'which had been dispersed each beneath a separate hat,

'awe, if the good nature of the man had not obviated 'my dread of the magician; but from that time, whenever the Doctor came to visit my father, we were always merry playfellows.' The little hero of the incident was a child of only five years old: but we have evidence in a letter of Garrick's to his father, that even a full year and a half before this he had entertained Mrs. Garrick with a whole 'budget' of stories and songs; had delivered the Chimney Sweep with exquisite taste as a solo; and, in the form of a duet with Garrick, Old Rose and Burn the Bellows.

But more serious affairs again claim Goldsmith's attention, and ours. His comedy cannot, in the most favourable expectation, appear before Christmas; and his necessities are hardly less pressing, meanwhile, than in his most destitute time. The utmost he received this year from the elder Newbery, for his usual task-work, would seem to have been about ten pounds for a compilation on a historical

subject. The concurrent advance of another ten pounds on his promissory note shows their friendly relations still subsisting; but the present illness of the publisher, from which he never recovered, had for some months interrupted the ordinary course of his business, and its management was gradually devolving on his nephew. No less a person than Tom Davies, however, came to Goldsmith's relief. Tom's business had thriven since he left the stage, and he determined to speculate in a history. The Letters from a Nobleman to his Son continued to sell; and still to excite curiosity, whether or not Lord Lyttelton had really written them. 'I 'asked Lord L. himself,' writes the learned Mrs. Carter to the less learned Mrs. Montagu, 'who assured me that he had never read them through, and moreover seemed to be

very

clearly of opinion that he did not write them. Seriously you may deny his being the author with the fullest certainty. It seems they were writ by Lord Cork.' All this sort of gossip (with no more foundation in the latter case than that Lord Cork and Orrery had addressed to his son a translation of Pliny's as well as other letters, and was no longer alive to contradict the rumour) was better known to Davies than to any one; and the sensible suggestion occurred to him of a History of Rome from the same hand, in the same easy, popular, unlearned manner. An agreement was accordingly drawn up, in which Goldsmith undertook to write. such a book in two volumes, and if possible to complete it in two years, for the sum of two hundred and fifty guineas; an undertaking of a somewhat brighter complexion than has

yet appeared in these pages; rife with future promise in that respect, it may be; and certainly very creditable to Davies. It is alleged by Seward and Isaac Reed, that, shortly before this agreement, Goldsmith's necessities had induced him to apply for the Gresham lectureship on Civil Law; an office of small remuneration and smaller responsibility, which the death of a Mr. Mace had vacated and to which a Mr. Jeffries was elected; but his name does not seem to have been formally entered as a candidate, and it is more certain that shortly after the agreement with Davies he had again taken lodgings in his favourite Islington, and was busy writing there.

Goldsmith's resource, in the midst of labour, as in his brief intervals of leisure, was still the country-haunt, the club, and the theatre; nor should what was called his Wednesday's club fail to find commemoration here. The social dignities of Gerrard Street had not sufficed for his 'clubable' propensities. Wholly at his ease there, he could not always be; and it will happen to even those who are greatest with their great friends, to find themselves pleasantest with their least. The very year before Doctor Johnson died he expressed his own strong sense of this, in founding the modest club to which he invited Reynolds (the terms are lax, and the expenses light: 'we meet thrice a week, and he who misses forfeits 'twopence'); and, if it were a want to Johnson to have occasional admixture of inferior intellects to be at ease with, how much more to Goldsmith! His shilling-rubber

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club at the Devil Tavern (scene of that earliest club for which Ben Jonson wrote his Latin rules), has been already named; and he frequented another of the same modest pretension, in the parlour of the Bedford in Covent Garden. But what most consoled him for the surrendered haunts of his obscurer days, was a minor club (known afterward by his own name) at the Globe Tavern in Fleet Street; where he attended every Wednesday as regularly as on the Fridays in Gerrard Street, and seems to have played the 'fool' as agreeably as when he had no reputation to be damaged by the folly. Songs sung by the members were the leading attraction at this club; and I derive my principal knowledge of it from a collection of songs and poems of the time which belonged to one of the members. This worthy 'William Ballantyne' had solaced his old age with manuscript notes on the amusements of his youth; and the book, so annotated, passed into the possession of my friend Mr. Bolton Corney.

Among the least obscure members were King the comedian (whose reputation Lord Ogleby had established); little Hugh Kelly, a young Irishman of eight-and-twenty, who had lately shown some variety of cleverness and superficial talent, and now occupied chambers near Goldsmith's, in the Temple; Edward Thompson, whom Garrick assisted with his interest to a command in the navy, and who is still remembered for his songs and his edition of Andrew Marvel; and another Irishman, named Glover, who had been bred a doctor, figured afterwards as an actor, and now

earned a scanty subsistence as a sort of Grub Street Galen. The anecdotes of Goldsmith which appeared on his death in the Annual Register (with the signature G.), which reappeared in the Dublin edition (1777) of his poems by Malone, and were adopted into the memoirs by Evans and Percy, were written by this Glover; who was one of the many humble Irish clients whom Goldsmith's fame drew around him, and who profited by every scantiest gleam of his prosperity. It is he who says (and none had better cause to say it), 'Our Doctor,' as Goldsmith was now universally called, had a constant levee of his distressed countrymen, 'whose wants, as far as he was able, he always relieved; ' and he has been often known to leave himself even without a guinea, in order to supply the necessities of others.' It is to be added of Glover, however, who was notorious for his songs and imitations, that he was given to practical jokes; and often rewarded his patron's generosity with very impudent betrayal of his simplicity. It was he who, in one of his Hampstead rambles, took Goldsmith into a cottage at West End of whose inhabitants he knew nothing, and, to the poet's awkward horror and mal-address, when he saw the trick, imposed himself on the party assembled as a pretended old acquaintance, and coolly sat down to tea with them.

Hugh Kelly seems to have been a greater favourite with good Mr. Ballantyne. Much,' says one of his notes, as I esteemed Mr. Kelly, when a member of the Wednes'day club, at the Globe in Fleet Street, called Goldsmith's,