the commencement of their
intimacy is too characteristic to be overlooked.
Johnson, having accepted an invitation to sup with
Goldsmith in his new lodgings, was discovered by
Percy, who had called to escort the sage to their
host's, in gorgeous apparel.  As the doctor's usual
attire, according to Miss Reynolds, was that of a
beggar-man, Percy stood gaping, amazed at the
transformation. "Why, sir," the doctor hastened to
explain, "why, sir, I hear that Goldsmith, who is a
very great sloven, justifies his disregard to cleanliness
and decency by quoting my practice, and I am
desirous this night to show him a better example."
This single exemplary deviation into tidiness has
been quoted ever since -as reflecting immense credit
upon the good sense of the sage, and no doubt it was
as creditable as the teetotalism of the rector's daughter
in Punch:-" Edith!1 exclaimed her aunt, upon seeing
the new convert help herself to sherry next day at
lunch, "why, you were the very first to take the
pledge at last night's total abstinence meeting!"
"Yes, aunt, but that was to set an example." As
Johnson relapsed next day and henceforth into
slovenliness, the only lesson he taught Goldsmith was
the last the poet needed-to-alternate extreme untidiness with extreme coxcombry of attire.




FRIENDSHIP WITH JOHNSON 133
Here, then, was the beginning of a friendship
justly dearer to Goldsmith than any made in
London, with the possible exception of that
with Sir Joshua Reynolds. Both what was like
and what was unlike in their respective characters
mutually attracted Johnson and Goldsmith. To
begin with, there was the masculine and feminine
mutual attraction, by which not contrary so
much as complementary qualities are drawn
towards each other and, so to say, dovetail into
each  other.  Goldsmith's diffidence, dependence
and sensitiveness at once looked up to and
leaned upon Johnson's strong mind, stout heart
and Gulliver-like insensibility to Lilliputian arrows.
But, again, these two men were drawn together by
that in which they resembled each other probably
more than any other two men in all Londonexquisite tenderness of heart. And this tenderness,
once more, was quickened and deepened in each
through the similarity of their Grub Street experiences.
Indeed, Johnson had sunk in deeper depths than
Goldsmith ever sounded-depths which even his
stout heart could not recall without a shudderthough no man had a more robust scorn for sentimental sorrow than Johnson-a scorn which he
could not hide even from Goldsmith when the poet appealed to him by his tears for sympathy upon the partial failure of The Good-Natured Man. Yet Johnson
himself once and in the presence of a stranger broke
down hysterically under a merely sentimental sorrow.
While reciting at the Thrales and in the presence of
Mr Scott, a stranger, his Vanity of Human Wishes,
his voice faltered when he came to the lines describing the struggles of a scholar's life, and at their close




134


OLIVER GOLDSMITH


he broke down in tears. He broke down in tears as
he read"There mark what ills the scholar's life assail,
TOIL, ENVY, WANT, THE PATRON AND THE JAIL!"
The lines do not appeal pathetically to the reader,
because he has no associations with them. Heine
paints a pathetic picture of a French drummer, a
survivor of the horrors of the retreat from Moscow.
Had the reader heard his music it would have
sounded to him only the hard and hollow rattle of
a drum; but to this old soldier of Napoleon, as he
beat it, looking up the while at Heine with dim,
hollow and abysmal eyes, it recalled all the horror
of that appalling retreat. Well, Johnson had had
his Moscow, and no veteran of Napoleon ever fought
a harder fight, or bore himself in battle more stoutly,
or showed in defeat a more stubborn and stoic
fortitude; but when the campaign was over, and
when, like that French drummer, he repeated and
recalled his own music-lines written with his heart's
blood-then the beat of that muffled drum broke
him down. It was not, then, the lines but their
associations which shook Johnson's stout heart. It
was the memories they recalled of the struggles,
sufferings, privations and humiliations he ha4d endured-" the oppressor's wrong, the proud man's
contumely, the insolence of office and the spurns
which patient merit of the unworthy take."
And Johnson's struggles were not only -fiercer than
Goldsmith's but also more protracted; while he had
not to buoy him up Goldsmith's " knack at hoping."
He was a congenial and confirmed hypochondriac,
haunted continually by spectres of despondency and




FRIENDSHIP WITH JOHNSON 135
despair. He hated even to be left for a moment
alone and dreaded quitting any company to go to,
his lonely home as a child'dreads to go in the dark.
"There is not one of us here," he said once, on
looking round at the gay crowd at Ranelagh, "there
is not one of us here who is not afraid to go home
and face himself." And there were times when on
going home to face himself he would feel the
horror that Frankenstein felt on the night when
he returned to find the ghastly monster he had
created waiting to  avenge his creation.  And,
indeed, all Johnson's other trials and troubles-his
struggles, sufferings, privations and humiliations,
the hope deferred that made the heart sick, the
disappointed hope which embittered the heartall these were mere incidents and accidents, trifling
and transient, compared with the rooted sorrow of
a mind diseased.
"The mind is its own place and in itself
Can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven."
And if that place is a prison-and it was a prison
to Johnson-it is a prison from which there is no
escape. "Denmark's a prison," says Hamlet to
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, when they were
sent -by the king to spy upon him, and on their
replying, " We think not so, my lord," Hamlet makes
the answer which is the secret of all happiness and
all misery, "Why, then, 'tis none to you; for there
is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes
it so: to me it is a prison." That is, the mind is
the palate through which we taste everything, and,
if the palate's diseased, everything will have a morbid
taste-the sweet will taste bitter and the bitter acrid.




136


OLIVER GOLDSMITH


Johnson's palate was congenitally diseased. He was
a confirmed hypochondriac, tormented continually,
even in his least unhappy moments, by memories
and remorses. He took the gloomiest views of life,
of death, of his own spiritual state and prospects,
and even of the mercy and goodness of God. Indeed,
you might almost describe his whole life from the
cradle to the grave in the well-known lines of Shelley:
"Many a green isle needs must be
In the deep, wide sea of misery;
Or the mariner, worn and wan,
Never thus could voyage on;
Day and night, and night and day
Drifting on his dreary way,
With the solid darkness black
Closing round his vessel's track;
Whilst above the sunless sky,
Big with clouds, hangs heavily."
Thus, while Johnson's Grub Street struggles were
more poignant and protracted than Goldsmith's, he
lacked the poet's sanguine temperament which helped
to buoy him up in these deep waters. On the other
hand, Johnson was strong where Goldsmith was weak,
and this strength was proof at once against the slings
and arrows of outrageous fortune from without and
against despondency from within. Like Horatio
Johnson was"As one that in suffering all had suffered nothing;
A man that fortune's buffets and rewards
Had ta'en with equal thanks...
Whose blood and judgment were so well commingled
That he was no pipe for Fortune's finger
To play what stop she pleased."
And this strength of Johnson's was proof also and
above all against the scouring of his mind by the ill



FRIENDSHIP WITH JOHNSON 137
usage of the world, and here he and Goldsmith were
at one. When someone expressed to Goldsmith his
wonder at Johnson's friendship with a man of disreputable antecedents, the poet exclaimed: "The
man is now miserable, and that is enough to
recommend him to Johnson." It was. Mere misery
alone was to Johnson as the masonic sign of a
brotherhood into which he had himself been initiated,
and which he felt himself henceforth bound always to
relieve. Of his pension of  300o a-year how much
did he reserve for himself? Between ~70 and ~80.
The balance of ~'220 or ~230 he gave away to the
poor. " They do not like to see me," he said, "unless
I bring 'em money." And before the days of his
pension, when he was himself the poorest of the poor,
he would go without food to give others a breakfast.
Poor little homeless lads, waifs and strays that lay
down at night in the cruel streets of London, homeless, hungry, half-naked, lying in doorways or under
archways, or on bunks, or in the recesses of bridges,
would sometimes find in the morning when they woke
a penny clenched in a grimy hand. It was Johnson.
When he had but few pennies himself, and was himself but a homeless wanderer in those stony streets,
he would force a penny into the little clenched hand
for to-morrow morning's breakfast. The wretched
lost woman, outcast in the London streets, lying
senseless in the mud, Johnson takes up in his arms,
bears her to his home, entrusts her to the care of his
wife, and he and she together for thirteen long months
nursed her and helped her back to the recovery of her
lost health and strength, and to the recovery of her lost
faith in the kindness of man and in the goodness of
God.   He turned his house into an almshouse for




I138


OLIVER GOLDSMITH


old ladies who quarrelled with each other incessantly,
and incessantly tormented him with their quarrels,
but could never wear and weary out the charity
which gave them shelter.  When a friend asked
him, " Why should you support and shelter so
many worthless and thankless creatures? " he
answered simply, " Sir, if I did not assist them,
who would? They must then die of want." The
poor and him that had no helper claimed kindred
with Johnson, as having once been of their brotherhood, and always had their claim allowed. And
Johnson showed the same sensitiveness to the
clearer claims upon him  of his kindred.  "Sir,"
he said once to a young clergyman, Henry White,
"tsir, I cannot accuse myself of having been in
general an undutiful son. Once, indeed, I was disobedient; I refused to attend my father to Uttoxeter
market. Pride was the source of that refusal, and
the remembrance was painful. A few years ago I
desired to atone for this fault. I went to Uttoxeter
in very bad weather, and stood for a considerable
time bare-headed in the rain on the spot where my
father's stall used to stand. In contrition I stood,
and I hope the penance was expiatory." What a
number of years of hardening hardships and still
more hardening disappointments and rebuffs overlay
this remorse for a transgression of his boyhood, and
yet beneath them all it lay living, throbbing, poignant!
What love and reverence, too, do his letters to his
mother breathe! What touching tenderness does he
show in parting even from an old servant, whom he
loved because of her love for his mother. Indeed, I.
do not know many things more characteristic of
Samuel Johnson than the following extract from his




FRIENDSHIP WITH JOHNSON 139
private Prayers and Meditations which describes this
parting:" Yesterday, 17th October, at about ten in the morning, I took my leave for ever of my dear old friend,
Catherine Chambers, who came to live with my
mother forty-three years ago, and has been little
parted from us since. I desired all to withdraw, then
told her that we were to part for ever, that, as Christians,
we should part with prayer, and that I would, if she
were willing, say a short prayer beside her. She expressed great desire to hear me, held up her poor
hands as she lay in bed with great fervour, while I
prayed, kneeling by her, nearly in the following words."
Here follows the prayer. " I then kissed her. She
told me that to part was the greatest pain she had
ever felt, and that she hoped we should meet again in
a better place. I expressed with swelled eyes and
great emotion of tenderness the same hope.  We
kissed and parted, I humbly hope to meet again and
part no more."
Such was the strong and true friend Goldsmith
was now about to make, and love, and lean upon for
the rest of his troubled life. It was the kind of friend
of all others that he needed, for Johnson was a tower
of strength to those that leaned upon him, and all he
had endured had at once strengthened and sweetened
his character. Not only, as Goldsmith said of him,
"he had nothing of the bear about him except his
skin," and not only beneath this bearskin beat the
tenderest of hearts, but the bearskin itself, like the
skin of the polar bear, was a protective product against Arctic hardships. Johnson's uncouth
manners, I mean, were rather defensive than
offensive - the outcome of a long and fierce




140


OLIVER GOLDSMITH


struggle  with rough  circumstances and  harsh
taskmasters.
Thus Goldsmith and Johnson were mutually
attracted at once by what was like and by what was
unlike in their respective characters, and indeed they
became such special friends as to be caricatured and
satirised as inseparable. It was naturally, then, to
Johnson that Goldsmith owed his emergence from
the purgatory of the Grub Street pot-boiler into the
heaven of the immortals. Here is Johnson's own
version of the incident:
'I received one morning a message from poor
Goldsmith that he was in great distress, and, as it was
not in his power to come to me, begging that
I would come to him as soon as possible. I sent
him a guinea and promised to come to him directly.
I accordingly went as soon as I was dressed, and
found that his landlady had arrested him for his
rent, at which he was in a violent passion. I perceived that he had already changed my guinea and
had got a bottle of Madeira and a glass before him.
I put the cork into the bottle, desired he would be
calm, and began to talk to him of the means by
which he might be extricated. He then told me
that he had a novel ready for the Press, which he
produced to me. I looked into it and saw its merit;
told the landlady I should soon return; and, having
gone to a bookseller, sold it for sixty pounds. I
brought Goldsmith the money, and he discharged
the rent, not without rating the landlady in a high
tone for having used him so ill."
What seems to strike most every reader of this
oft-quoted story of the birth of The Vicar of
Wakefield is the improvidence of the author, who,




FRIENDSHIP WITH JOHNSON 141
in the face of his dire distress, spent a good part
of the guinea which Johnson, no doubt at some
sacrifice, spared him, upon a bottle of Madeira. It
recalls that other guinea Johnson procured for the
poet Boyse when he was absolutely starving, which
the bard spent forthwith upon a single sumptuous
meal, only to be found next morning writing his
rhapsodies in bed with his arms thrust through two
slits in the blanket, his only covering, his only
clothes! I should like, therefore, to be allowed to
say in defence of Goldsmith that improvidence of
this kind was so far from being peculiar to him that it
was the badge of all his Grub Street tribe. Johnson
used to denounce the intolerance which taunted any
business or profession with the failing common to
its members. And no doubt such taunts are not
uncharitable merely but unreasonable, since the fact
of any fault being common to any profession suggests
that the conditions, not the professors, of the calling
are responsible for its distinctive vice. To charge
divines, doctors, lawyers, merchants, shopkeepers,
artizans or working-men with some distinctive professional besetting sin is but to reproach the dyer
because his hand "is subdued to what it works in."
Thus the charge of improvidence usually made
against authors, artists and actors should lead us
to look for its cause, not in the characters, but in
the circumstances of these Bohemians. Nor should
we have to look far. A fixed income is to a precarious income as a coal mine is to a gold mine.
The amount of coal extractable from a coal mine
from day to day is calculable; but the incalculable
chances of a gold reef tend to produce in the miner
the proverbial improvidence of the gambler. A




142


OLIVER GOLDSMITH


similar gambling trust in the resources of their
brains and in the chances of to-morrow is at the
root of the proverbial improvidence of authors,
artists and actors.
Before, then, we hold Goldsmith wholly responsible
for his improvidence we should look both to his
circumstances and to others in such circumstances.
What contemporary author, who was dependent for
his bread solely upon his pen, put Goldsmith to
shame by his exemplary prudence? Smollett, Sterne,
Fielding, even Johnson himself are here in the same
dock. Even the bottle of wine incident, which has
so discredited Goldsmith, can be paralleled in the
life of his exemplary deliverer, Johnson,  "Dr
Johnson," says George Stevens, "confessed himself
to have been sometimes in the power of the bailiffs."
Richardson, the author of Clarissa, was his constant
friend on such occasions. "I remember writing to
him," said Johnson, "from a sponging-house, and
was so sure of my deliverance through his kindness
and liberality that, before his reply was brought,
I knew I could afford to joke with the rascal who
had me in custody, and did so over a pint of adulterated wine, for which at that instant I had no money
to pay." Thus what Richardson did for Johnson,
Johnson did for Goldsmith; and if the vicarious debt
went back no further-if Richardson owed no one
a similar extrication from similar difficulties-it was
because he was a prosperous printer first and a
popular novelist a long way after. No author, then,
of that day, who had to depend for his bread on his
pen alone, could afford to throw a stone at the improvidence of Goldsmith.
That Goldsmith should have owed his deliverance




FRIENDSHIP WITH JOHNSON 143
from the bailiffs, that The Vicar of Wakefield should
have owed its acceptance by a bookseller to Johnson,
was as natural as it was fortunate; for there was no
such friend of the friendless in his day as this Great
Cham of literature and Great Bear of society. As
all who love Goldsmith should love Johnson, I should
like to close this chapter upon the beginning of
their friendship with the indisputable testimony of
an estranged friend to the exceeding goodness of
Johnson's heart. " Ie loved the poor," says Mrs
Thrale, "as I never saw anyone else do, with an
earnest desire to  make them    happy.  'What
signifies,' says someone to him, 'giving halfpence
to common beggars. They only lay it out in gin
and tobacco.' 'And why should they be denied
such sweeteners of their existence?' replied Johnson.
'It is surely very savage to refuse them every
possible avenue of pleasure reckoned too coarse for
our own acceptance. Life is a pill which none of
us can bear to swallow without gilding; yet for the
poor we delight in stripping it barer still, and are
not ashamed to show visible displeasure if ever the
bitter taste is taken from their mouths.'"'
It was the kindliness of a kindred spirit which
inspired Elia's A Complaint of the Decay of Beggars
in the Metropolis.
Hear, again, Mrs Thrale upon Johnson's kindliness
to those ill-conditioned pensioners who filled his
home, wrangling incessantly together, and unanimous
only in their grumbles against their benefactor.
Johnson himself, in a letter to Mrs Thrale, thus
describes this happy family:-" Mrs Williams hates
everybody. Levett hates Mrs Desmoulins and does
not love Mrs Williams. Mrs Desmoulins hates them




144       OLIVER GOLDSMITH
both. Poll"-a Miss Carmichael-" loves none of
them." "He used to lament.pathetically to me,"
says Mrs Thrale, in reference to such complaints
from Johnson, "that they made his life miserable
from the impossibility he found of making them
happy. If, however, I ventured to blame their ingratitude and condemn their conduct, he would
instantly set about softening the one and justifying
the other; and finished commonly by telling me
that I knew not how to make allowance for situations
I never experienced."
No casual, occasional or emotional kindness can
compare with such unweariable beneficence to beneficiaries who kept him in continual discomfort with
their complaints, their quarrels, their ingratitude and
their unhappiness.




CHAPTER XIII


"THE VICAR OF WAKEFIELD"
THE     VICAR OF WAKEFIELD, or rather a
third share of it, as we have seen, was sold by
Johnson to save Goldsmith's being sent to jail
for a debt of a few pounds due for his board and
lodging, and this is characteristic of the bitter, and,
it might be supposed, embittering conditions under
which much of it was written. Indeed, while writing
it Goldsmith had been in hiding for debt, and had
been flung half-crowns and even shillings by Newbery
as generous advances. Another bookseller, Dodsley,
had declined to make him any advance; while a
third, Tonson, had rejected Goldsmith's offer to edit
Pope so insolently that the poet was enraged into
caning the bearer of the offensive refusal. These difficulties and humiliations were none the Tess embittering because Goldsmith had, and knew that he had,
brought many of them upon himself. Only those
superior persons who have never brought anything
upon themselves can suppose that punishment is
lightened by the consciousness of having deserved it.
But there were also other miseries and mortifications
which no one could have deserved less than Goldsmith
or have felt more-those due to the brutality of his
various task-masters-which must be taken into account in considering the circumstances under which
The Vicar of Wakefield was written. And the circumstances should be considered in order to do justice to
10              145




146


OLIVER GOLDSMITH


the originality of the novel. For, look at it from
what point of view you will, The Vicar of Wakefield
is an extraordinary novel. To begin with, what novel
written in circumstances so embittering was ever so
untainted with bitterness? Tainted with bitterness!
It is the humanest novel in all literature, welling up
out of the heart of Goldsmith in the midst of his
miseries, like those founts of sweet water that spring
up in the midst of the brine and bitterness of the
Pacific. And while The Vicar of Wakefield contrasts
in its humanity with the bitterness of Goldsmith's
environment when he wrote it, in its purity it contrasts with the pruriency, the grossness, or the foulness of contemporary novels - with Richardson's
Pamela, Fielding's Tom Jones and Smollett's Roderick
Random. One other contrast between Goldsmith's
writing and that of his contemporaries must also be
noted-a contrast in style. The limpid simplicity and
sincerity of Goldsmith's style were in startling contrast
with the pompous pretentiousness of the style which
Johnson had made the vogue.
Hence Goldsmith's style did not appeal to the critics
whose taste is usually sophisticated. All experts,
including critics, come in time to make something of
a " mystery " of their trade, after the manner of doctors
who, says Cicero, make out a prescription for a snail
thus:-" terrigenam, herbzgradum, domiportam, sanguine cassum." Hence it happens that in a conflict of
taste between the public and the critics the public is
sometimes right. In a conversation upon this subject
-about the possibility of the taste of the public differing from that of the critics-Johnson cites Goldsmith
as a case in point. In justifying his hesitation to pass
an unfavourable verdict upon an unpublished work




"THE VICAR OF WAKEFIELD" 147
which had been submitted to his judgment, Johnson
said, "You never can be sure whether, though it may
not please you, it may please the public. Both Goldsmith's comedies were once refused; his first by
Garrick, his second by Colman, who was prevailed
on at last by much solicitation, nay by a kind of
force, to bring it on. His Vicar of Wakefield I myself
did not think would have much success. It was
written and sold to a bookseller before his Traveller,
but published after it; so little expectation had the
bookseller from it. Had it been sold after the Traveller he might have had twice as much money for it,
though sixty guineas was no mean price. The bookseller had the advantage of Goldsmith's reputation
from the Traveller in the sale, though Goldsmith had
it not in selling the copy." The "cooks," as Martial
called the critics, are not always right, nor the "guests "
always wrong in any conflict of judgment between
them, and anyway it is more to an author's advantage
to please the guests!
" Ccena fercula nostrac
Mallem convivis quan placuisse cocis."
When the public happens to be right in any such
conflict of taste, the root of the difference will always
be found to be that which is one of the roots of the
difference between genius and talent-genius ever
returning to nature, talent always.diverging from it.
Talent trusts to art and ornament for the charms
which genius has in right of her sole trust to nature.
It is a little like the difference between the youth and
age of the maid in The Deserted Village:"As some fair female, unadorned and plain,
Secure to please while youth confirms her reign,




148


OLIVER GOLDSMITH


Slights every borrowed charm which dress supplies,
Nor shares with art the triumph of her eyes.
But when those charms are past-for charms are frailWhen time advances, and when lovers fail,
She then shines forth, solicitous to bless,
In all the glaring impotence of dress."
This quarrel between genius and talent for the
ear of the public is ever recurring in literary historygenius trying in vain for years to bring back to nature
the taste which talent had sophisticated.
This was the battle which the genius of Goldsmith
had to fight in his day, and he fought it alone with a
strength and a courage impossible to the feeble creature described by Boswell. In the days of his severest
struggles he declined even Johnson's request that he
would contribute to Fawkes and Woty's Poetic
Calendar, because of his disapproval of the false and
affected school it represented. "Nothing," he says
in one of his essays, "has been so often explained
and so little understood as simplicity in writing.
Simplicity in this acceptation has a larger significance
than either the arXo0o of the Greeks or the simplex of
the Latins; for it implies beauty. It is the a,6oov XGC
Ojvy of Demetrius Phalerius, the simplex munditiis
of Horace, and expressed   by one word, naiveted
in the French language. It is, in fact, no other than
beautiful nature without affectation or extraneous
ornament. By the present mode of education we are
forcibly warped from the bias of nature and all simplicity in manners is rejected. We are taught to
disguise and distort our sentiments until the faculty
of thinking is diverted into an unnatural channel; and
we not only relinquish and forget, but also become
incapable of our original dispositions. We are totally




"THE VICAR OF WAKEFIELD" 149
changed into creatures of art and affectation. Our
perception is abused and even our senses are perverted.
Our minds lose their native force and flavour. The
imagination, sweated by artificial fire, produces nought
but vapid bloom. The genius, instead of growing
like a vigorous tree, extending its branches on every
side and bearing delicious fruit, resembles a stunted
yew, tortured into some wretched form, projecting no shade, displaying no flavour, diffusing no
fragrance, yielding no fruit, and affording nothing
but a barren conceit for the amusement of the idle
spectator."
Perhaps De Baudelaire's definition of genius is as
apt and adequate as any yet suggested of that indefinite and indefinable gift-" La gdnie n'est que
l'enfance retrouv/e a volonte." Ruskin, too, in his
Stones of Venice, makes the same suggestion in his
comparison there of men of genius to children. In
this, as in so many other things, Goldsmith was a
child, which helps to explain the slow way he made
against the sophisticated taste of the time. The Vicar
of Wakefield, for instance, was tossed aside into a
drawer by the younger Newbery-to whom Johnson
had sold it-as an unlucky speculation; nor did even
the success of The Traveller, as Johnson suggests,
hasten its publication. It was eight months after the
fourth edition of The Traveller had appeared, and
fifteen months after The Vicar had come into his
possession that Newbery at last summoned up
sufficient courage to publish it.  And it needed
courage to publish it even then. Not one of the
leading journals noticed it at all on its appearance,
while the few inferior prints which condescended
to review it spoke of it coldly and baldly. It was




150


0 OLIVER GOLDSMITH


at once too old and too new, too simple and too
original for the professional critic, who could see in
it only the " hundred faults " which Goldsmith in his
preface admitted it to have. As Southey says, the
novel was " a puzzler to its critics." - They were immersed too deeply in the literature in vogue to see
any beauty in it, like that lady who, when crinolines
were -in fashion, thought the Greek dress bald, odd
and ugly. The Vicar needed for its appreciation the
detachment of distance or of time, the unprejudiced
judgment of the Courts to which Bacon appealedforeign nations and the next ages. To both appeals
the -answer is this, that The Vicar of Wakefield
has appeared in more editions and in more translations than any novel that ever was written. Four
years after its publication the cynical Herder,- after
exposing and exploding Goethe's boyish idols, read
out to him as a new and true ideal a German translation of The Vicar of Wakefield, and Goethe listened
entranced. Half a century later, writing to Zelter,
Goethe recalls the impression made upon him in
these his impressionable years by the novel Herder
had read out:" It is not to -be described the effect that Goldsmith's Vicar had upon me, just at the critical
moment of mental development. That lofty and
benevolent irony, that fair and indulgent view of
all infirmities and faults, that meekness under all
calamities, that equanimity under all changes and
chances, and" the whole train of kindred- virtuesi
whatever names they bear, proved my best education;
and in the end these are the thoughts and feelings
which have reclaimed us from all the errors of life."
And when he re-read the novel in old age he was




",THE VICAR OF WAKEFIELD" 151
not disillusioned, for it had still for him all the charm
and all the edification he found in it at that crisis of
his intellectual development.
Whence then this originality of The Vicar of
Wakefield, which made it a "puzzlement" to English
critics and a revelation to Goethe? It comes from
this, that the novel is Goldsmith himself. Hence,
too, the contrasts between its humanity and the inhumanity of Goldsmith's environment, and between
its purity and the impurity of contemporary novels.
The Vicar of Wakefield, in a word, was no mere
creature of his embittering circumstance, was no
mere imitation of his gross, or foul, or prurient contemporary novelists, was no mere reflection of the
sickly or sickening tastes of his age. It is Goldsmith
himself. Its finest characters are impersonations of
his own characteristics, and the experiences of his
hero were the experiences of himself.    His own
simple vanity, his own child-like gullibility, the divine
sweetness of his nature, the more divine goodness of
his heart- are all there, and because they are all there
the novel is the most enduringly and universally
popular novel in literature.
What Goldsmith says, perhaps sarcastically, in
Retaliation, of Cumberland is as true of himself in
The Vicar of Wakefield as it was untrue of that Sir
Fretful Plagiary:"Or wherefore his characters thus without fault?
Say, was it that vainly directing his view
To find out men's virtues, and finding them few,
Quite sick of pursuing each troublesome elf,
He grew lazy at last and drew from himself?"
When I said in the introductory chapter to this
little book that if you wish to find the real Gold.




I5 2


OLIVER GOLDSMITH


smith you will find him more faithfully reflected in
his own works than in the accounts of his contemporaries or in the biographies of his biographers, I had
The Vicar of Wakefield most in my mind. In this
novel Goldsmith most of all manifests himself. It is
his own humanity which shines through the novel, as
sunlight through the -stained and storied windows of a
cathedral. The figures may be different and the colours
different, but it is the same sun which transfigures all.
When I say the novel is Goldsmith I do not mean
merely, as I said just now, that he distributed through
it his own characteristics and his own experiences.
That, of course, is true. The early experiences of
Mr Burchell, the adventures of George, the vanity
and simplicity of Moses, the humanity of the vicar,
are all the experiences, the adventures, the simplicity,
the humanity of Goldsmith himself. But I mean
something more than this when I say that Goldsmith
is the novel. As a prism divides and disperses white
light into its component rays-red, orange, yellow,
green, blue, indigo and violet-so Goldsmith similarly distributed his own characteristics and his own
experiences through the personages and through the
incidents of the novel. But behind all these rays of
the spectrum, comprehending and comprising them
all, is the pure white light-v-making what was bright
brighter, and lightening darkness itself, and that is
the spirit of the novel-the spirit of Goldsmith-and
that, too, is the secret of its universal and enduring popularity. It is its divine humanity, and the
sincerity of its humanity. It is not cant; it is not
sentiment; it is not Sterne; it is not Rousseau; it
is Goldsmith. It is not a man who affected to feel
or think the humanity it paints; it is not a man who




"THE VICAR OF WAKEFIELD" I53
merely felt it or thought it; it is a man who felt it,
who thought it, who loved it, who lived it, who was
it. "Goldsmith," says Thackeray, "is the most loved
of all authors," and he is the most loved because he
loved most, and because his love shines and shows
through every page of this divine novel. As in life
Goldsmith was the most transparent of men-every
thought of his heart showing itself clear as the
pebbles at the bottom of a mountain brook, or, like
the bubbles of that brook, rising in speech to the
surface —so in his works, too, and especially in The
Vicar of Wakefield, he opens to us his whole heart.
And it is his heart, beating in every page of the
novel, which makes such a wide and deep appeal to
the heart of humanity. Men love those who love them,
and it is the overflowing humanity of the novel which
has most of all endeared it to its readers. As Scott
said of it, " We bless the memory of an author who
contrives so well to reconcile us to human nature."
In truth, Goldsmith, in The Vicar of Wakefield,
has done a unique thing. By his simple truth to
simple nature, by his gentle humour, wit, wisdom and
pathos, and by the exquisite charm of an idyllic
style, he has made goodness as interesting as greatness. Alone of all the novels that live The Vicar of
Wakefield lives in right of its appeal to what is
divine within us. Of course, there are novels without
number which make an appeal to what is divine
within us; but they don't live. They are nambypamby, goody-goody, insipid with the insipidity
Guinevere wearied of:
" He is all fault who hath no fault at all.


The low sun makes the colour."




154      OLIVER GOLDSMITH
But what novel, except The Vicar of Wakefield,
lives for all time, and is loved in all lands through
the divine right of its divine humanity? I cannot
help asking the reader once more to think, as he
reads the novel, of the life of the man when he wrote
it-his degrading surroundings, his debasing associates, his bitter and embittering experiences-and to
wonder how he has subdued all, transformed and
transfigured all, drawn from all sweetness and light,
as the flower draws its fairness and fragrance from
the dung of the earth. It is not only, to recur to
that image of St Augustine's, the sun shining through
foul mists without being befouled, but it is the sun at
its setting transfiguring with its own glow and glory
the clouds which would have obscured it.




CHAPTER XIV


"THE TRAVELLER"
W CHEN Goldsmith flung out by the hands of
Johnson The Vicar of Wakefield to keep
the wolf from the door, he said nothing even to this
dear friend of another child of his brain which might
have been sacrificed instead. The Traveller lay also
at that moment completed in his desk, but he withheld
it, and even all mention of it, as too dear and sacred
to be brought into such a sordid business. Soon
after, however, Goldsmith submitted it to Johnson,
who not only approved of it, but " improved " it. He
interpolated half a dozen lines of this jolting sort:
"How small of all that human hearts endure,
That part which laws or kings can cause or cure!,'
The change from Goldsmith's verse to lines like
these is as the change from the graceful sailing of
the swan down stream to its waddle upon the bank.
In another way also Johnson's help was unfortunate,
since, when it became known that he had had a hand
in the poem, it was assumed that he wrote most of
it. This assumption was strengthened by Johnson's
characteristic correction of Goldsmith at "The Club."
"Mr Goldsmith," asked Chamier at a meeting of
"The Club," "what do you mean by the last word
in the first line of your Traveller?"'Remote, unfriended, melancholy, slow.'




