Miss Hawkins's most delicate anecdotes. She says that soon after Goldsmith had contracted with the booksellers for this particular compilation, for which he was to be paid five hundred guineas, he went to Mr. Cadell and told him he was in immediate danger of being arrested; that Cadell immediately called a meeting of the proprietors, and prevailed on them to advance him a considerable part of the sum, which, by the original agreement, he was not entitled to till after a twelvemonth from the publication of his work; and that, on a day which Mr. Cadell had named for giving the needy author an answer, Goldsmith came and received the money, under pretence of instantly satisfying his creditors; whereupon Cadell, to discover the truth of his pretext, watched whither he went, and after following him to Hyde Park Corner, saw him get into a post-chaise, “in which a woman of the town was waiting for him, and with whom, it afterwards appeared, he went to Bath to dissipate what he had thus fraudulently obtained." It has been seen that Cadell had nothing to do with the matter; and it may be presumed that the good-natured lady's other facts rest on as slender a foundation."

On her authority, if it be received at all, must also be received another anecdote which is meant for a companionpiece to the sketch of dissipation just given. On one of his country excursions in that kind of company, the lady tells us, Goldsmith happened to stop at an inn on the road, where he found an old portrait hanging up in the parlor, which pared "MEMORANDUM. September 15, 1770. It is agreed between Oliver Goldsmith, M.B., and Thomas Davies, of Covent Garden, bookseller, that Oliver Goldsmith shall abridge for Thomas Davies the book entitled Goldsmith's Roman History, in two volumes 8vo, into one volume in 12mo, so as to fit it for the use of such as will not be at the expense of that in 8vo. For the abridging of the said history and for putting his name thereto, said Thomas Davies shall pay Oliver Goldsmith fifty guineas, to be paid him on the abridgment and delivery of the copy: as witness our hands. OLIVER GOLDSMITH. THOMAS DAVIES."

1 Memoirs, i. 296.

? Cadell became subsequently the owner of a part of this copyright, as the assignee of Davies; but the fact does not vitiate the argument in the

1

seemed to him so admirably painted that he suspected it at once to be a Vandyke, and resolved to become possessed of it if he could. He summoned the mistress of the house, asked her if she set any value on that old-fashioned picture, and, finding that she was wholly a stranger to its worth, told her it bore really such a great resemblance to his dear aunt Salisbury (picking up on the instant Mrs. Thrale's maiden name) that if she would sell it cheap he would buy it. A bargain was struck, a price infinitely below the value was paid, Goldsmith carried away the picture with him, and, adds the amiable relater of the story (who alleges for it, I should remark, the authority of Mr. Langton), "had the satisfaction to find that by this scandalous trick he had, indeed, procured a genuine and very salable painting of Vandyke's." It is hardly worth while to remark of the incident thus narrated, that, even if its main facts were true (which, if we are to believe Northcote's evidence as to Goldsmith's ignorance of painting, backed by his own in the dedication of the Deserted Village, they could hardly have been), it takes its character and color from the narrator; and that if the mere purchase of a picture at a price greatly below its worth must be held to involve a scandalous trick, for as to the romance about aunt Salisbury it is not credible for a moment, a very long list, indeed, of extremely scandalous tricksters might be named, from Swift upwards and downwards, on whom much hitherto hoarded indignation should straightway be poured. It is to be feared, therefore, that the dissipation - piece is, on the whole, to be regarded as the more characteristic of the two.

Indeed, it would be idle to deny the charge of dissipation altogether. It is clear that with the present year he

1 Memoirs, i. 295.

"I was to-day at an auction of pictures with Pratt, and laid out two pounds five shillings for a picture of Titian, and if it were a Titian it would be worth twice as many pounds. (!) If I am cheated, I'll part with it to Lord Masham; if it be a bargain, I'll keep it to myself. That's my conscience."-Journal to Stella, Works, iii. 126.

passed into habits of needless expense; used the influence of a popularity which was never higher than now, to obtain means for their thoughtless indulgence; and involved himself in the responsibilities which at last overwhelmed him. He exchanged his simple habits, says Cooke, for those of the great; he commenced quite a man of lettered ease and consequence; he was obliged to run into debt; "and his debts rendered him at times so melancholy and dejected that I am sure he felt himself a very unhappy man." One of these sad involvements occurred in the autumn, when, it is supposed, being pressed for some portion of the loan expended on his chambers, he exacted from Griffin an advance of five hundred guineas for the first five volumes of the Natural History, which the bookseller was obliged to make up by disposing of half a share to another bookseller

