him for some time; and no one answering at his door, he opened it without announcement, and walked in. His friend was at his desk, but with hand uplifted, and a look directed to another part of the room; where a little dog sat with difficulty on his haunches, looking imploringly at his teacher, whose rebuke for toppling over he had evidently just received. Reynolds advanced, and looked past Goldsmith's shoulder at the writing on his desk. It seemed to be some portions of a poem. He looked more closely,

and was able to read a couplet which had been that instant written. The ink of the second line was wet.

This visit of Reynolds is one of the few direct evidences which the year affords of his usual intercourse with his more distinguished friends. There is no reason to doubt, however, that he had been pretty constant in his attendance at the Club during the past winter; he was a member of the Society of Arts, and had been often at their meetings; and his miseries and necessities must have been great indeed, that would have kept him long a stranger to the Theatre.

The last season had been one of peculiar interest. The year 1763 had opened with evil omen to Garrick. For the first time since the memorable performance at Goodman's Fields, now twenty-two years ago, when, in the midst of unexampled enthusiasm, his eye fell upon a little deformed figure in a side box, was met by the approving glance of an eye as bright as his own, and, in the admiration of Alexander Pope, his heart swelled with the sense of fame, Garrick, at the commencement of that year, felt his influence shaken and his ground insecure. On a question of prices, the Fribble whom Churchill has gibbetted in the Rosciad led a riotous opposition in his theatre, to which he was compelled to offer a modified submission; and not many weeks later, after appearing in a comedy by Mrs. Sheridan and giving it out to be his last appearance in any new play (the character was a solemn old coxcomb, and one of his happiest performances), he announced his determination to go abroad for two years. The pretence was health; but the real cause (resentment

of what he thought the public indifference, and a resolve that they should feel his absence) is surmised in a note of Lord Bath's which lies before me, addressed to his nephew Colman, the ad interim manager of the theatre.

Garrick left London in the autumn; and his first letter to Colman from Paris describes the honours which were showering upon him, the plays revived to please him, the veteran actors recalled to act before him. He had supped with Marmontel and d'Alembert; 'the Clairon' was at the supper and recited them a charming scene from Athalie; and he had himself given the dagger scene in Macbeth, the curse in Lear, and the falling asleep in Sir John Brute, with such extraordinary effect, that the most wonderful 'wonder of wonders' was nothing to it. Yet on the very day that letter was written (the 8th of October, 1763), a more wonderful wonder was enacting on his own theatre. A young bankers' clerk named Powell, to whom, on hearing him rehearse, he had given an engagement before he left London of three pounds a week for three years, appeared on that day in Beaumont and Fletcher's Philaster, and took the audience by storm. Foote is described to have been the only unmoved spectator. The rest of the audience were not content with clapping; they stood up and shouted; and Foote's jeering went for nothing. Walpole describes the scene with what seems to be a satisfied secret persuasion (in which Goldsmith certainly shared) that Garrick had at last a dangerous rival. He calls the new actor 'what Mr. Pitt called my Lord Clive,' a heaven-born hero;

says the heads of the whole town are turned; and describes all the boxes taken for a month. Powell's salary was at once raised to ten pounds a week, George Garrick consenting on the part of his brother; and such was the anxiety of the town to see him in new characters, and the readiness of the management in giving way to it, that in this his first season, from October '63 to May '64, he appeared in seventeen different plays, to a profit on the receipts of nearly seven thousand pounds. His most successful efforts indicate the attractive points of his style. In Philaster he appeared sixteen times, in Posthumus eleven, seven times in Jaffier, six in Castalio, and five in Alexander. Garrick himself had meanwhile written to him from Italy to warn him against such characters as the latter, and restrain him from attempting too much. The advice was admirably written, and gratefully acknowledged; nor is there any reason to doubt its sincerity. Remoteness of place has in some respects the effect of distance of time; and the great actor, doubtless not sorry to be absent till the novelty should abate, was less likely to be jealous in Piedmont or the Savoy than in the green-room of Drury Lane. He knew himself yet unassailed in what he had always felt to be his main strength, his versatility and variety of power. Three men were now dividing his laurels; and till Powell could double Richard and Sir John Brute, till O'Brien could alternate Ranger with Macbeth, and till Weston could exhibit Lear by the side of Abel Drugger, Garrick had no call to be seriously alarmed.

Be that as it might, however, Powell's success was a great thing for the authors. He came to occupy for them, opportunely, a field which the other had avowedly abandoned; and Goldsmith, always earnest for the claims of writers, sympathized strongly in his success. Another incident of the theatrical season made hardly less noise. O'Brien's charms in Ranger and Lovemore proved too much for Lady Susan Ilchester, and she ran away with him. It cured Walpole for a time of his theatre-going. He had a few days before been protesting to his dear friend Mann that he had the republican spirit of an old Roman, and that his name was thoroughly Horatius; but an earl's daughter running away with a player, ran away with all his philosophy. He thought a footman would have been preferable; and could not have believed that Lady Susan would have stooped so low. On the other hand, Goldsmith speaks of O'Brien's elegance and accomplishments ('by 'nature formed to please,' said Churchill), and seems to think them not unfairly matched. But much depends on whether these things are viewed from a luxurious seat in the private boxes, or from a hard bench in the upper gallery.

Poverty pressed heavily just now upon Goldsmith, as I have said. His old friend Grainger came over on leave from his West India station, to bring out his poem of the Sugar Cane; and found him in little better plight than in his garret days. I taxed little Goldsmith for not writing,' he says to Percy, as he promised. His answer was that ' he never wrote a letter in his life. . and 'faith I believe

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