156


OLIVER GOLDSMITH


Do you mean tardiness of locomotion? " " Yes,"
answered Goldsmith. " No, sir," thundered Johnson,
"'you did not mean tardiness of locomotion; you
meant that sluggishness of mind which comes upon
a man iki solitude." "Ah" exclaimed Goldsmith,
"that was what I meant." As slowness of gait
indicates depression of spirits, as much as briskness implies exhilaration, no " doubt Goldsmith
intended to suggest dejection.  Being, however,
flurried and disconcerted, as he usually was in
that overpowering company, he agreed in turn
with each of his challengers. The effect of this
explanation by Johnson to Goldsmith of what
he really did mean was of course to suggest that
the "Inspired Idiot" owed much of his inspiration
to his great friend. "Chamier," said Johnson afterwards, "believed then that I had written the line as
much as if he had seen me write it."
It was not Johnson only who treated Goldsmith as
a half-articulate baby, but even Tom Davies, the butt
himself of all his friends, was good enough to explain
what the poet really did mean by " Damien's bed of
steel." " Doctor Goldsmith,"' writes this pompous
little man, "says he meant by 'Damien's bed of
steel' the rack; but I believe the newspapers informed us that he was confined in a high tower,
and actually obliged to lie upon an iron bed." What!
Tom Davies too!
" The little dogs and all,
Tray, Blanch and Sweetheart, see, they bark at me!'
This patronising arrogance, which was the usual
tone towards Goldsmith of his London friends, must
have been especially exasperating to so sensitive a
soul. I remember an aunt of mine, who, having




"THE TRAVELLER"


I57


come from Drogheda, might therefore be presumed
to know the proper pronunciation of the name of
that town, being corrected by a Manchester shopwoman for saying "Draweda."   "I suppose you
mean 'Drogeeda,' madam," said this superb person.
"No," rejoined my aunt, "I mean Draweda; and,
as I was born there, I ought to know that the people
of that town themselves pronounce it thus." "I can
well believe it," retorted the shopwoman with a shrug
of scorn.
Smug and invincible arrogance of this exasperating
kind met Goldsmith in London at every turn, irritating, disconcerting and depressing him. For it must
be remembered, and I hope I may be pardoned for
the continual reminder to the reader, that the set and
single attitude of all this circle towards Goldsmith
was that of patronage, either condescending or
contemptuous. With what a vindictive gusto, for
example, does Miss Reynolds, Sir Joshua's sister and
housekeeper and Johnson's "Rennie dear," recall
and record this crushing snub Goldsmith received.
"Goldsmith," she writes, "always appeared to be
overawed by Johnson, particularly when in company
with people of consequence-always as if impressed
with some fear of disgrace; and, indeed, well he
might. I have been witness to many mortifications
he has suffered in Dr Johnson's company. One day
in particular, at Sir Joshua's table, a gentleman to
whom Goldsmith was talking his best stopped him
in the midst of his discourse with, 'Hush! hush!
Dr Johnson is going to say something.'"
Mrs Piozzi with no less vindictive gusto tells of
a similar snub. v Goldsmith and Johnson," she
writes, "spent an evening with Eaton Graham at




I 58


OLIVER GOLDSMITH


some tavern.  Graham's heart was open and he
began inviting away; told what he could do to
make his college agreeable, and begged the visit
might not be delayed. Goldsmith thanked him and
proposed setting out with Mr Johnson forBuckinghamshire in- a fortnight. 'Nay, hold, Dr Minor,' says
Graham, 'I did not invite you! "'
Now I ask what must have been the general
feeling and bearing towards Goldsmith when two
ladies, who must be credited with some of their sex's
social sensitiveness, could quote with approval such
brutalities? Yes, and even to-day like brutalities
are quoted still as happy, even though the relative
proportions of " Doctor Major " and of " Doctor
Minor>" are reversed; for I suppose no one to-day
will deny that the author of The Vicar of Wakefield,
The Traveller, The Deserted Village, She Stoops to
Conquer, and The Chinese Letters, is of incomparably
greater literary account than the author of Rasselas,
Irene, The Vanity of Human Wishes, The Lives of
the Poets and The Rambler. Yes, even to-day the
contempt of the contemptible Boswell still infcts..
the very biographers of Goldsmith. They forget
that in Boswell's Life Goldsmith's place and part,
his relation to Johnson, are those of the dwarf to
the giant in the apologue in The Vicar of Wakefield.
In that ill-starred association the giant carries off
in the campaign all the spoil and glory and the
luckless dwarf all the mutilations and humiliations.
Boswell even attributes the inspiration of The
Traveller to the conversation of. Johnson! though
the plan of the poem was conceived and some of
it was written while Goldsmith was on tramp
through Europe and long before his acquaintance




"THE TRAVELLER"


159


with Johnson. "Much both of the sentiments and
expression of The Traveller," says Boswell, "were
derived from conversation with Johnson!"  This
recalls Johnson's humorous reason for not associating with one Campbell, that all Scotchmen would
ever after such association say of anything good he
published, " Ay, he got that fro' Cawmell." But as
Johnson could not have got breeches from this
highlander, neither could Goldsmith have got from
Johnson his grace, his tenderness, his naivete, his
melody, nor even his philosophy. The very title
which Johnson suggested for the poem, The Philosophic Wanderer, as compared with that given it
by Goldsmith, indicates a radical difference between
their ideas of poetry. Goldsmith's ideal was simplicity, and what he approved of in Parnell he
aimed at himself-" that the language of poetry
should be as the language of life, and should convey
the warmest thoughts in the simplest expression."
Nor, again, does that other comparison which
continually recurred in the journals of the day, of
Goldsmith to Pope, bear examination. The poetry
of Pope and Goldsmith is about as mutually comparable as a diamond with an opal. What has the
ice-cold glitter of the geometrically-cut facets of the
diamond in common with the shifting, tender, rainbow
tints of the opal?
The truth is, as it seemed inconceivable to his
friends that Goldsmith could be absolutely original,
he got even from them during his life small credit
for originality either of thought or expression.
"Even from them," I ought rather to say least of all
from his friends. When years later someone said to
Johnson that The Traveller owed much of its




i 6o


OLIVER GOLDSMITH


popularity to the partiality of Goldsmith's friends, he
replied, "Nay, sir, the partiality of his friends was
always against Goldsmith. It was with difficulty we
could give him a hearing."
After his death, of course, when praise might be
lavished upon him, because it would then do him no
good and give him no pleasure, his friends were free
to admit the originality as well as the beauty of the
poem; for what Hudibras says of his lady's love is
true also of fame, which
"As idly burns
As fire in antique Roman urns
To warm the dead and vainly light
Those only that see nothing by 't."
Four years after Goldsmith's death Langton observed
at Sir Joshua's table, "There is not one bad line
in that poem of The Traveller-not one of Dryden's
careless verses." "I am glad," replied Sir Joshua,
"to hear Charles Fox say it was one of the finest
poems in the English language." "Why were you
glad?" rejoined Langton. "You surely had no
doubt of this before?"  "No," cried Johnson, emphatically, "the merit of The Traveller is so well
established that Mr Fox's praise cannot augment it
nor his censure diminish it."
But Johnson said the simple truth in contending that
during Goldsmith's life "the partiality of his friends
was always against him. It was with difficulty we could
give him a hearing." Unfortunately for Goldsmith his
position and reputation in " The Club " that is, with his
literary friends, were fixed before he had achieved such
eminence as The Traveller must have given him.
That pompous Philistine, Sir John Hawkins, thus
fairly enough defines Goldsmith's position and




"THE TRAVELLER"


reputation with "The Club" before the publication of
The Traveller. " As he wrote for the booksellers we
at the Club looked on him as a mere literary drudge,
equal to the task of compiling and translating, but
little capable of original and still less of poetical
composition." A first and persistent impression of
this kind made most of all against a temperament
like Goldsmith's, sensitive, self-conscious, and easily
disconcerted. Had he entered "The Club' as the
author of the finest poem, play and novel of the day,
he would have had conceded to him such deference
as must have reassured his morbid self-distrust; and
this very concession would have justified itself. At
his ease in an assured position he would not have
been thrown off his balance by Beauclerk's sarcasm,
Hawkins' brutality, or Johnson's bludgeoning; while
neither Hawkins, Beauclerk nor Boswell would have
dreamed of treating him as a butt. Entering " The
Club" "a very great man," as Johnson-after his
death-pronounced him, his wise and witty sayings,
which even in Boswell's record were many, would be
marked, and his Irish extravagances would be disregarded or regarded only as Irish extravagances.
Entering "The Club" "as a mere literary drudge,"
he was treated with a contempt which sometimes
justified itself, since he lost his head when he lost
his confidence. Thus he would flounder sometimes
into absurdities, and these absurdities would be noted,
while all that was witty or wise in his talk would
be discredited or disregarded. The average mind is
focussed to see only what it is, so to say, set foronly absurdity in a person presumed to be absurd,
and only brilliancy or profundity in a person presumed
to be brilliant or profound,




i62


OLIVER GOLDSMITH


I was chairman once at an entertainment where
the most effective reciter I had ever heard, a Mr
Mullen, kept his audience in roars of laughter by a
succession of farcical recitations. At last I begged
him to give the audience the relief of a pathetic piece,
knowing that his pathetic recitations were even more
effective than his comic. He stood up accordingly
and recited his great piece, a really harrowing poem
on the death of a collier's little child, and every verse
and almost every line of this piteous and piteously
recited piece was received with shouts and shrieks
of laughter! The audience had got it into its head
that Mr Mullen was a funny man, and their minds
being set and focussed upon this idea, they found
even his pathos amusing. Similarly, minds of this
kind will be always on the look-out only for the
absurd in a man who has got a name for absurdity,
especially if he be sufficiently conspicuous to be a
target for detraction. Then, not only the paradox
of an "Inspired Idiot" pleases, but the uninspired
are pleased to think him an idiot in spite of his
inspiration.
Thus in two ways Goldsmith was unfortunate in
entering " The Club " before he had made his reputation. As an acknowledged man of genius he would
have been treated with a respect reassuring to his easily
disconcerted diffidence; while his established reputation would have set the minds of his friends to
observe and note all-and there would be muchwhich answered to that reputation, and to disregard
as the mere foam on swiftly poured-out wine what
might in itself seem extravagant or absurd.
No one, for example, who knew Goldsmith only
through  The Traveller could have formed the




"THE TRAVELLER"


I63


impression of him fostered by Boswell and echoed
by Macaulay, the impression that he lacked powers
of observation and of reflection-" that he had seen
much of the world; but had noticed and retained
little more of what he had seen than some grotesque
incidents and characters which had happened to
strike his fancy "-since, as I have already suggested,
the characters of the peoples amongst whom he sojourned for so short a time have never been more
adequately and accurately delineated than in The
Traveller. Again, The Traveller refutes another
charge of Macaulay's, that Goldsmith lacked powers
of reflection. "For accurate research or grave disquisition," writes Macaulay, " Goldsmith was not well
qualified by nature or education. He knew nothing
accurately; his reading had been desultory; nor had
he meditated deeply on what he had read." It is true
that Goldsmith's reading was desultory and his knowledge miscellaneous and loose; but this is to say only
that he was a poet. A poet's scholarship is seldom
exact,methodical or profound. Heprefers to look direct
at nature and life to studying them reflected and
re-reflected in the dim repeating mirrors of books.
But, though it is certainly true that Goldsmith's
reading was desultory and his knowledge inaccurate
and discursive, it is not true at all that he never
meditated deeply upon what he had seen or read.
Indeed, I cannot imagine how Macaulay, who was
credited with reading everything, and who credited
himself with knowing everything, could speak thus
of Goldsmith, who was the first to suggest reforms
that have since been carried out, and the first to
predict revolutions that have since shaken two worlds.
Within the four hundred and thirty lines of The




164


OLIVER GOLDSMITH


Traveller alone we shall find deep, sound and
philosophic thought, disguised from us often by the
symmetrical grace of the poetry, as the grace of a
Greek athlete masks his strength. Here is the dry
thesis Goldsmith sets himself to prove:"Hence every state to one loved blessing prone,
Conforms and models life to that alone;
Each to the favourite happiness attends,
And spurns the plan that aims at other ends;
Till carried to excess in each domain,
This favourite good begets peculiar pain."
But the illustrations by which he supports this
thesis are so beautiful that we rest in them and forget
the solid structure they were designed to uphold.
The Caryatides are such exquisitely sculptured
statues, they arrest and  rivet the eye.   But the
philosophy is there as well as the poetry; and it is
neither trite, nor shallow, nor unsound. The general
conclusion is not perhaps universally or at least
absolutely true:" If countries we compare,
And estimate the blessings which they share.
Though patriots flatter, still shall wisdom find
An equal portion dealt to all mankind;
As different good by Art or Nature given,
To different nations makes their blessings even."
No doubt we can get used to everything-even to
hell, as Mammon comfortably suggests:"Our torments also may in length of time
Become our elements; these piercing fires
As soft as now severe-our temper changed
Into their temper-which must needs remove
The sensible of pain."




"THE TRAVELLER"                    i65
Or as The Travel/er itself has it:"And though the rocky-crested summits frown,
These rocks by custom turn to beds of down."
But there is more than this in Goldsmith's doctrine
that every nation has its compensatory blessings, and
also that these blessings themselves, so to say, run
to seed
"Where wealth and freedom reign, contentment fails,
And honour sinks where commerce long prevails."
By the way, it is significant that the sole fault
found in The Traveller with the Briton is arrogant
unsociability. At the close of that fine outburst
which Johnson could not quote without a starting
tear:
"Stern o'er each bosom reason holds her state,
With daring aims irregularly great.
Pride in their port, defiance in their eye,
I see the lords of human kind pass by;
Intent on high designs, a thoughtful band,
By forms unfashioned, fresh from Nature's hand,
Fierce in their native hardiness of soul,
True to imagined right, above control,
While e'en the peasant boasts these rights to scan,
And learns to venerate himself as man;))
At the close, I -say, of this noble panegyric
Goldsmith as usual defines the shadow cast by each
national distinctive virtue, and in the Briton's case
this shadow is insular and insulating arrogance:" That independence Britons prize too high,
Keeps man from man and breaks the social tie.
The self-dependent lordling stands alone,
All claims that bind and sweeten life unknown;
Here by the bonds of nature feebly held,
Minds combat minds, repelling and repelled."




i66


OLIVER GOLDSMITH


No one felt more this stiff, stand-off, frigid and
freezing unsociability, never off-guard itself, and
never understanding such relaxation in another, as
this genial, effusive Irishman, Goldsmith. Most of
all in "The Club" he found them always on the
offensive or on the defensive or on the offensivedefensive - "minds combat minds, repelling and
repelled." To enter that cockpit of " The Club,"
you should strip yourself of every feather not meant
for flight or fight.
But there was another folly, beside that of his
frivolous talk, which made Goldsmith seem an idiot
to solid, sensible, practical men-the lack of worldly
wisdom shown by the dedication of The Traveller to
his brother. No one knew better than Goldsmith, as
The Vicar of Wakefield shows, to what profitable
service a dedication might be turned, while no one
stood in sorer need of such service than the poor
poet; yet he dedicates the poem to a man " who,
despising fame and fortune, retired early to happiness
and obscurity with an income of forty pounds a
year " - only because that man was his brother.
How folly of this kind was regarded by the men
from whom chiefly we derive our knowledge of
Goldsmith, may be inferred from the following
account of a fellow-clubman, the worthy Sir John
Hawkins, of Goldsmith's interview with the Earl of
Northumberland:" Having one day a call to wait on the late Duke,
then Earl, of Northumberland," says the knight, " I
found Goldsmith waiting for an audience in an outer
room. I asked him what had brought him there; he
told me an invitation from his lordship. I made
my business as short as I could, and, as a reason,




"THE TRAVELLER"


i67


mentioned that Dr Goldsmith was waiting without.
The Earl asked me if I was acquainted with him; I
told him I was, adding what I thought likely to
recommend him. Upon Goldsmith's coming out I
asked him the result of his conversation. 'His lordship,' says he, 'told me he had read my poem, The
Traveller, and was much delighted with it; that he
was going Lord-Lieutenant to Ireland, and that,
hearing that I was a native of that country, he should
be glad to do me any kindness.' ' And what did you
answer,' I asked, 'to this generous offer?' 'Why,'
said he, 'I could say nothing but that I had a brother
there, a clergyman, that stood in need of help.'
"Thus," comments Sir John, " did this idiot in the
affairs of the world trifle with his fortunes and put
back the hand that was held out to assist him! "
W~hen men of this sort call Goldsmith "an idiot,"
it is as well to remember what appeared to them to
be idiotic.




CHAPTER XV


"THE GOOD-NATURED MAN."
THE VICAR OF WAKEFIELD, which was
I    sold to deliver Goldsmith from the bailiffs,
whom Newbery had let slip upon him (for
Mrs Fleming, Goldsmith's inexorable landlady, was
a creature of Newbery's), contains this inexplicable
compliment to that worthy:-" The person was
no other than the philanthropic bookseller in
St Paul's Churchyard, who has written so many
little books for children. He called himself their
friend, but he was the friend of all mankind."
I should rather have identified him with the
philanthropist immortalised in An Elegy on the Death
of a Mad Dog, or in that on Mrs Mary Blaize:"A kind and gentle heart he had,
To comfort friends and foes;
The naked every day he clad,
When he put on his clothes."
"The needy seldom passed the door,
And always found her kind:
She freely lent to all the poorWho left a pledge behind."
Certainly Newbery took care to get more than a
pawnbrQker's interest on every pound he advanced
to Goldsmith. Neither could the Newbery nephew,
to whom both The Traveller and The Vicar of Wakefield were sold, be truthfully called "the friend
of all mankind," unless Goldsmith be excepted.
i68




"THE GOOD-NATURED MAN" 169
Though edition after edition of the novel and of
the poem were published within a few years, not
a farthing of the hundreds of pounds they brought
in found its way into Goldsmith's pocket. Indeed,
the very Saturday in May 1766 on which the second
edition of The Vicar of Wakefield followed hard
upon the first, a bill for fifteen guineas, which
Goldsmith had drawn upon the elder Newbery, was
dishonoured.
Neither was the nephew moved by the fast
multiplying editions of The Traveller to add another
guinea to the original twenty paid for the poem.
On the other hand, a poem by Anstey, called The
New  Bath   Guide, brought its immortal author
two hundred pounds.   Immortal, at least in the
judgment of Horace Walpole, which should be held
to outweigh that of Time. " Victrix causa Diis
placuit; sed victa Catoni." And here perhaps I
may be allowed a digression to give the reader an
idea of the value of the judgment of the critic who
pronounced Goldsmith " An Inspired Idiot."
In his Memoirs of the Reign of George III., Horace
Walpole devotes a chapter to the literature of the
early part of this reign, and in this chapter a single
line each is given to Goldsmith, to Smollett, to
Johnson, and not even a single line to Sterne.
Goldsmith makes his first and last and brief appearance in the Memoirs as the correct author of The
Traveller. Smollett's sole distinction is that of "a
profligate hireling and abusive Jacobite writer";
while Johnson is "a lumber of mean opinions and
prostituted learning."
On the other hand, pages of panegyric are devoted
to the immortals-Mrs Macaulay for her History;




170


OLIVER GOLDSMITH


Bentley for his Patriotism; Dalrymple for his
Rodondo; and, above all, to Anstey for his New
Bath Guide. It will be seen that in his literary
judgments Horace Walpole could hardly be called
an inspired idiot, since time has reversed them all.
But to return to "the friend of all mankind,"
Newbery, Goldsmith found him, when in need of
sixpence-and he was always in need of sixpence"a Friend of Humanity." Goldsmith was always in
need of sixpence not because of his improvidence
merely, but because of his gullibility and generosity.
He was the merest milch-cow "with udders all drawn
dry" by a host of milkers. A report that Goldsmith
was in funds was such a signal for pillage as the Arab
cry of "A Caravan!" and within an hour Oliver was
as poor as the poorest of his beneficiaries.
Why, then, it might fairly be asked, should
Newbery be expected to pour gold through this
mere conduit-pipe? Newbery was a business man;
and his business was to get the most copy at the
least cost out of Goldsmith-as he did diligently.
He had to make him such advances as would keep
him alive and in his employ; but here, as a good
business man, his duty ended. Certainly; and I
am not questioning his claim to being a good
business man, but only doubting whether that is
absolutely synonymous with his being a good man,
not to say with his being " the friend of all mankind."
I am only in fact questioning the justice of Newbery's
canonisation in The Vicar of Wakefield.
As, however, everything is relative, Newbery,
as compared with Griffiths, or as compared with
the lessee of Newbery's own son-in-law, Kit Smart,
deserved to be called "the philanthropic bookseller."




"THE GOOD-NATURED MAN i 7'
This lessee of Kit Smart was a bookseller named
Gardener, who rented Kit's brains on a lease of
ninety-nine years, during which term the poet was
bound by a legal instrument to write weekly and only
for the Universal Visitor. We at least have no
cause of quarrel with the arrangement, since the
lease would have lapsed in time to allow Kit to
start The Saturday Review, if another Universal
Visitor had not prematurely claimed the poor poet.
Compared, then, with the truculent Griffiths or the
exacting Gardener, Newbery might appear a
philanthropist, but he was hardly a liberal paymaster.
Here, e.g., is a specimen of the scale of his payments to Goldsmith in a receipt from the poet still
extant:-" Received from Mr Newbery five guineas
for writing a short English Grammar.    Oliver
Goldsmith, Decr. 28, I766." "And I shall compile,"
he says in Retaliation, thus at the close of his life
summing up its main work-compilation. All the
work by which we know him to-day-poems, plays
and novel-were incidental. Like many another
author, he lives for ever through work which could
not keep him alive; while the dreary task-work
which kept him alive - grammars, histories and
countless other compilations - do not live themselves to-day. To be sure, he was admittedly,
pre-eminent as a compiler-an odd pre-eminence
by- the way for an addle-pate-but he was no less
pre-eminent in everything else that he attempted;
and it seems a deplorable dissipation of the genius
of a great original painter to have its most precious
hours employed in making reduced and refined
copies for the use of schools of coarse and confused




172


OLIVER GOLDSMITH


engravings. As, however, even for compilations and
even from the philanthropic Newbery his remuneration,
as the above receipt shows, was not always princely,
Goldsmith felt compelled to look elsewhere for
relief of his necessities; and was only too glad to
act upon the suggestion of the kindly Sir Joshua
that he should resume practice as a physician with
the advantage of the advertisement of The Traveller.
The first requisite-the first at least in Goldsmith's
eyes-for success as a physician was an imposing
appearance, and he ordered accordingly three
gorgeous suits, at the expense no doubt of his
tailor, and also at the expense of his own comfort.
He had to live up to his clothes, and was, as he
complained dismally to his friend, Cooke, because
of their gorgeousness, "shut out of several places
where I used to play the fool very agreeably." "If
the splendour of the handsome roquelaire, of the
purple silk small-clothes, the sword, the gold-headed
cane and the full-dress doctor's wig was too imposing for his humbler friends, they did not impose
sufficiently upon his patients.  For, if the first
qualification for the successful practice of physic is
appearance, the second, according to Goldsmith
himself, is assurance. In his Life of Beau Nash, he
says: "The business of love somewhat resembles
the business of physic; no matter for qualifications;
he that makes vigorous pretensions to either is
surest of success." Here Goldsmith failed. He was
always self-distrustful, while he might well be selfdistrustful of his medical skill. At last he gave up
the unpromising experiment in disgust when a lady
patient insulted him by preferring to his opinion
that of a common apothecary! Everyone-except




"THE GOOD-NATURED MAN) 173
its victim-enjoyed Beauclerk's witty reply to Goldsmith's resolution of disgust:-" I shall give up
altogether prescribing for my friends." "Do, do,
doctor; prescribe only for your enemies."
Having failed once more and for the last time
as a physician, Goldsmith turned an eager eye to
the stage. In those days, as in ours, a successful
play was the most immediately remunerative of all
literary productions, but in those days also, as in
ours, it was the most difficult of achievement. To
begin with, it is naturally and incomparably easier
to induce a publisher, than it is to induce a manager,
to usher your work into the world. Both the risk
and the cost of failure is far more formidable to a
manager, who incurs crushing expense in submitting
a new piece to the momentary judgment of a
capricious audience. It must succeed at once or
not at all. It cannot be kept on the boards, like
a book on a counter, till the public taste may happen
to veer round to it.
A play, then,-unless indeed its other merits be
overpowering-must to succeed be as opportune
almost as a newspaper, must hit the taste of the
town while on the wing:
"Choose a firm cloud before it fall, and in it
Catch, ere she change, the Cynthia of this minute."
Here was Goldsmith's chief difficulty. He disdained
and declined to be opportune. Nothing would
induce him to write down to the level of the silly
sentimentalism then in vogue. Taking his countryman, Farquhar, as his model, he resolved to be
healthily even robustly natural; whereas daylight
and fresh air were shut out from the current plays.




I74


OLIVER GOLDSMITH


Again, Goldsmith would no more stoop to fit
his characters to the special capacities of the actors
than he would stoop to fit his play to the special
tastes of the audience. It was too much then, as
it is still, the practice for a dramatist to take the
exact measure of the popular actors of the moment,
as a tailor takes the exact measure of his customer,
and to cut out the characters accordingly. Goldsmith,
however, kept an unwavering eye on nature alone.
Lastly, Goldsmith had Garrick to deal with, and
Garrick had at once an old grudge and a new
prejudice against the poet. He had an old grudge
against the author of The Enquiry, who wrote so
disdainfully of the stage, and he had a new prejudice
against a member of "The Club " whom his fellowmembers held so lightly. " The partiality of his
friends, sir, was always against Goldsmith. It was
with difficulty we could give him a hearing," to
quote again, what is well worth remembering,
Johnson's testimony to the character of " The Club "
feeling and bearing towards the poet.
Indeed Goldsmith, foreboding nothing but difficulty
and disagreeability with Garrick, had written The
Good-Natutred Man for the other house-Covent
Garden-but, when the death of Rich threw the
affairs of this theatre into confusion, the poet had
to have desperate recourse to Garrick. He was,
in fact, desperate through money difficulties, from
which nothing but the success of his comedy could
extricate him. As there was nothing now for it,
therefore, but a recourse to Garrick, Sir Joshua, with
his usual goodness, intervened to patch up the old
quarrel between poet and manager. But even from
the first the reconciliation was ill-joined. Garrick




"THE GOOD-NATURED MAN" I75
would treat the negotiation as a suit; Goldsmith
as a bargain, which it unquestionably was. No
dramatist could expect any manager, and most
certainly Goldsmith could not expect Garrick, to
accept a play on other merits than its own, and
Goldsmith, therefore, was justified in assuming that
the acceptance of his comedy was no compliment
to himself. Even Garrick's biographer, Tom Davies,
makes this candid admission:-"Mr Garrick, who
had so long been treated with the complimentary
language paid to a successful patentee and admired
actor, expected that the writer would esteem the
patronage of his play a favour. Goldsmith rejected
all ideas of kindness in a bargain that was intended
to be of mutual advantage to both parties, and in
this he was certainly justifiable. Mr Garrick could
reasonably expect no thanks for the acting of a new
play, which he would have rejected if he had not
been convinced it would have amply rewarded his
pains and expense.  I believe the manager was
willing to accept the play, but he wished to be
courted to it; and the Doctor was not disposed to
purchase his friendship by the resignation of his
sincerity."
This is not the first time, nor is it the last, that
Goldsmith, who has been represented so persistently
as the weakest of men, maintained a manly front
of self-respect, which hardly any other author of
the day in his desperate circumstances would have
had the fortitude to show. He paid for it, of course,
and bitterly. Garrick accepted the piece and then
proceeded to starve the author to submission by
postponement after postponement.   Goldsmith's
straits were so extreme that he had at last to apply




176


OLIVER GOLDSMITH


to Garrick for an advance, which these postponements
rendered rather a debt than a loan. This advance was
made by Garrick with an alacrity, which is explained
by his immediate demand for its equivalent in "a
pound of flesh cut from nearest the heart"-or, in
other words, by his demand for the mutilation of
the comedy by the excision of its second character
in importance and merit. Garrick believed that
the play would be strengthened by the elimination
of Lofty, whose character, he contended, distracted
attention from the contrast it should have illustrated
and emphasised-the contrast between Honeywood
and  Croaker.  Goldsmith in his fight for the
retention of Lofty was, as everyone now admits, in
the right, just as he was in the right afterwards in
his struggle for the retention of the bailiffs to whom
the audience originally objected; but Garrick was
obdurate.
When, finally, Garrick proposed to leave the point
in dispute to the arbitration of his own reader of plays,
the laureate, Whitehead, Goldsmith lost all patience
and the quarrel waxed so hot that both Burke and
Reynolds had to intervene to compose it. It was
still smouldering, however, when the accession of
Colman to the management of Covent Garden,
gave Goldsmith the chance of having the play
accepted by the house for which it was originally
written. Accordingly he forthwith submitted it to
Colman, who promptly accepted it.
But Goldsmith had still to reckon with Garrick,
and a doubly envenomed Garrick. Deeper even
than his grudge against Goldsmith, was Garrick's
grudge against the new manager of Covent Garden,
who had not only deserted him, but had carried off




"THE GOOD-NATURED MAN" 177
into the opposite camp some of his best actors.
Garrick, looking about for the most powerful weapon
for the ruin of both Colman and Goldsmith, found it
in a play which fell in with the current finical taste as
strongly as The Good-Natured Man ran counter to
it-Kelly's False Delicacy. Though False Delicacy
belonged to a school which Garrick had heretofore
done what he could, as dramatist and manager, to
discountenance, and though it was an incredibly silly
specimen of that silly school, it was the best stick to
the Drury Lane manager's hand to beat two dogs
with, and he now threw all his strength into securing
its success. He wrote for it a prologue and epilogue,
touched up its best character, persuaded Mrs Dancer
(who hated Kelly, not without reason) to play the
only other character with any merit; and finally, " by
finessing and trick," he induced Colman to keep back
The Good-Natured Man until False Delicacy had still
more deeply prejudiced against it the taste of the
town.
False Delicacy, then, was first in the field, and, as it
reflected the sentiment of the hour, it was the success
of the hour; for the public, like a vain beauty, would
rather see its own reflection in the mirror held up to
it than the finest reflection of Nature itself. The
admirable acting of the play might account for its
success on the boards; but it had, besides, a literary
success, testified by the sale within a few weeks of
ten thousand copies, which to-day seems unaccountable, and, indeed, seemed unaccountable even in that
day after the first furore had subsided.
Thus False Delicacy did the utmost that could be
expected from it; but it failed to do the utmost
Garrick expected from it. It could not so sophisticate
12




178


OLIVER GOLDSMITH


the taste of the town as to spoil altogether its relish
for the nature and robust humour of The GoodNatured Man.
What, however, had most perhaps to do with the
success, and also with the failure-so far as it was a
failure-of The Good-Natured Man was the acting.
Powell perfunctorily walked through the part of
Honeywood. As the star of the hour he could afford
to keep his word when, at the rehearsals, he said that
he could make nothing of the part-and he kept it.
On the other hand, the Croaker of Shuter and the
Lofty of Woodward saved the piece from the
damnation which the lethargy of Powell and the
robust humour of the bailiffs' scene had nearly
incurred. For the bailiffs' scene, perhaps the best in
the comedy, was hissed by the superfine vulgarians of
the pit, and had to be omitted after the first night.
On the other hand, the incendiary scene, where the
fooling is far from admirable, as unexpectedly buoyed
up the sinking piece. What chiefly saved the play,
however, was the admirable acting of Shuter, which
brought down the house in scenes that do not, in
reading, seem uproariously humorous. In the last
scene of the fourth act especially Shuter's acting
broke down the superfine and supercilious affectation
of the sentimentalists, set the whole house in a roar
and saved the play.
Meanwhile, Goldsmith's misery was exquisite. In
spite of the discouragement of Colman, whose foreboding of failure had been even more positive and
gloomy than Garrick's, Goldsmith had himself the
utmost confidence in his appeal to humour and
nature, and now he saw the scenes upon which he
had relied most-and   with most reason-either




"THE GOOD-NATURED MAN) 179
falling flat or absolutely hissed. That he should
have been crushed by his disappointment, or rather
that he should show even to his dearest friend how
crushed he was, has ever since excited the somewhat
contemptuous pity even of his biographers. No
doubt Goldsmith did break down utterly in the
reaction after months of over-work and over-worry,
during which his flayed nerves had been played upon
mercilessly by both Garrizck and Colman. Having at
the fall of the curtain made Shuter the generous
acknowledgment "'that he had exceeded his own
ideas of the character of Croaker, and by the comic
richness of the colouring had made it almost as new
to him as to the audience," he hurried off with a heavy
heart to the Club meeting. Here, though he could
not eat a single morsel, he rattled away more noisily
than usual to hide his chagrin, and even sang his
great song about " An Old Woman tossed in a
blanket seventeen times as high as the Moon."
All this while, he confessed afterwards to Percy in
Johnson's presence, " I was suffering horrid tortures,
and verily believe that if I had put a bit into my
mouth it would have strangled me on the spot, I was
so excessively ill. But I made more noise than usual
to cover all that, and so they never perceived my not
eating, nor, I believe, at all imaged to themselves
the anguish of my heart. But when all were gone,
except Johnson here, I burst out a-crying, and even
swore by  -- that I would never write again!"
Such a breakdown after the wearing worry of
months, after his great disappointment and after the
struggle to hide it, was neither unnatural nor unmanly.
Johnson himself, the manliest of men, had his own
weak hour when Thrale had to place his hand before




i8o


OLIVER GOLDSMITH


his mouth to silence the terrible outpourings of his
morbid conscience. Johnson, it is true, did not, like
Goldsmith, recall and repeat to a third person this
confession after he had recovered the depression
which occasioned it; but this third person, it should
be remembered, was a yet older friend of Goldsmith's,
Percy. Goldsmith, in repeating the confession to
Percy, had little idea that Johnson would now consider himself free to repeat it to Mrs Thrale of all
people, and to repeat it, even with some scorn, for the
poet's weakness. "No man," he said to Mrs Thrale,
in justification of his ridicule of this break-down of
Goldsmith's, "no man should be expected to sympathise with the sorrows of vanity." It might be
thought that Johnson, who, at least, understood the
pleasures of vanity-for no man of his day was more
amenable to flattery-might have sympathised with
its sorrows. Johnson's scorn of Goldsmith's sensitiveness, in fact, was about as reasonable as the scorn of
a mediaeval knight, clad in complete steel, for the
cowardice of a footman without defensive armour.
Take, for example, the epithet in Johnson's Prologue to
The Good-Natured Man, to which Goldsmith objected.
By the way, this ponderous and lugubrious prologue
to a farcical comedy opens incongruously thus:"Pressed by the load of life the weary mind
Surveys the general toil of human kind;
With cool submission joins the labouring train,
And social sorrow loses half its pain."
As aptly might a sepulchre "ope its ponderous and
marble jaws" to admit you into a ballroom. Then
followed in the original the couplet:"Our little bard without complaint may share
This bustling season's epidemic care.'




