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furnished them in what was thought a decidedly luxurious style-" Wilton carpets," "mahogany sofas," 'card-tables," "looking-glasses," &c. These chambers, consisting of three apartments, were to be his fixed London residence for the rest of his life. For neighbour, and occasional money-lender, on the same floor, he had a jolly barrister named Bott, also from the Green Island; and in the rooms underneath was the great lawyer Blackstone, dreadfully disturbed in the composition of his Commentaries, every other night, when Goldy had friends with him, by the singing and stamping and general hulla-baloo overhead. Two nights every week, however, were club-nights with Goldy, when he met company out of his own chambers. Monday evening for some time, as has been already mentioned, and then Friday evening, was the fixed evening of meeting with his more celebrated friends of the Gerrard Street Club. But for homelier jollity, and especially for the pleasures of song along with conviviality, he belonged, it appears, to another club, called the Wednesday's Club, which met at the Globe Tavern in Fleet Street. In addition to persons now unknown, this club numbered among its members Kelly the dramatist, King the comedian, Thompson the song-writer and editor of Andrew Marvel, an Irish medical man and ex-actor named Glover, and a certain William Ballantyne. Some manuscript memoranda by this last of the proceedings of the club, and of the songs sung in it, came into Mr. Forster's hands, and enabled him, in his Life of Goldsmith, to recover more of the history of the club and of Goldsmith's connexion with it than had been previously known.

From such a trial of the nerves as the comedy had been it was almost a relief to toil on at compilation. And here it will be as well to give an account at once of all of this sort that Goldsmith was occupied with during the last years of his life, including the undertaking that was largest of all and that hung like a millstone about his neck almost to the day of his death. Contributions to the Gentleman's Journal, started by Griffin in November 1768, and to a Westminster Magazine, begun in 1772, are hardly worth mentioning; a Life of Parnell, prefixed to an edition of Parnell's Works, published by Davies in 1770, was but by-play; and a Life of Bolingbroke, prefixed to a reprint by Davies, in the same year, of some of Bolingbroke's pamphlets, is perhaps the poorest compilation that came from Goldsmith's pen, if not the most featureless thing that ever called itself a biography. It was on his more extensive compilations of an historical kind that Goldsmith depended. His Roman History, which he had promised Davies in two years, and shares in which had been assigned to other publishers, duly appeared in two volumes 8vo. in May 1769, leaving him free for a greater compilation which he had just agreed for with Griffin. It was to be a huge Natural History, or History of the Earth and of Animated Nature, in eight volumes, the payment to be 800 guineas for the whole, or at the rate of 100 guineas a volume. It was the most magnificentlooking engagement that Goldsmith had ever made; but it proved, as has been said, a millstone hung round his neck. For, five hundred guineas of the price having been paid ere the work had been well begun, and the whole before June 1772—

by which time Griffin, to raise the money, had transferred his right to others-Goldsmith, while employed on the undertaking, was in the condition rather of one working off a heavy debt than one working for expected wages. Hence the necessity of other labours to be carried on collaterally. These were-a History of England in 4 vols., promised to Davies in June 1769, for 500/., and finished and published in August 1771; a school-abridgment for Davies, in 1772, of the Roman History already published; and a History of Greece, begun for Griffin in 1773, but not published till after the author's death. Add a translation of Scarron's "Comic Romance," and perhaps other things of the same kind of which no account has been kept, and Goldsmith's miscellaneous literary industry from 1769 onwards will not appear inconsiderable. Deserving particular mention is a project of his, in 1773, of a "Dictionary of Arts and Sciences," or, as we should now say, an Encyclopædia, to be edited by himself, and for which he had promises of contributions from Johnson, Burke, Reynolds, Garrick, Burney, and others. He had drawn up a prospectus of this really promising scheme, and made other preparations, when the impossibility of finding capital obliged him to desist.