There are no years when, according to Reynolds's engagement-books, his dinners with Goldsmith were so frequent as in this and the following. "The Hornecks, Dr. Goldsmith, and Wilkes very often," is the remark of his biographer (i. 326), who adds (363): "He seems at this time to have dined oftener with Goldsmith than with any one else," and says in a later passage (381), "A very frequently recurring employment of Sir Joshua's Monday evenings, about this time (1770-1771), is a dinner at four, often with Goldsmith; then the Academy lecture at half-past five, followed by a council-meeting at seven, and after that an adjournment to the club." I will add what is said by Reynolds's biographer, with quotation from another of his note-books, in illustration of my mention, at the close of this biography, of the outcast girls whom Goldsmith befriended. "I believe Reynolds to have been the confidant of some at least of those sorrowful cases, and to have helped to relieve them. So at least I explain the first entry on a fly-leaf of the pocket-book for 1771, which runs: Goldsmith's girl; Mrs. Quarrington; inquire for Mrs. Jones at Mrs. Sneyd's, Tibbald's Row, Red Lion Street. Mrs. Hartley, Little James Street, Haymarket, at Mr. Kelly's.' These are all models. One of Goldsmith's outcast protégées had, I imagine, been employed as a model on his recommendation.”—Life, ii. 71.

2 Yet the old habits remained. "I have heard Sir Joshua remark of him, in times of his greatest distress, he was often obliged to supplicate a friend for the loan of ten pounds for his immediate relief; yet if by accident a distressed petitioner told him a piteous tale, nay, if a subscription for any folly was proposed to him, he, without any thought of his own poverty, would, with an air of generosity, freely bestow on the person who solicited for it the very loan he had himself but just before obtained."-Northcote's Life of Reynolds, i. 288.

(Mr. Nourse), and which Goldsmith had wholly expended before half a dozen chapters were written. For he had laid the subject aside to go on with his English History; though not unwarned of the unpopularity the lat ter might involve him in, so mad was the excitement of the time. Would he be a Hume or a Mrs. Macauley? He would be neither, he said; he objected equally to both.

Against party it is certain that Goldsmith always set himself. "I fly from petty tyrants to the throne." He has, at the same time, been careful to tell us that he did this upon principle, and not from "empty notions of divine or hereditary right." In the preface to his History, where that expression occurs, he takes occasion to object to the opinions put forth by Hume respecting government as "sometimes reprehensible," and to declare, for his own part, that when at any time he had felt a leaning towards monarchy it had been suggested by the consideration that a king, being but one man, may easily be restrained from doing wrong, whereas, if a number of the great are permitted to divide authority, who can punish them if they abuse it? An error is involved in this reasoning not inexcusable, I hope, by those who have read the sketches of party given in this narrative; but at least it suffices to show us why, on the particular theme, Goldsmith joined Johnson against Burke, though he differed from Johnson in this, that in real truth he went with neither faction.

Yet surely, if ever even faction, as against itself, could be invested with a something manly and defensible, it was now. The most thoughtful, the most retired, the least excitable of men, were suddenly aroused to some interest in it. A friend of Gray relates that he had an appointment to meet the poet at his lodgings in Jermyn Street, and found him so deeply plunged in the columns of a newspaper, which with his dinner had been sent him from a neighboring tavern, that his attention was with difficulty drawn from it. "Take this," said he, in a tone of excitesuch writing as I never before saw in a

ment; "here is

newspaper." It was the first letter with the signature of "Junius." But it was not what now we must associate with "Junius"; not the reckless calumnies and scandals, not the personal spites and hatreds; not such halting liberalism as his approval of the taxation of America, and his protest against the disfranchisement of Old Sarum, which then so completely seized upon the reason as well as the tempers of men. It was the startling manifestation of power and courage; it was the sense that unscrupulous ministers had now an enemy as unscrupulous; that here was knowledge of even the worst chicaneries of office, which not the most sneering official could make light of; that no minister in either house, no courtier at St. James's, no obsequious judge at Westminster, no supercilious secretary in any of the departments, could hereafter feel himself safe from treachery and betrayal; and that what hitherto had been only a vulgar, half-articulate cry from the Brentford hustings, or at best a faint whisper echoed from St. Stephen's, was now made the property and enjoyment of every section of the people-of the educated by its exquisite polish, of the vulgar by its relish of malice, of the great middle-class by its animated plainness, vigorous shrewdness, and dogged perseverance. "I will be heard," cried Burke in the House of Commons, in the course of what he wittily called the fifth act of the tragi-comedy acted by his Majesty's servants for the benefit of Mr. Wilkes at the expense of the constitution-"I will be heard. I will throw open those doors, and tell the people of England that when a man is addressing the chair on their behalf the attention of the Speaker is engaged." But "great noise" of members talking proved too much for even that impetuous spirit; he was not heard; nor, until the publication of Sir Henry Cavendish's Notes a dozen years since, had the English people any detailed means of knowing what had passed during the most excit

1 This account is from Sir Egerton Brydges. Mr. Nichols merely says: "One day when I entered his apartment I found him absorbed in reading the newspaper. This was the first letter which appeared of 'Junius."" -Works, v. 51.