"TTHE GOOD-NATURED MAN" I8I
"Don't call me 'Our little bard,"' objected Goldsmith, and the - objection has been laughed at ever
since as ludicrously characteristic of the poet.
"Malone," says Mr Forster, "used to refer to this
eagerly - desired omission as one of the most
characteristic traits he knew of Goldsmith." And
Mr Forster is as much amused by the characteristic
objection as Malone. Now I should just like to
ask would Malone himself, if he had been a writer,
instead of a critic, of plays, have been complimented
by being taken in this way by the hand, led before
the footlights and introduced for the first time to an
audience as a mannikin bard? The epithet, you
say, would not have suited Malone as it did Goldsmith. But suppose it did suit Malone, or suppose,
to come nearer the case of Goldsmith, it was
thought by all Malone's condescending or contemptuous friends to suit him, would he have liked
it the better? Would not the "galled jade wince"
more than one whose "withers were unwrung"?
The truth is, it is not Goldsmith's objection to the
epithet " little " which is characteristic, but Malone's
and Forster's ridicule of that objection. To those
of Goldsmith's contemporaries who took their cue
from " The Club," and to those who have since taken
their cue from Boswell, the objection of Tom Thumb
to be introduced to any company upon the palm
of the giant's hand seemed ridiculous; but what
is really ridiculous is this contemptuous or condescending patronage of the author of The Traveller,
of The Vicar of Wakefield, and of The Good-lNatured
Man itself.
For with all its faults The Good-Natured Man, thus
condescendingly patronised, takes its indisputable




I82      OLIVER GOLDSMITH
place beside the poem and the novel as the best
thing of its kind hitherto done in that generation.
It is not, no more than The Vicar of Wakefield or
She Stoops to Conquer, an artistic or coherent work.
Its situations are happy thoughts, but after-thoughts,
less integral parts of a well-composed picture than
a succession of lively lantern slides. But the humour
of the comedy is rich, spontaneous and irresistible;
while no one, I think, will question Mrs Inchibald's
criticism of its leading characters:" The characters of Croaker, of Honeywood and of
Lofty, each deserves the highest praise which fictitious
characters can receive-in fiction they are perfectly
original, yet are seen every day in real life."




CHAPTER XVI


CHILDISH EXTRAVAGANCES
W     HEN Goldsmith was usher at the Peckham
Academy, Mrs Milner, the wife of the
principal, said to him, "You had better, Mr Goldsmith, let me take care of your money as I do for
some of the young gentlemen." "In truth, madam, there
is equal need," replied Goldsmith. Mrs Milner had
noted that the usher's, slender salary was dissipated
as soon as received in treats to the boys. It was so
all his life through. If anyone ever knew what the
odd expression "a cool hundred" meant, it was
certainly not Goldsmith, whose hundreds were
always hot enough to burn an immediate hole in
his pocket. The Good-Natured Man was played for
ten consecutive nights with a success which brought
the author-for his three nights' benefit-close on
~400, while his profit upon the publication of the
comedy amounted to ~IOo more. Four-fifths of this
sum he invested at once in the purchase of chambers
in Brick Court, Middle Temple, which he furnished
sumptuously for the sumptuous entertainment of his
friends. This sumptuous entertainment of friendsthe most thankless of all forms of beneficence-helped
to involve him in drudgery and in debts which
shortened his life. Let me say a word, first, about
the drudgery and next about the debts. He had to
write, as he said to Cradock, a volume every month
183




i84


OLIVER GOLDSMITH


of his life, and a volume a month of the kind of
work the most distasteful to an original geniuscompilation. Nothing, let me say, shows a clear
head more conclusively than lucid condensationpacking the portmanteau so as to put the most in
the least space and the best order. Yet, though Goldsmith wrote a volume a month of this distasteful
condensation, and had to write, therefore, almost
as quickly as he could put pen to paper, his work
was crystal clear. Hear Johnson upon Goldsmith's
pot-boiling condensations of history:-" Whether,
indeed, we take Goldsmith as a poet, as a comic
writer or as an historian, he stands in the first class."
"An historian 1 " exclaims Boswell, naturally enough.
"An historian! My dear sir, you surely will not rank
Goldsmith's compilations of Roman History with the
works of other historians of this age?" This Johnson
proceeds to do, no doubt making for Goldsmith an
extravagant claim in some respects, but inot in
the respects of lucidity, charm and compactness.
" Besides, sir," Johnson adds, "it is the great
excellence of a writer to put into his book as much
as his book will hold. Goldsmith has done this in
his history.... Goldsmith tells you shortly all
you want to know; Robertson detains you a great
deal too long.  No man will read Robertson's
cumbrous detail a second time; but Goldsmith's
plain narrative will please again and again....
Goldsmith's abridgment is better than that of Lucius
Florus or Eutropius; and, I will venture to say that,
if you compare him with Vertot in the same places
of Roman History you will find that he excels Vertot.
Sir, he has the art of compiling, and of saying everything he has to say in a pleasing manner, He is




CHILDISH EXTRAVAGANCES i85
now writing a Natural History, and will make it as
entertaining as a Persian tale."
It must be remembered here that Goldsmith's
historical compilations, unlike the histories with
which they were compared by Johnson-Lyttleton's,
or Robertson's, or. Dalrymple's-were neither his
specialty nor his life-work. On the contrary, they
were incidental tasks for which he had no particular
fitness, fancy or taste, tasks not of his own setting,
but of a bookseller's, undertaken not of choice, but
of necessity. In one word, they were perfunctory
drudgery, and ought, therefore, to bear all the marks
of perfunctory drudgery-slovenliness, wordiness and
obscurity. Being, however, perfunctory drudgery by
Goldsmith they bore all the marks of all his workclearness, compactness and gracefulness. As nothing
needs a clearer head than condensed compilation, it
is, then, absurd to suppose that Goldsmith's brain was
" Like a fountain troubledMuddy, ill-seeming, thick,"
and needing time to run itself clear. A man with a
slow-working and confused brain could not have done
these compilations in the short time allowed him by
the booksellers nor in the clear, attractive style which
won such praise from Johnson. If he did such work
so well it was not because he liked it, but because he
could not help doing well whatever he attempted.
He took to compilation only because he was kept
ever needy by his extravagance and because the
money it brought him in was out of all proportion
to the trouble it cost him. For the two volumes of
his History of Rome Tom  Davies paid him 250
guineas; while he received from the same bookseller




i86


OLIVER GOLDSMITH


~ioo a volume for four volumes of a History of
England. Griffin, again, engaged to give him ioo
guineas a volume for eight volumes of a Nateral
History.. It will be seen then that now and henceforth Goldsmith has himself only to blame for his
ever-increasing difficulties. A man whose expenditure keeps always in geometric ratio to his income
inevitably becomes poorer in proportion to the increase
of his gains. When Goldsmith's biographers regretfully contrast the sums paid him for his histories with
the p4500 paid to Robertson for his Charles the Fifth,
they regret it because they conclude that payments
upon this sumptuous scale would have lightened the
poet's difficulties. As a matter of fact they would
have multiplied them, since he always proportioned
his expenditure to his income as the tyre of a wheel
is proportioned to its nave.
Lady Mary Wortley Montague says of Steele and
Fielding, " Both agreed in wanting money, and would
have wanted it were their hereditary lands as extensive as their imaginations"; and as both were, like
Goldsmith, sanguine men, perhaps the extensiveness
of their imaginations had much to do with the extravagance of their expenditure. At any rate, when
Goldsmith got a lump sum he must muddle it away
on anyone-except his creditors. He paid them just
enough to secure from them more credit, on the
principle of pouring a pint of water down a pump
which has run dry to wet and swell the sucker and
thereby induce it to yield an ample supply.
On the other hand, it must be remembered that it
was his heart which chiefly impoverished him, and
which would have impoverished him had he been
rich as Rothschild. "I have heard," writes North



CHILDISH EXTRAVAGANCES I87
cote in his Life of Reynolds, " I have heard Sir Joshua
remark of Goldsmith that in times of his greatest
distress he was often obliged to supplicate a friend
for the loan of ten pounds for his immediate relief;
yet if by- accident a distressed petitioner told him a
piteous tale, he, without any thought of his own
poverty, would, with an air of generosity, freely
bestow on the person who solicited for it the very
loan he had himself but just before obtained." The
fact is, nothing could wear out either Goldsmith's
uncalculating charity or his incorrigible credulity.
That rascal, Pilkington, as we have seen, who had
taken him in already a hundred times, could take him
in for the hundred and first with his preposterous tale
of the Duchess and the white mice. In his charity
Goldsmith forgot injuries too as quickly as he forgot
rogueries. There was no man he disliked more and
with more reason, than the overbearing and venomous
Baretti, who never missed an opportunity of insulting
him; yet, says Davies, " When this unhappy Italian
was charged with murder, and sent by Sir John Fielding to Newgate, Goldsmith opened his purse and would
have given him every shilling it contained; he, at the
same time, insisted upon going in the coach with him
to the place of his confinement."
It might be inferred-it has been inferred-from
such expressions as Northcote's "with an air of
generosity," that Goldsmith's charity was as showy
as his dress and that the ostentation of each was due
alike to vanity. As a matter of fact, however, the
channel of his charity ran mostly underground.
Scorned outcasts, the moral sewage of a great city,
shovelled out of sight as loathsome, were far costlier
to him than his finer friends. "I believe," writes




i88


OLIVER GOLDSMITH


Northcote, " Reynolds to have been the confidant of
some at least of Goldsmith's sorrowful cases and to
have helped to relieve them. So at least I explain
the first entry on the fly-leaf of the pocket-book for
177I which runs:-' Goldsmith's girl: Mrs Quarrington; inquire for Mrs Jones at Mrs Sneyd's, Tibbald's
Row, Red Lion Street. Mrs Hartley, Little James
Street, Haymarket, at Mrs Kelly's.' These," adds
Northcote, "are all models. One of Goldsmith's
outcast prot6gees had, I imagine, been employed as
a model on his recommendation."
"He had been known," says Percy, "to quit his
bed at midnight in order to procure shelter and relief
for some destitute creature left to die in the streets."
"He had," says Cooke, " two or three authors, several
widows and poor housekeepers always on his list, and
if his purse was empty he emptied his wardrobe
or his breakfast-table for their relief. 'Now let me
suppose,' he would say with a happy smile, 'that I
have eaten a much heartier breakfast than usual and
I'm nothing out of pocket."' His last guinea, testifies
Cooke, was the only limit of his humanity.
At Goldsmith's death the public funeral proposed
in his honour was denied him because he died in debt;
but his own debtors, the outcasts in tears who thronged
his staircase, did him more honour than these snobbish
celebrities would have done him by bearing his pall
to Westminster Abbey.
Let me say a word now of that other extravagance
of Goldsmith's, which also has been ascribed to a vain
ostentation-his extravagance in dress. Goldsmith's
extravagance in dress proceeded not from assurance
but from diffidence; not from conceit but from
humility. He was always, as his letters to his in



CHILDISH EXTRAVAGANCES 189
timates show, miserably conscious of his personal
defects.  Being at once ugly and conscious of his
ugliness, he was through his exquisite sensitiveness
the most vulnerable to ridicule, and, in his impressionable years, the most mercilessly ridiculed of
human beings. This ridicule, which met him at
every turn and stage of his early life-at home, at
school, at college-left upon his character marks as
indelible and as disfiguring as the marks left on his
face by the small-pox. Hence that nervous eagerness
to please and to shine which so often defeated itself
in uncongenial or contentious society; and hence,
too, the endeavour, also self-defeated, to gild his
personal defects with fine clothes. To say that these
fine clothes had the reverse effect- the effect of
emphasizing the plainness they were designed to
disguise-is only to say that Goldsmith was like
most self-conscious plain folk; since you seldom see
such startling costumes or colours as are worn by
those ladies who are, and who feel that they are,
already too conspicuously plain.
In truth, the key to Goldsmith's extravagances,
whether of dress or of living, is the key also to almost
all that he was loved and laughed at for-his childlikeness. " In wit a man, simplicity a child." Here
he is established in these Middle Temple Chambers,
disturbing by his childlike frolics the learned Blackstone in the rooms beneath, distracting him in his
composition of the fourth volume of his Commentaries.
Blackstone complained bitterly and with reason of the
riotous rows above his head of the poet's children's
parties, where he played with them blind-man's-buff,
forfeits, etc. etc., sang roystering Irish songs for them, or
would wear, to amuse them, the front of his wig behind.




190


OLIVER GOLDSMITH


This wig, says Macklin, the actor, Goldsmith threw
up to the ceiling as he danced at a party in his house,
crying, " Men were never so much like men as when
they looked like boys." "Come now, let us play the
fool a little! " was his usual preface to a romp, and
his friends took him at his word and played the fool
with him. At Barton, the residence of Little Comedy,
who had become Mrs Bunbury, she and her sister,
Mrs Gwyn, the Jessamy Bride, and their guests played
all sorts of schoolboy tricks upon Goldsmith, especially at the cost of his grand clothes, smearing his
gorgeous coat with paint, tearing his fine ruffles, ruining his imposing wig, but never succeeding in ruffling
his temper. Most of all he was at home with children,
enjoying nothing so much as a romp with them; and
I do not know that I can close this chapter better
than by quoting the following story from Colman's
Random Records as the most characteristic perhapsof all the stories told of this poet whose " child's heart
within the man's" was ever in evidence.
"I remember," says George Colman in these Random
Records, " when I was a child of five Goldsmith taking
me on his knee to amuse me, when I rewarded him
with a spiteful blow given with all my force in his face.
My father for punishment locked me up in a dark
room, where I howled and kicked the door-till it
opened, and Goldsmith entered, smiling, with a candle,
which showed the mark of my spiteful blow still in
his face. Setting the candle down, he took me in his
arms and kissed and soothed and fondled me while I
sulked and sobbed. When at last the sobs ceased
Goldsmith seized the propitious moment; he went
down on all fours, and placing three hats, which
happened to be in the room, upon the carpet, and




CHILDISH EXTRAVAGANCES i9i
putting a shilling under each, he began to conjure all
three under a single hat to my utter amazement.
Henceforth, whenever Goldsmith called I rushed to
him for a romp and we became the merriest and most
loving play-fellows."
That was Goldsmith's " Retaliation," recalling the
spirit of the poem in which he dealt so gently with
men to whom he owed nothing but blows.




CHAPTER XVII


"THE DESERTED VILLAGE"
T   HE title of "Inspired Idiot" was given to
Goldsmith in right of two poems which had
less claim to the spontaneity of inspiration than any
perhaps of equal length that ever were composed.
The Traveller was eight years in gestation, The
Deserted Village two. So, at least, all Goldsmith's
biographers assure us; but for myself I cannot
reconcile the time they assign to the composition
of The Traveller with the anecdote they give of
Reynolds' surprise visit to the author when he was
at work upon the poem. Reynolds, when his knock
at Goldsmith's door was unanswered, entered the
room unbidden, to find the poet at his desk, but
absorbed in teaching a little dog to sit up with one
hand, while the other held the pen wherewith he had
just written this couplet:"By sports like these are all their cares beguiled;
The sports of children satisfy the child."
Sir Joshua, glancing over his shoulder, read the
couplet in ink still wet, and saw its-happy illustration
in the game Goldsmith was playing with his dog.
But this visit took place in the early part of i764,
the couplet occurs about a third of the way through
the poem, which was published at the close of the
year. As the couplet could not have been an interI92




",THE DESERTED VILLAGE"p t93
polation, since it follows duly upon lines already
written, it would appear to imply that the other twothirds of The Traveller must have been written before
the close of the year.
On the other hand, the dedication of The Traveller
to his brother leaves no doubt that part of it was
written eight years before its publication:"The friendship between us can acquire no new
force from the ceremonies of a Dedication; but, as
a part of this poem was formerly written to you
from Switzerland, the whole can now with propriety
be only inscribed to you."
Though, however, there were eight years between
the conception and the publication of The Traveller,
its composition probably took little longer actual
time than that of The Deserted Village. Indeed,
the poet's pot-boiling drudgery-at the rate of a
volume a month-left him little time for original
work. But all the time and trouble he could spare
he gave to it. The pains Goldsmith took with these
poems was extreme compared with the careless
facility of his compilations and of his contributions
to the press. Cooke, who called upon Goldsmith
the day after he had begun The Deserted Village,
thus describes and comments upon the.elaborate
pains taken with its composition. The Doctor, he
says, wrote poetry very slowly, "not from tardiness
of fancy, but from the time he took in pointing the
sentiment and polishing the versification." He wrote
first a prose sketch of the idea he had conceived,
which he versified slowly, and these verses he revised
and re-revised till he had perfected them to his ear
and taste. On the morning of Cooke's visit, for
73




194


OLIVER GOLDSMITH


example, he had written thus ten lines-from the
fifth to the fifteenth - and congratulated himself
upon having done so well:-" Come, let me tell
you, this is no bad morning's work.  And, now,
my dear boy, if you are no better engaged, I
should be glad to enjoy a Shoemaker's Holiday
with you."
Here is the programme of a Shoemaker's
Holiday:-First, a breakfast with a few friends
in Goldsmith's Chambers at ten; then, a walk
through the fields to Highbury Barn, where
they dined at one; then tea at six in White
Conduit House, and finally supper at the Grecian,
or at the Temple Exchange Coffee-house, or at
the Globe in Fleet Street. "The whole expenses of
the day's fdte never exceeded a crown, and oftener
were from three - and - sixpence to four shillings;
for which the party obtained good air and exercise,
good living, the example of simple manners and
good conversation."
Goldsmith, when in spirits, was the very life and
soul of the party, as he was of all his clubs-and
many a club had he-always excepting the unsociable Gerrard Street debating society. Even when
the members of "The Club" met, not on neutral
ground in Gerrard Street, but as the guests of Sir
Joshua, they made a cock-pit of his dining-room,
as Lawyer Dunning complained; and when a lawyer
complains of contentiousness, he must indeed find
himself in a very cave of iEolus. But in such purely
sociable parties as Cooke describes, Goldsmith, being
self-possessed and self-assured, was always delightful,
and often brilliant, company. Being himself the
mQLnatural-AfI nJiewas kalways happiest in the




" THE DESERTED VILLAGE" 195
society of the unaffected, even of the unsophisticated
-of those who had 'noto nameif^ Tsea    n-sc6-osirn
to fear by letting themselves go. As he expresses
it in the poem  I have now come to, The Deserted
Village:"To me more dear, congenial to my heart,
One native charm than all the gloss of art:
Spontaneous joys where Nature has its play,
The soul adopts and owns their first-born sway;
Lightly they frolic o'er the vacant mind,
Unenvied, unmolested, unconfined."
The very naturalness of the poor endeared them
to Goldsmith. How dear they were to him in other
ways and for other reasons his essays testify; but
nowhere is his profound sympathy with them   expressed with such pathetic power as in The Deserted
Village. The peasantry for whom he pleads there,
are not English or Irish, but English and Irish,
though Auburn, whether in prosperity or desolation,
is Lissoy and nowhere else. It is not a shallow and
sentimental patriotism which makes me urge an Irish
claim to Auburn, but impatience of the stupidity that
disputes it.  I wonder in what sprightly English
village did Goldsmith see the jocund Hodge at such
play as he describes:"How often have I blessed the coming day,
When toil remitting lent its turn to play,
And all the village train, from labour free,
Led up their sports beneath the spreading tree.
While many a pastime circled in the shade,
The young contending, while the old surveyed;
And many a gambol frolicked o'er the ground,
And sleights of art and feats of strength went
round;




196


OLIVER GOLDSMITH


And still, as each repeated pleasure tired,
Succeeding sports the mirthful band inspired.
The dancing pair that simply sought renown
By holding out to tire each other down.
The swain, mistrustless of his smutted face,
While secret laughter titter'd round the place;
The bashful virgin's side-long looks of love;
The matron's glance that would those looks reprove."
Such scenes he had seen on every Sunday and
holiday in Ireland as in his day they were general
there; but where in England were they to be seen?
While, as I have said already, no one disputes the
identity of the village preacher and of the village
schoolmaster with Charles Goldsmith and Thomas
Byrne. To be sure I saw it urged the other day in a
book edited by Mr Andrew Lang-Poets' Countrythat Auburn could not have been Lissoy, because the
nightingale is mentioned in the poem"And filled each pause the nightingale had made,"
while everyone knows that the nightingale never
visits Ireland! I recalled as I read Johnson's subtle
criticism of these lines in Lycidas,
"We drove afield, and both together heard
What time the grey fly winds her sultry horn,
Battening our flocks with the fresh dews of night."
"What image of tenderness," exclaims Johnson,
"can be excited by these lines?  We know that they
never drove afield and that they had no flocks to
batten."  As the critic in Poets' Country admits the
village in decay to be Irish, the nightingale must
have migrated with its emigrants to be replaced by
" the hollow-sounding bittern."




"THE DESERTED VILLAGE" 197
As a matter of fact, however, the depopulated
Auburn, though more Irish than English, was
English also according to Goldsmith's own statement. "I remember this depopulation in my own
country and have seen it in this." And here let
me say that every English critic and biographer of
Goldsmith, from Macaulay and Mr Forster down,
laugh at the philosophy and at the political economy
of the poem as self-evidently absurd. Goldsmith
might, indeed, as a poet be " inspired "; as a thinker
he was an " idiot." It is odd then that every reform
which he suggested has been or is being carried out;
that the revolutions he predicted took place; and
that commerce and manufactures have both directly
and indirectly depopulated the villages of England.
Goldsmith saw the mere beginning of the movement,
but he foresaw its end. Can anyone who knows
what the country districts of England were and what
they are to-day, dispute either the change or the evil
of the change?
"Ill fares the land to hastening ills a prey,
Where wealth accumulates and men decay:
Princes and lords may flourish and may fade;
A breath can make them, as a breath has made;
But a bold peasantry, their country's pride,
When once destroyed, can never be supplied.
A time there was, ere England's griefs began,
When every rood of ground maintained its man;
For him light labour spread her wholesome store,
Just gave what life required, but gave no more;
His best companions, innocence and health;
And his best riches, ignorance of wealth."
Is not this-when all due allowance has been made
for the Utopian exaggeration of poetry-substantially
true? NQ one now will deny that wholesome English




198         OLIVER GOLDSMITH
country growths are drained into the towns to rot
there as refuse.
"Where, then, ah! where- shall poverty reside,
To 'scape the pressure of contiguous pride?
If to some common's fenceless limits stray'd
He drives his flock to pick the scanty blade,
These fenceless fields the sons of wealth divide,
And e'en the bare-worn common is denied.
If to the city sped-what waits him there?
To see profusion that he must not share;
To see ten thousand baneful arts combined
To pamper luxury and thin mankind;
To see those joys the sons of pleasure know
Extorted from his fellow-creature's woe.
Here, while the courtier glitters in brocade,
There, the pale artist plies his sickly trade;
Here, where the proud their long-drawn pomp display,
There, the black gibbet glooms beside the way.
The dome where pleasure holds her midnight reign,
Here, richly decked, admits the gorgeous train:
Tumultuous grandeur crowds the blazing square,
The rattling chariots clash, the torches glare.
Sure scenes like these no troubles ere annoy!
Sure these denote one universal joy!
Are these thy   serious thoughts?  Ah, turn thine
eyes
Where the poor houseless, shivering female lies.
She once perhaps in village plenty blest,
Has wept at tales of innocence distrest;
Her modest looks the cottage might adorn,
Sweet as the primrose peeps beneath the thorn
Now, lost to all, her friends, her virtue fled
Near her betrayer's door, she lays her head;
And pinched with cold, and shrinking from the shower,
With heavy heart deplores that luckless hour,
When idly first, ambitious of the town,
She left her wheel and robes of country brown."
Trade which drafts the villages into the towns,
is uncertain and is demoralising' in its uncertainty;




"THE DESERTED VILLAGE                   199
since precarious employment destroys habits of
industry and creates habits of dissipation, with the
result that the poor become poorer not in means only
but also in morals. That the rich at the same time
become richer is the reverse of a counter-balance,
since their- wealth, being mostly, so to say, in foreign
bottoms, deflects our policy abroad; while at home
its selfishness and invidiousness exacerbate the
dangerous discontent of the destitute. These consequences of commerce under our eyes to-day suggest
that the philosophy of The Deserted Village may not,
after all, be so shallow as the scorn of Macaulay and
the rest denotes it; while its moral-that the seeming
strength of a purely commercial country is but
dropsical-may have something also to be said for it.
Surely a country which is self-supporting, self-contained and self-dependent, is stronger at once for
offence and for defence, less invertebrate and less
vulnerable, than a country which commerce has
unnerved with responsibilities, distracted with dependencies, and left, like a part-armoured ironclad,
defenceless through two-thirds of her unwieldy
length, and left also at the mercy for its food supply
of any power that may have temporary command of
the sea? Of course there is much to be said also on
the other side, and Goldsmith knew it, as those who
study his essays can see; but this does not make his
lament of the evils of the side to which England, as a
commercial country, leaned, less true or less wise.
Facts, I think are with him rather than with his
critics, when he deplores the existence, the increase,
and the demoralisation of emigration, migration,
luxury, and of the trust in the treacherous strength of
commerce. The moral of the poem, as expressed in




200


OLIVER GOLDSMITH


the closing lines-of which the four last are by
Johnson-seems to me to be written in the history of
all commercial countries:"Aid slighted truth with thy persuasive strain;
Teach erring man to spurn the rage of gain;
Teach him that states of native strength possessed,
Though very poor, may still be very blest;
That trade's proud empire hastes to swift decay,
As ocean sweeps the laboured mole away;
While self-dependent power can time defy,
As rocks resist the billows and the sky."
I hope I may be forgiven for dragging in here, in
support of "the shallow philosophy" of Goldsmith,
an extract from  a speech of the profoundest of
practical philosophers. In a speech delivered in the
House of Commons on I7th February 1606-7, Bacon
said:" Such I take to be the constitution of this kingdom
if, indeed, we shall refer our counsels to greatness and
power and not quench them too much with the consideration of utility and wealth. For, Mr Speaker,
was it not, think you, a true answer that Solon of
Greece made to the rich King Crcesus of Lydia, when
he showed unto him a great quantity of gold that he
had gathered together in ostentation of his greatness
and might? But Solon said to him, contrary to his
expectation:-' Why, sir, if another come that hath
better iron than you, he will be lord of all your gold.'
Neither is the opinion of Machiavel to be despised,
who scorneth that proverb of State-taken first from
a speech of Mucianus-that 'monies are the sinews of
war.' Saith Machiavel, 'There are no true sinews of
war but the very sinews of the arms of valiant men,




",THE DESERTED VILLAGE" 201
Nay more, Mr Speaker: whosoever shall look into
the seminaries and beginnings of the monarchies of
the world, he shall find them founded on poverty....
And therefore, if I shall speak unto you mine own
heart, methinks we should a little disdain that the
nation of Spain, which, however of late it hath grown
to rule, yet of ancient time served many ages, first
under Carthage, then under Rome, after under
Saracens, Goths and others, should of late years
take unto themselves that spirit as to dream of a
monarchy in the West, according to that device, Video
solem orientem in occidente, only because they have
ravished from some wild and unarmed people mines
and store of gold; and, on the other side, that this
island of Britain, seated and manned as it is and that
hath, I make no question, the best iron in the world
-that is the best soldiers in the world-shall think
of nothing but reckonings and audits, and meum and
tuum, and I cannot tell what."
The sudden collapse as of a burst balloon of this
bloated kingdom of Spain would alone justify Goldsmith's doubt of the endurance of any empire purely
commercial in its origin, its aim, its ideas and ideals.
Of the poetry of The Deserted Village I need say
little, for about that there is no controversy. Its
mellow and, so to say, moonlit loveliness has, I think,
upon all readers the sweet and sad effect of the plaintive remembrance of happy, days long dead. It has
all the artlessness of consummate art; for never was
a poem less inspired in the popular sense of the word.
Every line of it was cut with lapidary care; for
except Gray, no one was so fastidiously painstaking
with his poetry as Goldsmith. Hence he shares with
Gray the distinction that the classic passages of his




202


OLIVER GOLDSMITH


poems are as pathetically familiar to every ear as the
tune of" Home Sweet Home " or of "Auld Lang Syne."
It was natural that the fastidious Gray himself should
have been amongst the earliest and — most enthusiastic admirers of the poem. He listened to Nicholls,
as he read it out to him, with rapt attention and
exclaimed at the close, "This man is a poet! "
A greater poet and, finer critic than Gray - the
greatest poet and critic of that century-Goethe,
hastened to pay the tribute of translation to The
Deserted Village. In his autobiography Goethe says:
-" A little poem which we passionately received into
our circle allowed us from henceforward to think of
nothing else. Goldsmith's Deserted Village necessarily
delighted everyone at that grade of cultivation, in
that sphere of thought. Not a living and active, but
a vanished existence was described-all that one so
readily looked upon, that one loved, prized, soughtpassionately in the present to take part in it with the
cheerfulness of youth.... Here, again, we found an
honest Wakefield in his well-known circle, yet no longer
living in his bodily form, but as a shadow -recalled by
the soft mournful tones of the elegiac poet. The very
thought of this picture is one of the happiest possible,
when once the design is formed to evoke once more
an innocent past with a graceful melancholy. And
in this kindly endeavour, how well has the Englishman succeeded in every sense of the word. I shared
the enthusiasm for this charming poem with Gotter,
who was more felicitous than myself with the translation of it undertaken by us both; for I too had
painfully tried to imitate in our language the delicate
significance of the original, and thus had well agreed
with single passages, but not with the whole,"




"THE DESERTED VIILAGE" 203
Goldsmith knew nothing of these tributes of poets
to his poem; but he had at least the encouragement
of immediate popular applause. Within four months
from its publication on 20th May I770, no less than
five editions of the poem were exhausted.