Amid all this toil for the Muse of hackwork (what a hag she must be!) Goldsmith did not quite neglect the finer and dearer Muse of his own affections. On the 26th of May, 1770, there appeared, published by Griffin, at his shop in Catherine Street, price two shillings, The Deserted Village: A Poem: By Dr. Goldsmith. This poem, dedicated to Sir Joshua Reynolds, and for the copyright of which Goldsmith had received one hundred guineas from Griffin, was instantaneously popular. Two new editions of it were called for in the following month, and a fourth in August; and through the rest of that year the lovely village of Auburn was in all men's fancies, passages from the poem were in every mouth, and the topics, which it suggested, of depopulation, luxury, and landlordism, were discussed in connexion with it. Whatever reputation Goldsmith had won as an English poet by his Traveller was now more than confirmed, and people were only anxious to have more in the verseform from one who managed that form with so perfect a mastery. As a writer of verse, however, Goldsmith was too fastidious, too careful of every line and phrase, to be very productive. The Haunch of Venison: A Poetical Epistle to Lord Clare, written in 1771, but not published till after his death, and Threnodia Augustalis, “rather a compilation than a poem,” as he himself says, written to be set to music on the death of the Princess Dowager of Wales, and actually recited and sung at a public commemoration of that event in February 1772 in the rooms of Mrs. Cornelys, in Soho-these, with one remarkable exception, to be mentioned in due time, are the only pieces of verse of any length that came from Goldsmith's pen after The Deserted Village. But, to make amends for his sparingness in the article of verse, he gave the world a second comedy, richer and better every way than his first, and indeed about the best thing of its kind in the English literature of the eighteenth century. He was busy with this comedy in 1771, and seems to have had it by him finished before the end of that year; but there was the usual, or even more than the usual, delay and difficulty in getting it accepted and brought on the

stage. Not till the 15th of March, 1773, was it brought out at Covent Garden by Colman, under the name She Stoops to Conquer; or the Mistakes of a Night, which Goldsmith had happily adopted for it at the last moment. Colman himself was dead against it, and had spread about dismal forebodings of its failure. But the triumph was immediate and complete. It was performed every possible night for the rest of the season, and once by royal command; all the town rang with it; and the humours of the immortal Tony Lumpkin raised such roars of laughter that good, hearty laughter came again into fashion on the stage, the deathblow was given to prim "Sentimental Comedy," and the practitioners and partisans of that style of drama were beaten off the field. Goldsmith's receipts from the theatre may have been between 400/. and 500/.; and as when the play was published, 6,000 copies were sold within a year, he must have received something additional on that account. It was dedicated to Dr. Johnson, in words admirably chosen. "By inscribing this "slight performance to you," said Goldsmith, "I do not mean so much to compliment you as myself. It may do me some honour to inform the public that I have lived 'many years in intimacy with you. It may serve the interests of mankind also to 'inform them that the greatest wit may be found in a character without impairing the most unaffected piety." What could be better expressed? Pen in hand, as one here sees, Goldy could do anything of this kind more beautifully and delicately than any one else."

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And now, having, with one exception, completed our inventory of Goldsmith's writings, whether of the compilation kind or of the finer and more permanent kind, during the last years of his life, we are free for a look at the dear fellow himself, and his habits and circumstances socially, during all this exercise of his pen.

His head-quarters were his chambers in No. 2, Brick Court, Middle Temple. Not only had he furnished them expensively; but the breakfasts, dinners, and suppers which he frequently gave in them, whether to his friends of the Johnson and Reynolds set, or to the needier Hiffernans, Glovers, Kellys, and other literary Irishmen, of whom he had always a retinue attached to him, were extravagantly lavish. This, with his perpetual giving away of guineas to poor blackguards, or better fellows, who wanted them, and his general carelessness of money, kept him always poorer than, with his receipts, he need have been. His receipts during the last six years of his life may be calculated at between 3,000l. and 4,000/. in all, which was worth in those days about double what such a sum would be worth now; and yet he was always in debt. Something may have gone to his relations in Ireland-to his much-loved brother Henry, before his death in May 1768; to his mother, who survived till 1770, and was blind in her old age; and then to his younger brother Maurice, to whom at any rate we find him resigning a small legacy that had been left him by Uncle Contarine. Some expense to Goldsmith was also caused by the arrival in London of his nephew Hodson, and his residence there for some time without means of his own. Goldsmith's famous accounts with his tailor, Filby, which ran high

