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securing friends; whose character was unstained by any of the intrigues of the past ten years; and who had selected for his associates men like himself, less noted for their brilliant talents than for their excellent sense and spotless honour. With the extremer opinions of Lord Temple, these men had little in common. Though staunch against general warrants and invasions of liberties and franchises, they were as far from being Wilkite as the reckless demagogue himself; and they had obtained the general repute of a kind of middle constitutional party. Little compatible was this with present popularity, Burke well knew ; but he saw beyond the ignorant present. To the last he hoped that Pitt might be moved; and in the May of this year so expressed himself to his friend Flood, in a letter which is curious evidence of his possession of the political secrets of the day; but, though believing that without the splendid talents and boundless popularity of the great commoner, an admirable and lasting system" could not then be formed, he also believed that the only substitute for Pitt's genius was Rockingham's sense and good faith, and that on this plain foundation could be gradually raised a party which might revive whig purity and honour, and last when Pitt should be no more. Somewhat thus, too, the honest and brave Duke of Cumberland may have reasoned; when to his hapless nephew the King, again crying out to him in utter despair, and imploring him, with or without Pitt, to save him from George Grenville and the Duke of Bedford, he gave his final counsel. Lord Rockingham was summoned; consented, with his party, to take office; and was sworn in First Lord on the 8th of July. Lord Shelburne would not join without Pitt but a young whig duke (Grafton), of whom much was at that time expected, gave in his adhesion; and General (afterwards Marshal) Conway, Cumberland's personal friend and the cousin and favourite of Horace Walpole, a braver soldier than politician, but a persuasive speaker, and an honourable as well as most popular man, gave his help as secretary of state : William Burke, Edmund's distant relative and dear friend, being appointed his under-secretary. Upon this the old meddling "fizzling " Duke of Newcastle went and warned Conway's chief against "these Burkes Edmund's real name, he said, was O'Bourke; and he was not only an Irish adventurer, a jacobite, and a papist, but he had shrewd reasons for believing him a concealed jesuit to boot. Nevertheless, seven days after the administration was formed, the jesuit and jacobite, introduced by their common friend Fitzherbert (who had been named to the Board of Trade), was appointed private secretary to the Marquis of Rockingham; and Burke's great political life began.

The first letter of the newly appointed secretary to the new

Premier, written from Queen Anne-street the day after his appointment, was to David Garrick; and is the first pleasant evidence we receive, that whatever may be the success of his adventure in politics, there is small chance of its weaning him from the society of wits and men of letters to which this narrative belongs. Burke cheerfully invokes his "little Horace" to call and see his "Mecenas atavis," and "praise this administra"tion of Cavendishes and Rockinghams in ode, and abuse their "enemies in epigram." Garrick had arrived in England, from his foreign tour, three months before; his old weaknesses coming back as he verged nearer and nearer home, and, for his last few days in Paris, disturbing him with visions of Powell. "I'll answer for nothing and nobody in a playhouse," he wrote to Colman ; "the devil has put his hoof into it, and he was a deceiver "from the beginning of the world. Tell me really what you think "of Powell. I am told by several that he will bawl and roar. "Ross, I hear, has got reputation in Lear. I don't doubt it. "The Town is a facetious gentleman.” A few days later, Sterne was writing to him from Bath "strange" things of Powell; and when himself on the point of starting for London, he met Beauclerc accidentally, who reported not less strangely of the new tragedian. "What, all my children!' I fear he has taken a wrong "turn. Have you advised him?” he wrote again to Colman. "Do you see him? Is he grateful? is he modest? Or, is he con"ceited and undone?" Nor could the uneasy little great actor bring himself to make his journey home, till he had privately sent on for anonymous publication at the moment of his arrival, a rhymed satirical fable in anticipation and forestalment of expected Grub-street attacks, wherein he humbly depicted himself as The Sick Monkey, and the whole race of other animals as railing at the monkey and his travels. But it was labour all thrown away. The finessing and trick were of no use, the hearts of his admirers being already securely his without such miserable help. Grubstreet, when he came, showed no sign of discomposure; and there was but one desire in London and Westminster, to see their favourite actor again.

Let us not be surprised if these intolerable vanities and selfdistrusts weighed, with contemporaries of his own grade, against the better qualities of this delightful man, and pressed down the scale. Johnson loved him, but could not always show it for hatred of his foppery; Goldsmith admired him, yet was always ready to join in any scheme for his mortification and annoyance. Two things had been done in his absence to which he addressed himself with great anxiety on his return. The Covent-garden actors had established a voluntary benefit-subscription, to relieve

their poorer fellows in distress; and, jealous of such a proposal without previous consultation with himself, he was now throwing all his energy into a similar fund at Drury-lane, which should excel and over-rule the other. Without him, too, the club had been established; but as he could not hope to succeed in setting up a rival to that, he was anxiously using every possible means to secure his own immediate election. Johnson resolutely opposed it. Reynolds first conveyed to him Garrick's wish, to the effect that he liked the idea of the club excessively, and thought he should be of them. "He'll be of us!" exclaimed Johnson; "how does "he know we will permit him? The first duke in England has no "right to hold such language." To Thrale, the next intercessor, he threw out even threats of a blackball; but this moved the worthy brewer to remonstrate warmly, and Johnson, thus hard pressed, picked up somewhat recklessly a line of Pope's, as in selfdefence one might pick up a stone by the way-side, without regard to its form or fitness. "Why, sir, I love my little David dearly, "better than all or any of his flatterers do; but surely one ought "to sit in a society like ours

Unelbow'd by a gamester, pimp or player.