CHAPTER XVIII


GOLDSMITH'S TEMPERAMENT
THE DESERTED VILLAGE established the
reputation of Goldsmith as the first English
poet of his day, and the first perhaps, of pastoral
English poets of any day. Burke, writing to
Shackleton some years after Goldsmith's death, exclaims: "What true and pretty pastoral images has
Goldsmith in his Deserted Village! They beat allPope and Phillips and Spenser, too, in my opinion,
that is in the pastoral, for I go no further."
But the home which inspired the poem, which
would have enjoyed this praise most and whose own
praise he would most have enjoyed, was now desolate.
His brother Henry had died shortly after the poem
was begun; his Uncle Contarine, whose kindness to
him in the days of his shiftless vagabondage nothing
could weary or wear out, had long lapsed into the
imbecility of dotage, and his mother, though she lived
for a month -after the publication of the poem, had
also survived herself and was dead to everything but a
dull consciousness of her own existence. Yet no one
needed more or craved morefor the intimate and infinite
sympathy of a home than Goldsmith. How often does
he express this longing and how passionately! In the
opening lines of The Traveller, he pictures his brother's
happy home and turns from the picture with tears:
"But me, not destined such delights to share,
My prime of life in wandering spent and care;
204




GOLDSMITH'S TEMPERAMENT 205
Impelled, with steps unceasing, to pursue
Some fleeting good, that mocks me with the view;
That, like the circle bounding earth and skies,
Allures from far, yet, as I follow, flies;
My fortune leads to traverse realms alone,
And find no spot of all the world my own."
In The Deserted Village he pictures a home of his
own he once had hoped to make, in which, like the
hunted hare, he "might die at home at last."  "0
blest retirement" he exclaims"0 blest retirement, friend to life's decline,
Retreats from care that never must be mine!
How blest is he who crowns in shades like these
A youth of labour with an age of ease!
Who quits a world where strong temptations try,
And, since 'tis hard to combat, learns to fly!
Sinks to the grave with unperceived decay,
While resignation gently slopes the way;
And, all his prospects brightening to the last,
His heaven commences ere the world be past."
I am laying a little stress upon Goldsmith's loneliness in London, because I wish to call attention to
another distinctively Irish trait in the poet's character
which will help to explain, or, if you like, extenuate,
his boyish and boisterous outbursts-his profoundly
Irish, i.e., profoundly melancholy, temperament. The
English idea of the Irishman is that caricatured on
the stage, where he is always represented as unthinking, irresponsible, the very impersonation of
" gaiety without eclipse"; and such, no doubt, is the
social and surface aspect of the Irishman presented
to his English associates. But these irresponsible
moods and moments are mere moods and moments,
transitory and often reactionary-a reaction from




206


OLIVER GOLDSMITH


the settled and profound melancholy which is the
base of the Irish temperament. It would seem
paradoxical to say that the Irish seem such a merry,
because they are such a melancholy, race, but there
is truth in the paradox. Is there anything more
characteristic of national temperament than national
music? But what is the character of Irish national
music? It is either profoundly melancholy or
recklessly rollicking-a dirge or a jig. And the one
is the reaction from the other. Swift sneers sardonically: " If you observe when you walk through the
streets, you will see the merriest faces in mourning
coaches." And so, indeed, you will. Not of course
in the coaches of the chief mourners, nor in any
coach en route to the cemetery; but in other coaches
than those of the chief mourners and on the return
journey. It is the reaction from the prolonged and
profound strain of mourning melancholy.
Now much Irish merriment, and not Irish only
but sometimes also English-witness Charles Lamb's
boisterous moods even in sober moments-is similarly
reactionary and is correlated with profound melancholy. Most certainly Goldsmith's temperament,
judging from contemporary accounts of his many
moody moments, was of this Irish kind-of the
Qpposite kind, that is, to the sanguine, joyous
temperament attributed to him by his biographers.
De Quincey, for instance, in his sympathetic essay
on Goldsmith writes:-" Goldsmith enjoyed two
immunities from suffering that have been much overlooked; and such immunities that, in our opinion,
four in five of all the people ever connected with his
works as publishers, printers, compositors (that is,
men taken at random) have very probably suffered




GOLDSMITH'S TEMPERAMENT 207
more than he. The immunities were these:-Ist,
from any bodily taint of low spirits. He had a
constitutional gaiety of heart; an elastic hilarity;
and as he himself expresses it, 'a knack of hoping'
-which knack could not be bought with Ormus and
with Ind, nor hired for a day with the peacockthrone of Delhi. How easy it was to bear the
brutal affront of being to his face described as
'Doctor Minor,' when one hour or less would dismiss the 'Doctor Major,' so invidiously contradistinguished from himself, to a struggle with
scrofulous melancholy; whilst he, if returning to
solitude and a garret, was returning also to habitual
cheerfulness. There lay one immunity, beyond all
price, from a mode of strife to which others, by a
large majority, are doomed-strife with bodily
wretchedness. Another immunity he had of almost
equal value, and yet almost equally forgotten by
biographers —viz., from  the responsibilities of a
family. Wife and children he had not. They it is
that, being a man's chief blessings, create also for
him the deadliest of his anxieties, that stuff his pillow
with thorns, that surround his daily path with snares."
Goldsmith's " knack at hoping " was gone with his
youth, and his youth was long gone. The process
of disillusionment for which old age stands depends
rather upon experience than upon years; and so far
as disillusioning experience was concerned, Goldsmith
at forty was as old as most men at eighty. For
the rest, as I say, his temperament was essentially
Irish, profoundly melancholy- in solitude, however
bright and even boisterous might be the reactionary
outbursts of merriment in society.  Indeed the
evidence of all his intimates is cumulative and con



208


OLIVER GOLDSMITH


clusive as to his frequent fits of moodiness, even- in
society, in these later years. But Goldsmith's lonely
wretchedness in these years was as deep as Johnson's.
For there is another side to De Quincey's picture
of marriage as a mere extension of a man's misery,
because it gives, in Bacon's phrase, " hostages to
fortune."  If, for example, Goldsmith had, as he
once meditated, married Kelly's sister-in-law, and
if he had been as happy in his marriage as his rival
playwright, he would have had less thorns in his
pillow and have felt less those that he had. Such
a wife would have kept him out of difficulties, and
would by her sympathy have lightened immeasurably
all his other troubles. Most troubles, indeed, live and
grow in darkness, like those crawling creatures that
thrive under a stone in a field: you lift the stone
and let the light in upon them and they vanish.
But Goldsmith's miseries were multiplied and
magnified in the darkness of his loneliness, and that
the loneliness of London and even of Club-life in
London. "Why do you not join a club?" said dear
old James Payn to me once when, on my first visit
to London, I was complaining of its polar loneliness.
"How would that help?" I answered; "not one of
my fellow-members would care if I were hanged tomorrow." "My dear fellow," cried Payn fervently,
" you are quite wrong there. They would all be
delighted if you were hanged to-morrow-for then
they could say: 'Why I knew that fellow, King."'
My cynical readers will see a double happiness in
this thrust of my old friend-at me no less than at
the London clubs. But, the hit, however I may
have deserved it, was not aimed at me by the most
polite and amiable of men. It was from his experi



GOLDSMITH'S TEMPERAMENT 209
ence of clubs this clubable man spoke, and Goldsmith
was little likely to have found any of his clubs more
sympathetic. Even after death should have " opened
the gate to good fame and extinguished envy
Extincus amabitur idem," Johnson had to rebuke
thus the detraction of Goldsmith's old fellow-clubmen.
Rising with great dignity and looking them full in
the face he said, " If nobody was suffered to abuse
poor Goldy but those who could write as well, he
would have few censors." And I need not say that
during his life Goldsmith was left in little doubtas his wistful remark to Reynolds about the envy
which robbed the successful literary man of affection,
shows-that a club was the last place in which to
look for sympathy. It was the last place also in
which he showed need of sympathy. Generally he
rattled away at his clubs boyishly, even boisterously,
as if he had not a care in the world. But these sallies
were often reactionary rebounds from hours of desperate despondency and indicated (the very opposite
of what they seemed to indicate) a harassed mind.
When that pert minx, Miss Clara Brooke, once
rebuked the uproariousness of his merriment by
quoting to him his own line,
" And the loud laugh which speaks the vacant mind,"'
she had little idea that his mirth spoke the
reverse of a vacant mind, in its classical sense of a
mind free from care. The miserable and solitary
Irishman escaping for the moment from   himself
was uproarious in his mirth because of his joy at
that escape. This will help to account for many of
Goldsmith's boyish and boisterous outbursts, which
might almost be taken as the measure not of his
14




210


OLIVER GOLDSMITH


high, but of his low spirits. Henceforward to its
troubled close Goldsmith's life was lonely, unhappy
and harassed. Most of the work he had to do was
drudgery of the dreariest kind,.and he had to do
it with the heart-breaking certainty that it would
be interminable. His difficulties, in fact, were irredeemable because he was irredeemable himself.
What, you ask, was to prevent him living within an
income which was princely compared with that of
his early days? You might as well ask what was to
prevent him being a curmudgeon? He was as much
congenitally improvident and extravagant as he was
congenitally simple, kindly, genial and generous.
His whole character hangs together, woof and warp,
and you cannot tear out the dark threads without
tearing out the threads of gold inextricably interwoven therewith. But, unlike most of "the great
race," his debts made him more miserable than they
made even his creditors, and that with an incommunicable misery which he brooded over alone.
No man, then, I think, in all lonely London could
feel more deeply what Johnson felt at the height of
his fame and expressed in his memorable letter to
Lord Chesterfield, that the grudging acknowledgment of his position in the world of letters had come
too late-" I am solitary and cannot impart it." All
those whom Goldsmith would have loved to have
convinced by his success that their old loving-kindness to him had not really been wasted on a wastrel
had passed beyond these voices, and he could hope
no more to return to them an acknowledged great
man,
"Around my fire an evening group to draw,
And tell of all I felt and all I saw."




GOLDSMITH'S TEMPERAMENT 211
He had, too, a nearer and more tragic loss to make
him -unhappy than that of mother, brother or uncle
-the loss of his old self. Immediately after the
publication of The Deser/ed Village he went abroad
with the most sympathetic of all his English friends,
with whom he had found always the nearest approach
to a home-with the Hornecks, the Jessamy Bride,
Little Comedy and their mother; but the tour, so
far as Goldsmith was concerned, was a failure. It
was a failure because "he took himself with him,"
and because that self was not his old self. Writing
from Calais and from Paris to Reynolds he says
"With regard to myself I find that travelling at
twenty and at forty are very different things. I set
out with all my confirmed habits about me, and
I can find nothing on the Continent as good as when
I formerly left it.... I expect returning when we
have- stayed out one month, which I should not care
if it were over this day.... I will soon be among
you, better pleased with my situation at home than
I ever was before. And yet, I must say, that if
anything could make France pleasant, the very good
women with whom I am at present would certainly
do it."
He was happier at twenty, when alone and penniless, he trusted, as he tramped from country to country,
to chance and charity for bed and board, than he was
at forty, travelling in a carriage in comfort and in the
company the most charming- to him of any in the
world. The Non sum qualis eram no doubt goes for
much in accounting for his disappointment with an
expedition to which he had looked forward with such
pleasure. At twenty, sitting down to the banquet or
life with an appetite keen and unjaded, beef and beef




2 I 2


OLIVER GOLDSMITH


seem ambrosia and nectar, but at forty your jaded
appetite turns in distaste even from ambrosia and
nectar. But, besides, Goldsmith was worried with his
increasing and inextricable difficulties. " As for our
intended journey to Devonshire," he writes again to
Reynolds, " I find it out of my- power to perform it, for,
as soon as I arrive at Dover I intend to- let the ladies
go on, and I will take a country lodging somewhere
near that place in order to do some business. I have
so outrun the constable that I must- mortify a little to
bring it up again."
This trip abroad with Hornecks, may I say in passing, has done Goldsmith's reputation as little good as
it did himself, since in it occurred two trivial incidents
which have been misrepresented to his disadvantage.
Boswell, as I have noted already, interpreted- Goldsmith's speech of affected offence at the admiration
the French officers showed at Lisle to the Jessamy
Bride and her sister:- 'Elsewhere I also have my
admirers!" to mean "that he was seriously angry
that more attention was paid to them than to him."
Yet the Jessamy Bride herself in telling the story
always explained that Goldsmith spoke with affected
pique and in the merest jest.
Then there is the other story told to Goldsmith's
discredit by "special attorney," Hickey, whose rudeness is softened in Retaliation into " bluntness "
"Too courteous, perhaps, or obligingly flat?
His very worst foes can't accuse him of that."
This Hickey, who joined Goldsmith's party in Paris,
made everyone laugh on his return by his account of
the poet's vainglorious boast that he could clear at a
leap a fountain at Versailles, into which he fell in the




GOLDSMITH'S TEMPERAMENT 213
attempt. This is always quoted to Goldsmith's discredit as a piece of bounce, whereas it was a piece
of mere boyishness. No one quotes to the discredit
of Johnson his insisting, when an old man, on rolling
his colossal form over and over from the top to the
bottom of a hill. Occasional boyishness of this kind
is held even in England to be an evidence rather of
mental sanity than of silliness, as indeed the proverb,
"The man who is never a fool is always a fool," suggests. Goldsmith, who was a boy all his life, made
the mistake of playing the fool in the presence of fools.
When "the great Dr Clark," as Boswell calls him,
was making a knot of men merry in the pump-room
at Bath, he saw Beau Nash approaching and whispered
the caution, "Boys, boys, let us be grave: here's a
fool coming! " There is nothing a fool more enjoys
than to catch a wise man tripping, and the greater
the fool and the greater the wise man, the greater the
delight at the lapse. The delight of the little sweep
at Lamb's fall in the gutter was precisely proportioned
to the age and respectability of Elia. The fall in the
gutter of another little sweep of his own age, and
black as himself, would have been a delight certainly
to the child, but nothing approaching the delight of
seeing a grave, grown-up man in spotless broadcloth
rolling in the mud. Now, part of this little sweep's
delight was due to the incongruity of the spectacle
of the tumble of a grave grown man and of broadcloth in the mire; but part also was due to gratified
envy, charmed to see "its better" reduced even for a
moment to its own low and begrimed level.
In the same way such creatures as Hickey and
Hawkins were delighted to note and report any random speech or boyish freak of Goldsmith's, in part




214      OLIVER GOLDSMITH
because of the " Inspired Idiot" paradox, but in part
because it seemed to reduce the poet to their own
level.
To return, however, to the point from which I
started in this chapter, much of the boyish and boisterous merriment of Goldsmith was reactionary-the
merriment of a melancholy temperament and of a sad
and solitary man, who, escaping from himself in company, is as noisily happy as a schoolboy escaped
from school. A great deal of the noisy merriment of
Irishmen is of this kind-of the kind Byron notes:"And if I laugh at any mortal thing,
'Tis that I may not weep."




CHAPTER XIX


"THE HAUNCH OF VENISON"
EFORE Goldsmith went abroad with the Hornecks he wrote a Life of ParnelA, wrote it to order
hurriedly and perfunctorily. It was a congenial task,
however, and a deserved success, as Johnson gracefully
testifies in his Lives of the Poets:-" The Life of ParneAl," he says there, " is a task which I should very
willingly decline, since it has been lately written by
Goldsmith, a man of such variety of powers and such
felicity of performance that he always seemed to do
best that which he was doing; a man who had the
art of being minute without tediousness, and general
without confusion; whose language was copious
without exuberance, exact without restraint, and easy
without weakness. What such an author has told us
who would tell again?"
Of this, variety and versatility of powers Goldsmith gave new evidence in his poem written for
Lord Clare and never meant for publication-(indeed
it was not published till two years after the poet's
death), The Haunch of Venison. Goldsmith and Lord
Clare were fellow-countrymen and close friends, so
close that upon the death of Lord Clare's only son
the poet paid the peer a long and sympathetic visit.
Lord Clare's only daughter, too, was a playfellow of
the poet's, for at this time she was a child, while he,
as she used to say of him long afterwards, was never
215




2I6


OLIVER GOLDSMITH


anything else. He played games with her and she
played tricks on him, and to the last hour of her long
life, Mr Forster says, speaking on the testimony of
her son, Lord Nugent, " she dearly loved his memory."
Childlike also was a naive speech of Goldsmith's in
reference to this stay with Lord Clare, which has as
usual been reported to his discredit. In a mixed company he one day complained thus of Lord Camden:
"I met Lord Camden at Lord Clare's house in the
country, and he took no more notice of me than if I
had been an ordinary man." This complaint was
greeted with shouts of laughter from all the company
excepting Johnson. " Nay, gentlemen," said Johnson,
"Doctor Goldsmith is right. A nobleman ought to
have made up to such a man as Goldsmith; and I
think it is much against Lord Camden that he neglected
him."
Goldsmith's mistake-a mistake he was making
continually to his continual discredit-was expressing what another man would have suppressed. Any
other man of his literary distinction, however modest,
would have thought what Goldsmith expressed-that
Lord Camden had not shown him due consideration;
for it must be remembered that Lord Camden was
not a mere Count Zaehdarm nobleman, who knew
and cared nothing for literature, but an ex-Lord
Chancellor, who might be supposed to respect
intellectual eminence. In truth, Goldsmith's naive
remark indicated rather his usual self-distrust than
self-esteem. I venture to say that any other man of
equal literary distinction would have interpreted
Lord Camden's slight not to his own discredit but
to Lord Camden's-as his lordship's petty revenge
for having been black-balled by the Club. When




"THE HAUNCH OF VENISON" 217
the Chancellor suffered this indignity Goldsmith was
one of its members. But Goldsmith, like all selfconscious and self-distrustful men, was for ever on
the lookout for slurs and slights of this kind, and
he had never far or long to look for them! As
for his naive expression, then, of his sense of this
slight of Lord Camden's, it was naive, that was all.
Goldsmith's tongue hung by a hair-trigger to his
thought, and all that other men keep to themselves
he blurted out incontinently. " Johnson," writes
Boswell, "said Goldsmith was very envious." I
defended him by observing that he owned it frankly
on all occasions. "Sir," replied Johnson, "you are
enforcing the charge. He had so much envy that
he could not conceal it. He was so full of it that
he overflowed. He talked of it to be sure often
enough. Now, sir, what a man avows he is not
ashamed to think, though many a man thinks what
he is ashamed to avow." If Goldsmith so overflowed
with the gall of envy, how is it that none of it spilled
over into his writings? "Whatever appeared of this
kind in Goldsmith,'> writes Percy, " was a mere
momentary sensation) which he knew not how like
other men to conceal. It was never the result of
principle, or the suggestion of reflection: it never
embittered his heart or influenced his conduct." If
every actor, singer, author, soldier or sailor, every
man, I mean, who is "a fool to fame," expressed
in words the passing envy in his thoughts, he would
be considered a monster of that base passion. Goldsmith was singular, only in " wearing his heart upon
his sleeve for daws to peck at.'> "Goldsmith," said
Tom Davies, "was so sincere a man that he could
not conceal what was uppermost in his mind"; and




2I8


OLIVER GOLDSMITH


he adds of his supposed envy, "His envy was so
childish and so absurd that it may be very easily
pardoned, for everybody laughed at it; and no man
was ever very mischievous whose errors excited
mirth.  Goldsmith never formed any scheme or
joined in any combination to hurt any man living."
In truth, it was with Goldsmith as Elia says it was
with himself, " In what is called good company he
would, when some unlucky occasion provoked it,
stammer out - some senseless pun (not altogether
senseless perhaps if rightly taken) which has stamped
his character for the evening. It was hit or miss
with him and nine times out of ten he contrived,"
adds Elia, "to send away a whole company his
enemies." That was true also of Goldsmith if you
read instead of " pun "joke, and instead of " enemies,"
scorners. And as with Elia, so with Goldsmith nine
times out of ten; the " anti-Caledonian intellect" (so
admirably described in "Imperfect Sympathies ") in
conflict with the Caledonian explained the mnisunderstanding.
May I take in illustration the story which the
gentleman who nicknamed the poet "An Inspired
Idiot" said "was a picture of Goldsmith's entire
life "? Goldsmith praised in a newspaper paragraph
Lord Mayor Townshend, the protege of Lord Shelburne, whom Junius had denounced as "Malagrida."
On the night of the same day on which the paragraph
appeared Goldsmith happened to sit next Lord Shelburne in Drury Lane Theatre when his lordship
expressed to him a hope that he had said nothing
about "Malagrida" in the article. Goldsmith in
replying, added, "Do you know that I never could
conceive the reason why they call you 'Malagrida,'




"THE HAUNCH OF VENISON" 219
for Malagrida was a very good sort of man." "You
see plainly," says the spiteful Beauclerk in the
letter to Lord Charlemont in which he tells the
anecdote, "you see plainly what Goldsmith meant
to say; but that happy turn of expression is peculiar
to himself. Mr Walpole says that this story is a
picture of Goldsmith's whole life." Here an obvious
ellipsis, due to hurry of thought, is fastened upon
as though it were due to denseness or confusion of
thought! An Irishman who would be the first to
make this blunder would be the first also to see it,
and he would be the first to make it and to see
it-because of his quickwittedness. To me too that
story, with Beauclerk's and Walpole's remarks upon it,
"is a picture of Goldsmith's whole life" in London,
where, to quote again from Elia's Imperfect Sympathies,
no one's mind was ever "caught in undress." I
admit that Goldsmith ought to have said, and with
due emphasis, to Lord Shelburne, "Do you know
that I never could conceive the reason why they
call you 'Malagrida' as a term  of reproach, for
Malagrida was a very good sort of man." If he
had-spoken slowly and with due emphasis the words
"as a term of reproach," he would have been at
once understood! In a word, Goldsmith's thought
in the ellipsis outstripped his tongue, and if the
speech is to be taken "as a picture of Goldsmith's
whole life," then it indicates, what all his extempore
writing indicates, a mind the reverse of slow-witted
or muddle-headed.
The happiest specimen of this extempore writing
is perhaps The Haunch of Venison, thrown off by
Goldsmith on his return from his visit to Lord Clare
in acknowledgment of the venison sent after him




220


OLIVER GOLDSMITH


by his host. It owed something to the third satire
of Boileau, as Boileau's third satire owed something
to the eighth satire in Horace's second book. Goldsmith's touch, however, is far lighter and brighter
than either Boileau's or Horace's, as light and bright
as Pope's in The Rape of the Lock, and much more
easy and natural. No one has noted, though I
think it worth noting, that Goldsmith has himself
only to blame-his own brag and bounce-for the
rape of the venison, and perhaps it is also worth noting
that it never occurred to him-as it never would have
occurred to him in reality-to keep a morsel of the
delicacy for himself. I must quote from the poem as
an admirable specimen of Goldsmith's lightness of
touch and brightness of humour:"Thanks, my Lord, for your venison, for finer or fatter
Never ranged in a forest, or smoked in a platter;
The haunch was a picture for painters to study,
The fat was so white and the lean was so ruddy.
Though my stomach was sharp, I could scarce help
regretting
To spoil such a delicate picture by eating.
I had thoughts in my chamber to place it in view,
To be shown to my friends us a piece of virtu;
As in some Irish houses-where things are so-soOne gammon of bacon hangs up for a show;
But for eating a rasher of what they take pride in,
They'd as soon think of eating the pan it is fried in.
To go on with my tale, as I gazed on the haunch,
I thought of a friend that was trusty and staunch,
So I cut it and sent it to Reynolds undrest,
To paint it, or eat it, just as he liked best.
Of the neck and the breast I had next to dispose'Twas a neck and a breast that might rival Monroe's I
But in parting with these I was puzzled again,
With the how, and the who, and the where, and the
when.




"THE HAUNCH OF VENISON" 221
There's H-d, and C-y, and H-rth, and H-ff,
I think they love venison, I know they love beef.
There's my countryman, Higgins-Oh! let him alone
For making a blunder or picking a bone.
But, hang it! to poets, who seldom can eat,
Your very good mutton's a very good treat;
Such dainties to them their health it might hurt;
It's like sending them ruffles when wanting a shirt.
While thus I debated, in reverie centred,
An acquaintance-a friend as he called himself-entered.
An under-bred, fine-spoken fellow was he,
And he smiled as he looked at the venison and me.
' What have we got here? Why this is good eating!
Your own, I suppose? Or is it in waiting?'
'Why, whose should it be?' cried I, with a flounce,
'I get these things often' (but that was a bounce).
'Some lords, my acquaintance, that settle the nation,
Are pleased to be kind-but I hate ostentation.'
'If that be the case then,' cried he, very gay,
'I'm glad that I've taken this house on my way.
To-morrow you take a poor dinner with me:
No words-I insist on't-precisely at three:
We'll have Johnson and Burke; all the wits will be
there;
My acquaintance is slight, or I'd ask my Lord Clare.
And now that I think on't, as I am a sinner!
We wanted this venison to make out a dinner.
What say you? A pasty? It shall and it must,
And my wife, little Kitty, is famous for crust.
Here, porter!-This venison with me to Mile-end;
No stirring, I beg-my dear friend-my dear friend!'
Thus, snatching his hat, he brushed off, like the wind,
And the porter and eatables followed behind."
The poet, left speechless, had to console himself
with the hope of meeting Johnson and Burke; but
in their places next day he found a Scot and a Jewsuch a Scot and such a Jew!-wedged with him and
his host and hostess into "a chair-lumbered closet,
just twelve feet by nine." However, there was at




222       OLIVER GOLDSMITH
least the venison pasty to fall back upon. But when
dinner was served:"At the top a fried liver and bacon were seen,
At the bottom was tripe in a swingeing tureen;
At the sides there was spinach and pudding made hot;
In the middle a place where the pasty-was not!
Now, my Lord, as for tripe 'tis my utter aversion,
And your bacon I hate like a Turk or a Persian;
So there I sat stuck like a horse in a pound,
While the bacon and liver went merrily round.
But what vexed me most was that d —d Scottish rogue,
With his long-winded speeches, his smiles and his
brogue;
'And, Madam,' quoth he, 'may this bit be my poison,
A prettier dinner I never set eyes on:
Pray, a slice of your liver, tho' may I be curst,
But I've eat of your tripe till I'm ready to burst.'
'The tripe,' quoth the Jew with his chocolate cheek,
I could dine on this tripe seven days in a week;
I like these here dinners, so pretty and small:
But your friend there, the Doctor, eats nothing at all.'
'Ho, ho!' quoth my friend, 'he'll come on in a
trice,
He's keeping a corner for something that's nice;
There's a pasty '-' A pasty!' repeated the Jew,
'I don't care if I keep a corner for't too.'
'What the de'il, mon, a pasty! ' re-echoed the Scot,
'Tho' splitting I'll still keep a corner for thot.'
'We'll all keep a corner!' the lady cried out;
'We'll all keep a corner!' was echoed about.
While thus we resolved, and the pasty delayed,
With looks that quite petrified entered the maid;
A visage so sad and so pale with affright,
Waked Priam in drawing his curtains by night.
But we quickly found out-for who could mistake
her?That she came with some terrible news from the
baker.
And so it fell out: For that negligent sloven
Had shut out the pasty in shutting his oven!"




"THE HAUNCH OF VENISON" 223
Goldsmith winds up the poem with a graceful compliment to Lord Clare:"A least, it's your temper, as very well known,
That you think very slightly of all that's your own:
So perhaps in your habit of thinking amiss,
You may make a mistake and think slightly of this."
The Haunch of Venison is notable for one of the
very few personal attacks made by Goldsmith in his
writings, for the Scot on whom Cinna was rightly
fathered, and who " owns to Panurge," was that
scandalous and scurrilous Parson Scott who was
rewarded by a rich Northumberland living for his
ribald abuse of the opponents of the Government.
There could not be two more mutually antipathetic
characters than Goldsmith and this mercenary and
malignant Scotch parson, as the following anecdote
related by Basil Montagu suggests:
"A few months before the death of Dr Scott,
author of Anti-Sefanus and other political tracts in
support of Lord North's administration, I happened
to dine with him in company with my friend, Sir
George Tuthill, who was the doctor's physician.
After dinner Dr Scott mentioned, as a matter of
astonishment and a proof of the folly of men who are
according to common opinion ignorant of the world,
that he was sent once with a carte blanche from the
Ministry to Oliver Goldsmith to induce him to write
in favour of the administration. 'I found him,' he
said, " in a miserable set of chambers in the Temple.
I told him my authority; I told him that I was empowered to pay most liberally for his exertions; and,
would you believe it? he was so absurd as to say,
" I can earn as much as will supply my wants without




224      OLIVER GOLDSMITH
writing for any party; the assistance you offer is
therefore unnecessary to me." And so I left him,
added the reverend doctor with indignant scorn,' in
his garret!'"
It would seem a paradox to say that we owe The
Haunch of Venison to the same quickness of thought
which was responsible for the " Malagrida" blunder
or rather ellipsis, "a picture," to Walpole, "of Goldsmith's whole life"; but it is true nevertheless. Only
the other day a Professor of Agriculture, to whom I
was complaining of the excessive use of the bearingrein in London, assured me that it was indispensable
for the control of swift, high-bred and high-fed horses,
which it prevented in their impatient impetuosity
from stumbling or bolting. Goldsmith in London
would have been wise to have worn the mental
equivalent of a bearing rein.




CHAPTER XX


AT PLAY
THE Life of ParneUI was such a success that it
encouraged Davies to order from Goldsmith a
L~e of Bolingbroke, which, however, was written
in such haste, and amid such distractions as that
of his visit to Lord Clare in the country, that it
was but a sorry piece of work. Yet it was a less distasteful piece of drudgery than the double-distilled
compilation he had now in hand-the abridgment of
his own Roman History into a single duodecimo
volume. By a- relentless fate he is doomed still to
tread the shadow of his Peckham Academy prisonhouse and to compile school-books instead of composing pastorals. On the other hand, these compilations, which cost him comparatively little, paid him
incomparably better than his poetry.  What old
Fuller says of learning is yet more true of literature
"It hath gained most by those books by which the
printers have lost." At any rate the world has gained
most by books which have brought least gain to their
writers, since a book which " is not of an age, but for
all time," is for all time because it is not of an agenot specially aimed at the opportune and popular but
at the passing tastes of its own generation. If Shakespeare, to whom Johnson paid this compliment, was
for both an age and for all time, it was in right of his
being a dramatist, since the dramatist must write for
15               225




226


OLIVER GOLDSMITH


the groundlings as well as for the fit and few, if he is
to succeed at all. Hence, as in Shakespeare's day, so
in Goldsmith's, and so also in our own; the classical
works which are at once classical and popular, which
appeal at once to their own age and to all ages, are,
speaking generally, dramatic. Only for the theatre
could Goldsmith hope to do original work that would
be also popular and lucrative, and to the theatre therefore he again prepared to appeal. Such hours as he
could steal from his Animated Nature, from the
abridgment of his Roman History and from the compilation of his History of England he devoted to the
composition of She Stoops to Conquer. From the
following letter to Bennet Langton he would seem
to have finished almost simultaneously the comedy
and the History of England.
" MY DEAR SIR,"- -he writes to Langton about a
year after his return from his continental trip-" Since
I had the pleasure of seeing you last I have been
almost wholly in the country at a farmer's house,
quite alone, trying to write a comedy. It is now
finished; but when or how it will be acted, or whether
it will be acted at all, are questions I cannot resolve.
I am, therefore, so much employed upon that, that I
am under the necessity of putting off my intended visit
to Lincolnshire for the season. Reynolds is just
returned from Paris and finds himself now in the case
of a truant that must make up for his idle time by
diligence. We have, therefore, agreed to postpone
our journey till next summer, when we hope to have
the honour of waiting upon Lady Rothes "-Langton
had recently married one of the three CountessDowagers of Rothes-" and you, and staying double




AT PLAY


227


the time of our late intended visit. We often meet
and never without. remembering you. I see Mr Beauclerk very often, both in town and country. He is
now going directly forward to become a second
Boyle: deep in chemistry and physics.  Johnson
has been down upon a visit to a country parson,
Doctor Taylor, and is returned now to his old
haunts at Mrs Thrale's. Burke is a farmer, en attendant abetter place; but visiting about too. Every soul
is visiting about and merry except myself. And that
is hard too, as I have been trying these three months
'to do something to make people laugh. There have
I been strolling about the hedges studying jests with
a most tragical countenance. The Natural History
is about half finished, and I will shortly finish the rest.
God knows I am tired of this kind of finishing, which
is but bungling work;' and that, not so much my
fault as the fault of my scurvy circumstances. They
begin to talk in town of the Opposition's gaining
ground; the cry of liberty is still as loud as ever. I
have published, or Davis has published for me, An
Abridgment of the History of England, for which
I have been a good deal abused in the newspapers for
betraying the liberties of the people. God knows I
had no thought for or against liberty in my head —
my whole aim being to make a book of a decent size
that, as Squire Richard says, 'would do no harm to
nobody.' However, they set me down as an arrant
Tory, and consequently an honest man. When you
come to look at any part of it you'll say that I am a
sour Whig. God bless you! and with -my respectful
compliments to her ladyship.-I remain, dear sir,
your most affectionate, humble servant,
" OLIVER GOLDSMITH."




