supper for himself, "and a dram for the poor devil of a waiter, "who might otherwise get sick from so nauseating a meal."

Before I pass from these humble records of the Wednesday-club, it will be proper to mention Kelly's withdrawal from it. Alleged attacks by Goldsmith on his comedy having been repeated to him with exaggerations, Kelly resolved to resent the unfriendliness. What the exact character of their friendship had been, I cannot precisely ascertain; but though recent, it had probably for a time been intimate. Kelly succeeded Jones as editor of the Public Ledger, and the mutual connexion with Newbery must have brought them much together; we find Kelly, as the world and its prospects became brighter with him, moving into chambers in the Temple, near Goldsmith's; nor is it difficult to believe the report of which I have found several traces, that but for his sensible remonstrance on the prudential score, his wife's sister, who lived in his house and was pretty and poor as his wife, being simply, as she had been, an expert and industrious needlewoman, would have been carried off and wedded by Goldsmith. Since their respective comedies they had not met; when, abruptly encountering each other one night in the Covent-garden green-room, Goldsmith stammered out awkward congratulations to Kelly on his recent success, to which the other, prepared for war, promptly replied that he could not thank him because he could not believe him. "From that hour they never spoke to one another :" and Kelly, reluctant that Goldsmith should be troubled to "do anything more "for him," resigned the club. The latter allusion was (by way of satire) to a story he used to tell of the terms of Goldsmith's answer to a dinner invitation which he had given him. "I would "with pleasure accept your kind invitation," so ran the whimsical and very pardonable speech, "but to tell you the truth, my dear "boy, my Traveller has found me a home in so many places, that "I am engaged, I believe, three days. Let me see. To-day I "dine with Edmund Burke, to-morrow with Doctor Nugent, and "the next day with Topham Beauclerc; but I'll tell you what "I'll do for you, I'll dine with you on Saturday." Now Kelly, though conceited and not very scrupulous, was not an ill-natured man, on the whole; he wrote a novel called Louisa Mildmay, which, with some scenes of a questionable kind of warmth, an illnatured man could not have written; but he was not justified in the tone he took during this quarrel, and after it. It was not for him to sneer at Goldsmith's follies, who was for nothing more celebrated than for his own unconscious imitations of them; who was so fond, in his little gleam of prosperity, of displaying on his sideboard the plate he possessed, that he added to it his silver spurs; and who, even as he laughed at his more famous country

man's Tyrian bloom and satin, was displaying his own corpulent little person at all public places in "a flaming broad silver-laced "waistcoat, bag-wig, and sword."

Mr. William Filby's bill marks the 21st of January as the day when the "Tyrian bloom satin-grain, and garter-blue silk breeches" (charged 81. 28. 7d.) were sent home; and doubtless this was the suit ordered for the comedy's first night. Within three months, Mr. Filby having meanwhile been paid his previous year's account by a draught on Griffin, another more expensive suit ("lined with "silk, and gold buttons") was supplied; and in three months more, the entry on the same account of "a suit of mourning," furnished on the 16th of June, marks the period of Henry Goldsmith's death. At the close of the previous month, in the village of Athlone, had terminated, at the age of forty-five, that brother's life of active piety, and humble but noble usefulness, whose unpretending Christian example, far above the worldlier fame he had himself acquired, his brother's genius has consecrated and preserved for ever. Shortly after he had tidings of his loss, the character of the Village Preacher was most probably written; for certainly the lines which immediately precede it were composed about a month before. From his father and his brother alike, indeed, were drawn the exquisite features of this sketch; but of the so recent grief we may find marked and unquestionable trace, as well in the sublime and solemn image at the close, as in those opening allusions to Henry's unworldly contentedness, which already he had celebrated, in prose hardly less beautiful, by that dedication to the Traveller which he put forth and paraded with as great a sense of pride derived from it as though it proclaimed the patronage of a prince or noble. Now too is repeated, with yet greater earnestness, his former tribute to his brother's hospitality.

A man he was to all the country dear;

And passing rich with forty pounds a year.
His house was known to all the vagrant train;
He chid their wanderings, but relieved their pain:
The long-remember'd beggar was his guest,

Whose beard descending swept his aged breast;

The ruin'd spendthrift, now no longer proud,

Claim'd kindred there, and had his claims allow'd;

The broken soldier, kindly bade to stay,

Sat by his fire, and talk'd the night away;

Wept o'er his wounds, or, tales of sorrow done,

Shoulder'd his crutch and show'd how fields were won. . . .
At church, with meek and unaffected grace,

His looks adorn'd the venerable place;

Truth from his lips prevail'd with double sway,
And fools who came to scoff remain'd to pray.

The service pass'd, around the pious man,
With steady zeal, each honest rustic ran;
Even children follow'd, with endearing wile,

And pluck'd his gown, to share the good man's smile :
His ready smile a parent's warmth express'd,

Their welfare pleased him, and their cares distress'd.
To them his heart, his love, his griefs were given,

But all his serious thoughts had rest in heaven :

As some tall cliff, that lifts its awful form,

Swells from the vale, and midway leaves the storm,

Though round its breast the rolling clouds are spread,
Eternal sunshine settles on its head.

