open and improve the mind; and never had Goldsmith reason to believe the world in any respect disposed to do him justice, that he was not also most ready and desirous to do justice to others. But even with the friends I have named, remained too much of the fondness of pity, the familiarity of condescension, the air of generosity, the habit of patronage; too readily did these appear to justify an illdisguised contempt, a sort of corporate spirit of disrespect, in the rest of the men of letters of that circle; and when was the applause of even the highest, yet counted a sufficient set-off against the depreciation of the lowest of mankind?

No one who thus examines the whole case can doubt, I think, that Goldsmith had never cause to be really content with his position among the men of his time, or with the portion of celebrity at any period during his life assigned to him. All men can patronise the useful, since it so well caters for itself; but as many as there are to need the beautiful, there are few to set it forth, and fewer still to encourage it; and even the booksellers who crowded round the author of the Vicar of Wakefield and the Traveller, came to talk but of booksellers' drudgery and catchpenny compilations. Is it strange that as such a man stood amid the Boswells, Beatties, Bickerstaffes, Murphys, Grahams, Hawkinses, and men of that secondary class, unconscious comparative criticism should have risen in his mind, and taken the form of a very innocent vanity? It is a harsh word, yet often stands for a harmless thing. May it not even be forgiven him if, in galling moments of slighting disregard, he made

occasional silent comparison of Rasselas with the Vicar, of the Rambler with the Citizen of the World, of London with the Traveller? 'Doctor, I should be glad to see you at 'Eton,' said one of the Eton masters and author of an indifferent Masque of Telemachus, as he sat at supper with Johnson and Goldsmith, indulging somewhat freely in wine, and arrived at that pitch in his cups, when he gave this invitation, of looking at one man and talking to another. 'I shall be glad to wait upon you,' answered Goldsmith. 'No, no,' replied Graham: "'tis not you 'I mean, Doctor Minor; 'tis Doctor Major, there.' 'Now, that Graham,' said Goldsmith afterward, 'is a fellow to make one commit suicide;' and upon nothing graver than expressions such as this, have men like Hawkins inferred that he loved not Johnson but rather envied him for his parts. Indeed,' pursues the musical knight, he once entreated a friend to desist from praising him; "for in doing so," said he, "you harrow up my ""soul: which it may be admitted was not at all improbable, if it was Hawkins praising him; for there is nothing so likely as a particular sort of praise to harrow up an affectionate soul. Such most certainly was Goldsmith's, and he loved with all his grateful heart whatever was loveable in Johnson. Boswell himself admits it, on more than one occasion; and contradicts much of what he has chosen to say on others, by the remark that in his opinion Goldsmith had not really more of envy than other people, but only talked of it freely.

1

That free talking did all the mischief. He was candid and simple enough to say aloud, what others would more prudently have concealed. 'Here's such a stir,' he exclaimed to Johnson one day, in a company at Thrale's (it was when London had gone mad about Beattie's common-place Essay on Truth, had embraced the author as 'the long-delayed 'avenger of insulted Christianity,' and had at last treated, flattered, and caressed him into a pension of £200 a-year): 'here's such a stir about a fellow that has written one 'book, and I have written many.' 'Ah, Doctor!' retorted Johnson, on his discontented, disregarded, unpensioned friend; 'there go two-and-forty sixpences, you 'know, to one guinea:' whereat the lively Mrs. Thrale claps her hands with delight, and poor Goldsmith can but sulk in a corner. Being an author, it is true, he had no business to be thus thin-skinned, and should rather have been shelled like a rhinoceros; but a stronger man than he was, might have fretted with the irritation of such doubtful wit, and been driven to even intemperate resentment. Into that he never was betrayed. With all that at various times, and in differing degrees, depressed his honest ambition, ruffled his pride, or invaded his self-respect, it will on the whole be very plain, by the time this narrative has closed, that no man more thoroughly, and even in his own despite, practised those gracious and golden maxims with which Edmund Burke this very year rebuked the hasty temper of his protégé Barry, and which every man should take for ever to his heart. Who can live in the world without

some trial of his patience?' asked the statesman of the young painter, who had fallen into petty disputes at Rome. And then he warned him that a man can never have a point of mere pride that will not be pernicious to him; that we must be at peace with our species, if not for their sakes, yet very much for our own; and that the arms with which the ill dispositions of the world are to be combated, and the qualities by which it is to be reconciled to us and we reconciled to it, are moderation, gentleness, a little indulgence to others, and a great deal of distrust of ourselves; which are not qualities of a mean spirit, as some may 'possibly think them, but virtues of a great and noble 'kind, and such as dignify our nature as much as they 'contribute to our fortune and repose.'

Well would it have been for the subject of this biography, if the same justice which the world thus obtained from him, throughout their chequered intercourse, he had been able to obtain either from or for himself. It has not hitherto been concealed that, in whatever respect society may have conspired against him, he is not clear of the charge of having aided it by his own weakness; and still more evident will this be hereafter. With the present year ended his exclusive reliance on the booksellers, and, as though to mark it more emphatically, his old friend Newbery died; but with the year that followed, bringing many social seductions in the train of the theatre, came a greater inability than ever to resist improvident temptation and unsuitable expense. His old habit of living merely

from day to day beset every better scheme of life; the difficulty with which he earned money had not helped to teach him its value; and he became unable to apportion wisely his labour and his leisure. The one was too violent, and the other too freely indulged. It is doubtful if the charge of gambling can be to more than a very trifling extent supported: but in the midst of poverty he was too often profuse, into clothes and entertainments he threw money that should have liquidated debts, and he wanted courage and self-restraint to face the desperate arrears that still daily mounted up against him. Hardly a new resource that did not bring a new waste, and fresh demands upon his jaded powers.

But before we too sternly pronounce upon genius sacrificed thus, and opportunities thrown away, let the forty years which have been described in this biography; the thirty of unsettled habit and undetermined pursuit, the ten of unremitting drudgery and desolate toil; be calmly retraced and charitably judged. Nor let us omit from that consideration the nature to which he was born, the land in which he was raised, his tender temperament neglected in early youth, the brogue and the blunders which he described as his only inheritance; and when the gains are counted up which we owe to his genius, be it still with admission of its native and irreversible penalties. His generous warmth of heart, his transparent simplicity of spirit, his quick transitions from broadest humour to gentlest pathos, and that delightful buoyancy of nature