that something advantageous to Goldy might arise from this introduction to the Northumberland family-especially as the Earl was Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, had all sorts of offices on the Irish establishment at his disposal, and might easily, with public approval, have given some sinecure to one who was not only a popular author, but an Irishman to boot. Goldsmith did have an interview with the Earl at Northumberland House, received compliments from him on his Traveller, and was informed that the Earl had heard he was a native of Ireland, and would be glad to do him any kindness. Instead of improving the occasion for himself, "this idiot in the affairs of the world," as Sir John Hawkins calls him, only told the Earl he had a brother in Ireland, a poor clergyman, who stood in much need of help. "As for myself,” he said afterwards in telling the story to Sir John, “I have no dependence on the promises of great men : I look to the booksellers for support." This was no mere affectation on Goldy's part; it was really true. With the exception of Mr. Robert Nugent, afterwards Lord Nugent, Viscount Clare and Earl Nugent-a jovial, elderly Irishman, of great wealth, and free-and-easy politics, who admired Goldsmith, and was always glad to see him at his seat at Gosfield Hall, Essex-Goldsmith never cared to trouble any of the "great people" with his intimacy. And the utmost that came to him from this friendship, besides a week of country air now and then, was the appearance, once or twice, of a haunch of venison in his chambers in town. For, of course, Goldsmith was now done with Islington and Mrs. Fleming. The Temple, now and thenceforth, was his established place of residence. He had had rough temporary accommodation here, as we have seen, 66 on the library staircase," in 1764; and this he is found exchanging, in or about 1765, for superior chambers in the same court-i.e., Garden Court. These he retained till 1768.

In June 1765 Goldsmith, to take advantage of his new popularity, published, with hisname, and under the title of Essays, and with the motto "Collecta Revirescunt," a selection from his anonymous papers in the Bee, the Busy-Body, the Lady's Magazine, the British Magazine, &c. Other people, he says in the preface, had been reprinting these trifles of his, and living on the pillage, and now he reclaimed the best of them. The republication was in one duodecimo volume, for which Newbery and Griffin, who were the joint-publishers, gave him ten guineas each. Then, again, through the rest of that year and the whole of 1766 and 1767,-his Traveller having brought him more applause than cash-he relapses, for cash-purposes, into hackwork, compilation, and translation. He thought of translating the Lusiad, but, his ignorance of Portuguese being a slight obstacle, left that undertaking for Mickle. Among the compilations which he did execute we hear of such things as A Survey of Experimental Philosophy and a Short English Grammar for Newbery, a translation of a French History of Philosophy (Physical Speculations) for Francis Newbery, a collection of Poems for Young Ladies for Payne of Paternoster Row, and another poetical collection in two volumes for Griffin called Beauties of English Poetry. For this last, to which he gave his name, he received a considerable sum; but the sale of the collection, which

was otherwise a tasteful one, is said to have suffered from the admission into it of two pieces of Prior not deemed fit for family reading. And what, all this while, had become of the Vicar of Wakefield? It emerged from the younger Newbery's shop in the very midst of the compilations just named-viz. on the 27th of March, 1766, or fifteen months after the Traveller had been out. The Vicar of Wakefield: A Tale; supposed to be written by himself-such was the title under which the little prose masterpiece announced itself. With less of acclamation than had hailed the Traveller, but gently, quietly, and surely, as it was read in households, and its charming sweetness felt wherever it was read, the Tale made its way. There was a second edition in May, a third in August, and before Goldsmith died the sixth edition was in circulation.

As, by his Traveller, Goldsmith had taken his place among English poets, so by the Vicar of Wakefield he took a place, if not as one of the remarkable group of English "novelists that distinguished the middle of the eighteenth century (for they had all been voluminous in this department), at least, with peculiar conspicuousness, near that group. Richardson had been five years dead; Fielding twelve years; only Smollett of the old three remained, with his Humphry Clinker still to be written. But Sterne, the fourth of the group, had recently flashed into notice-eight volumes of his Tristram Shandy, published between 1759 and 1765, having taken the literary world by storm, and made their strange author, then a middle-aged clergyman of loose notions, the lion of London society for the time being, with dinner engagements always fourteen deep. Not the radiance of Tristram Shandy itself, however, diamond-darting in all colours athwart the literary heaven, could hide the pure soft star of Goldsmith's new creation. How simple this Vicar of Wakefield was, how humorous, how pathetic, how graceful in its manner, how humane in every pulse of its meaning, how truly and deeply good) So said everybody; and gradually into that world of imaginary scenes and beings made familiar to British readers by former works of fiction, and the latest additions to which had been Smollett's and Sterne's inventions, a place of especial regard was found for the ideal Wakefield, the Primrose family, and all their belongings. Moses, with the gross of green spectacles and shagreen cases for which he sold the horse; the philosophical wanderer George; the two daughters, Olivia and Sophia; the bouncing Flamborough girls; Miss Carolina Wilhelmina Amelia Skeggs, and the other fine lady from London; the rogue Jenkinson and his repentance; the rascally Squire; and the good uncle, Sir William, alias Burchellwho could forget any of them? Above all the good clergyman himself, with his punctilious honour, his boundless benevolence, and his one or two foibles! Who could help laughing over that passage in which he tells how the rogue Jenkinson, in proceeding to swindle him, assails his weak point by asking if he is the great Dr. Primrose who had written so learnedly in favour of monogamy and against second marriages? "Never did my heart feel sincerer rapture than at this moment.

