He had one room in the turret of Canonbury House, which, since altered and subdivided, to within the last twenty years remained as it was in his time-a genuine relic of Elizabeth's hunting-seat. It was an old oak-room on the first floor, with Gothic windows, panelled wainscot, and a recess in its eastern corner for a large press-bedstead, which doubtless the poet occupied.' Canonbury Tower, with which Newbery had some connection as holding a lease or property in it (of which he gave the management to the Flemings), was for many years let out in this way, and had been the frequent resort of men connected with literature: but if, as at times alleged, any of Goldsmith's poetry was written here, it was written in the present autumn, and could have been but the fragments or beginnings of a poem; for he did not return to the lodging. He now remained some weeks in it; and is said to have been often found, during the time, among a social party of his fellow-lodgers (publishers Robinson and Francis Newbery, printers Baker and Hamilton, editor Beaufort, afterwards of the Town and Country Magazine, poets Woty and Huddlestone Wynne, and pamphleteering parsons Rider and Sellon), presiding at the festive board of the "Crown" tavern, in the Islington lower road, where they had formed a kind of temporary club. At the close of the year he had returned to the Temple, was in communication with Burke about his comedy, and was again pretty constant in his attendance at Gerrard Street.

1 Mr. Hone, in his Every Day Book, says, on the authority of Mr. Symes, bailiff of the manor of Islington, "that his mother-in-law, Mrs. Evans, who had lived there three-and-thirty years, and was wife to the former bailiff, often told him that her aunt, Mrs. Tapps, a seventy years' inhabitant of the tower, was accustomed to talk much about Goldsmith and his apartment. It was the old oak-room on the first floor. Mrs. Tapps affirmed that he there wrote his Deserted Village, and that he slept in a large press-bedstead placed in the eastern corner. From this room two small ones for sleeping in have since been separated, by the removal of the panelled oak wainscoting from the northeast wall, and the cutting of two doors through it, with a partition between them; and since Goldsmith was here, the window on the south side has been broken through."-The Every Day Book for 8th May, 1825 (i. 638). The passage in the text was written in 1848.

CHAPTER XVIII

PATRONS OF LITERATURE

1767

On his reappearance in London, Goldsmith found political excitement raging and Burke still rising higher through the storm. He might have wondered to see, among the first acts of the new administration, his countryman and friend Robert Nugent, the most furious upholder of colonial taxation, selected for a lordship of the Board of Trade, and raised to the rank of Baron Nugent and Viscount Clare; yet this was nothing to the marvel of seeing emanate, from Lord Chatham's Chancellor of the Exchequer, a new project for taxation of America. The rest of their career had been only less disgraceful; nor is it possible, without some allusion to it, to exhibit properly either the social influences of the time or that incident of Goldsmith's life with which this chapter will close. Violating public faith in their attack on the East India charter, they had sustained, from its resolute exposure by Mr. O'Bourke (as pompous Beckford, Lord Chatham's tool in the matter, persisted in calling Edmund), a most damaging blow. They had suffered an ignominious defeat, without precedent since Walpole's fall, on the question of continuing the land tax at four shillings, which Dowdeswell succeeded in reducing to three, backed by all the country gentlemen, by the Bedfords and the Grenvilles, by the single partisan or so who still followed Newcastle, and by all the Rockinghams except Burke, who alone ("not having our number of acres," said the top-booted gentlemen to each other) fell from his party on that question, and would not vote to lighten

the land. They had tasted as bitter humiliation in the later rejection of their overtures for help by the despised head of the last administration, who, manfully acting on Burke's warnings and suggestions, maintained, in the meeting with the Bedfords at Newcastle House, that the power of Lord Bute was still to be resisted; resolutely refused to sanction any arrangement which would again expose America to the mercies of George Grenville; and finally rejected the party combination which the old Duke of Newcastle, to get himself once more into office, had ever since he left office been laboring to effect "tooth and nail" (that is, says Horace Walpole, "with the one of each sort that he has left, the old wretch!"). And when, during the earlier progress of these confusions and disgraces, Chatham sullenly disappeared from the scene and withdrew the last restraint from his ill-assorted colleagues, George Grenville, seeing his opportunity, had taunted the fiery Townshend to open rebellion. An agent from Connecticut,' Jared Ingersoll, was present in the house (the reader will remember that these were not the days of reporters), and has described what passed. Grenville stopped suddenly in the midst of a powerful speech on the exist ing financial depression, and, turning to the Treasury bench, exclaimed: "You are cowards; you are afraid of the Americans. You dare not tax America." "Fear!" cried Townshend, from his seat, "fear! cowards! dare not tax America? I dare tax America!" For a moment Grenville stood silent; but immediately added: "Dare you tax America? I wish to God I could see it "; to which Townshend impetuously retorted, "I will, I will." The King's friends helped Grenville to keep the boaster to his pledge, and he redeemed it. But though he passed his Colonial Importation Duties bill as easily as a turnpike act, the ill