228


OLIVER GOLDSMITH


Hardly had he postponed the visit to Langton than
he accepted an invitation to Barton, and the reason
why he postponed the first and immediately accepted
the second may be read between the lines of the
letters he wrote to Bennet Langton and to Mrs Bunbury. Mrs Bunbury was " Little Comedy," and at her
house at Barton he met her sister, "The Jessamy
Bride," and a host of little children; and here, therefore,
he could play the child and play the fool and be
absolutely at home and at his ease. His usual
exordium, indeed, was, "Come now, let us play
the fool a little," for he knew that he could play it
here without a fool's misinterpretation. He played
all kinds of tricks and had all kinds of tricks played
upon him, and was always in good humour and even
in good spirits. "Some difference of opinion," said
Mrs Gwynn, " The Jessamy Bride," recalling this visit
years after, "having arisen with Lord Harrington
respecting the depth of a pond, the poet remarked
that it was not so deep, but that if anything valuable was to be found at the bottom he would not
hesitate to pick it up. His Lordship, after some
banter, threw in a guinea. Goldsmith, not to be outdone in this kind of bravado, in attempting to
fulfil his promise without getting wet, accidentally
fell in, to the amusement of all present, but persevered,
brought out the money and kept it, remarking that he
had abundant objects on whom to bestow any further
proofs of his lordship's whim or bounty." She adds
that he was most of all at home in a romp with
children. Here, to be sure, Goldsmith is at one with
a fellow-countryman who in all other respects contrasts with him-the Duke of Wellington. The Duke
boasted truly that, as he never took, he never allowed




AT PLAY


229


a liberty, and indeed he brought even royalty up with
a round turn when it dared to make free with him;
nevertheless, there was nothing he loved more than
a romp with children, who pinched and slapped and
slopped tea purposely over him to his great delight.
But while the Iron Duke only played at being a
child with children, as Hector doffed his helmet
for a moment to take Astyanax in his arms,
Goldsmith was a child.   He had all the sensitiveness, the self-consciousness, the frankness, the
frolic, the sudden sun and shade, and the inconsiderateness, indiscretion and irresponsibility
of childhood.  Therefore he was at ease and
at home with children and with those whose
"child's heart within the man's" still beat responsive to his mood.
How different the Barton Goldsmith was from " The
Club" Goldsmith, or even from the Goldsmith of
Langton-whose host was the most amiable of all the
members of" The Club "-may be inferred from a comparison of the letter which I have just quoted with the
letter which I am about to quote. It is a reply to an
invitation from Mrs Bunbury to their Christmas
party, in which " Little Comedy" playfully advised the
poet to come dressed in his best spring-velvet coat, in a
wig suitable to a dance with the hay-makers, and, above
all, to be prepared to follow always her sister's advice
and her own in playing loo. "Letters," says Bacon,
"are of all the words of men in my judgment the
best; for they are more natural than orations and
public speeches, and more advised than conferences or
present speeches." Accept Goldsmith's letters thus
as intermediate between his writings and his random
speeches, and you will have a truer picture of the




230


OLIVER GOLDSMITH


man than Boswell's or Walpole's or Garrick's. And
especially characteristic is this reply to an invitation
to a place where he was intimately and absolutely at
home:"MADAM,-I read your letter with all that allowance which critical candour could require, but, after
all, find so much to object to and so much to raise
my indignation that I cannot help giving it a serious
answer.
"I am not so ignorant, Madam, as not to see there
are many sarcasms contained in it, and solecisms
also. ('Solecism' is a word that comes from the
town of Soleis in Attica, among the Greeks, built
by Solon, and applied as we use the word 'Kidderminster' for curtains from a town of that name-but
this is learning you have no taste for!)-I say, Madam,
there are many sarcasms in it and solecisms also.
But, not to seem an ill-natured critic, I'll take leave
to quote your own words, and give you my remarks upon them as they occur. You begin as
follows:"'I hope, my good Doctor, you soon will be here,
And your spring-velvet coat very smart will appear,
To open our ball the first day of the year.'
Pray, Madam, where did you ever find the epithet
'good' applied to the title of Doctor? Had you
called me 'learned Doctor,' or 'grave Doctor,' or
'noble Doctor,' it might be allowable, because they
belong to the profession. But, not to cavil at trifles,
you talk of my 'spring-velvet coat' and advise me
to wear it the first day in the year, that is, in the
middle of winter-a spring-velvet coat in the middle




AT PLAY


23 1


of winter!!!! That would be a solecism indeed!
And yet, to increase the inconsistence, in another
part of your letter you call me 'a beau.' Now, on
one side or other you must be wrong. If I am a
beau I can never think of wearing a spring-velvet
in winter: and, if I am not a beau, why, then, that
explains itself. But let me go on to your two next
strange lines:
"'And bring with you a wig that is modish and gay,
To dance with the girls that are makers of hay.'
The absurdity of making hay at Christmas you
yourself seem sensible of. You say your sister will
laugh; and so, indeed, she well may! The Latins
have an expression for a contemptuous kind of
laughter, 'naso contemnere adunco '-that is, to laugh
with a crooked nose. She may laugh at you in the
manner of the ancients if she thinks fit. But now
I come to the most extraordinary of all extraordinary
propositions, which is, to take your and your sister's
advice in playing at loo. The presumption of the
offer raises my indignation beyond the bounds of
prose. It inspires me at once with verse and with
resentment. I take advice! And from whom? You
shall hear:
"'First let me suppose, what may shortly be true,
The company set and the word to be Loo:
All smirking and pleasant and big with adventure,
And ogling the stake which is fixed in the centre.
Round and round go the cards, while I inwardly
damn
At never once finding a visit from Pam.
I lay down my stake, apparently cool,
While the harpies about me all pocket the pool,




232       OLIVER GOLDSMITH
I fret in my gizzard, yet cautious and sly,
I wish all my friends may be bolder than I.
Yet still they sit snug; not a creature will aim
By losing their money to venture at fame.
'Tis in vain that at niggardly caution I scold,
'Tis in vain that I flatter the brave and the bold:
All play their own way, and they think me an ass'What does Mrs Bunbury?' 'I, Sir? I pass.'
'Pray what does Miss Horneck? Take courage; come,
do.'
'Who, I? Let me see, Sir; why I must pass too.'
Mr Bunbury frets, and I fret like the devil,
To see them so cowardly, lucky and civil.
Yet still I sit snug, and continue to sigh on,
Till, made by my losses as bold as a lion,
I venture at all-while my avarice regards
The whole pool as my own.      'Come, give me five
cards.'
'Well done!' cry the ladies: 'Ah, Doctor, that's good!
The pool's very rich-Ah! the Doctor is loo'd!'
Thus foiled in my courage, on all sides perplext,
I ask for advice from the lady that's next:'Pray, Ma'am, be so good as to give your advice;
Don't you think the best way is to venture for't twice?'
'I advise,' cries the lady, 'to try it, I own.'
'Ah! the Doctor is loo'd! Come, Doctor, put down.'
Thus playing and playing, I still grow more eager,
And so bold and so bold, I'm at last a bold beggar.
Now, ladies, I ask, if law matters you're skilled in,
Whether crimes such as yours should not come before
Fielding;
For giving advice that is not worth a straw,
May well be called picking of pockets in law;
And picking of pockets, with which I now charge ye,
Is by quinto Elizabeth, Death without Clergy.
What justice when both to the Old Bailey brought!
By the Gods! I'll enjoy it, tho' 'tis but in thought!
Both are placed at the bar with all proper decorum,
With bunches of fennell and nosegays before 'em;
Both cover their faces with mobs and all that,
But the judge bids them angrily take off their hat.




AT PLAY


-233


When uncovered a buzz of enquiry goes round'Pray, what are their crimes?' 'They've been pilfering
found.'
'Pray, whom have they pilfered?' ' A Doctor, I hear.'
'What, yon solemnrfaced, odd-looking man that stands
near?
'The same.' 'What a pity! How does it surprise one!
Two handsomer culprits I never set eyes on!'
Then their friends all come round me with cringing and
leering,
To melt me to pity and soften my swearing.
First, Sir Charles advances with phrases well strung,
'Consider, dear Doctor, the girls are but young.'
'The younger the worse,' I return him again,
'It shows that their habits are all dyed in grain.'
'But then they're so handsome, one's bosom it grieves,'
'What signifies handsome, when people are thieves?'
'But where is your justice? Their cases are hard.'
'What signifies justice  I want the reward.'
There's the Parish of Edmonton offers forty
pounds: There's the Parish of St Leonard, Shoreditch, offers forty pounds: There's the Parish of
Tyburn from the Hog-in-the-Pound to St Giles'
watch-house, offers forty pounds-I shall have all
that if I convict them!
" But consider their case; it may yet be your own!
And see how they kneel! Is your heart made of stone?'
This moves:-So at last I agree to relent
For ten pounds in hand and ten pounds to be spent.'
"I challenge ye all to answer this. I tell you you
cannot. It cuts deep-but now for the rest of the
letter. And next-but I want room-so I believe
I shall battle the rest out at Barton some day next
week. I don't value you all!-O. G."
This playful piece of doggerel is, perhaps, worth




234      OLIVER GOLDSMITH
quoting because it suggests how much at ease and
at home and happy he felt in the society of people
who understood him sufficiently to take his boisterous
gaiety for what it was-the riotous relief of a child
escaped from school.




CHAPTER XXI


"SHE STOOPS TO CONQUER"
OLDSMITH'S interludes of play were in these
'J    days "short and far between."  He was in
desperate difficulties, from which he could get even
temporary relief only through the production of a
successful comedy. But everything seemed against
the production, not to say the success, of the comedy
he had just finished. Opportuneness is everything
in the success of a play, or for that matter, in every
contemporary literary success. When Sir E. Russell'
congratulated Mr Rudyard Kipling upon the success
of his Recessional, the poet answered with a shrug,
"It was opportune; that's all. It is not what you
write, but when."  Many great works have slight
contemporary success, and many contemporary successes are the reverse of great, because a meteor,
being in our own atmosphere, shines brighter to our
eyes than a fixed star which is outside our system,
shining with a light so far above us that it takes a
long time to reach us. By an odd irony the line,
"One touch of nature makes the whole world kin,"
is quoted invariably to point the opposite moral to
that Ulysses meant to express by it-that fashion
blinds us by its glare to merit which is based solidly
upon truth to nature —
"One touch of nature makes the whole world kin,
That all with one consent praise new-born gawds,
235




236


OLIVER GOLDSMITH


Though they are made and moulded of things past,
And give to dust that is a little gilt
More laud than gilt o'er dusted."
It is only by keeping in mind the blinding effect
of fashion that we can understand the heart-breaking
delays, difficulties, discouragements and disappointments which retarded and embarrassed the production of a comedy so sprightly and natural as She
Stoops to Conquer.
Up to its production sentimental comedy, whose
Muse seems to have been a genteel boarding-school
miss subject to the vapours, was all the rage. Had
Goldsmith been the feeble creature he is usually
supposed to have been, he too must have been
infected with the mawkish taste of the time, or must
at least have pandered to it if he did not share it.
With his singular versatility he must have succeeded
in this vein as he had succeeded in all the other
various veins he had attempted; but he deliberately
defied the taste of the town and of the time, though
he knew, as his essays show, how much this defiance
would cost him.
Part of the cost and a heavy part too, was the killing
worry attending on the production of She Stoops to
Conquer. Its full-blooded and full-bodied life and
humour, its wholesome heartiness, were in such
absolute opposition to the anaemic comedy then in
vogue that almost everyone concerned in its production despaired of its success. Colman himself, indeed,
was so assured of its failure that he did what he
could to ensure it. In the first place, he kept
Goldsmith on the rack of an insupportable suspense,
till at last the poet-to whom the production of
the comedy meant extrication from pressing and




"SHE STOOPS TO CONQUER" 237
poignant distress-wrote to the manager the following
desperate letter:"DEAR SIR,-I entreat you'll relieve me from that
state of suspense in which I have been kept a long
time. Whatever objections you have made, or shall
make to my play, I will endeavour to remove and
not argue about them. To bring in any new judges
whether of its merit or its fault I can never submit
to. Upon a former occasion, when my other play
was before Mr Garrick, he offered to bring me before
Mr Whitehead's tribunal, but I refused the proposal
with indignation: I hope I shall not experience as
hard treatment from you as from him. I have, as
you know, a large sum of money to make up shortly;
by accepting my play I can readily satisfy my
creditor that way; at any rate I must look to some
certainty to be prepared. For God's sake take the
play and let us make the best of it, and let me have
the same measure at least which you have given to
as bad plays as mine.-I am your friend and servant,
"OLIVER GOLDSMITH."
In answer Goldsmith had the manuscript of the
play returned to him with so many disparaging and
even demolishing criticisms on the blank pages that the
author, now at his wits' end for money, sent off the
play, criticisms and all, to Garrick.
At this point the never-failing Johnson intervened
with prudent council and active help. He induced
Goldsmith to reclaim the play from Garrick by representing to him the popular prejudice which would
be created against it through its withdrawal from
Covent Garden becoming public; while he undertook
to see Colman and to put upon him all possible




238


OLIVER GOLDSMITH


pressure to produce it forthwith. It needed all the
pressure Johnson could put, as he afterwards assured
Reynolds-"Colman," he said, "was only prevailed
upon by much solicitation, nay, by a kind of force,
to bring the comedy on."
Colman, on his part, so resented this pressure that
he was resolved that a play forced upon him against
his judgment should vindicate his judgment by its
failure. He really took as much pains to ensure its
failure as managers usually take to secure the success
of an accepted play. To begin with, he so saturated
his company with his own prejudice against the
comedy that all the leading actors, except Shutter,
threw up their parts! The defection of Mrs Abington
seemed in itself and by itself fatal to the prospects
of the play; but, to make assurance of its failure
double sure, Woodward threw up the part of Tony
Lumpkin, and Gentleman Smith that of young Marlow.
To these cardinal points Quick (the harlequin of the
theatre, who had been allotted in The Good-Natured
Man only the petty part of post-boy) and Lee Lewis
were promoted!
The prospects of the play with such a cast seemed
so hopeless that Goldsmith was urged to postpone its
production; but, as he could not postpone his money
difficulties, he was forced to let the play take what
seemed its sorry chance. "I'd rather," he said,
making the best of a bad business, "that my play
were damned by bad players than merely saved by
good acting." In truth, the urgency of his creditors
left him no alternative. He was utterly at the
mercy of Colman and the manager's mercy was
cruel. Colman was resolved to starve the comedy
to death, not by the lack of adequate acting only,




"SHE STOOPS- TO CONQUER)" 239
but by the Lack also of decent accessories. He would
not allow a single new scene to -be painted for it nor
a single new dress provided; while he was absolutely
at pains to infect the public, as he had infected his
company, with his own hopeless opinion of the play.
At the very box-office of the theatre the servant who
was sent to engage a box for the Duke of Gloucester
was assured that the-play was not worth seeing.
That Goldsmith himself, with his melancholy
temperament and in his desperate circumstances,
should be infected with these forebodings was inevitable. He had hardly even the heart to offer
the copyright of the play to Newbery in payment
of his debt to the publisher:-" To -tell you the truth,
there are great doubts of its success," he said frankly
and gloomily when he proposed the sale.
On the evening of its production he attended the
dinner presided over by Johnson where his friends
mustered to his support; but he could not eat a
morsel and could hardly speak a word. After dinner,
when they hurried off to the theatre, he dared not
accompany them, but wandered away alone in an
opposite direction. He was, in, fact, face to face
with ruin; for the failure of the play-and its failure
seemed to him assured-meant nothing less than
financial ruin. It seemed to him in his despair
to mean even more than financial ruin; to mean
bankruptcy of the brain as well as of the purse. If
this play were the wretched thing dramatic experts
had pronounced it, then he was written out. Only
a man who has to depend for his bread wholly upon
original brain work can realise the torture and the
terror of this thought. Goldsmith, pursued by it as
by a spectre, wandered he knew not whither until




240


OLIVER GOLDSMITH


in the Mall of St James' Park he met a friend who
was amazed to find him outside the theatre where
and while his -fate was hanging in the balance.
"Suppose," suggested the friend, "some alteration
of the piece at the last moment might be thought
advisable and you were not at hand to advise upon
it?"  On this hint, -which was in keeping with all
his forebodings, Goldsmith hurried back to the
theatre, which he reached at the opening of the fifth
act and in time to hear the only hiss of the evening!
It confirmed all his fears. "What's that?" he cried
to Colman, who, considerate to the last, answered,
"Psha! Doctor, don't be afraid of a squib when we
have been sitting these two hours on a barrel of
gunpowder! " This spiteful remark was but Colman's
spleenful expression of disappointment at the amazing
success of a comedy whose failure he had been so
assured of and had done what he could to assure.
Indeed the hiss itself was probably a spiteful
testimony to the success of the piece since there
can be little doubt that the papers of the day were
right in assigning it to one or other of Goldsmith's
discomfited competitors, Kelly or Cumberland, in
whose ears the applause given to the play sounded
as the knell of their own school of sentimental
comedy.
Not only were the papers of the day unanimous
in their testimony to the merit of the comedy, to
its success and to the wild enthusiasm of the audience
" when it was given out for the author's benefit"; but
even Horace Walpole, who hated Goldsmith, and
who was himself hit by an allusion to a friend and
to his club in the play, admitted that it "succeeded
prodigiously," while insisting that its " lowness)"




" SHE STOOPS TO CONQUER" 241
ought to have damned it. "I know of no comedy
for many years," said Johnson, later, "that has so
much exhilarated an audience, that has answered
the great end of comedy-making an audience
merry."  Yet Cumberland-Sheridan's Sir Fretful
Plagiary-writing thirty years later, declared that
the applause was wholly factitious, proceeding only
from claqueurs whom he had himself taken with him
to the theatre to buoy up the foundering piece!
Cumberland, who with Kelly-like Giant Pope and
Pagan-could but bite his nails as he sat miserably
in his seat seeing that his day was over!   As
an epigram in one of the papers of the day
expressed it"At Dr Goldsmith's merry play,
All the spectators laugh, they say,
The assertion, sir, I must deny,
For Cumberland and Kelly cry."
Nor did Goldsmith's triumph lack a captive bound
to his chariot wheels, for Colman was so mercilessly
taunted by the papers with his careful provisions
for the failure of the comedy that he ran away, to
Bath to get out of hearing of his tormentors. But
finding himself still pilloried in Bath he wrote to
Goldsmith himself to get him released. "Colman,"
writes Johnson to Mrs Thrale, "is so distressed with
abuse that he has solicited Goldsmith to take him
off the rack of the newspapers."
Yet these newspapers and the biographers of
Goldsmith are unduly severe upon Colman, who,
after all, as Johnson said of managers, as he lived
to -please had to please to live. He had to trim
his sail to take the popular breeze of the moment
which had long blown steadily in the direction of
T6




242


OLIVER GOLDSMITH


sentimental comedy; while She Stoops to Conquer
was as audacious a challenge to sentimental comedy
as could be offered. Loud laughter itself was low,
but five acts of loud laughter, and of laughter aimed
not indirectly only but even directly at the sentimental
school, was indeed a daring venture. So far from
bowing to the judgment of the town (which had
insisted upon the elimination of the bailiff scene from
The Good-Natured Man as low), Goldsmith gibbeted
this silly snobbery in She Stoops to Conquer. "I
love to hear the Squire sing," says one of Tony's
gutter pals, "bekays he never gives us nothing that
is low." "0 damn anything that's low, I cannot
bear it!" cries another. "The genteel thing is the
genteel thing at any time," says a third, "if so
be that a gentleman bees in a concatenation accordingly."  " I like the maxum  of it, Master
Muggins," rejoins his friend. "What though I am
obligated to dance a bear, a man may be a gentleman
for all that. May this be my poison if my bear ever
dances but to the very genteelest of tunes, Water
Parted, or the minuet in Ariadne."
There was no mistaking these hits at the public
who had hissed the bailiff scene in The Good-Natured
Man, and they were not mistaken; but indeed the
whole comedy was Goldsmith's defiant answer to
the" False Delicacy" of the sentimental school.
Surely the strength of mind and the moral courage
shown by this challenge to the public which had
hissed the bailiff scene in The Good-Natured Man
ought alone to suggest a reconsideration of the
feeble idea of Goldsmith Boswell gives us? Let
me take by contrast Sheridan's Rivals, brought upon
the stage after the reaction against the sentimental




"SHE STOOPS TO CONQUER" 243
school initiated by Goldsmith had set well in. See
how in this comedy Sheridan felt constrained to
make to the sentimental taste of the public the
unfortunate concession of the mawkish Faulkland
and Julia episode, which so waterlogs the piece.
Yet it was so far from waterlogging the piece on
its first presentation to the public that it buoyed it
up-absolutely saved it from damnation! Mr Bernard
in his Recollections writes thus of the effect of this
venture of Sheridan's upon a first night audience:The Rivals, in my opinion, was a decided attempt
to follow up the flow which Goldsmith had given
in She Stoops to Conquer. My recollection of the
manner in which The Rivals was received bears
me out in that supposition. The audience were
composed of two parties-those who supported the
prevailing taste and those who were indifferent to
it and liked nature. On the first night of a new
play it was very natural that the former should
predominate, and what was the consequence? Why,
that Faulkland and Julia - which Sheridan had
obviously introduced to conciliate the sentimentalists,
but which in the present day are considered heavy
incumbrances-were the characters most favourably
received; whilst Sir Anthony Absolute, Bob Acres
and Lydia, those faithful and diversified pictures
of life, were barely tolerated; and Mrs Malapropas she deserved to be-was singled out for special
vengeance."
But to these sentimentalists, who were a far more
formidable force when She Stoops to Conquer was
produced, Goldsmith made no concession whatever.
Contrast the robust humour and human nature of the
scenes and characters of She Stoops to Conquer with




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OLIVER GOLDSMITH


the sickly Faulkland and Julia episode in The Rivals,
and you will have an idea, though far from an
adequate idea, of the contrast between Goldsmith's
comedy and, say, Kelly's False Delicacy, which was
such an opportune success. Now the taste which
made False Delicacy such an opportune success still
prevailed sufficiently to go near to wrecking The
Rivals seven years later, in spite of Sheridan's
Faulkland and Julia concession to it. How great,
therefore, the probability of its wrecking only five
years later She Stoops to Conquer, which was so far
from making any concession to it that it defied and
derided it!
It will be seen, then, that it was not so much to
the discredit of Colman's judgment to be assured of
the failure of She Stoops to Conquer, which was wholly
made up of such scenes and characters as almost
wrecked The Rivals two years later, without a single
particle of that redeeming sentimental leaven which
Sheridan found it necessary to introduce and whose
introduction alone saved his play.
What, then, is really surprising is not Colman's
fear, but Goldsmith's daring, and yet more that this
daring should have been justified so triumphantly
by the result. She Stoops to Conquer was played
to crowded and enthusiastic houses to the end of the
season; was played again in summer at the Haymarket, and in the following winter re-opened Covent
Garden to resume there its successful run.  The
proceeds of the author's three nights-between four
and five hundred pounds-satisfied the most pressing
of his creditors, while the copyright of the comedy
paid Newbery many times over. But the debt
which it gave Goldsmith the deepest gratifica



"SHE STOOPS TO CONQUER" 245
tion to discharge was paid in the dedication to
Johnson
"DEAR SIR,-By inscribing this slight performance
to you, I do not mean so much to compliment you
as myself. It may do me some honour to inform
the public that I have lived many years in intimacy
with you. It may serve the interests of mankind
also to inform them that the greatest wit may be
found in a character without impairing the most
unaffected piety. I have particularly reason to thank
you for your partiality to this performance. The
undertaking a comedy not merely sentimental was
very dangerous; and Mr Colman, who saw the piece
in its various stages, always thought so. However,
I ventured to trust it to the public, and though it
was necessarily delayed till late in the season, I have
every reason to be grateful.-I am, dear sir, your
most sincere friend and admirer,
"OLIVER GOLDSMITH."
To Johnson more than to any man Goldsmith owed
the submission of his comedy to the public verdict,
but the favourableness of that verdict he owed to
himself alone. Everything was against him-the
manager, the company, the staging, the acting, but,
above all, the fashion. Fashion has far more to do
with the success of a play, whose fate a night or
two decides, and decides by the voice chiefly of the
gallery, than it has to do with that of a book, which
appeals at once to a more deliberate verdict and to
a more competent jury; and fashion, as I have just
shown, so favoured the rival school of comedy that
only its sentimental episode saved The Rivals two
years later from damnation. But Goldsmith did not




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stoop to conquer by any such concession, though the
fashion he faced and fought was a far more formidable force then than when Sheridan compromised
with it to escape defeat. It is true that only a couple
of years intervened between the first representation
of She Stoops to Conquer and of The Rivals, but it
was a couple of years plus, She Stoops to Conquer,
whose success dealt such a staggering blow to the
sentimentalists as they never recovered. Time and
Nature were on Goldsmith's side; for in time what is
natural always reasserts itself.  Naturam  expellas
furca tamen usque recurret. Only a short time since
I saw The Rivals, The Schoolfor Scandal and She
Stoops to Conquer, all equally adequately acted, and
was struck-as the audience also obviously wasby the naturalness of Goldsmith's comedy compared
with the artificiality of Sheridan's masterpieces.
Indeed from The Rivals the Faulkland and Julia
episode had to be eliminated to float the piece;
while even The Schoolfor Scandal, in spite of all its
amazing cleverness, or rather, perhaps, because of its
preternatural cleverness, was unconvincing and fell
a little flat. For in The Schoolfor Scandal Sheridan
went farther back than the sentimental Steele for
his inspiration, went back to the artificial comedy of
the Restoration, where everything is as meretricious
as its morals. But in She Stoops to Conquer as in
everything else he has written, Goldsmith went back
straight to Nature and therefore the comedy seems to
us natural still to-day.
"To me more dear, congenial to my heart,
One native charm than all the gloss of art."




CHAPTER XXII1


"AS A HARE WHOM HOUNDS AND HORNS PURSUE"
"'-pHE insults to which Goldsmith had to submit,"
I    says Thackeray, "are shocking to read ofslander, conitumely, vulgar satire, brutal malignity
perverting his commonest motives and actions. He
had his share of these, and one's anger is roused at
reading of them, as at seeing a woman insulted or
a child assaulted, at a notion that a creature so very
gentle and weak and full of love should have had
to suffer so." In those days there were professional
libellers in the Press who made a living out of the
profession. Creatures with the instinct of the sphex
wasp to sting at the paralysing spot in order to
make a meal of its helpless victim. "Attacks upon
private character," says Mr Forster, "were then the
most liberal existing source of newspaper income,"
and of these Goldsmith was made the target more
and more as he became more and more conspicuous.
His crowning triumph, the success of She Stoops to
Conquer, natuirally provoked a host of these Press
Thugs-" It is the bright day that brings forth the
adder"-and I am going to dwell for a little upon
the most venomous of these attacks for more than
one reason. It may serve, in the first place, as a
specimen of the kind of attack to which the
gentlest, most generous and most sensitive of men
was specially subjected just because he was gentle
247




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OLIVER GOLDSMITH


and generous and sensitive, because he could be
stung but would not sting, because, to quote once
more the servile words of Macaulay, "he forgave
injuries so readily that he might be said to invite
them."  But, in the second place, this attack is
worth singling out for particular notice because
both it and its consequences helped so much to
embitter the last year of the poor poet's harrowed
life.  Little more than a week after the first.
triumphant presentation of She Stoops to Conquer
there appeared in The London Packet the following
letter, with the motto, " Vous vous noyez par vanite,"
addressed to " Dr Goldsmith"
"SIR,-The happy knack which you have learnt
of puffing your own compositions provokes me to
come forth. You have not been the editor of newspapers and magazines not to discover the trick of
literary humbug. But the gauze is so thin that the
very foolish part of the world see through it and
discover the doctor's monkey face and cloven foot.
Your poetic vanity is as unpardonable as your
personal; would man believe it, and will woman bear
it to be told that for hours the great Goldsmith
will stand surveying his grotesque orang-outang's
figure in a pier-glass? Was but the lovely H-k
as much enamoured you would not sigh, my gentle
swain, in vain. But your vanity is preposterous.
How will this same bard of Bedlam ring the changes
in praise of Goldy! But what has he to be either
proud or vain of? The Traveller is a flimsy poem
built upon false principles-principles diametrically
opposite to liberty. What is the Good-Natured Man
but a poor water-gruel dramatic dose? What is the




"AS A HARE HOUNDS PURSUE" 249
Deserted Village but a pretty poem of easy numbers
without fancy, dignity, genius or fire? And pray
what may be the last speaking pantomime, so praised
by the doctor himself, but an incoherent piece of
stuff, the figure of a woman with a fish's tail, without
plot, incident or intrigue? We are made to laugh
at stale, dull jokes, wherein we mistake pleasantry
for wit, and grimace for humour: wherein every
scene is unnatural and inconsistent with the rules,
the laws of nature and of drama, viz.: Two gentlemen come to a man of fortune's house, eat, drink,
sleep, etc., and take it for an inn. The one is intended
as a lover to the daughter. He talks with her for
some hours and, when he sees her again in a different
dress, he treats her as a bar-girl and swears she
squinted. He abuses the master of the house and
threatens to kick him out of his own doors. The
Squire, whom we are told is to be a fool, proves the
most sensible being of the piece; and he makes out
a whole act by bidding his mother lie close behind a
bush, persuading her that his father, her own husband,
is a highwayman and that he has come to cut their
throats; and to give his cousin an opportunity to go
off, he drives his mother over hedges, ditches and
through  ponds.  There is not, sweet suckling
Johnson, a natural stroke in the whole play but
the young fellow giving the stolen jewels to the
mother, supposing her to be the landlady. That
Mr Colman did no justice to this piece I honestly
allow; that he told all his friends it would be
damned I positively aver; and from such ungenerous
insinuations without dramatic merit it rose to public
notice and it is now the ton to go and see it, though
I never saw a person that either liked it or approved




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it any more than the absurd plot of Mr Home's
tragedy of Alonzo. Mr Goldsmith, correct your
arrogance, reduce your vanity, and endeavour to
believe as a man, you are of the plainest sort, and,
as an author, but a mortal piece of mediocrity.
" 'Brise le Miroir infidele
Qui vous cache la verite.'
"'TOM TICKLE'?". This scurrilous letter of that noisome skunk, Kenrick,
would be beneath notice, even the notice of the
super-sensitive Goldsmith, but for the offensive
allusion to Miss Horneck, which gave deep pain
to the lady and seemed to the poet to threaten to
disturb or even destroy the friendly relations with
a family where he had found the only home he had
known since he quitted Ireland.
Now what was a chivalrous Irishman of Goldsmith's
temper and temperament, "( irascible as a hornet" and
exquisitively sensitive, to do to avenge this insult to
a lady who had honoured him with her friendship?
There was no other redress open than personal
chastisement of the creature responsible for the
letter or for the appearance of the letter in The
London Packet.  As the letter was anonymous
Goldsmith hurried off with a friend, probably
Captain Higgins, to the office of the paper. Here
he mistook the publisher of the paper for the editor
and proceeded to inflict the personal chastisement
on him. But alas! when you come down to a
mere brute conflict the brute has the advantage over
the man, and the sturdy publisher was much more
than a physical match for the undersized and enfeebled poet.  Goldsmith got the worst of the




"AS A HARE HOUNDS PURSUE" 251
degrading scuffle that ensued, and, to crown his
mortification, Kenrick, issuing at that moment from
the editor's room, intervened to separate the combatants and to send the discomfited and disfigured
poet home in a coach.
Even if you get the better of a wrestle with a sweep
there is little glory in the victory; but if you get the
worst of it! The poor poet was pilloried in all the
papers, which naturally took the side of their contemporary.  In those days in England, as to-day in
America, papers depended to a great extent for their
interest and for their circulation upon personal gossip,
scandal and slander. When a lady said to Sam Rogers,
who had a tongue like a sword and the poison of asps
under his lips, " I hear, Mr Rogers, you are always
saying ill-natured things." "Well, you see, ma'am,"
piped Rogers," I have a very weak voice, and, if I did
not say ill-natured things, no one would hear me!"
In the Press, as in Society, it is the ill-natured things
which get the largest circulation, and naturally therefore in those days the other papers regarded the letter
in The London Packet as good business and took its
side against the sorely-tried poet.
Then Thomas Evans, the assaulted publisher, not
satisfied with his physical victory, indicted Goldsmith
for the assault and would condescend to a compromise
only on condition of the poet's paying fifty pounds to
a Welsh charity.
Finally, Goldsmith's dear friends in the Club made
themselves more merry even than usual over his discomfiture. Even Johnson enjoyed it! "I fancy, sir,"
said Boswell, upon the appearance of what Johnson
called Goldsmith's " manifesto " in the London Chronicle, " I fancy, sir, this is the first time that Goldsmith




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OLIVER GOLDSMITH


has been engaged in such an adventure." "Why,
sir," replied Johnson, " I believe it is the first time he
has beat; he may have been beaten before. This, sir,
is a new plume to him."
It is at least pleasant to find that Johnson supposed
Goldsmith to have had the best of the scuffle, whereas
the poet's sympathetic friend, Craddock, leaves you
in no doubt that the sturdy Welshman had the best of
it. I cannot see why Johnson should make merry over
the encounter-allowing Goldsmith's provocation to
have been adequate-since he himself was prepared to
meet with a cudgel " Ossian " Macpherson's threatened
physical onslaught and also the threatened moral
onslaught of that black-mail bully and blackguard,
Foote. Nor, again, can I see why Johnson should
ridicule Goldsmith's " manifesto " as more presumptuous or uncalled-for than his own letter to Lord Chesterfield, which he was at pains to transcribe for the
admiration of posterity. The neglect of a single
author by a single private patron, like Lord Chesterfield, was an incomparably less public evil than the
libellous licence of the Press, while Goldsmith's grievance against the Press was an incomparably grosser
private injury than that which Johnson revenged in
his famous letter. With all my admiration for this
famous letter I cannot help saying that Boswell paid
Johnson too high a compliment in crediting him with
the composition of Goldsmith's dignified protest.
"Goldsmith's apology," says Boswell, "was written so
much in Dr Johnson's manner that both Mrs Williams
and I supposed it to be his; but when he came home
he soon undeceived us. When he said to Mrs Williams,
'Well, Dr Goldsmith's manifesto has got into your
paper,' I asked him if Dr Goldsmith had written it,