Sir,' cried I, 'the applause of so good a man as I am sure you are adds to "that happiness in my heart which your benevolence has already excited. You

"behold before you, Sir, that Dr. Primrose, the monogamist, whom you have been pleased to call great. You here see that unfortunate divine, who has so long,

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' and, it would ill become me to say successfully, fought against the deuterogamy "of the age." "" And the description of the family picture, executed by the travelling painter who took likenesses at fifteen shillings a head! Their neighbours, the Flamboroughs, had been painted, seven of them in all, each holding an orange; but the Primroses would not be painted that way. "We desired to have something in a brighter style; and, after many debates, at length came to a "unanimous resolution of being drawn together, in one large historical family piece. This would be cheaper, as one frame would serve for all, and it would "be infinitely more genteel; for all the families of any taste were now drawn in the 66 same manner. As we did not immediately recollect an historical subject to hit

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us, we were contented each with being drawn as independent historical figures. My wife desired to be represented as Venus, and the painter was desired not to be "too frugal of diamonds in her stomacher and hair. The two little ones were to "be as Cupids by her side; while I, in my gown and band, was to present her "with my books on the Whistonian controversy. Olivia would be drawn as an "Amazon sitting upon a bank of flowers, dressed in a green joseph richly laced "with gold, and a whip in her hand. Sophia was to be a shepherdess, with as many sheep as the painter could put in for nothing; and Moses was to be dressed "" out with a white hat and feather. Our taste so much pleased the Squire that he "insisted on being put in as one of the family, in the character of Alexander the Great, at Olivia's feet." But there was no end to the passages that people quoted and continued to quote. Nay, not to Britain alone was the renown of the story confined. There had been French translations of one or two of Goldsmith's anonymous writings before; but the Vicar of Wakefield ran, almost at once, over the Continent. It was four years after its first publication when young Herder in Strasburg read a German translation of it to young Goethe. Every reader of Goethe's Autobiography knows what an impression the beautiful prose-idyll, as he called it, made on the heart and imagination of the glorious youth, and how he used its names and fancies to invest with a poetic haze the realities of his own early German loves. To the end of his days, and after he had long been the monarch of German literature, Goethe retained his affection for the book, and spoke of it as having been an influence of subtle spiritual blessing to him at an important moment of his mental history. Here was praise, indeed, could Goldsmith have heard of it! But Goethe was but twenty years of age when he first read the Vicar of Wakefield, and it is doubtful whether, when Goldsmith died, he knew that there was such a person as Goethe in the world!

On the strength of his increasing literary reputation, Goldsmith, even before the publication of his Vicar, had made one more attempt to get into practice as a London physician. He had been advised to this by Reynolds, who thought there were a good many families that might rather like to have the author of the Traveller for their medical man, and was anxious to see his friend in the receipt of a less precarious

