"taken the liberty" to intercede for Shebbeare. Shebbeare and Johnson! Smollett and Mallet! Hume and Hill! how exquisite the impartiality of regard and estimation. It was false, too; for poor Smollett's name never appeared in the pension list at all, and Johnson, on his appearance in it at Michaelmas quarter 1763, had no worthier neighbour than "Mr. Wight, Ward's chymist, one quarter, "75l," which name follows "Mr. Samuel Johnson one quarter, 751.” It might seem almost incredible to assert, but it is the simple fact, that the most distinguished public recognition of literary merit made at this time was to Arthur Murphy, and to Hugh Kelly, the latter having been for some years in Government pay: but Goldsmith had declined the overtures which these men accepted. Such political feeling as he had shown in his English History, it is true, was decidedly anti-aristocratic: but though, with this, he may have exhibited a strong leaning to the monarchy, he had yet neither the merit, which with the king was still a substitute for most other merit, of being a Scotchman; nor even the merit, which might have done something to supply that defect, of concealing his general contempt for the ministers and politicians of the day. It requires no great stretch of fancy to suppose that such a remark as this of Jack Lofty's in the Good Natured Man, would not be extremely pleasant in great places. "Sincerely, don't you pity us poor creatures in affairs? Thus it is eternally solicited for "places here, teazed for pensions there, and courted everywhere. "I know you pity me. Yes, I see you do.... Waller, Waller, is "he of the house?. . . . Oh, a modern poet! We men of business despise the moderns; and as for the ancients, we have no "time to read them. Poetry is a pretty thing enough for our "wives and daughters, but not for us. Why now, here I stand, "that know nothing of books; and yet, I believe, upon a land"carriage fishery, a stamp-act, or a jaghire, I can talk by two "hours without feeling the want of them." Goldsmith could not have drawn a more exact portrait of the official celebrities, the ministers of state, of his time; and they rewarded him as he probably expected.

While the matter was still in discussion, there had come up to London, the Scotch professor, Beattie, who had written the somewhat trumpery Essay on Truth to which I formerly adverted; and which had eagerly been caught at, with avowed exaggeration of praise, as a mere battery of assault against the Voltaire and Hume philosophy. The object, such as it was, was a good one; and though it could not make Beattie a tolerable philosopher, it made him, for the time, a very perfect social idol. He was supposed to have "avenged" insulted Christianity. "He is so caressed, and "invited, and treated, and liked, and flattered by the great, that

"Every one," says

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"I can see nothing of him," says Johnson. Mrs. Thrale, "loves Doctor Beattie but Goldsmith, who says he "cannot bear the sight of so much applause as we all bestow upon "him. Did he not tell us so himself, who could believe he was so "amazingly ill-natured?" Telling it thus, one half called him ill-natured; and the other half, absurd. He certainly had the objection all to himself. "I have been but once at the club since you "left England," writes Beauclerc to Lord Charlemont ; we were "entertained as usual by Doctor Goldsmith's absurdity. Mr. Vesey] can give you an account of it." Some harangue against Beattie, very probably; for even the sarcastic Beau went with the rest of the "ale-house in Gerrard-street," as he calls the club, in support of the anti-infidel philosopher. What most vexed Goldsmith, however, was the adhesion of Reynolds. It was the only grave difference that had ever been between them; and it is honourable to the poet that it should have arisen on the only incident in the painter's life which has somewhat tarnished his fame. Reynolds accompanied Beattie to Oxford, partook with him in an honorary doctorship of civil law, and on his return painted his fellow doctor in Oxonian robes, with the Essay on Truth under his arm, and at his side the angel of Truth overpowering and chasing away the demons of Infidelity, Sophistry, and Falsehood; the last represented by the plump and broadbacked figure of Hume, the second by the lean and piercing face of Voltaire, and the first bearing something of a remote resemblance to Gibbon. "It very ill becomes a man of your eminence and "character," said Goldsmith to Sir Joshua, and his fine rebuke will outlast the silly picture, "to debase so high a genius as "Voltaire before so mean a writer as Beattie. Beattie and his "book will be forgotten in ten years, while Voltaire's fame will "last for ever. Take care it does not perpetuate this picture, to "the shame of such a man as you." Reynolds persisted, notwithstanding the protest; but was incapable of any poor resentment of it. He produced, this same year, at Goldsmith's suggestion, his painting of Ugolino, founded on a head not originally painted for that subject, but which had struck Burke as well as Goldsmith to be eminently suited to it; and their friendship, based as it was on sympathies connected with art as well as on strong private regard, knew no abatement. Beattie himself, however, was full of resentment. He called his critic a poor fretful creature, eaten up with affectation and envy; yet he liked many things in his genius, he said, and (writing a year hence, when he had no more to fear from him) was 66 sorry to find last summer that he looked upon 66 me as a person who seemed to stand between him and his "interest." The allusion was to the pension; for which it was

well known that Goldsmith was an unsuccessful solicitor, and which had been granted unsolicited to Beattie. The king had sent for him, praised his Essay, and given him two hundred a year. Johnson welcomed the news in the Hebrides with his most vehement expression of delight; though, seeing he had quoted his favourite Traveller but three days before, till the "tear started to "his eye," he might have thought somewhat of his other unpensioned friend, and clapped his hands less loudly.

