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So I cut it, and sent it to Reynolds undrest,

To paint it, or eat it, just as he lik'd best.

Of the neck and the breast I had next to dispose . .

'Twas a neck and a breast that might rival Monroe's..

But in parting with these I was puzzled again,

With the how, and the who, and the where, and the when:
There's H-d, and C-y, and H-rth, and H—ff,

I think they love venison.. I know they love beef!

Ah! he had excellent reason to know it. These were four of his poor poet-pensioners, three of whom, in the first uncorrected copy of the poem, stood undisguisedly as 'Coley, and Williams, and Howard, and Hiff;' but Hiffernan is alone recognisable now. (Monroe was Lord Townshend's Dorothy, to whose charms he devoted his verse.)

But hang it.. to poets who seldom can eat,
Your very good mutton 's a very good treat;
Such dainties to them! it would look like a flirt,

Like sending 'em ruffles when wanting a shirt.

While thus I debated, in reverie centred,

An acquaintance, a friend as he call'd himself, enter'd ;

An underbred, fine-spoken fellow was he,

And he smil'd as he look'd at the venison and me.

This is the hero of the poem; and sketched so vividly, with a humour so life-like and droll, that he was probably a veritable person. In the first published copy, indeed, which contains touches I prefer to the corrected version, he is described as 'a fine spoken Custom-house officer he.' In what follows, the leading notion is founded on one of Boileau's satires, but the comedy is both more rich and more delicate. The visitor ascertains that the venison is really Goldsmith's.

If that be the case then,' cried he, very gay,
'I'm glad I have taken this house in 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 the dinner.

What say you .
And my wife, little Kitty, is famous for crust.

a pasty it shall, and it must;

Here, porter!.. this venison with me to Mile-end;
No stirring, I beg.. my dear friend.. my dear friend!'
Thus, snatching his hat, he brush'd off like the wind,
And the porter and eatables follow'd behind.

Left alone to reflect, having emptied my shelf,
And nobody with me at sea but myself,'

Though I could not help thinking my gentleman hasty,
Yet Johnson, and Burke, and a good venison pasty,
Were things that I never dislik'd in my life. .
Though clogg'd with a coxcomb, and Kitty his wife.
So next day, in due splendour to make my approach,
I drove to his door in my own hackney-coach.

Sad is the disappointment. He had better have remained (as the Duke of Cumberland had said in those love-letters to Lady Grosvenor with which the newspapers were now making mirth for the town) with 'nobody with him at sea but himself.' Johnson and Burke can't come. The one is at Thrale's, and the other at that horrible House of Commons. But never mind, says the host; shall see somebody quite as good. And here Goldsmith remembered his former visitor, Parson Scott, who had just now got his fat Northumberland livings in return for his Anti Sejanus, and was redoubling anti-whig efforts (in hope of a bishopric very probably), as Panurge and Cinna.

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There is a villain who writes under the signature of Panurge,' exclaimed the impetuous Barré, from his seat on the 12th of March, 'a noted ministerial scribbler undoubt'edly supported by government, who has this day charged the Duke of Portland with robbing Sir James Lowther,

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yet this dirty scoundrel is suffered to go unpunished.' Not wholly; for Goldsmith, to whom Burke had probably talked of the matter at the Club, now ran his polished rapier through this political parson. Never mind for Burke and Johnson, repeats his host; I've provided capital substitutes.

For I knew it,' he cried, both eternally fail,

The one with his speeches, and t'other with Thrale :
But no matter, I 'll warrant we'll make up the party
With two full as clever, and ten times as hearty.
The one is a Scotchman, the other a Jew,

They 're both of them merry, and authors like you.
The one writes the Snarler, the other the Scourge;
Some think he writes Cinna.. he owns to Panurge.'

The only hope left is the pasty; though it looks somewhat alarming when dinner is served, and no pasty appears. There is fried liver and bacon at the top, tripe at the bottom; spinach at the sides, with pudding made hot;' and in the middle a place where the pasty was . . not.' Now Goldsmith can't eat bacon or tripe; and even more odious to him than either is the ravenous literary Scot, and the talk of the chocolate-cheeked scribe of a Jew (who likes these here dinners so pretty and small'): but still there's the pasty promised, with Kitty's famous crust; and of this a rumour goes gradually round the

table, till the Scot, though already replete with tripe and bacon, announces 'a corner for thot;' and 'we'll all keep a corner,' is the general resolve, and on the pasty everything is concentrated: when the terrified maid brings in, not the pasty, but the catastrophe, in the shape of terrible news from the baker. To him had the pasty been carried, crust and all :

And so it fell out, that that negligent sloven
Had shut out the pasty on shutting his oven.

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It may have been on hearing these verses read in the Beauclerc and Bunbury circles (it was from a copy Lord Clare had given Bunbury they were afterwards printed) that Horace Walpole conceded to the silly changeling,' as he called Goldsmith, bright gleams of parts;' this being the style of verse he relished most, and could value beyond Travellers and Deserted Villages. It was in a later letter he made it a kind of boast that he had never exchanged a syllable with Johnson in his life, and had never been in a room with him six times; for the necessity of finding himself, once a year at least, perforce in the same room with him, and with Goldsmith too, did not till the present year begin. On St. George's day, 1771, Sir Joshua Reynolds took the chair at the first annual dinner of the Royal Academy: where the entertainers, himself and his fellow Academicians, sat surrounded by such evidence of claims to respect as their own pencils had adorned the walls with, and their guests were the most distinguished men of the day. It was one of the happy

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devices of the president by which he steered the new and unchartered Academy through those quicksands and shoals that had wrecked the chartered institution out of which it rose. Academies cannot create genius; academies had

nothing to do with the

begetting of Hogarth, or Reynolds, or Wilson, or Gainsborough, the greatest names of our English

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