-one year as high as 70%.-were swelled by orders of clothes for this inconvenient young gentleman. But, on the whole, his general recklessness in his Brick Court Chambers, where he never kept a drawer locked, and let his man Dennis manage everything—this and his open-handedness to all about him in the London streets account sufficiently for his expenditure. Often, however, he was out of London, taking his open-handedness with him to the fields, or along country roads, and into roadside inns or country houses. He was particularly fond of starting with one or two Irish friends, after breakfast in Brick Court, on a ramble to Islington, Kilburn, Hampstead, or some other suburb, returning late or not till next day. He and his friend Bott rented together for some time in 1768, and again in 1769, a convenient cottage eight miles from London on the Edgeware Road; and in this "Shoemaker's Paradise," as Goldsmith called it in honour of the trade of its builder, he worked away for weeks together, in those years, at his Roman History and other things, running up to London when he liked. The neighbourhood was a favourite one with him, for he returned to it during portions of 1771 and 1772, for greater leisure to write his Animated Nature-not this time to the "Shoemaker's Paradise," or with Bott, but to a farm-house, in Hyde Lane, near the six-mile stone on the same Edgeware Road. Here, occupying a single room, and boarding with the farmer's family, who became exceedingly fond of him, he wrote not only a good portion of his Animated Nature, but also, it is said, She Stoops to Conquer. Of course, in addition to these occasional retirements to the quiet of the Edgeware Road, there were longer journeys at intervals into various parts of England. He is traced into Hampshire, Sussex, Suffolk, Derbyshire, Leicestershire, Lincolnshire, and Yorkshire; and in 1771 he was, for a good while together, with his friend Lord Clare at Bath. Some of these country excursions appear to have been undertaken in the interests of his Animated Nature; at all events, in the course of the excursions, he now and then jotted down an observation for use in that compilation. More purely for pleasure was a visit of six weeks to France in the autumn of 1770-his only visit to the Continent since his long and strange vagabond ramble in it fifteen years before. On this occasion he went as one of a family-party, with Mrs. Horneck, a widow lady, whose acquaintance he had recently made through Sir Joshua Reynolds, and her two daughters, beautiful girls of twenty and eighteen respectively. The elder, for whom Goldsmith had invented the playful name of "Little Comedy," was engaged to be married to a Mr. Bunbury; the younger, Mary Horneck, or "The Jessamy Bride," as Goldsmith called her, was unengaged, and——! Well, who knows? Of no feminine creature, at all events, save this "Jessamy Bride," do we hear, in all Goldsmith's life, so near to him, and in such circumstances, that the world can fancy he was in love with her and can wish that they had wedded. "The Jessamy Bride!" what a suggestion of the jasmine-flower, of gracefulness and white muslin, in the very sound of her name! Poor, plain, mean-looking Goldy! -two-and-forty years of age, too!-did he only look and sigh, and know it to be hopeless? Everything was against him even in this journey. For example, there

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was that wretched Hickey, the attorney, who joined the party in Paris, and would make a butt of Goldy even in the presence of the ladies, and came back with the story how, maintaining a certain distance from one of the fountains at Versailles to be within reach of a leap, he made a jump to prove his assertion and his muscular power to the Jessamy, and tumbled into the water. Who could marry a man like that? One comfort is that she did not marry Mr. Hickey. When she was engaged, which was not till a year after Goldsmith's death, it was to a Colonel Gwyn, whose wife she became about three years after that. She was alive as late as 1840, having survived Goldsmith sixty-six years. She talked of him fondly

to the last.

The reader may remember a certain Kenrick, who succeeded Goldsmith as Griffiths's hack on the Monthly Review in 1757, and who had ever since been, for some reason, his deadly enemy. In March 1773, when Goldsmith had reached the

very height of his living reputation, and She Stoops to Conquer was winning the plaudits of the town, this envious brute, who was editing the London Packet newspaper, inserted in its columns an anonymous letter of abuse against Goldsmith and all that he had done. Not content with condemning all Goldsmith's writings and especially his last comedy, as worthless, flimsy, and what not, he ventured on such elegancies as this: "Your poetic vanity is as unpardonable as your personal: would man believe it, and will woman bear it, to be told that for hours the great "Goldsmith will stand surveying his grotesque orang-outang figure in a pier-glass? "Was but the lovely H--k as much enamoured, you would not sigh, my gentle "swain, in vain!" When Goldsmith read this, his blood was properly up; and, accompanied by Captain Horneck of the Guards, the brother of the lady whose name had been dragged in, he was off to the bookseller Evans's in Paternoster Row, where the newspaper was published. What passed was described to Mr. Prior, when he was writing his Life of Goldsmith, by Mr. Harris, the publisher of St. Paul's Churchyard, who had been in Evans's employment at the time in question, and was a witness to the scene. "I have called," said Goldsmith to Evans, "in consequence of a scurrilous attack in your paper upon me (my name is Goldsmith), “and an unwarrantable liberty taken with the name of a young lady. As for myself “I care little, but her name must not be sported with." Evans, professing that he knew nothing of the matter, stooped down as if to look for the offensive article in a file of the newspaper, when Goldsmith, unable to resist the sight of the big Welsh back so temptingly exposed, came down upon it with a whack of his cane. Instantly it was big Welshman against little Irishman; a lamp which hung overhead was broken in the scuffle, and they were both drenched with the oil; one of the shopmen ran for a constable, and the sneak Kenrick himself, coming out from his editor's room, helped Captain Horneck to separate the combatants, and send Goldsmith home in a coach. For a week the town was merry over the affray, chiefly at Goldy's expense; who had, moreover, to pay 50l. to a Welsh charity, to avoid an action by Evans. One's wish now is that time could be rolled back to the moment of the scuffle, so that the lamp-oil that was spilt might have been poured down Kenrick's throat.

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