"AS A HARE HOUNDS PURSUE" 253
with an air that made him see I suspected it was his,
though subscribed by Goldsmith. ' Sir,' replied
Johnson, ' Dr Goldsmith would no more have asked
me to write such a thing as that for him than he would
have asked me to feed him with a spoon or do anything else that denoted his imbecility.... Sir, had he
shown it to any one friend he would not have been
allowed to publish it. He has, indeed, done it very
well; but it is a foolish thing well done. I suppose
he has been so much elated with the success of his
new comedy that he has thought everything that concerned him must be of importance to the public."'
This is well worth quoting as characteristic of the
whole tone of- Johnson and a fortiori of the Club
generally towards Goldsmith. If any other prominent
member of the Club had been as unanimously and
indecently attacked by the Press and had made the
following public-spirited protest, would Johnson have
considered it uncalled for and conceited?
"Lest it should be supposed that I have been willing to correct in others an abuse of which I have been
guilty myself, I beg leave to declare that in all my
life I never wrote or dictated a single paragraph,
letter or essay in a newspaper, except a few moral
essays under the character of a Chinese about ten
years ago in the Ledger and a letter to which I signed
my name in the St James Chronicle. If the liberty
of the Press, therefore has been abused I have had
no hand in it.
" I have always considered the Press as the protector
of our freedom, as a watchful guardian capable of
uniting the weak against the encroachments of power.
What concerns the public most properly admits of a




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OLIVER GOLDSMITH


public discussion; but of late the Press has turned
from defending public interest to making inroads
upon private life, from combating the strong to overwhelming the feeble. No condition is now too obscure
for its abuse and the protector has become the tyrant
of the people. In this manner the freedom of the
Press is beginning to sow the seeds of its own dissolution; the great must oppose it from principle and the
weak from fear, till at last every rank of mankind
shall be found to give up its benefits, content with
security from its insults.
" How to put a stop to this licentiousness, by which
all are indiscriminately abused and by which vice consequently escapes in the general censure, I am unable
to tell. All I could wish is, that as the law gives us
no protection against the injury, so it should give
calumniators no shelter after having provoked correction. The insults which we receive before the public
by being more open are the more distressing; by
treating them with silent contempt we do not pay a
sufficient deference to the opinion of the world. By
recurring to legal redress we too often expose the
weakness of the law which only serves to increase our
mortification by failing to relieve us. In short, every
man should singly consider himself as the guardian of
the liberty of the Press, and, as far as his influence can
extend, should endeavour to prevent its licentiousness
becoming at last the grave of its freedom.
"OLIVER GOLDSMITH."
What is there personal in this letter to make it
self-important and presumptuous? Only its opening
text and occasion. For the rest, the letter is written
impersonally in the public interest to protest against




"AS A HARE HOUNDS PURSUE" 255
an abuse of the Press which in that day by universal
admission cried aloud for abatement. No doubt the
provocation to the letter was personal, but as all
the papers were in full cry at the moment against
Goldsmith, it had ceased to be private. In truth, to
us who can see things at this distance in their true
perspective, Goldsmith made rather too little than
too much of himself by taking notice of such
scurrilous attacks at all. That Johnson should consider the letter consequential shows of what slight
consequence even he held either Goldsmith himself
or his grievances; and as it was to Johnson the
sensitive poet usually turned "in all his griefs-and
God had given his share," he must have felt himself
friendless now when he most of all needed a sympathetic friend.
For Kenrick's scurrilous attack was made at a
moment when Goldsmith, so far from being, as
Johnson suggested, intoxicated with his triumphs
was distraught with his desperate difficulties. It was
not, in fact, his sense of his own importance which
made him so sensitive, and irritable through his
sensitiveness, but his sense of his crowding and
crushing liabilities. These worries made him vulnerable as a shelless crab to such an attack as Kenrick's;
while the attack itself and its consequences-his
discomfiture, the ridicule of his Club friends and the
universal abuse of the Press-tortured him yet more
insupportably. That a letter wrung from him under
these provocations should be so little personal and
petulant, should be, on the contrary, so measured,
judicial, impersonal and public-spirited is surprising,
and would have surprised Johnson if he had had an
idea of Goldsmith's sensitiveness, of his desperate




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OLIVER GOLDSMITH


circumstances and of his miserable consciousness that
they were desperate. Of none of these, least of all
of the last of these-that Goldsmith had lost his
sheet anchor, his "knack at hoping"-had Johnson
an adequate idea. For Goldsmith in these days was
more regular than ever in his attendance at the Club,
where he hoped to escape from his miserable selfin vain. For in the Club he found himself more
solitary than in his solitary home. "Little do men
perceive," says Bacon, " what solitude is and how far
it extends; for a crowd is not company, and faces are
but a gallery of pictures, and talk but a tinkling
cymbal where there is no love. The Latin adage
meeteth with it a- little: 'Magna civitas magna
solitudo."' This little book has been written to small
purpose if it has not suggested to the reader that
Goldsmith found himself in London generally, but
particularly in the Club, in uncongenial society, and
he would necessarily feel this uncongeniality most
when he was most miserable. When you are miserable -you not only need sympathy most and long
most for it, but are also most sensitive to such whips
and scorns, snubs, slights and insults as Goldsmith
had to take patiently from the unworthy both in and
out of the Club in these last distracted days of his
lonely life.




CHAPTER XXIII


"RETREAT FROM CARE THAT NEVER MUST BE MINE "
cc    6PE," says Prior, quoting consciously or unconsciously a saying ascribed to more than
one great Greek, "is but the dream of those awake";
and up to now Goldsmith had not only lived himself,
but had also hypnotised his publishers into living
in these waking dreams. He had got from these
printers advance after advance upon projected
publications, and had thus squandered his credit
with them as recklessly as he had squandered the
over-drafts themselves which they had honoured.
He lost faith in himself with their loss of faith in
him, and at a time when he most needed his
buoyancy of spirit. He had to do the most depressing work-mere compilation-under the most
depressing conditions-those of paying for eaten
bread.  Schopenhauer compares the illusions by
which we are led on in life, and led on even to live,
to the bunch of hay which an Italian donkey-driver
ties at the end of the cart pole, the hope of which
helps the weariest beast to drag the heaviest load
over the roughest ground and on the hottest day.
But when, as in Goldsmith's case, the hay has been
already eaten, then the only stimulus are the blows
and curses of the exasperated driver.
Indeed by this the booksellers, who had employed
and paid the poet in advance, had become so ex'7              257




258


OLIVER GOLDSMITH


asperated that they declined to entertain perhaps
the most promising of all Goldsmith's pot-boiling
proposals. He proposed to edit a Popular Dictionary
of Arts and Sciences, and to secure for it contributions
from all the leading experts of the day. Though,
however, he had promises of contributions from such
men as Johnson, Burke, Reynolds, Burney, etc., the
booksellers declined to embark on the undertaking
on grounds which Tom Davies, their representative,
states at length in his Life of Garrick. They did
not, he says, distrust the abilities either of Goldsmith
himself or of his proposed coadjutors, but they did
distrust the doctor's business capacity. The proposed
Dictionary was too big a work to be entrusted to an
editor so easy-going, unreliable and procrastinating,
who had already exhausted the faith of the trade in
him by other plausible proposals which had secured
him advances only to be spent before the work
contracted for was even begun.
Goldsmith, however, assured that a bill backed
by such solvent names as those of Burke, Johnson
and Reynolds would be accepted by the trade, was
at pains to write what he thought, and what Craddock
thought, one of his best bits of prose as an introduction to the projected Dictionary. Bishop Percy,
-too, supposed that the trade had fallen in with so
promising a proposal as the following extract from
the Percy Memoir shows, which shows also-and it
is for this reason that I quote it-how the poor poet
was as reckless in the dissipation of his health as
he was in all other economies
"Goldsmith had engaged all his literary friends
and the members of the Club to contribute articles,
each on the subject in which he excelled; so that




"RETREAT FROM CARE" 259
it could not but have contained a great assemblage
of excellent disquisitions. He accordingly had prepared a Prospectus in which, as usual, he gave a
luminous view of his design; but his death unfortunately prevented the execution of the work.
He was subject to severe fits of the strangury, owing
probably to the intemperate manner in which he
confined himself to the desk when he was employed
in his compilations-often indeed for several weeks
successively without taking exercise.  On such
occasions he usually hired lodgings in some farmhouse a few miles from London and wrote there
without cessation till he had finished his task. He
then carried his copy to the bookseller, received
his compensation and gave himself up, perhaps for
months without interruption, to the gaieties, amusements and societies of London."
Such a life is soon ended. Weeks of continuous
and intense sedentary work, alternating with weeks
of such London dissipation and accompanied by
that corroding cancer of the mind-worry-might
well have undermined a stronger constitution than
Goldsmith's. Worry itself is like a tumour into
which everything else that is wrong in the body
settles, exasperating it -and being exasperated by it.
I say this in extenuation of some petulant outbreaks
recorded about this time of Goldsmith. A man who
is at peace with himself may well be at peace with
all men; while the quarrelsome man usually is he
that has his first and chief quarrel with himself.
In judging, then, these outbreaks of Goldsmith's
which Boswell and others have recorded, we should
keep in mind not only the provocation, which was
often exasperating, but also the state of exaspera



260


OLIVER GOLDSMITH


tion to which ill-health and work and worry had
brought the poet.   The whole quarrel between
Brutus and Cassius is explained at the close of the
scene when Brutus says:"0 Cassius, I am sick of many griefs.
Portia is dead."
And Cassius exclaims,
" How 'scaped I killing when I crossed you so?"
The occasion even of a life-long quarrel with a
friend is often not its cause, since this had to do
with someone or something else that had fretted
him an hour before into irritability.
May I take in illustration the momentary quarrel
between Johnson and Goldsmith which occurred at
this time and has with many readers of Boswell
discredited the sensitive poet. At a party at Messrs
Dilly, the booksellers, where amongst the fellowguests of Johnson and Goldsmith were a dissenting
minister, Dr Mayo, and the evangelical hymn-writer,
Toplady, Boswell, with his usual tactful felicity,
started of all subjects that of toleration. Johnson
thundering intolerantly on toleration sounds in our
ears to-day rather like St Anthony Absolute furiously
asserting his calmness. That he should have been
heard as patiently as he was speaks eloquently for
the Christian spirit of Dr Mayo, who never lost
his temper even under such taunts-as unjust as
they were unprovoked-as this: "Dr Mayo," says
Johnson, " like other champions for unlimited toleration, has got a set of words." Goldsmith also was
trampled upon with as little consideration and as
little justice. " Our first reformers," began Goldsmith,
"who were burnt for not believing bread and wine




"RETREAT FROM CARE" 261
to be Christ-" "Sir," shouted Johnson in interruption, " they were not burnt for not believing bread
and wine to be Christ, but for insulting those that
did believe it." An odd defence, certainly, of the
Inquisition! Whatever may be said for the torture
of a single heretic for a few minutes by burning
him alive in order to prevent the spread of a heresy
which would involve the burning alive for all eternity
of thousands, there is nothing to be said 'for a
Christian's avenging an insult to his faith by the
stake. Goldsmith was thus not only summarily but
permanently silenced, while the argument thundered
on if, indeed, it could be called an argument. "Si
pugna est, ubi tu pulsas, ego vapulo tantum." Here,
however, is Boswell's account of the affair:"During this argument Goldsmith sat in restless
agitation from a wish to get in and shine. Finding
himself excluded, he had taken his hat to go away,
but remained for some time with it in his hand, like
a gamester who, at the close of a long night, lingers
for a little while to see if he can have a favourable
opening to finish with success. Once when he was
beginning to speak he found himself overpowered
by the loud voice of Johnson, who was at the opposite
end of the table and did not perceive Goldsmith's
attempt. Thus disappointed of the wish to obtain
the attention of the company, Goldsmith in a passion
threw down his hat, looking angrily at Johnson and
exclaiming in a bitter tone,' Take it!' When Toplady
was going to speak, Johnson uttered some sound
which led Goldsmith to think that he was beginning
again and taking the words from Toplady. Upon
which he seized this opportunity of venting his
own envy and spleen under the pretext of supporting




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another person. ' Sir,' said he to Johnson, '-the
gentleman has heard you patiently for an hour; pray
allow us now to hear him.' Johnson (sternly), 'Sir,
I was not interrupting the gentleman. I was only
giving him a signal of my attention. Sir, you are
impertinent.' Goldsmith made no reply, but continued in the company for some time."
That, is worth quoting if only as a not unfair
specimen of the kind of Boswellian comment which
has so discredited Goldsmith. Would Boswell have
charged any other member of the company with " a
wish to shine," because he desired to contribute to
the discussion, or with "envy and spleen" because
he resented the gross rudeness with which he was
excluded? What, again, would Boswell have said
if it had been Goldsmith who had thundered away
for an hour in justification of persecution, and if it
had been Johnson who was snubbed and suppressed
by such a preposterous " Poor Poll " contradiction as,
"Sir, they were not burnt for not believing bread
and wine to be Christ, but for insulting those who
did believe it"? On whose side, too, is the balance
of impertinence in the discussion as Boswell reports
it? That in Doctor Major "is but a choleric word "
which in Doctor Minor " is flat blasphemy." Boswell
certainly would never have struck the balance as
Johnson himself magnanimously did a little later
at the Club.
" Johnson, Mr Langton and I went together to the
Club, where we found Mr Burke, Mr Garrick and
some other members, and amongst them our friend
Goldsmith, who sat silently brooding over Johnson's
reprimand to him after dinner. Johnson perceived
this and said aside to some of us, 'I'll make Gold



"RETREAT FROM CARE" 263
smith forgive me'; -and then called to him in (a loud
voice, 'Dr Goldsmith, something passed to-day
where you and I dined: I ask your pardon.' Goldsmith answered placidly, ' It must be much from you,
sir, that I take ill.' And so at once the difference
was over and they were on as easy terms as ever,
and Goldsmith rattled away as usual."
What, however, probably strikes most readers in
this report of the dinner at Dilly's is Goldsmith's
child-like attitude and childish petulance as he stands
hesitating, hat in hand, at the door, in the hope of
being allowed to get a word in, and his flinging down
his hat in a passion when that hope had gone exclaiming pettishly, " Take it!" It seems ludicrously,
and perhaps to a cynical reader despicably, childish;
but to readers who realise Goldsmith's state at this
time-state of health, of circumstances and of mindthe irritable outburst will seem rather pathetic than
laughable. Usually Goldsmith forgave and forgot
immediately even Johnson's sledge-hammer snubs,
and if he now brooded over this one miserably and
for hours, it was only because he was now so miserable in himself. And if, after the reconciliation, he
seemed to Boswell to rattle away as lightheartedly
as usual, it was all on the surface. As his countrymen, Cooke and Glover, who knew and shared his
Irish temperament, testified, he would hurry away
from such a scene to his lonely home, only to brood
miserably over his desperate circumstances.  At
home his two servants, John Eyles and Mary Ginger,
noted now in their kind and considerate master a
sad change of temper. He was irritable, impatient
and passionate, but, they added, so penitent for his
outbursts that they used to quarrel as to which of




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OLIVER GOLDSMITH


the two should be the first to fall in his way
immediately afterwards since he was sure to express his penitence practically by a generous tip.
The fact is Goldsmith's past life had at last come
up with him. The privations he had suffered when
he tramped the Continent and when he lived in
London amongst the beggars in Axe Lane, the
alternation of weeks of intense and continuous
sedentary work with weeks of dissipation, and the
exhaustion of his credit with exasperated booksellers
to whom he had pledged his over-worked brain for
years in advance, all these helped to undermine a
constitution never robust, and left him a sensitive
prey to a host of worries and an easy prey to illness
and death. Perhaps the pension, which his friends
sought to secure for him, might have so lightened
his troubles as to have lengthened his life; but
pensions in these days were paid usually for services
rather to politics than to literature.  No doubt
Wedderburne, in defending Johnson's pension against
Tommy Townshend, had spoken of the magnanimous
intention of the ministry henceforth to extend the
bounty of the crown to other and worthier writers
than mere political pamphleteers-to writers who
had the double claim of need and of literary distinction-yet though no one was more eligible on both
grounds than Goldsmith, the application for a pension
to him was decidedly refused. It was granted to such
immortal writers as Arthur Murphy, Hugh Kelly and
Shebbeare, and for such immortal writings as Beattie's
Essay on Truth; but the author of The Vicar of
Wakefield was sent empty away. The grant to
Beattie was a double mortification to Goldsmith as
it was invidiously made at the time when that for




"RETREAT FROM CARE" 265
the poet had been refused, and also when the Scotch
Professor's shallow and pretentious answer to
Voltaire and to Hume was extravagantly praised
as superior to anything in prose the Irishman had
written. " Here's such a stir," said Goldsmith, "about
a fellow that has written one book and I have written
many." "Ah, Doctor," retorted Johnson, "there goes
two-and-forty sixpences, you know, to one guinea."
What is a contemporary's judgment on a contemporary worth when Johnson could think the
Essay on Truth a masterpiece, and when Reynolds
could paint Beattie with the Essay on Truth under his
arm and the angel of Truth by his side driving away
the fiend of falsehood represented by the figure of
Hume, that of sophistry represented by the face of
Voltaire, and that of infidelity personated by the obese
Gibbon! " It very ill becomes a man of your eminence
and character," said Goldsmith to Reynolds, "to debase so high a genius as Voltaire before so mean a
writer as Beattie. Beattie and his book will be
forgotten in ten yeats, while Voltaire's fame will last
for ever. Take care it does not perpetuate this picture
to the shame of such a man as you."
To be sure, Beattie's pose as fidei defensor went far
to overcome Johnson's anti-Scotch prejudice, while
his being a Scotsman went far to securing him a
pension in these days of Lord Bute. It was not, however, only the orthodox and the Scotch that hailed
Beattie as a new star of the first magnitude, but also
the Club, and indeed all London Society. Hence
when Goldsmith ventured to estimate the Essay on
Truth as every reader of to-day would estimate it, he
was universally hooted down as ill-conditioned and
envious.  "Everyone," said Mrs Thrale, "loves Dr




266


OLIVER GOLDSMITH


Beattie but Goldsmith, who says he cannot bear the
sight of so much applause as we all bestow upon him.
Did he not tell us so himself, who could believe he
was so amazingly ill-natured?" Of course Goldsmith's ill-health and embarrassed circumstances, his
disgust with his dearest friends, Johnson and Reynolds'
extravagant appreciation of Beattie,and his disappointment that the Essay on Truth should be rewarded
with'a pension which all his own work could not secure,
edged his criticism of the Scotch Professor with a
bitterness which seemed wholly envious. He was
envious and confessed it, but it was the confession,
not the envy, which was peculiar to him. It is true
that when even Boswell admitted that "Goldsmith
had not more of this vice than other people have, but
only talked of it freely," Johnson contended that his
talking of it freely showed "that he had such a
superabundance of the odious quality that he cannot
keep it within his own breast, but it boils over." But
you should take this outburst of Johnson's with its
provocation in order to weigh what it's worth. It
must always be remembered in reading Boswell's Life
of Johnson that the biographer was for ever setting his
friends by the ears, rather out of meddlesomeness than
out of mischievousness. Again and again he reminds
you of the boy at school who is for ever trying to get
up a fight between two of his school-fellows by first
provoking and then repeating to each in turn something irritating said by the other. Having a special
jealousy of Goldsmith's favour with Johnson, he was
specially given to provoking and then repeating to
each something to his disparagement said by the other.
Now, when it is remembered that Goldsmith was
the least discreet of men, and again, that the most




"RETREAT FROM CARE" 267
discreet of men will at times say something of his
dearest friend which, if repeated, would enrage him
irreconcilably, the wonder is that the tale-bearing
Boswell had not exasperated Johnson into saying
harsher things of Goldsmith than any of those he has
recorded. Goldsmith, who, as Retaliation shows,
had a singularly shrewd judgment of men, had taken
Johnson's measure, knew at once his powers and his
limitations better than any man, except Burke, in the
Club, and when, therefore, Boswell would designedly
provoke him by the extravagance of his praise of
Johnson's powers, Goldsmith would naturally urge
his limitations. When, e.g., Boswell, being about to
return to Scotland, paid a farewell visit-a final
farewell as it turned out-to Goldsmith, and proceeded as usual to launch out into hyperbolical
eulogy of Johnson, he says, " The jealousy and envy
of Goldsmith, which, though possessed of many most
amiable qualities, he frankly avowed, broke out
violently at this interview.... He now seemed
very angry that Johnson was going to be a traveller;
said he would be a dead weight for me to carry and
that I should never be able to lug him along through
the Highlands and Hebrides." Nor would he patiently
allow me to enlarge upon Johnson's wonderful abilities,
but exclaimed, "Is he like Burke, who winds into a
subject like a serpent?" "But," said I, " Johnson is
the Hercules who strangled serpents in his cradle."
By the way, I know nothing more characteristic of
the fatuity of Boswell than that he should print this
retort years after he had uttered it, under the impression that it was relevant, happy and crushing. Compared with it the oft-quoted exhortation of that
Sheffield clerical magistrate, Alderson, to a criminal




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OLIVER GOLDSMITH


brought before him, is relevance itself:-" John, John!
This is sad indeed I God Almighty has given you
health and strength, instead of which you go about
stealing ducks!"  But to return: Boswell, having
irritated Goldsmith into disparagement of Johnson,
hurries always straight away to Johnson to repeat a
conversation in which the poet plays the part of
Advocatus Diaboli and himself that of Advocatus Dei
to his idol.
Keeping this in mind-and it should be continually
kept in mind in reading Boswell-the wonder is not
that Johnson was provoked into saying from time to
time harsh and unjust things of Goldsmith, which the
jealousy of Boswell eagerly recorded, but that the
friendship between the two writers remained to the
close unbroken and even uninterrupted. That Goldsmith's affection should have been proof against all
the snubs he received in public from Johnson is to
the credit of his sweetness of nature; but it is to the
credit of Johnson's magnanimity that his reciprocal
affection should have survived Boswell's repetition to
him in cold blood of the poet's petulant outbursts.
No doubt Boswell was by universal admission what
Johnson called him, a "clubbable man," but his very
sociability was, so to say, disintegrating, since he would
stimulate conversation by reporting personal remarks
to the person they concerned. Goldsmith, whose
tongue hung by a hair-trigger, and for whom Boswell
had a jealous dislike, suffered more than any other
member of the club from this busybody, who fertilised
discord as bees fertilise flowers. And not between
Johnson and Goldsmith only. I have little doubt
that much of the prejudice of Garrick, e.g., against
Goldsmith, was due to Boswell's report to him of some




"RETREAT FROM CARE" 269
of the outbursts of the dramatist when under harrow
of the manager. Yet it was to Garrick, now that the
booksellers declined to float The Popular Dictionary
of Arts and Sciences, that Goldsmith had, in his
desperate straits, to appeal for assistance. Mr Forster
prints the following letter from him to the manager
of Drury Lane, and its ungrammatical incoherence
and shaky signature-of which he gives a facsimile —
indicate pathetically the distraction in which it was
written:"MY DEAR SIR,-Your saying you would play
my Good-Natured Man- makes me wish it.   The
money you advanced me upon Newbery's note I
have the mortification to find is not yet paid, but
he says he will in two or three days. What I mean
by this letter is to lend me sixty pound for which I
will give you Newbery's note, so that the whole of my
debt will be an hundred for which you shall have
Newbery's note as a security. This may be paid
either from my alteration if my benefit should come
to so much, but at any rate I will take care you shall
not be a loser. I will give you a new character in
my comedy and knock out Lofty which does not
do and will make such other alterations as you direct.
— I am, yours,           OLIVER GOLDSMITH.
"I beg an answer."
Garrick is hardly perhaps to be blamed for
endorsing this letter, "Goldsmith's parlaver" (sic),
while he is certainly to be praised for offering the
loan asked for on Goldsmith's own acceptance. But
this loan was but as a straw grasped at by a drowning
man who felt himself sinking hopelessly in deep
waters where no ground was. Even the spiteful




270


OLIVER GOLDSMITH


Beauclerk would have rather pitied than scorned
Goldsmith in these days if he had guessed the
real cause of his wretchedness. "We have a new
comedy here," writes Beauclerk to Lord Charlemont,
"which is good for nothing. Bad as it is, however,
it succeeds very well, and has almost killed Goldsmith with envy." And these fits of gloom alternated
with forced and feverish outbursts of apparent gaiety
with the Hornecks at Barton, or with Sir Joshua
at Vauxhall, or at Beauclerk's house, where he played
the buffoon with Garrick, recalling those lines of
Metastasio:"If each man's deeply hidden woe
Were written out upon his brow,
For many then our tears would flow
Who rather move our envy now.
Alas! how many in whose breast
The keenest agonies exist,
Make in appearing to be blest,
Their sum of happiness consist."
More sympathetic friends than Beauclerk, however,
saw how it was in these days with Goldsmith. Sir
Joshua noticed his occasional distraction of manner in
the midst of his forced gaiety and his abrupt departure
even from the most congenial company to brood alone
over his troubles. Craddock, too, noted how painfully
Goldsmith was altered-his cheerfulness, when he was
cheerful, all forced and spasmodic. Craddock could
not rekindle even a spark of hope in a breast which
once was all hopefulness. To his suggestion that
a subscription edition of The Traveller and The
Deserted Village-if the holders of the copyrights
would consent to it-might bring in a substantial
sum, Goldsmith replied listlessly, "Pray, do what you




"RETREAT FROM CARE" 271
please with them." And when Craddock insisted upon
the poet's dining with his wife and himself on the
day before their return to Leicestershire, Goldsmith
replied, "I will; but on one condition-that you will
not ask me to eat anything." "In the course of the
evening," writes Craddock, in recalling this dismal
dinner, "Goldsmith endeavoured to talk and remark
as usual, but all was forced."
While Beauclerk was writing to Lord Charlemont,
expressing his delight in the success of a new and bad
play because it had almost killed Goldsmith with envy,
two of the poet's humblest creditors, milliners, the
Misses Gun, made this appeal to Craddock, " Oh, sir,
sooner persuade Mr Goldsmith to let us work for him
gratis than suffer him to apply to any other. We are
sure that he will pay us if he can." Which understood Goldsmith better?




CHAPTER XXIV


"RETALIATION"
WHAT struck me most in a recently-published
Life of Foote was the servile obsequiousness
of Garrick to this unscrupulous mimic who repaid his
many and deep obligations, both professional and
pecuniary, to the actor with scurrilous abuse. Foote
never had a kind word, or any other than a libellous
word, for Garrick (whose candid friends kept him
well-informed of the libels), yet the more abusive the
mimic became the more obsequious and obliging he
found the actor. The fact is there was something
more to fear-and which Garrick feared more-from
Foote than private libel-public mimicry-and the
dread of this kept the actor fawning at the mimic's
heel.
On the other hand, from Goldsmith, who seldom
said and never did an unkind thing, Garrick had, or
thought that he had, nothing to fear, and therefore he
ridiculed him relentlessly. But sometimes the longbullied boy at school turns upon his tormentor and
thrashes him once, but once for all, into good behaviour.
Thackeray told a dear old friend of mine, a daughter
of Ingoldsby, how his nose came to be broken at the
Charterhouse, how it became the permanent disfigurement it was, and how he avenged the outrage. It had
been broken accidentally by his life-long friend,
Venables-the original of George Warrington-but
272




" RETALIATION "


273


it was so skilfully set that it would have been no disfigurement had not a big bully bound Thackeray
helplessly to a tree and then deliberately and hopelessly smashed it in. " I grew big enough and strong
enough," said Thackeray afterwards to my old friend,
"to give that young ruffian the soundest thrashing a
boy ever got I"
Garrick also, having ridiculed and browbeaten
Goldsmith for years, succeeded at last in inflicting
upon him the permanent disfigurement of the
epitaph:"Here lies Nolly Goldsmith, for shortness called Noll,
Who wrote like an angel; but talked like poor Poll."
And Goldsmith, like Thackeray with his schoolmate bully, turned at last upon his tormentor and
inflicted upon him-no brutal bludgeoning certainly,
because it was not in the poet's nature to be
brutal-but such a correction, at once kindly and
caustic, as must have taught the actor manners for
the future, if there had been a future before the dying
poet.
I have quoted Garrick's epitaph because it alone
has survived and alone probably deserved to survive,
of all the epitaphs which occasioned Goldsmith's
Retaliation. All the others that pretended to have
preceded and provoked it were after-thoughts and
second thoughts-.thoughts chastened by the sobering reflection that their long-suffering victim could
and would at last strike back with a wholly unlookedfor spirit, science and effect.
But the original epitaphs of Goldsmith's Club
friends, extemporised upon him at one meeting in his
absence in ridicule "of his country, dialect and
18




274


OLIVER GOLDSMITH


person," and read out in his presence at their next
meeting, may safely be presumed to have had the
spite without the wit of Garrick's. Goldsmith seemed
then to be a helpless, harmless butt. The empty
hat, to borrow an apt American image, which irresistibly tempted a kick as it lay in the roadway, had
not yet had slipped under it the stone which would
make the kicker rue his sportiveness. Then, again,
Goldsmith's manner had become so strange and distraught of late, and his sensitiveness had of late become so much more shrinking and acute that he
tempted more than ever his tormentors. They came
round about him like bees:"Like flies that haunt a wound, or deer, or men,
Or almost all that is, hurting the hurt."
From the account Cumberland gives of the evening
when these biting epitaphs were read out (and Sir
Fretful Plagiary was not a sympathetic person, and
least of all sympathetic towards his rival playwright) Goldsmith was cruelly hurt, hurt so evidently
that even Cumberland himself was moved to mercy,
which he says he showed in letting the poet down as
gently as possible in his own contribution to these
jeux d'esprit.
Taking, then, Garrick's epitaph as a specimen at
least of the spite of these productions, and remembering that they were but the crown and climax of a
long series of such gibes, and remembering also and
above all Goldsmith's even morbid sensitiveness,
especially in these last days, to slights and snubs,
whips and scorns of the kind, you would expect the
poet's retort to these cumulative insolences to be as
tart as its provocation. But nothing could sour the




" RETALIATION "


275


milk of human kindness in the breast of the author
of The Vicar of Wakefield. However " irascible "
Goldsmith may have been, he was the reverse of
rancorous. However hurt or angered at the moment,
in an hour his sweetness of nature dissipated the
sense of injury, as the warmth of the sun dissolves
the cloud which had obscured it, and he is eager to
find something admirable in the man who would see
in him only the ridiculous.
But the kindliness of Goldsmith's Retaliation-its
provocation being considered-is not so notable even
as its shrewdness. This man, whom everyone more
or less misjudged, took everyone's measure precisely.
As he had estimated Beattie at his true value, when
he was universally hailed as the Malleus Heretecorum
of the age, so he estimated at his true value Burke,
when as yet he was a mere Irish adventurer, and
when abilities, which according to Lord Acton,
Dollinger and 'Montalembert rank Burke as "the
greatest Englishman after Shakespeare," were as yet
wholly unrecognised. " We then spoke of Retaliation
-I am quoting from Hazlitt's Conversations of
Northcote-and praised the character of Burke in
particular as a masterpiece. Nothing that he had
ever said or done but what was foretold in it; nor
was he painted as the principal figure in the foreground with the partiality of a friend, or as the great
man of the day, but with a background of history,
showing both what he was and what he might
have been." Only less admirable because it was
less prophetic is the character of Garrick, whose
strength and weakness are hit off with a touch at
once light and sure, and as sympathetic as it is
masterly.




276       OLIVER GOLDSMITH
Here is the prophetic portrait of Burke:
"Here lies our good Edmund, whose genius was such,
We scarcely can praise it or blame it too much;
Who, born for the universe, narrowed his mind,
And to party gave up what was meant for mankind.
Though fraught with all learning, still straining his throat
To persuade Tommy Townshend to give him his vote.
Who, too deep for his hearers, still went on refining,
And thought of convincing, while they thought of dining.
Though equal to all things, for all things unfit,
Too nice for a statesman, too proud for a wit:
For a patriot too cool; for a drudge disobedient;
And too fond of the right to pursue the expedient.
In short 'twas his fate, unemployed or in place, sir,
To eat mutton cold and cut blocks with a razor."
If Burke was to be "bounded in a nut-shell "-if
his genius, the prostitution of his genius and the
paltry party rewards of this prostitution, were to be
expressed epigrammatically-I cannot see how they
could be more adequately, aptly and compactly put
than in this thumb-nail sketch.
In the portrait of Garrick, too, every line tells, and
the picture, on the whole, so far from being, as it
might well have been, vindictively coloured, has all
its shadows softened:"Here lies David Garrick, describe me who can,
An abridgment of all that was pleasant in man;
As an actor, confessed without rival to shine;
As a wit, if not first, in the very first line.
Yet with talents like these and an excellent heart,
The man had his failings, a dupe to his art.
Like an ill-judging beauty, his colours he spread,
And beplastered with rouge his own natural red.
On the stage he was natural, simple, affecting;
It was only that when he was off he was acting.
With no reason on earth to go out of his way,
He turned and he varied full ten times a day.