That the failure of hope in this direction should a little have soured and changed the unlucky petitioner, will hardly provoke surprise. He had hitherto taken small interest, and no part, in politics; and his inclination, as far as it may be traced, had never been to the ministerial side. But he seems no longer to have scrupled to avow a decisive sympathy with the opposition; and there is as little reason to doubt that he was now building frail hopes of some appointment through Lord Shelburne's interest. His personal knowledge of that able but wayward statesman gives some colour to the assertion; and I have found, in a magazine published a few years after Goldsmith's death, a distinct statement confirming it, by one who evidently knew him well, and who adds that "the expectation contributed to involve him ; and "he often spoke with great asperity of his dependence on what he "called moonshine." Feeble as the light was, however, there are other proofs of his having followed it in these last melancholy months of his life. Lord Shelburne's member and protégé, Townshend, was at this time Lord Mayor of London; and by his fiery liberalism, and really bold resolution, quite careless of those "Malagrida" taunts against his patron with which the sarcasm of Junius had supplied ministerial assailants, was now exasperating the Court to the last degree. Yet Goldsmith did not hesitate to praise the "patriotic magistrate," and to avow that he had done 80. "Goldsmith, the other day," writes Beauclerc to Lord Charlemont, put a paragraph into the newspapers, in praise of Lord Mayor Townshend. The same night we happened to sit next "to Lord Shelburne, at Drury-lane. I mentioned the circum"stance of the paragraph to him, and he said to Goldsmith, that ❝he hoped he had mentioned nothing about Malagrida in it. 'Do “you know,' answered Goldsmith, that I never could conceive "the reason why they call you Malagrida, FOR Malagrida was a "very good sort of man.' You see plainly what he meant to say; but that happy turn of expression is peculiar to himself. "Mr. Walpole says that this story is a picture of Goldsmith's "whole life."

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Ah! so it might seem to men whose whole life had been a holiday. No slavish drudgery, no clownish straits, no scholarly

loneliness, had befallen them; and how to make allowance in others for disadvantages never felt by ourselves, is still the great problem for us all. Poor Goldsmith's blunder was only a false emphasis. He meant that he wondered Malagrida, being the name of a good sort of a man, should be used as a term of reproach. But his whole life was a false emphasis, says Walpole. In his sense, perhaps it was so. He had been emphatic throughout it, where Walpole had only been indifferent; and what to the wit and man of fashion had been a scene for laughter, to the poet and man of letters had been fraught with serious suffering. "Life is 66 a comedy to those who think, and a tragedy to those who feel." Democritus laughed, and Heraclitus wept.

Beauclerc told Lord Charlemont in the same letter just quoted, that Goldsmith had written a prologue for Mrs. Yates, which she was to speak that night at the Opera-house. "It is very good. "You will see it soon in all the newspapers, otherwise I would "send it to you." The newspapers have nevertheless been searched in vain for it, though it certainly was spoken; and it seems probable that Colman's friends had interfered to suppress it. Mrs. Yates had quarrelled with the Covent-garden manager; and one object of the "poetical exordium" which Goldsmith had thus written for her, was to put before that fashionable audience the injustice of her exclusion from the English theatre. He had great sympathy for Mrs. Yates, thinking her the first of English actresses; and it is not wonderful that he should have lost all sympathy with Colman. Their breach had lately widened more and more. Kenrick, driven from Drury-lane, had found refuge at the other house; and, on the very night of Mrs. Yates's prologue, Colman suffered a new comedy, by that libeller of all his friends, to be decisively damned at Covent-garden. If Goldsmith could have withdrawn both his comedies upon this, he would probably have done it; for at once he made an effort to remove the first to Drury-lane, which he had now the right to do. But Garrick insisted on his original objection to Lofty; and justified it by reference to the comparative coldness with which the comedy had been received during the run of She Stoops to Conquer in the summer, though with the zealous Lee Lewes in that part (Lewis had not yet assumed it). He would play the Good Natured Man if that objection could be obviated, not otherwise. Here the matter rested for a time. But in the course of what passed, Goldsmith found that Newbery had failed to observe his promise in connection with the unpaid bill still in Garrick's hands. This was hardly generous; since the copyright of She Stoops to Conquer had passed in satisfaction of all claims between them, and was already promising Newbery the ample profits which it subsequently

realised beyond his debt. These are said to have amounted to upwards of three hundred pounds; and the play was still so profitable after several years' sale, that when the booksellers engaged Johnson for their first scheme of an Edition and Memoir, the project was defeated by a dispute about the value of the copyright of She Stoops to Conquer.

The other larger debt to "the trade," which had suggested to Goldsmith his project of a Dictionary, he had now no means of discharging but by hard, drudging, unassisted labour. His so favourite project, though he had obtained promises of co-operation from Johnson, Burke, and Reynolds, had been finally rejected. Davies, who represented the craft on the occasion, whose own business had not been very prosperous, and many of whose copyrights had already passed to Cadell, gives us the reason of their adverse decision. He says that though they had a very good opinion of the Doctor's abilities, yet they were startled at the bulk, importance, and expense of so great an undertaking, the fate of which was to depend upon the industry of a man with whose indolence of temper, and method of procrastination, they had long been acquainted. He adds, in further justification of the refusal, that upon every emergency half-a-dozen projects would present themselves to Goldsmith's mind, which, straightway communicated to the men they were to enrich, at once obtained him money on the mere faith of his great reputation: but the money was generally spent long before the new work was half finished, perhaps before it was begun; and hence arose continual expostulation and reproach on the one side, and much anger and vehemence on the other. Johnson described the same transactions, after all were over, in one of his emphatic sentences. "He "had raised money and squandered it, by every artifice of acqui"sition and folly of expense. But let not his frailties be remem"bered he was a very great man."

:

CHAPTER XVIII.

1773.

THE CLOUDS STILL GATHERING. 1773.

THE cherished project, then, of the Popular Dictionary of Arts and Sciences, the scheme on which Goldsmith had built so t. 45. much, was an utter and quite hopeless failure; and, under the immediate pang of feeling this, the alteration of his fisrt comedy for Garrick, even upon Garrick's own conditions,