Still the subject was not suffered to let drop, and the next who undertook it was Hawkins. "He will disturb us, sir, by his "buffoonery," was the only and obdurate answer. Garrick saw that for the present it was hopeless (though not long after, as will be seen, Percy, Chambers, and Colman obtained their election); and, with his happier tact and really handsome spirit, visited Johnson as usual, and seemed to withdraw his claim. But he could not conceal his uneasiness. "He would often stop at my "gate," says his good-natured friend Hawkins, who lived at Twickenham, “in his way to and from Hampton, with messages "from Johnson relating to his Shakespeare, then in the press, and "ask such questions as these: Were you at the club on Monday "night? What did you talk of? Was Johnson there? I 666 suppose he said something of Davy ?-that Davy was a clever "fellow in his way, full of convivial pleasantry, but no poet, no "writer, ha !'" Hawkins might hear all this, however, with better grace than any one else; for that worthy magistrate took little interest in the club. In a letter to Langton, written shortly after, Johnson specially mentions him as remiss in attendance, while he admits that he is himself not over diligent. "Dyer,

"Doctor Nugent, Doctor Goldsmith, and Mr. Reynolds," he adds, are very constant."

Without its dignified doctorial prefix, Goldsmith's name is now seldom mentioned; even Newbery is careful to preserve it in his

memoranda of books lent for the purposes of compilation; and he does not seem, himself, to have again laid it wholly aside. Indeed he now made a brief effort, at the suggestion of Reynolds, to make positive professional use of it. It was much to have a regular calling, said the successful painter; it gave a man social rank, and consideration in the world. Advantage should be taken of the growing popularity of the Traveller. To be at once physician and man of letters, was the most natural thing possible: there were the Arbuthnots and Garths, to say nothing of Cowley himself, among the dead; there were the Akensides, Graingers, Armstrongs, and Smolletts, still among the living; and where was the degree in medicine belonging to any of them, to which the degree in poetry or wit had not given more glad acceptance? Out came Goldsmith accordingly (in the June of this year, according to the account books, which Mr. Prior has published, of Mr. William Filby the tailor), in purple silk small-clothes, a handsome scarlet roquelaure buttoned close under the chin, and with all the additional importance derivable from a full dress professional wig, a sword, and a gold-headed cane. The style of the coat and smallclothes may be presumed from the "four guineas and a half" paid for them; and, as a child with its toy is uneasy without swift renewal of the pleasurable excitement, with no less than three similar suits, not less expensive, Goldsmith amazed his friends in the next six months. The dignity he was obliged to put on with these fine clothes, indeed, left him this as their only enjoyment; for he had found it much harder to give up the actual reality of his old humble haunts, of his tea at the White-conduit, of his alehouse club at Islington, of his nights at the Wrekin or St. Giles's, than to blot their innocent but vulgar names from his now genteeler page. In truth, he would say (in truth was a favourite phrase of his, interposes Cooke, who relates the anecdote), one has to make vast sacrifices for good company's sake; "for here am I "shut out of several places where I used to play the fool very "agreeably." Nor is it quite clear that the most moderate accession of good company, professionally speaking, rewarded this reluctant gravity. The only instance remembered of his practice, was in the case of a Mrs. Sidebotham, described as one of his recent acquaintance of the better sort; whose waiting-woman was often afterwards known to relate with what a ludicrous assumption of dignity he would show off his cloak and his cane, as he strutted with his queer little figure, stuck through as with a huge pin by his wandering sword, into the sick-room of her mistress. At last it one day happened, that, his opinion differing somewhat from the apothecary's in attendance, the lady thought her apothecary the safer counsellor, and Goldsmith quitted the house in high indigna

tion.

He would leave off prescribing for his friends, he said. "Do so, my dear Doctor," observed Beauclerc. "Whenever you

"undertake to kill, let it only be your enemies." Upon the whole this seems to have been the close of Doctor Goldsmith's professiona practice.

CHAPTER XII.

1765. Et. 37.

VARIOUS PLACES. 1765-1766.

THE literary engagements of Doctor Oliver Goldsmith were meanwhile going on with Newbery; and towards the close of the year he appears to have completed a compilation of a kind somewhat novel to him, induced in all probability by his concurrent professional attempts. It was "A Survey of Experimental Philosophy, considered in its present state of "improvement ;" and Newbery paid him sixty guineas for it. He also took great interest at this time in the proceedings of the Society of Arts; and is supposed, from the many small advances

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