"RETALIATION"                    277
Though secure of our hearts, yet confoundedly sick
If they were not his own by finessing and trick:
He cast off his friends, as a huntsman his pack,
For he knew when he pleased he could whistle them back.
Of praise a mere glutton, he swallowed what came,
And the puff of a dunce he mistook it for fame;
Till his relish grown callous almost to disease,
Who peppered the highest was surest to please.
But let us be candid and speak out our mind,
If dunces applauded he paid them in kind.
Ye Kenricks, ye Kellys and Woodfalls so grave,
What a commerce was yours, while you got and you gave!
How did Grub Street re-echo the shouts that you raised,
While he was be-Rosciused, and you were be-praised!
But peace to his spirit! wherever it flies,
To act as an angel and mix with the skies.
Those poets who owe their best fame to his skill,
Shall still be his flatterers, go where he will:
Old Shakespeare receive him with praise and with love,
And Beaumonts and Bens by his Kellys above."
I have little doubt that in the epitaph on that
supreme egotist, Cumberland, there is double-edged
irony in the suggestion that the faultlessness of the
characters of his drama is due to their single original
being himself:"Here Cumberland lies, having acted his parts,
The Terence of England, the mender of hearts;
A flattering painter who made it his care
To draw men as they ought to be, not as they are.
His gallants are faultless, his women divine,
And Comedy wonders at being so fine.
Like a Tragedy Queen he has dizened her out,
Or rather like Tragedy giving a rout.
His fools have their follies so lost in a crowd
Of virtues and feelings that Folly grows proud;
And coxcombs, alike in their failings alone,
Adopting his portraits, are pleased with their own.
Say, where has our poet this malady caught?
Or wherefore his characters thus without fault?




278


OLIVER GOLDSMITH


Say, was it that vainly directing his view
To find out men's virtues, and finding them few,
Quite sick of pursuing each troublesome elf,
He grew lazy at last, and drew from himself."
Retacziation, said  Scott, "had  the  effect of
placing the author on a more equal footing with his
society than he had ever before assumed." He had
been the anvil long enough.
"Gin ye're an anvil, haud ye still:
Gin ye're a hammer, smite yer fill."
He had held- still long enough. "Semtper ego auditor
tan/um? " Satire was not his forte, as it was Juvenal's
and as it was Pope's, but even this species of writing
he could attempt with success, and his success, as Scott
suggests, would have won him if he had lived the peace
secured through proving yourself prepared for war.
As, however, he did not live even to finish the
poem, the effect of its circulation in an unfinished
state was, according to Horace Walpole, to estrange
his friends and so make more miserable his last
lonely  hours.  "His  numerous friends," writes
Walpole to Mason, "neglected him shamefully at
last, as if they had no business with him when it
was too serious to laugh. He had lately written
epitaphs for them all, some of which hurt, and
perhaps made them not sorry that his own was the
first necessary." "There is nothing," says Goethe,
"by which men display their character so much as
in what they consider ridiculous," and that this
" waterfly," Walpole, should see nothing but the
ridiculous in Goldsmith is conclusive rather of his
own absurdity than the poet's.
But there probably was ground for Walpole's




"RETALIATION"


279


suggestion that Retaliation estranged some of
Goldsmith's friends at a time that he would most
of all feel the estrangement. Being the most loving
and sympathetic of men himself, he yearned most of
all for love and sympathy, and most of all now when
he was quite broken in health, in spirits and in
fortune. At the opening of his first poem, The
Traveller, he contrasts wistfully his brother's happy
home with his own homelessness; in the middle of
The Deserted Village he pictures plaintively as not
for him an autumn rest from toil and ease from care
and shelter from the wasting worries of the world:
"To husband out life's taper at the close
And keep the flame from wasting by repose."
But now he realises not only that there shall be
no such autumn for him, but that for him there
will be no autumn. He was to drop in mid-furrow,
broken down by the burden and heat of the day,
by harassing care, and most of all by the remorse
of the thought that it was his own reckless past which
had at last overtaken him, brought down his strength
in his journey and shortened his days. For he had
now become conscious that his days were shortened.
He asked Percy, who was his own age, to be his
biographer, dictating to him for this purpose some
of the incidents of his life, and committing to his
care much biographical manuscript material. He
tried to sell the lease of his Temple chambers and
he told the farmer with whom he lodged at Edgware
that he had given up London as a permanent place
of residence. If he were making at last-not mere
resolutions-but genuine attempts to retrench and
reform-to live a quiet life of regular work, drawing




280


OLIVER GOLDSMITH


upon the present to pay for the past, instead of upon
the future to pay for the present-it was too late
now. The hand of death was upon him, roughly as
in arrest, not with the gentleness he describes in the
beautiful line Sir Joshua Reynolds has illustrated
in a beautiful picture:"Sinks to the grave with unperceived decay,
While Resignation gently slopes the way."
There is a well-known passage from Sir William
Temple's Miscellanea which seems to have haunted
Goldsmith, since he quotes it more than once in his
essays and even puts it into the mouth of Croaker
in his Good-Natured Man-" When all is done,
human life is, at the greatest and best, but like a
froward child that must be played with and humoured
a little to keep it quiet till it falls asleep, and then
the care is over." But life is like a child also which
its mother in the morning clothes with one garment
after another till it is fitted for the work of the day,
and in the evening, when night comes and no man
can work, strips it of these garments in the reverse
order in which she had donned them, one after another,
till it lies down to sleep naked as it rose. But
Goldsmith was called to rest in mid-day, when the
many and various powers with which his mother
Nature had endued him were at their fullest and
finest. Having distanced all competitors as a poet,
as an essayist, and as a novelist, he had now in She
Stoops to Conquer distanced them as a dramatist,
and had in Retaliation begun to find his feet in a
field one would have thought the least congenial to
his genius-satire. And then, when that which he had
done was "but earnest of the things that he shall




" RETALIATION"                 281
do," he dies! The pity of it is too that these masterpieces were incidental work merely, and that the
chief labour of his short life, which helped to shorten
it, was the dreary drudgery of ephemeral compilation:
" Out Townshends make speeches and I shall compile."




CHAPTER XXV


FROM MISERY FREED
GOLDSMITH was to die, as he had lived, alone.
k     There could, I think, have been few people in
the London of that day more lonely in life than
Goldsmith, in spite of, or rather because of, his
sociability. His sociability came of his love of his
fellows-and no one ever loved his fellows more
than Goldsmith-but this love involved a thirst for
reciprocal sympathy which was seldom satisfied.
Cicero, who also was a sociable man, would never
have said, " Nunquam minus solus quam cum so/us," if
he could have found a company as congenial to him
as his own thoughts. But Goldsmith loved his kind
so intensely and was therefore so intensely sociable
that the most uncongenial company was dearer to
him than none. But the company usually at his
command in London was uncongenial. As for the
Club, it was about as congenial a circle as a bullring, where Goldsmith had often to play the part of
the wretched horse which is gored to death to the
delight of the spectators. Nor was he at home in
less severe London societies, where he would do
what no self-respecting Englishman or Scotsman
ever does-let himself go, as a child released from
school lets himself go. It is little to be wondered
at therefore if he usually carried back from such
meetings to his lonely lodgings a sore sense of social
failure.
282




FROM MISERY FREED


283


Hence the acute loneliness of his life in London;
and his death was in keeping with it. In the spring
of I774 he finished at his lodgings in Edgware his
A nimated Nature, and was at work upon the
completion of his Grecian History, while at the same
time abridging for schools his English History, translating Scarron's Comic Romance, revising his Enquiry
into the Present State of Polite Learning, and compiling a work on Experimental Philosophy which he
had begun eight years before. Such incessant and
disgustful drudgery might not itself have killed him
-though it had been for years his lot-if it was to
pay for daily bread, or even if it would secure him such
credit as would pay for daily bread. But the bread
it was to pay for had long been eaten and his credit
with the booksellers, which up till now had enabled
him to discount the future, was exhausted. "He
was working his damndest," (if I may be pardoned
for using, because of its intense expressiveness, a
favourite phrase of Thackeray's,) not to keep the wolf
from the door, but with the wolf at his throat.
What most of all helped to kill him, in a word,
was worry. The very complaint which hurried him
from Edgware to London for its relief was itself,
says Davies, brought on, not by incessant sedentary
drudgery merely or chiefly, but also and above all
"by a continual vexation of mind arising from his
involved circumstances."
In London he obtained the immediate relief he
sought from his complaint but at the cost of a prostrating low, nervous fever which he insisted upon treating,
against the, urgent remonstrances of his medical advisers - a kindly and competent apothecary, Mr
Hawes, and Dr Fordyce-with his favourite panacea,




284


OLIVER GOLDSMITH


James' powders. The doctors, on the other hand, pre.
scribed the favourite panacea of that day-bleeding
-which at least supplied the gambling excitement
of a race between the patient's life and the disease
as to which should be drained away first. Neither
Goldsmith's nor his doctors' panacea, however, really
touched the real disease, which was in the mind, "a
rooted sorrow, written troubles of the brain and that
perilous stuff which weighs upon the heart."  A
fourth doctor called in, Dr Turton, at last and at the
last diagnosed at the close of a sleepless week the
patient's mortal trouble. "Your pulse," said Turton
to the dying man, "is in greater disorder than it
should be from the degree of fever which you have.
Is your mind at ease?" "No; it is not," are the last
recorded words of Goldsmith.
His death, even at the early age of forty-five) you
cannot regret as it was the only happy issue out of all
his troubles:"0, let him pass! he hates him much
That would upon the rack of this tough world
Stretch him out longer."
But if no one can grudge the poor poet his deliverance by death, no one either can help being pained
by the circumstances of this deliverance. There never
was a human soul, I say again, that loved more or
craved more for love than Goldsmith, while Johnson's
Levett himself had not ministered more often or-more
sympathetically to hopeless anguish or to lonely
want:"In misery's darkest caverns known,
His ready help was ever nigh,
Where hopeless anguish poured his groan,
And lonely want retired to die."




FROM MISERY FREED


285


But he dies himself alone in hopeless anguish and,
I might almost say, of its hopelessness. His servant,
John Eyles, attended on him, and in his absence his
laundress, the wife of the porter of the Temple, sat by
his bedside till a hired nurse relieved them both,
while the doctors paid him at intervals their professional visits. Thus attended by hirelings he dies in
a little black hole of a room. " I was in his chambers
in Brick Court the other day," writes Thackeray to
Forster. " The bedroom is a closet without any light
in it. It quite pains one to think of the kind old
fellow dying off there."
And as he died, so he was buried, obscurely.
Where? No man knows. Somewhere or other in
the burial ground of the Temple Church. A public
funeral was at first contemplated, with Burke and
Reynolds, Garrick and Beauclerk, Lord Shelburne
and Louth as pall-bearers; but when it was found
that he died in debt all idea of it was given up. Pitt
died deep in debt; Fox died deep in debt; Sheridan
died deep in debt; but it occurred to no one that their
indebtedness should preclude them from a public
funeral or exclude them from Westminster Abbey.
Goldsmith's debts were to theirs but as a drop in a
bucket, while he paid in life the full penalty of a remorse
which never troubled them. Yet he had still to pay
in death a penalty which it occurred to no one that
they should pay. You might say that he was not as
great-a man as Pitt, or Fox or Sheridan-though even
upon that there may be two opinions-still, he was at
least sufficiently great to be thought worthy of a
public funeral, and if his indebtedness was to preclude
him from the honour, why should their heavier and
more criminal indebtedness be thought nothing of?




286


OLIVER GOLDSMITH


The truth is that, whether in life or in death, it needed
little to turn the balance of respect against Goldsmith.
Walpole, in writing about his death to Mason, says:
" The republic of Parnassus has lost a member: Dr
Goldsmith is dead of a purple fever. The poor soul
had sometimes parts, though never common sense."
It is the "Inspired Idiot" idea over again with the suggestion that the inspiration itself was only fitful. That
was the idea of men who, because they never allowed
their own minds to be seen in undress, thought such
semi-nakedness in another a sign of idiocy or of
poverty. It was the idea also of men who, because
their own minds moved slowly, took the slip or the
skip of a swift-moving mind for lameness. "Mr
Walpole says that this story is a picture of Goldsmith's
whole life," writes Beauclerk to Lord Charlemont.
What story? May I quote it again as a picture of
Goldsmith's whole life-in London? "I hope," said
Lord Shelburne to Goldsmith, apropos a paragraph
in that day's paper written by the poet, "that you
mentioned nothing in it about Malagrida "-Junius'
name for Lord Shelburne. "Do you know," said
Goldsmith, in replying, " that I never could conceive
the reason why they call you ' Malagrida,'for Malagrida was a very good sort of man." Here's a laughable ellipsis due to the swift movement of the speaker's
mind attributed to his characteristic idiocy! Archbishop Magee in one of his letters said that his lack
of a stammer made more against him in England'than
anything else.
Hence his debts only turned the wavering balance
against Goldsmith. They would not have debarred
a writer of his pre-eminence from a public funeral if
there had not lurked in men's minds something of the




FROM MISERY FREED


287


contempt expressed immediately after the poet's death
by Walpole.
However, no lying-in-state-splendide mnendax, to
quote the profound pun of Lord Chelmsford-in
Westminster Abbey would have so sincerely honoured
at once the goodness and the greatness of Goldsmith
as the grief of such great men as Burke and Reynolds,
of such good women as the Jessamy Bride Iand her
sister, Little Comedy, and of other women whose
goodness was of the heart only. Burke upon hearing
of his countryman's death burst into tears. When
the news reached Reynolds in his studio he did what
he had never done in the severest domestic bereavement-laid down his brush for the day.
At the request of the Jessamy Bride and her sister
Goldsmith's coffin was re-opened that they might
have a lock of his hair; while on the day of his
funeral his staircase was crowded by wretched and
characterless outcasts of the heartless London streets
with whom he had been used to share his last penny,
But the friend who probably held him longest in his
memory and warmest in his affection was Johnson, in
part no doubt because he had been so much to the poet
and done so much for him, but, in part, also because he
understood him at least as well as such a solid John
Bull could understand such a hare-brained Irishman.
No doubt, under the exasperation of Boswell's mischievous reports of Goldsmith's splenetic speeches,
Johnson would be provoked into saying harsh things
of the poet, but he knew him better and therefore held
him more highly than any of his other English friends,
except Reynolds.
"I was glad," said Sir Joshua, "to hear- Charles
Fox say that The Traveller was one of the finest




288


OLIVER GOLDSMITH


poems in the English language."  "Why," asked
Langton, " were you glad? You surely had no
doubt of this before?" "No," said Johnson, "the
merit of The Traveller is so well established that
Mr FQX's praise cannot augment it nor his censure
diminish it." "But," rejoined Sir Joshua, "his friends
may suspect they had too great a partiality for him."
"Nay, sir," retorted Johnson, "the partiality of his
friends was always against Goldsmith. It was with
difficulty we could give him a hearing... Goldsmith
was a man who, whatever he wrote, did it better
than any other man could do. He deserved a place
in Westminster Abbey; and every year he lived he
would have deserved it better."
Did he, as he spoke, recall the day when he and
Goldsmith visited Westminster Abbey and stood
together in Poet's Corner till Johnson broke at last
the silence of veneration with, "Forsitan et nostrum
nomen miscebitur istis"-a line which a little later
Goldsmith archly repeated, pointing to the skulls of
the Jacobites gibbeted on Temple Bar, as these two
sympathisers with that lost cause passed beneath
its arch?
There, in Westminster Abbey, Johnson (who died
solvent) lies, but not the insolvent Goldsmith-at
least, however, his monument is there, inscribed with
the lines of Johnson, more lasting than its marble:
" Qui nullumfere scribendi genus
non tetigit,
Nullum quod tetigit non ornavit."
But the worthiest memorial of a man is not " marble
nor the gilded monuments of princes," nor even the
"powerful rhyme" which has made him famous or




FROM MISERY FREED


289


which commemorates his fame, but the very spirit
of the man himself which has been transmitted through
his work to other ages and countries and has been
assimilated by successive generations of his readers.
And in The Vicar of Wakefield-that novel which has
appeared in so many editions and so many translations
-it is the very spirit of Goldsmith himself which lives
and loves and teaches others to love their kind. For
Goldsmith stands alone among writers in this, that
not one single drop of the overflowing bitterness of
his life or of his spirit tinctures his work. No one
was ever more sensitive than Goldsmith, 'and no one
was ever more habitually and brutally snubbed and
insulted, but nothing could cloud for long the inextinquishable kindliness of his nature.
All the mortifications to his child-like vanity, all
the provocations of his child-like petulance, all the
anger or the anguish of his sensitive soul, writhing
under the iron heel of some brutal taskmaster, all
melt like morning mists when his sweet and sunny
nature has had time to break through. By the time
he has reached his wretched home, climbed 'his garret
stairs, sat at his lonely desk and taken up his weary
pen, all, all are gone, forgiven and forgotten for ever.
Hence it is the disembodied and purified spirit of
Goldsmith, with all that is of the earth earthy fallen
from him and only the divine remaining, which looks
out at you through his works-guileless as a child,
playful as a boy, tender as a woman, wearing his
man's "wisdom lightly like the fruit which in our
winter woodland looks a flower," surely one of
"the sweetest souls
That ever looked with human eyes."
I9




4I




INDEX


ABINGDON, Mrs, 238
Acton, Lord, 275
Addison, 82
iEsop, I4
Alderson, 267
Alonzo, Home's, 250
Ardagh, town of, 18
Art of Poetry on a New Plan, xxii
Auburn, 6, 85, 197
Axe Lane, London, 34, 264
BACON, 62, 200, 229, 256
Ballymahon Club, 47
Barton, 228
Beattie's Essay on Truth, 264, 265
Beatty, 69
Beauclerk, 16I, 173, 219, 227, 270,
285, 286
Beau Nash, Life of, xxii, 122, 172,
213
Bee, The, 62, 72, 79, O17, II2
Black Dog, The attack upon, 23
Blackstone, 189
Bolingbroke, Life of, 225
Boswell, x, xii, xiii, xv, xxiv, xxv,
xxvii, 3, 14, I7, 45, 63, 79, 95,
109, I31, 158, I63, I84, 213, 217,
230, 242, 251, 252, 259, 260, 266,
267, 288
Boyse, 141
British Magazine, 12
Brooke, Clara, 209
Bryanton, Bob, 33, 49
Bunbury, Mrs, 228, 232
Burke, xvi, xviii, xx, xxiii, I76,
204, 221, 227, 258, 262, 267, 275,
276, 285, 287
Burney, Dr, 46, 258
Burns, 2
Bute, Lord, 265
Butler, 90
Byrne, 8, 14, 34, 196
Byron, 2, 214


Calendar, Poetic, 148
Camden, 216
Campbell, Mr, of Athlone, I6
Carrick, 3
Chambers, Sir William, xxiv
Chamier, xv, 155
Charlemont, Lord, 219, 270, 286.
Charles the Fifth, I86
Chatterton, 90
Chelmsford, Lord, 287
Chesterfield, 121, 210, 252
Christ, Life of, xxii, 122
Chronicle, St james', 253
The London, 251
Cibber, Colley, xvi
Cicero, xi
Clare, Lord, 215, 223, 225
Clark, Dr, 213
Club, "(The Robin Hood," xxiii
Club, the Wednesday, 33 -Coach of Fame, Io8
Collins, 99
Colman, I47, 176, 19o, 236, 237,
238, 241, 244, 249
Conquer, She Stoops to, I7, 27, 34,
158, 226, 235, 242, 243, 246, 247,
280
Contarine, Jane, 45, 90,    Uncle, 22, 27, 32, 36, 45,
204
Cooke, x, xxii, xxv, 6i, 73, I72,
188, I93, 263
Cork, 38
Craddock, xxi, 124, 183, 252, 258
270, 271
Croot, xx
Cumberland, 240, 241, 274, 277
DALRYMPLE'S History, I85
" Damien's bed of steel," 156
Davies, Tom, 156, 175, I85, 187,
2I7, 258, 283
Delap, Mrs, IO, 14


29I




292


OLIVER GOLDSMITH


Delicacy, Kelly's False, 177, 242,
244
De Quincey, 206
Dictionary, Popular, of Arts and
Sciences, 258
Dilly, Messrs, 260, 263
Dodsley, 93, 145
Dollinger, 275
Dryden, 6, 29
Dumas, 129
Dunning, xvi
ELIA, I29, 218
Ellis, Dr, 58, I 3
Elphin School, i6
Enquiry into the Present State of
Polite Learning, 30, 43, 58, 87,
97, IOI, io6, 174, 283
Epictetus, I
Evans, Thomas, 251
Eyles, John, 263, 285
FARQUHAR, 173
Farr, Dr, 7I
Fathers, Lives of the, xxii, 122
Fielding, 2, 75, 80, 142, 149, I86
Flinn, Mr, 36
Foote, Life of, 272
Fordyce, Dr, 283
Forster, xix, xxvii, 6, 32, 53, 76,
78, 9I, i8x, 197, 2i6, 247, 285
Fox, 285
Fuller, vii, 43, 225
GARDENER, I71
Garrick, xv, 3, Iox, I02, I47,
174, 230, 237, 262, 270, 272,
273, 275, 285
Garrick, Life of, 258
Ghost, the Cock Lane, xxii
Gibbon, 265
Ginger, Mary, 263
Glover, Goldsmith's friend, 33,, xxv, 6I, 263
Goethe, I50, 202, 278
Goldsmith as a tutor, 62
at Peckham School, 72
at Trinity College, 20,,    Dean, 45,,   embarks for Bourdeaux,
54


Goldsmith, Henry, xxvii, 204,,   his bohemianism, 16,,   his death, 284,,   his entry at the Temple,
36,  his friendship with Johnson, 131,,   his generosity, 28,    his horse, Fiddleback,
36,,   his journey with the
Hornecks, 211,,   his loneliness in London,
204,  his play She Stoops to
Conquer   produced,
239,  his poverty, 27,  his quarrel with Johnson,
260,,   his social failure, xxvi,,   in Brick Court, 183, 285,  in Grub Street, 75
in prison, 55,  life in Edinburgh, 46,,,  Leyden, 50
Paris, 50,,   method of work, xxii,,   personal appearance, 17,     practises as a physician,
67,,   rejected as hospital mate,
87,,   stranded at Leghorn, 63,    street ballads, 27,,   studies medicine, 46,,   the Rev. Charles, 5, I96,  tramp through Europe,
58
Gotter, 202
Gozzi, Count Gaspare, 13I
Graham, Eaton, 157
Gray, 201
Gregg, Bishop, 35
Griffen, Rev. Mr, 16
Griffiths, 73, 8i, 90, 103, 105, 170
Grub Street, 9, 75, I33, 277
Gun, the Misses, 271
Gwynn, Mrs, 228
HARRINGTON, Lord, 228




INDEX


293


Hawes, Dr, 283
Hawkins, Sir John, xix, 46, II6,
I60, I6I, I66, 213
Hazlitt's Conversations of Northcote,
275
Helps,.2
Hickey, 212, 213
Higgins, Captain, 250
History, General, ofthe Late War,
XXii, 122
History, Grecian, 283
History, Natural, I86, 227
History of England, xxii, 12I, I86,
226, 283
History of Rome, 185, 225, 226
Hodson, 68, 83, 90,, Mrs, 12, 20
Holberg, Baron, 59
Hornecks, the, 150, 211, 232, 270
Hughes, Rev. Patrick, I6
Hume, 265
Huxley, I
INCHIBALD, Mrs, I82
Ingoldsby, daughter of, 272
" Inspired Idiot" idea, vii
JACOB, 67
Jami, 62
Johnson, Life of, 266
J hnson, Samuel, vii, xiii, xv, xx,
xxiii, I, 14, 15, 25, 37, 70, 79, 95,
107, I33, 121, 13I1, I, 79, 184,
196, 200, 209, 2IO, 213, 215, 216,
221, 225, 227, 237, 239, 24I, 245,
249, 251, 252, 255, 258, 264, 265,
266, 284, 287, 289
Jonson, Ben, viii
KELLY, CORNELIUS, 18, 240, 241,
277
Kelly, Hugh, 264
Kenrick, 105, 250, 255, 277
Kipling, Rudyard,, 235
LAMB, CHARLES, 206, 2-I3
Langton, Bennet, III, 226, 262,
288
Lao, 114
Ledger, The Public, 112, 114, 253
Lee, Lewis, 238


Lefanu, Sheridan, 36
Letters, The Chinese, 38, 65, I13,
I58
Lisburn, Lord, 123
Lissoy, 6, 7, 15, 26, 32, 33, 85,
195
Lives, Plutarch's, xxii, 122; 124
Louth, 285
Lumpkin, Tony, 19, 34, 238
Lyttleton, 121, I85
MACAULAY, xx, xxiv, xxvii, 6, 34,
64, 75, 163, 169, I97, 199, 248
M'Donnell, Dr M'Veagh, 127, 129
Macklin, 190
Magazine, The Lady's, xxii
Magee, Dean, 35, 286
Majendie, I6
Malone, 181
Man in Black, The, 13
Man, The Good-Natured, 33, 79,
I33, i68, 183, 238, 242, 248,
280
Mangin, Rev. Edward, xix
Marlow, 19
Mason, 278
Mayo, Dr, 260
Mecklenburgh, History of, xxii, 122
Medway, The, 25
Memoirs of the Reign of George III.,
169
Millennium Hall, A Description of,
xxii
Mills, 90
Mills, Edward, 28
Milner, Miss, 73
Montagu, Basil, 223
Montague, Lady Mary Wortley, 186
Montaigne, 22, 68
Montalembert, 275
Moore, 99
Mountains, Written, 72
Murphy, Arthur, 264
Nature, Animated, xxiii, 226, 283
Newbery, 112, I25, 145, i68, 239,
244
North, Lord, 223
Northcote, I86
Northumberland, Earl of, I66
Nugent, Lord, 216




294


OLIVER GOLDSMITH


O'RELL, MAX, 6I
Orrery, 12 I
Ossian, 252
Otway, 90o
Packet, The London, 248, 250, 251
Paoli, xiv
ParnelA, Life of, 215, 225
Payn, James, 208
Peckham Academy, 72, 86, 92,
225
Percy, xxiii, 132, 80o, i88, 217,
258
Percy, Memoir, 23, 58, 95
Philosophy, Experimental, 283
Pilkington, Jack, I26, I87
Piozzi, Mrs, 157
Pitt, 285
Poets' Country, 196
Poets, Lives of the, 215
Pope, 29, I59, 278
Prayers and Meditations, 139
Prior, xxvii, 20, 257
Purdon, Ned, 74
QUICK, 238
Rambler, The, io6, io8
Rape of the Lock, The, 220
Recessional, 235
Recollections (Bernard), 243
Retaliation, 29, 76, 151, 17I, 191,
212, 272, 273, 275, 278, 280
Review, Monthly, Goldsmith's work
for, 73, 8i, 91
Review, The Martial, xxii
Reynolds, Miss, xvi
Reynolds, Sir Joshua, xv, xviii, 25,
56, io8, 133, 157, i6o, 174, 176,
187, 192, 194, 209, 21, 2I2, 226,
237, 258, 265, 266, 270, 280, 285,
287
Richardson, 70, 8o, 142, 149
Rivals, The, 242, 244, 246
Robertson's History, 185
Rogers, Sam, x, 25I
Rolt, 12I
Romance, Comic, 283
Rosalind, I9
Rothes, Lady, 226
Russell, Sir E., 235


SALE, 99
Scarron, 89
School for Scandal, 246
Schopenhauer, xxi, 257
Scott, Rev. Dr, 78, 223
Shakespeare, viii, I5
Shebbeare, 264
Shelburne, Lord, 218, 285, 286
Sheridan, 242, 246, 285
Shuter, I78, 238
Sleigh, Dr, 67
Smart, Kit, I70
Smith, Gentleman, 238
Smollett, 2,103, 104, 12, 142, 149,
169
Spectator, The, I09
Steele, 89, 129, I86
Stephen, Sir Leslie, I, 95
Sterne, 80, I42, 152
Strean, Dr Annesley, 10
Swift, 1o, 30, 83, 89, I03
Swishen, Rev. Dr, I6
Sympathies, Imperfect, 218, 219
TAYLOR, Dr, 227
Temple's, Sir William, Miscellanea,
280
Thackeray, 77, 153, 247, 272, 273,
283, 285
Thrale, x, xi, xxvii, 3, 133, 143, 179,
227, 241, 249, 265
Tieck's "Elves," Io
Tonson, 145
Toplady, 260, 261
Townshend, Lord Mayor, 218, 264,
28I
Traveller, The, xv, 7, 64, 123, I47,
155, I58, I6I, I63, i66, I92, 204,
248, 270, 279, 288
Tristram Shandy, 8o
Turton, Dr, 284
" Vagabond," History of a Philosophic, 55, 59, 67, 70
Venables, 272
Venison, The Haunch of,-215, 219,
223, 224
Village, The Deserted, 4, 6, 7, 95,
123, 124, 147, I58, I92,205, 211,
270, 279
Voltaire, 265




INDEX


295


IWakefeld, The Vicar of, 4, 28, 55,
/ 59, 80, 23, 140, 143, I45) I58,
f  166, 264, 275, 289
Walpole, Horace, xv, 3, 75, 10I,
169, 240, 278
Walpole, Sir Robert, 75
Warrington, George, Original of,
272
Wedderburne, 264
Wellington, Duke of, 228
Whitehead, 176, 237


Wilder, the Rev. Theaker, 23, 44
Williams, Mrs, 252
Wishes, The Vanity of Human,
I33
Woodfall, 277
Woodward, 238
Wonders of Nature and Art, xxii
World, The Citizen of the, 4, 37, 49
YOUNG, 70




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COLSTONS LIMITED
PRINTERS




A SELECTION OF BOOKS
PUBLISHED BY METHUEN
AND COMPANY LIMITED
36 ESSEX STREET
LONDON W.C.
CONTENTS


General Literature'.
Ancient Cities.
Antiquary's Books.
Arden Shakespeare
Classics of Art.
" Complete" Series
Connoisseur's Library.
Handbooks of English Church
History....
Illustrated Pocket Library of
Plain and Coloured Books
Leaders of Religion
Library of Devotion
Little Books on Art
Little Galleries.
Little Guides..


>AGI
15
15
15
x6
z6
16
27
17
18
i8 -19
x9
29


Little Library.
Little Quarto Shakespeare
Miniature Library
New Library of Medicine.
New Library of Music
Oxford Biographies
Romantic History
Handbooks of Theology
Westminster Commentaries
Fiction.  *
Books for Boys and Girls.
Novels of Alexandre Dumas
Methuen's Sixpenny Books.


PAGS
29
ax 22 -
23
-
23
as
28
29
9q


SEPTEMBER 1910




A SELECTION OF


MESSRS.


METHUEN'S


PUBLICATIONS
In this Catalogue the order is according to authors. An asterisk denotes
that the book is in the press.
Colonial Editions are published of all Messrs. METHUEN'S Novels issued
at a price above as. 6d., and similar editions are published of some works of
General Literature. Colonial editions are only for circulation in the British
Colonies and India.
All books marked net are not subject to discount, and cannot be bought
at less than the published -price. Books not marked net are subject to the
discount which the bookseller allows.
Messrs. METHURN'S books are kept in stock by all good booksellers.  If
there is any difficulty in seeing copies, Messrs. Methuen will be very glad to
have early information, and specimen copies of any books will be sent on
receipt of the published price ilus postage for net books, and of the published
price for ordinary books.
This Catalogue contains only a selection of the more important books
published by Messrs. Methuen. A complete and illustrated catalogue of their
publications may be obtained on application.


Addleshaw   (Percy).   SIR   PHILIP
SIDNEY. Illustrated. Second Edition.
Demy 8vo. xos. 6d. net.
Adeney (W. F.), M.A.      See Bennett
(W.H.).
Ady (Cecilia M.).- A   HISTORY    OF
MILAN UNDER THE SFORZA. Illus.
trated. Dcmy 8svo. ios. 6d. net.
Aldis (Janet).  THE    QUEEN     OF
LETTER    WRITERS, MARQUISBE DE
SAVIGNg, DAME Dx BbURBiLLY, x626-96.
Illustrated, Second Edition' — Demy 8vo.
12s. 6d. net.
Alexander (William), D. D., Archbishop
of Armagh.   THOUGHTS        AND
COUNSELS     OF    MANY    YEARS.
Demy x6mo. as. 6d.
Allen (M.). A HISTORY OF VERONA.
Illustrated. Demy 8vo. I2s. 6d. net.
Amherst (Lady).    A SKETCH      OF
EGYPTIAN    HISTORY    FROM   THE
EARLIEST TIMES TO       THE   PRESENT DAY. Illustrated. A New and
Cheager Issue. Demy 8vo. 7. sd.. t.
Andrewes (Amy G.) THE STORY OF
BAYARD. Edited by A. G. ANDREWES,
Cr. 8vo. ss. 6d.
Andrewes (Bishop).    PRECES    PRIVATAE. Translated and edited, with:
Notes, by F. E. BRIGHTMAN,~ M.A., of
Pusey House, Oxford. Cr. $vo. 6s.