The idea of the Deserted Village was thrown out at the close of the Traveller,

(Have we not seen, at pleasure's lordly call,

The smiling long-frequented village fall?
Beheld the duteous son, the sire decay'd,

The modest matron, and the blushing maid,
Fore'd from their homes. . .)

and on the general glad acceptance of that poem he had at once turned his thoughts to its successor. The subject of the growth of trade and opulence in England, of the relation of labour to the production of wealth, and of the advantage or disadvantage of its position in reference to manufactures and commerce, or as connected with the cultivation of land, which, two years after the Traveller appeared, Adam Smith exalted into a philosophic system by the publication of his immortal Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, was one that Goldsmith had frequently adverted to in his earliest writings, and on which his views were undoubtedly less sound than poetical. It may be worth remark, indeed, that a favourite subject of reflection as this theme always was with him, and often as he adverts to such topics connected with it as the effects of luxury and wealth on the simpler habits of a people, it is difficult to believe that he had ever arrived at a settled conclusion in his own mind, one way or the other. What he pleads for in his poetry, his prose for the most part condemns. Thus the argument of the Deserted Village is distinctly at issue with the philosophy of the Citizen of the World, in which he reasons that to the accumulation of wealth may be assigned not only the greatest part of our knowledge, but even of our virtues; and exhibits poets, philosophers, and even patriots, marching in luxury's train. On the other hand, he occasionally again breaks out (as in the Animated Nature) nto complaints as indignant as they are shallow and ill founded, that "the rich should cry out for liberty while they thus starve "their fellow-creatures" (he is alluding to the obligation on the

poor to sell and give up what they possess at the call of the rich, as if it were a hardship that they should not be paid for enjoying, themselves, what they rather choose to be paid for surrendering to others), "and feed them up with an imaginary good while they "monopolize the real benefits of nature." The real truth is that Goldsmith had no settled opinions on the subject, which nevertheless was one of unceasing interest to him, and to which he brought a mind at least so far free from prejudice, one way or the other, that at this moment it was open to reason and at the next to sentiment merely. Doubtless, however, the latter was most strongly felt and oftenest indulged. For his merely sentimental views had grown out of early impressions, were passionately responded to by the warmer sensibilities of his nature, and had received supposed corroboration from his own experience. He told Sir Joshua Reynolds that for four or five years before the Deserted Village was published, he had, by sundry country excursions into various parts of England, verified his fears of the tendency of overgrowing wealth to depopulate the land; and his remark to a friend who called upon him the second morning after he commenced the poem, was nearly to the same effect. "Some of my friends differ with me on this plan," he said, after describing the scheme, “and "think this depopulation of villages does not exist; but I am "myself satisfied of the fact. I remember it in my own country, "and have seen it in this."

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The friend who so called upon him, in May 1768; who marks the date as exactly two years before the poem appeared; and who tells us that the writing of it, and its elaborate revision, extended over that whole interval of twenty-four months; was supposed by Scott to have been Lee Lewes the actor. It is difficult to understand how this mistake originated; but it would seem that Sir Walter had judged from only a small portion of the papers whose authorship he thus misstated, and which, except in apparently imperfect and garbled extracts, have equally escaped all Goldsmith's biographers and never been properly made use of until now. The poet's acquaintance with the comedian had not yet begun, nor in the acknowledged (and extremely dull) Memoirs of Lee Lewes, does Goldsmith's name at any time occur. The real writer of the anecdotes was Cooke, the young law student already so often referred to as Goldsmith's countryman and near neighbour in the Temple; and their curious details have been hitherto almost wholly overlooked. They appeared from time to time in the European Magazine.

Cooke prefaces the mention of his calling on "the Doctor" the second morning after the Deserted Village was begun, by an account of the Doctor's slowness in writing poetry, "not from the tardiness

X

"of fancy, but the time he took in pointing the sentiment, and "polishing the versification." An invaluable hint to the poetical aspirant, as already I have strongly urged. Indisputable wealth of genius, flung about in careless exuberance, has as often failed to make a poet, as one finished unsuperfluous masterpiece has succeeded, and kept a name in the Collections for ever. Goldsmith's manner of writing the Deserted Village, his friend tells us, was this: he first sketched a part of his design in prose, in which he threw out his ideas as they occurred to him; he then sat down carefully to versify them, correct them, and add such other ideas as he thought better fitted to the subject; and if sometimes he would exceed his prose design by writing several verses impromptu, these he would take singular pains afterwards to revise, lest they should be found unconnected with his main design. Ten lines, from the fifth to the fifteenth, had been his second morning's work; and when Cooke entered his chamber, he read them to him aloud.

Dear lovely bowers of innocence and ease,

Seats of my youth, when every sport could please,

How often have I loiter'd o'er thy green,

Where humble happiness endear'd each scene!

How often have I paus'd on every charm,

The shelter'd cot, the cultivated farm,

The never-failing brook, the busy mill,

The decent church that topp'd the neighbouring hill,
The hawthorn bush with seats beneath the shade

For talking age and whispering lovers made.

"Come," he added, "let me tell you this is no bad morning's "work; and now, my dear boy, if you are not better engaged, I "should be glad to enjoy a Shoemaker's holiday with you."

This proposed enjoyment is then described by Cooke, in a simple, characteristic way. 66 "A Shoemaker's holiday was a day of great "festivity to poor Goldsmith, and was spent in the following "innocent manner. Three or four of his intimate friends rendez"voused at his chambers to breakfast about ten o'clock in the "morning; at eleven they proceeded by the City-road and through "the fields to Highbury-barn to dinner; about six o'clock in the "evening they adjourned to White Conduit-house to drink. tea; "and concluded by supping at the Grecian or Temple-exchange "coffee-house, or at the Globe in Fleet-street. There was a very 'good ordinary of two dishes and pastry, kept at Highbury-barn "about this time at tenpence per head, including a penny to the waiter; and the company generally consisted of literary charac"ters, a few Templars, and some citizens who had left off trade. "The whole expenses of the day's fête never exceeded a crown,