income than he received from the booksellers. It went so far that Goldsmith actually donned a splendid professional suit made for him by Filby-" purple silk smallclothes, a handsome scarlet roquelaure (i.e. short mantle) buttoned to his chin," with a full-dress wig, a sword, and a gold-headed cane. The top of this last he was to put to his mouth when meditative in the approved fashion at the bedsides of his patients. One hears, however, but of one patient of any consequence that he ever had. It was a Mrs. Sidebotham; and he did not keep her long. He had prescribed some dose for her, the terrific nature of which so stunned the apothecary that he refused to make it up; and, as the lady chose to trust the apothecary rather than the physician, Goldsmith went off in a huff, and vowed he would practise physic no more. Accordingly, though from this time the name of "Dr. Goldsmith” was more firmly attached to him than it had been, he fell back for the rest of his life on literature exclusively. A distinction between two kinds of his literary labours will have already amply presented itself in the course of our memoir so far; and this distinction has to be carried on in the reader's mind as applying even more conspicuously to what of his life remains. We have brought him to the year 1767, when he was thirty-eight years of age, spoken of with admiration as the author of the Inquiry into the State of Polite Learning, the Citizen of the World, the Traveller, a volume of Essays, and the Vicar of Wakefield, but known also to have written no end of compilations and done an immense amount of obscure hackwork for publishers. Well, he was to live seven years more; and during these seven years his life was still to distribute itself as before, and to exhibit a few finer occasional performances at the bidding of his own genius gleaming over a vast basis of sheer drudgery in compilation. "It is surely to be regretted," wrote one of his critics, "that the "author of the Traveller, one of the best poems that have appeared since those of “Mr. Pope, should not apply wholly to works of imagination." It was easy to say this, but how could it be helped? He found it impossible to live by poems and novels done as he would like to do them. By hackwork alone could he live; and, if he died of hackwork, you must blame the system?

One chance of escape there was, and Goldsmith had it shrewdly in view. The DRAMA was still a form of English literature in which one might follow the bent of one's genius, and yet hope for sufficient remuneration. If one could write a really successful play, and so establish a permanent connexion with the theatres! So had Goldsmith been thinking ever since the publication of the Vicar; and not merely thinking, for in the spring of 1767 he had finished the manuscript of his comedy, The Good-Natured Man, and, through Reynolds's introduction, had submitted it to Garrick, with a view to its production at Drury Lane. He had spent pains on the comedy, and had taken the liberty, in it also, of differing from the prevalent taste. The kind of comedy then in fashion was "Genteel Comedy" or Sentimental Comedy," as it was called; and there was a special horror, on the part of theatre managers and critics, of what might be considered "low" or too broadly farcical. Goldsmith, prepossessed in favour of the older dramatists of the century, and especially of his countryman Farquhar, whom he justly reckoned the best of them all, had ventured

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on a return to the style of free and natural humour.

Whether on this account, or

for other reasons, Garrick did not like the play; and, after much hesitation on his part, and suspense on Goldsmith's, it was put into the hands of Colman, the Covent Garden manager. Neither was Colman in any hurry; and poor Goldsmith, while waiting for the result, had to betake himself for immediate supplies to his alternative of compiling. Not with his old employer, Newbery of St. Paul's Churchyard (who, indeed, died in 1767), but with Thomas Davies of Russell Street, he made an agreement to write a compendium of "Roman History," to be ready in two years, and for which he was to receive 250 guineas. And so, with a portion of this money advanced him, he lived through 1767, and at length, on the 29th of January, 1768, had the satisfaction of seeing his Good-Natured Man produced at Covent Garden. Satisfaction is too strong a word. Colman had had no great hopes of the piece; the actors, with one or two exceptions, were cool about it; through a great part of the performance the audience were little moved; at the famous scene of the bailiffs hisses were heard, and cries of "low," "low," from the partisans of Genteel Comedy in the pit; and not till the fourth act was the house fairly conquered into laughter and approbation. Goldsmith, who had been accompanied to the house by Johnson, Burke, and others of the Gerrard Street Club, had suffered dreadfully. It was the club night; and though, when all was over, he took the congratulations offered him, and went back to the club with his friends, and seemed in riotously high spirits, and sang his comic song of the "Old Woman tossed in a Blanket," it was only makebelieve. "All the while," he said, telling the story afterwards at a dinner-table, "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 imagined to themselves the anguish of my heart. But, when

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all were gone except Johnson here, I burst out a-crying and even swore by that "I would never write again." "All which, Doctor," said Johnson, who had been listening with amazement to this frank public confession of Goldy, "I thought had 'been a secret between you and me; and I am sure I would not have said anything, "about it for the world." After all, however, the comedy might be called a success. With the offending scene of the bailiffs cut out, it ran a due number of nights; it brought Goldsmith between 300l. and 400/.; on its publication by Griffin, with the offending scene restored "in deference to the judgment of a few friends who think in a particular way," it had a considerable sale; and Johnson, who had stood by it manfully all through, and written the Prologue, pronounced it the best comedy that had appeared since the Provoked Husband.

All this time, of the writing of the Good-Natured Man, and the trouble in getting it brought out, Goldsmith had continued a tenant of his chambers in Garden Court, Temple, where latterly he had kept a man-servant. The success of his play, however, such as it was, induced him to a still farther promotion of himself in the matter of domicile and housekeeping. He purchased, for 400%., the lease of new chambers in "No. 2, Brick Court, Middle Temple, up two pair of stairs," and