Anon.   THE     WESTMINSTER        PRO.
BLEMS BOOK. Prose and Verse. Compiled from  The Saturday: Westminster
Gazette Competitions, x904-7907. Cr. 8vo.
3s. 6d. net.
VENICE AND HER TREASURES. Illustrated. Round corners. Fcaj. 8vo. 5s. nt.
Aristotle.  THE ETHICS OF. Edited,
with an Introduction and Notes, by JOHN
BURNET, M.A. Chealer isse. Dney 8vy.
Ios. 6d. net.
Atkinson (C. T.), M.A., Fellow of Exeter
College, Oxford, sometime Demy of Magdalen College. A HISTORY OF GER.
MANY, from x7x5-x181. Illustrated. Demy
8vo. x2s. 6d. net.
Atkinson (T. D.). ENGLISH ARCHITECTURE. Illustrated. Fcaa. vo. 3s. 6d.
net.
A GLOSSARY OF TERMS USED IN
ENGLISH     ARCHITECTURE.- Illustrated. Second Edition. Fcaj. 8v. 3s. 6d.
met.
Atteridge   (A. H.).   NA-POLEON'S
BROTHERS.      Illustrated.  Demy 8vo.
x8s. net.
Aves (Ernest). CO.OPERATIVE INDUSTRY. Cr. 8vo. s. net.
Bagot (Richard).    THE    LAKES    OF..-. NORTHERN-ITALY. Illustrated. Fcan.
8vo. 5S, nt.




GENERAL LITERATURE


Bain (R. Nisbet), THE LAST KING
OF   POLAND    AND   HIS CONTEMPORARIES.     Illustrated.  Dwemy- 8vo.
los. 6d. net.
Balfour (Graham).     THE   LIFE   OF
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON. Illustrated.  Fifth Edition -in on  Volume.
Cr. 8vo. Buckram, 6s.
Baring (The Hon. Maurice).      WITH
THE RUSSIANS IN        MANCHURIA.
Third Edition. Demy Svo.,:7s. 6d. net.
A., YEAR IN   RUSSIA. Second Edition.
DCemy 8vo. to. 6d. net,
RUSSrAN     ESSAYS    AND    STORIES.
Second Edition.,Cr. 8vo. ss. net.
LANDMARKS IN RUSSIAN LITERATURE. Second Ed. Cr; 8vao. 6s. net.
Baring-Gould (S.).    THE   LIFE:OF
NAPOLEON BONAPARTE. Illustrated.
Second Edition. Wide Royal 8vo. xo.6d.
net.
THE' TRAGEDY      OF THE    CAESARS:
A STUDY OF THE CHARACTERS OF THE
CGSARS OF THE JULIAN AND CLAUDIAN.
HousEs.   Illustrated. Seventh Edition.
Royal 8vo. xos. 6d. net.
A BOOK OF FAIRY TALES. Illustrated.
Second Edition. Cr. 8vo. Buckram. 6s.
Also Medium 8vo. 6d.
OLD ENGLISH FAIRY TALES. Illustrated. Third Edition. Cr. 8v.r Buck-ram. -6S.
-THE VICAR OF MORWENSTOW. Revised Edition. With a Portrait. Third
Edition. Cr. 8vo. 3s. 6d.
OLD COUNTRY LIFE. Illustrated. Fifth
Edition. Large Cr. 8vr. 6s.
A GARLAND      OF   COUNTRY SONG:
English Folk Songs with their Traditional
Melodies. Collected and arranged by S.
BARING-GOULD   and  H. F. SHEPPARD.
Demy 4to. 6s.
SONGS OF THE WEST: Folk Songs of
Devon and Cornwall. Collected from the
Mouths of the People. By S. BARING-GOULD,
M.A., and H. FLEETWOOD SHEPPARD, M.A.
New and Revised Edition, under the musical
editorship of CECIL J. SHARP. Large Im-perial 8vo. - S. net.
STRANGE SURVIVALS: SOM CHAPTERS
IN THE HISTORY OF MAN. Illustrated.
Third Edition. Cr. 8ev. 2s. 6d. net.
YORKSHIRE      ODDITIES:     INCIDENTS
AND STRANGE EVENTS. Fifth Edition.
Cr. 8vo. 2s. 6d. net.
A BOOK OF CORNWALL. Illustrated.
Second Edition. Cr. 8vo. 6*.
A BOOK OF DARTMOOR.          Illustrated.
Second Edition. Cr. 8vo. 6s.
A BOOK OF DEVON. Illustrated. Third
Edition. Cr. 8vo. 6s.
A BOOK OF NORTH         WALES. Illustrated. Cr.-8vo. 6s.
A BOOK    OF   SOUTH    WALES. Illustrated. Cr. 8vo. 6s.


A BOOK OF BRITTANY. Illustrated.
Second Edition. Cr. 8vo. 66.
A BOOK OF THE RHINE i From Ceve
to Mainz. Illustrated. Second' Edition.
Cr. 8vo. 6s.
A     BOOK3   OF THE  RIVIERA. Illus
trated. Second Edition. Cr. 8vo.. 6s.
A BOOK OF THE PYRENEES. illus.
trated. Cr. 8vo. 6. r.
Barker (E.). M.A., (Late) Fellow of Merton
College, Oxford.  THE    POLITICAL
THOUGHT OF PLATO         AND ARISTOTLE. Demy 8vo. Ios. 6d. net.
Baron (R. R. N.), M.A. FRENCH PROSE
COMPOSITION. Fourth Edition. Cr.
8vo.  s. 6..  ey, 3r. net.
Bartholomnew   (J. G.), F.R.S.L    -See
Robertson (C. G.).
Bastable (C. F.), LL.D.    THE   COMMERCE OF NATIONS. Fourth Edition.
Cr. 8v. as. 6d.
Bastian (H Charlton), M.A., M.D.,F.R.S.
THE EVOLUTION       OF LIFE. Illustrated. Demy 8vvo  7s. 6d net.
Batson (Mrs. Stephen).    A  CONCISE
HANDBOOK OF GARDEN FLOWERS.
Fcak. 8vo. 3s. 6d. net.
THE SUMM-ER GARDEN OF
PLEASURE. Illustrated.    Wide Demy
8vo. zy. net.
Beekett (Arthur),    THE SPIRIT OF
THE DOWNS: Impressions and Reminiscences of the Sussex Downs. Illustrated.
Second Edition. Demy 8v. xos. 6d. net.
Beekford (Peter).    THOUGHTS      ON
HUNTING. Edited by J. OTHO PAGET.
Illustrated. 'SecondEdition.:Demy 8wo. 6s.
Begbie (Halold). MASTER WORKERS.
Illustrated  Demy 8v. 7s. 6d. net.
Behmen (Jaeob). DIALOGUES ON THE
SUPERSENSUAL LIFE. 'Edited by
BERNARD HOLLAND. - Fca#. 8vos 3s;'6d.Bell (Mrs. Arthur G.). THE SKIRTS
OF THE GREAT       CITY. -Illustrated.
Second Edition. Cr. 8vo. 6s.   -
Belloe (H.), M.P. PARIS. Illustrated.
Secmd Edition, Revised., Cr. v. 6-. s.:
HILLS AND THE SEA. Pocket Editiost
Fcap. 8vo. 5s.
ON NOTHING AND KINDRED SUBJECTS. Third Edition. Fca,. 8vo. 5*.
ON EVERYTHING. SecondEdition. Fcd~.
8vo. ss.
M A-R IE   ANTOINETTE        Illustrated.
Third Edition; Demy 8vo. xrs. net.
THE    PYRENEES.     Illustrated. 'Secod
Edition. Demy Svo. 7s. 6d. net.
Bellot (H. H, L.), M.A. See Jones (L. A. A).




4


METHUEN AND COMPANY LIMITED


Bennett (Joseph). FORTY YEARS OF
MU-SIC, x865-xi0o. Illustrated. Demyvso.
i6s. nt.
Bennett (W. H.), M.A. A PRIMER OF
THE BIBLE.,Fifth Edition. Cr. 8vo.
2s.- 6d..
Bennett (W. H.) andAdeney, (W. F.). A
BIBLICAL INTRODUCTION. With a
-concise Bibliography. Fifth Edition  Cr.
8vo,. s. 6d.
Benson (Archbishop). GOD'S-BOARD.
Communion Addresses. Second Edition.
' Fcaj. 8vi. 3s.d. net.
Benson (R. M.). THE WAY OF HOLINESS. An Exposition of Psalm cxix.
-. Analytical and Devotional. Cr. 8vo. - s.
*Bensusan (Samuel L.). HOME LIFE
IN   SPAIN.    Illustrated.- Demy  $vo.
ros. 6d. nt.;
Berry (W. Grinton), M.A. FRANCE
SINCE WATERLOO. Illustrated. Cr.
8vo. 6s.,
Betham-Edwards (Miss)- HOME LIFE..IN FRANCE. Illustrated. Fifth Editin.
Cr.svo. -Bs. 6
Rindley (T. Herbert), B.D. THE OECU-;MENICAL     DOCUMENTS      OF   THE
FAITH. With Introductions and Notes.
Second Edition. Cr. 8vo. -. net.!inyon (LauVrene). See Blake (Wiliam).
-Blake (William). ILLUSTRATIONS OF
THE BOOK OF JOB. With General Introduction by LAURENCE BINYON. Illus-?: trated. 'Qu - to  1*.a.isn
Body (George) D.D. THE        SO UL' S
PILGRIMAGE: Devotional Readings from: thie Published and Unpublished,writ!ngs of
George Body, D.D. Selected and arranged.
by J. H. BURN, D.D., F.R.S.E. Demy
s: i 'i6mo. 2s. 6. d..         -
Boulting (W.). TASSO AND HIS TIMES.
Illustrated. Demy 8vo. tos. 6d. net.
Bovili — (W. B. Forster).   HUNGARY
AND THE HUNGARIANS. Illustrated.
Demy Bo. 7 s 6d. net.
Bowden-(E. M.). THE IMITATION OF
BU DD-H-A: Being     Quotations from
Buddhist Literature for each Day in theYf ear;. Fifth lEdition. Cr. I6m. t s.. 6d.
Brabant (F. G.), M.A. RAMBLES IN
SUSSEX. Illustrated. Cr. 8vo. 6s.
Bradley (A. G.). ROUND ABOUT WILTSHIRE. Illustrated. Second Edition. Cr;.'8vo. 6s.
THE ROMANCE OF NORTHUMBERLAND. Illustrated. Second Edition. Demy
8vo. 7s. 6d. net.


Braid (James) Open Champ on,.xo, x905
and 1906. ADVANCED GOLF. Illustrated.
Fifth Edition. Demy 8vo. sos. 6d.net.
Braid (James) and Others. GREAT
GOLFERS IN THE MAKING. Edited
by HENRY LEACH. - Illustrated. Second
Edition. Demy 8ob. 7~. 6d. net.
Brallsford (H. N.). MACEDONIA: ITS
— RACES AND THHIR FUTURB. Illustrated.. -Demy Svoo. i2s. 6d.. n.  --
Brodriek (Mary) and Morton (A. Anderson). A CONCISE DICTIONARY OF
EGYPTIAN ARCHEOLOGY. A Handbook for Students and Travellers. Illustrated. Cr. 8vo. 3s. 6d.
Brown (J. Wood), M.A. THE BUILDERS
OF FLORENCE. Illustrated.' Demy 4to.
x8s. net.
Browning    (Robert).   PARACELSUS.
Edited with Introduction, Notes, and Bibliography by MARGARET L. LEE and KATHARINE B. LOCOCK. Fcap. 8vo. 3s. 6d. net.
Buckton (A. M.). EAGER HEART: A
Mystery Play. E-ight  Edition. Cr. 8vo.
is. net.
Budge (E. A. Wallis). THE GODS OF
THE    EGYPTIANS. Illustrated.   Two
Volumes. Royal 8vo. 33 3s. net.
Bull (Paul) Army Chaplain. GOD AND
OUR SOLDIERS. Second Edition. 'Cr.
8vo. 6s.
Bulley (Miss). See Dilke (Lady);
Burns (Robert), THE POEMS. Edited by
ANDREW LANG and W. A. CRAIGIE. With
Portrait. Third Edition. Wide Demy 8vo,
gilt top. 6s.
Bussell (F. W.), D.D. CHRISTIAN
THEOLOGY AND SOCIAL PROGRESS. (Th  Bampton Lectures of i9o5). Demy
svO. xos. 6d. net.
Butler (Sir   William), Lieut.-General,
G.C.B. THE LIGHT OF THE WEST.
With some other Wayside Thoughts, x865 -x9g8. Cr. 8vo. y. net.
Butlin (F. M.). AMONG THE DANES.
Illustrated. Demy 8vo. 7s. 6d. net.
Cain (Georges), Curator of the Carnavalet
-Museum, Paris. WALKS IN      PARIS.
Translated  by A. R. ALLINSON, M.A.
Illustrated. Dey 8vo. 7s. 6d. net..:
Cameron (laryLovett). OLD ETRURIA
AND MODERN TUSCANY. Illustrated.
Second Edition. Cr. 8vos.6s. net
Carden (Robert W.). THE      CITY OF
GENOA.'-Illustrated  Demy 8vo. xos. 6A
net.




GENERAL LITERATURE


5


Carlyle  (Thomas).    THE    FRENCH
REVOLUTION.      Edited by C. R. L.
FLETCHER, Fellow of Magdalen College,
Oxford. Three Volumes. Cr. 8vo. r8s.
THE LETTERS AND SPEECHES OF
OLIVER CROMWELL.         With an Introduction by C. H. FIRTH, M.A., and
Notes and Appendices by Mrs. S. C.-LOMAS.
Three Volumes. Demy 8vo. x8s, et.
Celano (Brother Thomas of).       THE
LIVES   OF   FRANCIS    OF   ASSISI.
Translated by A. G. FERRERS HOWELL.
Illustrated. Cr. 8v. s. net.
Chambers (Mrs. Lambert). Lawn Tennis
for Ladies. Illustrated. Crown 8vo. as. 6d.
net.
Chandler (Arthur), Bishop ofBloemfontein.
ARA CCELI: AN ESSAY IN MYSTICAL
THEOLOGY.   Third Edition.   Cr. 8vo.
3s. 6. net.
Chesterfield (Lord). THE LETTERS OF
THE EARL OF CHESTERFIELD TO
HIS SON. Edited, with an Introduction by
C. STRACHEY, with Notes by A. CALTHROP.
Two Volumes. Cr. 8vo. ias.
Chesterton (G.K.). CHARLES DICKENS.
With two Portraits in Photogravure  Sixth
— Edition. Cr. Svo. 6s.
ALL   THINGS    CONSIDERED.      Fifth
"Edition. Fcai. 8vo. -s.
TREMENDOUS       TRIFLES.        Fourth
Edition. Fcap?. 8v. Ss.
Clausen (George), A.R.A., R.W.S. SIX
LECTURES ON PAINTING. Illustrated.
Third Edition. Large Post. 8vo. 3. 6d. net.
AIMS AND IDEALS IN ART. Eight. Lectures'delivered to the Students of the
Royal Acadermyof Arts. Illustrated. Second
Edition. Large Post 8o.,. net.
Clutton-Broek (A.)   SHELLEY: THE
MAN    AND   THE POET.     Illustrated.
Demy 8rv. 7s. 6d. net.
Cobb (W. F.), -M.A. -THE BOOK      OF
PSALMS t with an Introduction and -Note.
Demy 8ve. xos.;6d.net.
Cockshott (Winifred), St. Hilda's Hall.
-Oxford. THE    PILGRIM    FATHERS,
THEIR CHURCH AND COLONY. Illustrated.
Demy 8vo. 75. 6da net.
Collingwood (W. G.}, M.A. THE LIFE.OF JOHN     RUSKIN.     With Portrait.
Sixth Edition. Cr. 8vo.  s. 6d. net.
ColvIll (Helen H.). ST. TERESA OF
SPAIN.    Illustrated.  Second  Edition.
Demy 8Sw. 7s. 6d. net.
*Condamine (Robert     de   la).  THE
UPPER GARDEN. Fca,. 8vo,.. net.
Conrad (Joseph). THE MIRROR OF
THE SEA: Memories and Impressions.
Tird Edition. Cr. 8w. 6s.


Coolidge (W. A. B.), M.A. THE ALPS.
Illustrated. Demy 8o. - 7s. 6d. net
Cooper(C. S.),F.R.H.S.- SeeWestell (W.P.)
Coulton (G. G.). CHAUCER AND HIS
ENGLAND. Illustrated. Second Edition.
Demy 8vo. zos. 6d. net.
Cowper    (William),   THE     POEMS.
Edited with an Introduction and Notes by
J. C. BAILEY, M.A., Illustrated. Demy
Svo. zos. 6d. net.
Crane (Walter), R.W.S. AN- ARTIST'S
REMINISCENCES. Illustrated. Second
Edition. Demy 8vo..8s. net.
INDIA ' —IMPRESSIONS.       - Illustrated.
Second  dition. Demy 8v. ys. 6d. net.
Crispe (T. E.). REMINISCENCES OF A
K.C. With a Portraits. Second Edition.
Demy 8vo. ios. 6d. net.
Crowley (Ralph H.). THE HYGIENE
OF SCHOOL LIFE. Illustrated.      Cr.
Bvo. 3s. 6d. net.
Dante (Altghieri). LA COMMEDIA DI
DANTE. The Italian Text edited by
PAGET TOYNBE, MA., D.Litt. Cr. 8vw. 6s.
Davey (Riehard). THE PAGEANT OF
LONDON. Illustrated. - In Two Volumes.
Demy Svo. x5s. net.
Davis (H. W. C.). M.A., Fellow and Tutor
of Balliol College. ENGLAND UNDER
THE NORMANS AND          ANGEVINS:
xo66-x172. Illustrated. Demy 8vor. os. 6d.
net. -
Deans (R. Storry). THE TRIALS OF
FIVE QUEENS: KATHARINE OP ARAGO,
ANNz BOLEYN, MARY QUEENO O.SCOTS,
MARIB ANTOINETT - and CAROLINE OF
BRUNSWICK. Illustrated. Second Edition.
Demy 8vo. os. 6d. nit.
Dearmer (Mabel),     A CHILD'S LIFE
OF CHRIST.      Illustrated.  Large Cr.
8vo. 6s.
D'Este (Margaret). IN THE CANARIES
WITH A CAMERA. Illustrated. Cr. $vs.
7s. 6d. net.
Dickinson (G. L.), M.A., Fellow of King's
College, Cambridge.  THE     GREEK
VIEW OF LIFE. Seventh and Revised
Edition. Cr. 8vo. 2s. 6d. net.
Ditchfleld (P. H.), M.A., F.S.A. THE
PARISH CLERK. Illustrated.     Third
Edition. Demny 8vo. 7s. 6d. net.
THE OLD-TIME PARSON. Illustrated.
Second Edition. Deny 8vo. 7s. 6d. net.
Douglas (Hugh A.). VENICE ON FOOT.
With the Itinerary of the Grand Canal.
Illustrated. Second Edition. Fca#. 8vo.
Ss. net.




6


METHUEN AND COMPANY LIMITED


Douglas (James). THE -MAN IN THE
PULPIT.;. Cr. 8vo. us. 6d. net.
Dowden -(J.), D.D., Late Lord:-Bishop of
'Edinburgh. FURTHER      STUDIES IN
THE PRAYER BOOK. Cr. 8vo. 6#:.Driver (S. R.), D.D., D.C.L., Regirts Professor, of.Hebrew in the University of
Oxford.   SERMONS     ON   SUBJECTS
'CONNECTED       WITH     THE     OLD
N TESTAMENT. C. 8v;.;
Duff (Nora)., MATILDA.:OFTUSCANY,
- Illustrated. De- y8o.. lor,6d.f-net.  1
Dumas (Alexande)., THE CRIMES 'OF
"THE BORGIAS-ANDt' OTHERSf. With
air  ftroduction' by  R.- S. -'A'ii/iTT.
Illustrated., Cr,. 8vo. 6s..
TE E   CRIMES' OF; URBAIN: GRAN.
DIER  AND' OTHERS.T Illustrated. -Cr.
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THE- CRIMES,     OF  THE    -MARQUISE
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Illustratfed. Cr. 8vo. 6.r..
THE CRIMES OF        ALI PACHA AND
OTHERS. Illustrated, C*v-.,Svo  6s,
MYz MEMOIRS..Translated by E. M.
WALtER. With an Introduction by ANDREW
LANG. With Frontispieces in Photogravure.
In six'Volumes. f Cr. 8vo. 6s. each volume.
VOLr. I. o802-i82X. VOL. IV. X830o-83s.
VOL. II. 1822-1825. -.VL V. -83I-1832.
VOL. III. x826-x830. VOL' VI. x83a-i833.
MY PETS. Newly translated by -A 'R.
ALLINSON, M.A. -Illustrated. Cr. 8wo. 6r.
Duncan (David), D.Sc., LL.D. THE LIFE
AND     LETTERS      OF HERBERT
SPENCER. Illustrated. Demy 8vo. x5.
Diuinn-Pattison (R. P.).  NAPOLEON'S
MARSHALS.      Illustrated.  Denmy  8vo.
Second 'Editidn.: i2. 6d.- net.
THE " BLACK l PRINCE. - - Illustrated.
Second Edition. L Demy 8vo. 7i. 6d. net.
Durhami (The   arl of). A REPORT ON
CANADA. With an Introductory Note.
Demy 8vo. 4s. 6d. net.
DlPti(W. A.). TIE NORFOLK BROADS.
Ilflustrated.' Second Edition. Cr. 8Svo. 6s.
WILD LIFE IN EAST ANGLIA.           1u1strated. SecondE'ditaof Dem  8v. ts. d.
SOME LITERARY ASSOCIATIONS OF
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Ednionds (MaJor J.:E.), R:E.; D. A.
Q.-M,:G.- See Wood'(W. Birkbeck). '
Edwardes (Tickner). THE LORE OF,TrE -HONQEY    BEE, -Illustrated. Cr.
8vo. 6s..
LiFT-LUCK ON      SOUTHERN      ROADS.
Illustrated. Cr. 8v. 6s..,


Egepton (H. E.), M.A. -A HISTORY OF
BRITISH. COLONIAL POLICY.,:Third
Edition. Demyi8we. 7s. 6d. net.
EveGett-Green (MaPy Anne).     ELIZABET H; ELECTRESS PALATINE AND
QUEEN    OF. BOHEMIA..Revised by
her Niece S. C, LOMAS. With a Prefatory
Note,by A. W. WARD, Litt.DRt iDemy Sv.
xos. 6d. net.
ralrbrother (W. H-) M.A. TFiE PHIl.6
SOPHY- OF T. H. GREEN.         Second
Edition. Cr. Svo, 3,. 6d\  - A.-;
Fea (Allan). TlE r FLIGHT OI:THE
-KING. — Illustrated. — New and Revised
Edition. Demy 8vo. 7s. 6d. net.
SECRET CHAMBERS AND           HIDING.
PLACES., Illustrsted. Newo and Revited
edition. 'Demy Svo,,7. 6d. net;. - 'JAMES II. AND HIS WIVES. Illustrated.
Demy 8vo. xos. 6d. net.   '.    '<
Fell (E.F. B.B). THE FOUNDATIOXNS
OF LIBERTY. Cr. 8vo. S.. net.
Firth (C. H.), M.A., Regius Professor of
Modern   History  at Oxford.  CROMWELL'S ARMY: A History of.the English
Soldier during the Civil Wars, the Common.
wealth, and the Protectorate. Cr. 8vs. 6t.
FltzGerald (EdwaPd). THE RUBAIYATT
OF OMAR KHAYYAM. Printed from
the Fifth and last Edition. -With - ComXmentary by Mrs. STEPHEN BATSON, and,
Biography of Oma -y E. SD., Ross. Cr.
Evo. 6....
Fietcher (B. F. and    H. P.). -THE
ENGLISH    HOME. Illustrated. Demjy
8vo. is. 6i net.
Fletcher (J. S.), A BOOK OF YORK.
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FICTION


29


The Novels of Alexandre Dumas.
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THE ADVENKTUIRIS OF CAiPTAIX PAMFEILE.
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THE CONVICT'S SON.
THE CORSICAN -BROTHERS;, and OTHO THE
ARCHER.
CROP-EAREDS JACQUOT.
Dom- GORENFLOT.
THE FATAL COMUNAT.
THE FENciNG MASTER.
FERNANDE.
GABRIEL L&HSERT.
GEoRGEs.
THE GREAT MASSACRE.,
HEZNRI ]DR NAVARRE.
HiLiNit DR CHAVERNY.


THEc HORtOSCOPE
LouisE iDR LA VALLikEE. (Double volume.)
TaR MAR IN THE IRON MASKC. (Double
volume.)
MAtTRE_ ADAM.~
THE MOUTHR OF HELL.
NANON. (Double volum..)
OLYMPIA.
PAULINE; PASCAL RtUxo; and BONTEKON.
PkRE LA RUIHE.
THE PRtINCE OF THIEVES.
THE REMINISmCENCS OF AxTOHY.
ROBIN HooD).
SAMUEL GELD.
THE SNOWBALL AXP YHE SULTAWETTA.
SYLVANDIRE.
THE TAKING OF CALAIS.
TALES OF THE SUPERNATMURA.
TALES OF STRANGE A3DVENTURE.
TALES OF TERROR.
THE THERE MusKEzTEERs. (Double volume.)
THE TRAGEDY OF NANTES.
TWENTY YEARS AFTER. (Double volume.)
THE WILD-DUCK SHOOTER.
THE WOLF-LEAiDED.


Methuen's Sixpenny Book&
M edium Svo.


Albanesl (IL Marla).. L 0 V R A ND  Baring-Gould.(S.). FURZ R LOOM.
LOUISA.    ICHEAP JACK ZITA.
I KNOW'A -MAIDEN.            KITTY ALONE.
URITH.
Anstey (F.). A BAYARD OF BENGAL.. THE BROOM SQUIRE.
Austen (J.).- PRIDE AND PREJUDICE. IN iTHE ROAR OF THE SEA.
Bagot (Riehard). A ROM-AN MYSTERY.NOM
CSTING_ OF NETS.            A BOOK OF FAIRY TALES. Illustrated.
DONNA DIANA.                 LITTLE TU'PENNY.
WINEFRED.
Baitour (Andrcw). BY STROKE OF  THE FROB3ISHERS.
SWORD.                      THE QUEEN OF LOVL




30


METHUEN AND COMPANY LIMITED


ARMINELL.
BLADYS OF THE STEWPONEY.
Bar P(Robert). JENNIE BAXTER.
IN THE MIDST OF ALARMS.
THE COUNTESS TEKLA.
THE MUTABLE MANY.
Benson (E. F.). DODO.
THE VINTAGE.
Bronte (Charlotte). SHIRLEY.
Brownell (C. L).- THE HEART OF
JAPAN.
Burton (J. Bloundelle) ACROSS THE
SALT SEAS.
Caffyn (Mrs.). ANNE MAULEVERER.
Capes (Bernard). THE LAKE OF
WINE.:.
Clifford (Mrs. W. K.). A FLASH OF
SUMMER.
MRS. KEITH'S CRIME.
Corbett (Julian). A BUSINESS iN
GREAT WATERS.
Croker (Mrs. B. M.). ANGEL.
A STATE SECRET.
PEGGY OF THE BARTONS.
JOHANNA.
Dante (Alighleri). TH  DIVINE
COMEDY (Cary).
Doyle (A. Conan) ROUND THE RED
LAMP.
Duncan (Sara Jeannette). A VOYAGE
OF CONSOLATION.
THOSE DELIGHTFUL AMERICANS.
Eliot (George). THE MILL ON4THE
FLOSS.
Findlater (Jane H.). THE GREEN
GRAVES OF BALGOWRIE.
Gallon (Tom). RICKERBY'S FOLLY.
Gaskell (Mrs.). CRANFORD.
MARY BARTON.
NORTH AND SOUTH.
Gerard (Dorothea). -HOLY MATRIMONY.
THE CONQUEST OF LONDON.
MADE OF MONEY.
Gissing (G.). THE TOWN TRAVELLER.
THE CROWN OF LIFE.
Glanville (Ernest). T H E I N C A'S
TREASURE.
THE KLOOF BRIDE,


Gleig (Charles). BUNTER'5 CRUISF.
Grimm, (The Brothers),  GRIMM'S
FAIRY TALE S.
Hope (Anthony). A MAN OF MARK.
A CHANGE OF AIR.
THE CHRONICLE$ OF COUNT
ANTONIO.
PHROSO.
THE DOLLY DIALOGUES.
Hornung (E. W.). DEAD MEN -TELL
NO TALES.
Ingraham (J. H.). THE THRONE OF
DAVID.
Le Queux (W.). THE HUNCHBACK
OF WESTMINSTER.
Levett-Yeats (S. K.), THE TRAITOR'S
WAY.
ORRAIN.
Linton (E. Lnn). THE TRUE R HISTORY OF JOSHUA DAVIDSON.
Lyall (Edna). DERRICK VAUGHAN,
Malet (Lueas). THE CARISSIMA.
A COUNSEL OF PERFECTION..
Mann (Mrs. M. E.), MRS. PETER
HOWARD.
A LOST ESTATE.
THE CEDAR STAR.
ONE ANOTHER'S BURDENS.
THE PATTEN EXPERIMENT.
A WINTER'S TALE.
Marchmont (A. W.). MISER HOADLEY'S SECRET.
A MOMENT'S ERROR.
Marryat (Captain). PETER SIMPLR.
JACOB FAITHFUL.
March (Richard). A METAMORPHOSIS.
THE TWICKENHAM PEERAGE,
THE GODDESS.
THE JOSS.
Mason (A. E. W.). CLEMENTINA.
Mathers (Helen). HONEY.
GRIFF OF GRIFFITHSCOURT.
SAM'S SWEETHEART.
THE FERRYMAN.
Meade (Mrs. L. T.).- DRIFT.
Miller (Esther). l LIVING LIES.
Mitford (Bertpam). THE SIGN OF THE
SPIDER.
Montresor (W. F.). THE ALIEN




FICTION


3I


Morrlson (Arthur). THE HOLE IN
THE WALL.
Nesbit (B.). THE RED HOUSEL
Norris (W. E.). HIS GRACE.
GILES INGILBY.
THE CREDIT OF THE COUNTY.
LORD LEONARD THE LUCKLESL
MATTHEW AUSTEN.
CLARISSA FURIOSA.
Oliphant (Mrs.). THE LADY'S WALLK
SIR ROBERT'S FORTUNXE
THE PRODIGALS.
THE TWO MARYS.
Oppenheim (E. P.), MASTER OF MEN.
Parker (Gilbert). THE POMP OF THE
LAVILETTES.
WHEN VALMOND CAME TO P.ONTIAC.
THE TRAIL OF THE SWORD.
Pemberton (Max). THE FOOTSTEPS
OF A THRONE.
I CROWN THEE KING.
Phillpotts (Eden). THE HUMAN BOY.
CHILDREN OF THE MIST.
THE POACHER'S WIFE.
THE RIVER.
'Q' (A. T. Quiller Couch). T H
WHITE WOLF.
Ridge (W. Pett). A SON OF THE STATE.
LOST PROPERTY.
GEORGE aud THE GENERAL,


ERB.
Russell (W. Clark), ABANDONEDI
A MARRIAGE AT SEA.
MY DANISH SWEETHEART.
HIS ISLAND PRINCESS.
Sergeant (Adellne). THE MASTER OF
BEECHWOOD.
BALBARA'S MONEY.
THE YELLOW DIAMOND.
THE LOVE THAT OVERCAMEL
Sidgwiek (Mrs. Alfred). THE KINSMAN.
Surtees (R. S.). HANDLEY CROSS.
MR. SPONGE'S SPORTING TOUR.
ASK MAMMA.
Watford (Mrs. L. B.). MR. SMITH.
COUSINS.
THE BABY'S GRANDMOTHER.
TROUBLESOME DAUGHTERS.
Wallace (General Low), BEN-HUR.
THE FAIR GOD.
Watson (H. B. Marriott.), THE ADVENTURERS.
CAPTAIN FORTUNE.
Weekes (A. B.). PRISONERS OF WAR.
Wells (H. G.). THE SEA LADY.
White (Percy). A PASSIONATE P114
GRIM.




I


PRINTED BY
WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, LIMITED,
LONDON AND BECCLES.
-




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THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
GRADUATE LIBRARY
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