1 Since this biography first appeared Mr. Bancroft has depicted in a lively way (in the second volume of his History of the American Revolution, 274-275) the effect which Ingersoll's reports of what was then passing in the English House of Commons produced throughout the towns and villages of Connecticut.

fated ministry knew no more peace. Conway began to languish for the army, Grafton looked wistfully to Newmarket, Shelburne made no secret of his discontent; and the scenes that followed inflicted shame on all. Each, in his separate fashion, appealed against Townshend to Chatham, without, in any case, the courtesy of an answer. Townshend, with mimicry transcending Foote's, and wit that only Garrick "writing and acting extempore scenes of Congreve was thought able to have equalled, rose from the seat still shared by his colleagues with himself, to burlesque them, to jeer at them, and, amid murmurs of wonder, admiration, applause, pity, and laughter, to assail even Chatham himself. Burke, strong with a power that could inform even ridicule with passion, rose from where he also still sat, behind the occupants of the Treasury bench, to single out each for humiliating contrast with Chatham's silence and scorn; put up mock invocations to that absent, silent, sullen chief of theirs, as a being before whom thrones, dominations, princedoms, virtues, powers (and here, at each lofty phrase, amid shouts of laughter, he waved his hand over the ministers), all veiled their faces with their wings; and then, as in despair of reaching by argument a being so remote, passed into a prayer to this "Great Minister above, that rules and governs over all," to have mercy upon them and not destroy the work of his own hands. Augustus Harvey, to the regret of many, called him to order. "I have often suffered," cried Burke, as he sat down, "under persecutions of order, but I did not expect its lash while at my prayers. I venerate the great man, and speak of him accordingly." Still the great man kept silence. He had the gout, and would not leave Bath; he left Bath, and shut himself up in an inn at Marlborough; he left Marlborough, and came to London. But nothing would induce him to see his colleagues; not even the personal entreaties of the King. Would he, then, see himself, his Majesty

1 From a letter of Sir Matthew Featherstonehaugh, member for Portsmouth, to Lord Clive. See Chatham Correspondence, iii. 145-146; and Walpole's George III., ii. 407.

deigned to ask? He pleaded gout (it seems to have been suppressed gout, a worse affliction, from which he was suf fering),' and retreated to North End. But in a few days, having been seen by Lord Chesterfield riding about Hampstead Heath, again the King wrote, "If you cannot come to me to-morrow I am ready to call at North End"; and again, under cover of profuse submission, evasion did the work of refusal. By this time, in short, though laboring still with the bodily weakness which induced his first false step, Chatham seems to have discovered the drift of the King, and what it really was that was meant to have been effected under cover of his own great name. Lord Charlemont, describing the state of things to Flood ("Charles Townshend at open war, Conway angry, Lord Shelburne out of humor, the Duke of Grafton by no means pleased, and Lord Bute's friends at length positively declaring themselves "), implies little further concealment of the palace plot; one of Chatham's first remarks on his subsequent reappearance in public, to the effect that "the late good King had something about him by which it was possible to know whether he liked you or disliked you," was pointedly levelled at the good King's grandson; and there can hardly be a doubt but that his Majesty was now only fencing to obtain time, had already resolved upon a fresh arrangement of the offices, and, even from the moment of the new America-taxation scheme, had turned with decisive favor to Charles Townshend himself. The failure of the cry for help

1 Hume describes his state exactly, points out the cause, and indicates the remedy. He writes (in a letter which has escaped the historians) to the Countess de Boufflers (Private Correspondence, 243-244): "The public here, as well as with you, believe him wholly mad; but I am assured it is not so. He is only fallen into extreme low spirits and into nervous disorders, which render him totally unfit for business, make him shun all company, and, as I am told, set him weeping like a child upon the least accident. Is not this a melancholy situation for so lofty and vehement a spirit as his? And is it not even an addition to his unhappiness that he retains his senses? It was a rash experiment, that of repelling the gout, which threw him into this state of mind; and perhaps a hearty fit of it may again prove a cure to him." The philosopher's prediction was verified.