portion of celebrity at any period during his life assigned to him. All men can patronize the useful, since it so well caters for itself, but, 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 catch-penny compilations. Is it strange that as such a man stood amid the Boswells, Murphys, Beatties, Bickerstaffs, Grahams, Kellys, 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 Mr. George Graham, 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, Dr. Minor; 'tis Dr. Major, there." "Now, that Graham," said Goldsmith afterwards, 1 If any one would judge how far such a person as this Graham was entitled to address contemptuously such a man as Goldsmith, let him turn to a letter in the Garrick Correspondence, i. 193–195. 2 Boswell, iv. 98. Mrs. Piozzi had told the anecdote before him with the addition that Goldsmith was so eager to respond to the invitation that he "proposed setting out with Mr. Johnson for Buckinghamshire in a fortnight" (180). She had heard it from Johnson, who used to tell the story himself; and "what effect," he would say, in conclusion, "this had on Goldsmith, who was as irascible as a hornet, may be easily conceived." Mr. Croker has justly remarked that out of it, and the epithet Ursa Major applied to Johnson by Boswell's father, Miss Reynolds had evidently manufactured the anecdote told in her Recollections (Croker's Boswell, 831). "At another time, a gentleman who was sitting between Dr. Johnson and Dr. Goldsmith, and with whom he had been disputing, remarked to an |