would seem to have suddenly presented itself as one of those "artifices of acquisition" which Johnson alleges against him. He wrote to the manager of Drury-lane. The letter has by chance survived, is obligingly communicated to me by its present possessor, and of the scanty collection so preserved is probably the worst composed and the worst written. As well in the manner as in the matter of it, the writer's distress is very painfully visible. It has every appearance, even to the wafer hastily thrust into it, of having been the sudden suggestion of necessity; it is addressed, without date of time or place, to the Adelphi (where Garrick had lately purchased the centre house of the newly built terrace); nor is it unlikely to have been delivered there by the messenger of a sponging-house. A fac-simile of its signature, which may be compared with Goldsmith's ordinary hand-writing in a previous page, will show the writer's agitation, and perhaps account for the vague distraction of his grammar. MY DEAR SIR, Your saying you would play my Good-natured Man makes me wish it. The money you advanced me upon Newbery's note I have the mortification to find is not yet paid, but he says he will in two or three days. What I mean by this letter is to lend me sixty pound for which I will give you Newbery's note, so that the whole of my debt will be an hundred for which you shall have Newbery's note as a security. This may be paid either from my alteration if my benefit should come to so much, but at any rate I will take care you shall not be a loser. I will give you a new character in my comedy and knock out Lofty which does not do, and will make such alterations as you direct. The letter is indorsed in Garrick's handwriting as "Gold“smith's parlaver." But though it would thus appear to have inspired little sympathy or confidence, and the sacrifice of Lofty had come too late and been too reluctant, Garrick's answer, begged so earnestly, was not unfavourable. He evaded the altered comedy; spoke of the new one already mentioned between them; and offered the money required on Goldsmith's own acceptance. The small worth of the security of one of Newbery's notes (though the publisher, with his experience of the comedy in hand, would doubtless gladly have taken his chance of the renovated comedy), he had some time proved. Poor Goldsmith was enthusiastic in acknowledgment. Nor let it be thought he is acting unfairly to Newbery, in the advice he sends with his thanks. The publisher had frankly accepted the chances of a certain copyright, and had no right to wait the issue of those chances before he assumed the liability they imposed. The present note exhibits such manifest improvement in the writing as a sudden removal of a sore anxiety might occasion; but the writer's usual epistolary neatness is still absent from it. It is hastily folded up in three-corner'd shape, is also sealed with wafer, and also indorsed by Garrick "Goldsmith's "parlaver." MY DEAR FRIEND, I thank you! I wish I could do something to serve you. I shall have a comedy for you in a season or two at furthest that I believe will be worth your acceptance, for I fancy I will make it a fine thing. You shall have the refusal. I wish you would not take up Newbery's note but let Waller [probably a mistake for Wallis, Garrick's solicitor] tease him, without however coming to extremities; let him haggle after him and he will get it. He owes it and will pay it. I'm sorry you are ill. I will draw upon you one month after date for sixty pound and your acceptance will be ready money, part of which I want to go down to Barton with. May God preserve my honest little man, for he has my heart. Ever, OLIVER GOLDSMITH. Barton was a gleam of sunshine in his darkest days. There, if no where else, he could still strive to be, as in his younger time, "well when he was not ill, and pleased when he was not angry." It was the precious maxim of Reynolds, as it had been the selectest wisdom of Sir William Temple. Reynolds himself, too, their temporary disagreement forgotten, gave him much of his society on his return: observing, as he said afterwards, the change in his manner; seeing how greatly he now seemed to need the escape from his own thoughts, and with what a look of distress he would suddenly start from the midst of social scenes he continued still passionately fond of, to go home and brood over his misfortunes. Only two more pictures really gay or bright remain in the life of Goldsmith. The last but one is of himself and Sir Joshua at Vauxhall. And not the least memorable figures in that sauntering crowd, though it numbered princes and ambassadors then, and on its tide and torrent of fashion, floated all the beauty of the time, and through its lighted avenues of trees, glided cabinet ministers and their daughters, royal dukes and their wives, agreeable "young ladies and gentlemen of eighty-two," and all the red-heeled macaronies, were those of the President, and the ancient history Professor, of the Royal Academy. A little later we trace Goldsmith from Vauxhall to the theatre, but any gaiety or enjoyment there is not so certain. Kelly had tried a fourth comedy (The School for Wives), under a feigned name, and with somewhat better success than its two immediate predecessors, though it lived but a few brief nights; and Beauclerc, who writes to tell Lord Charlemont of the round of pleasures Goldsmith and Joshua had been getting into, and which had prevented their attending the club, had told him also, but a few weeks before, that the new comely was almost killing the poor poet with spleen. Yet it had been at Beauclerc's own house, and on the very night when the comedy was produced, that there shone forth the last laughter-moving picture I may dwell upon, in the chequered life now quickly drawing to its close. Goldsmith had been invited to pass the day there, with the Garricks, Lord and Lady Edgecumbe, and Horace Walpole; and there seems to have been some promise that Garrick and himself were to amuse the company in the evening with a special piece of mirth, the precise nature of which was not disclosed. But unfortunately the new comedy was coming on at Drury-lane, and soon after dinner the great actor fell into a fidget to get to the theatre, and all had to consent to wait his return. He went away at halfpast five, and did not re-appear till ten; the rest meanwhile providing what present amusement they could, to relieve the dulness of amusement in expectancy. The burden fell on Walpole and "most thoroughly tired I was," says that fastidious gentleman, "as I knew I should be, I who hate the playing off a "butt." Why this task should have been so fatiguing in the special case, Horace proceeds to explain by a peculiarity in the butt in question. "Goldsmith is a fool, the more wearing for "having some sense." : However, all fatigue has an end, and at last Garrick came back from the play, and the promised fun began. The player took a seat enveloped in a cloak, the poet sat down in his lap, and the cloak was so arranged as to cover the persons of both, excepting only Goldsmith's head and Garrick's arms, which seemed no longer to belong to separate bodies, but to be part of one and the same. Then, from the head, issued one of the gravest heroic speeches out of Addison's Cato, while the arms made nonsense of every solemn phrase by gestures the most extravagantly humorous and inappropriate. It is a never failing effect of the broadest comedy, in the hands of very ordinary performers; and, with such action as Garrick's to burlesque the brogue and gravity of Goldsmith, must surely have been irresistible. The reader who has any experience of Christmas games, will doubtless remember having given in his own time many a laugh to this "Signor Mufti," as personated on that Christmas night eighty years ago. Mrs. Gwatkin, Sir Joshua Reynolds's younger niece, told also what she had seen of it, as personated by the same actors, to Mr. Haydon, who related it in his diary long before Horace Walpole's anecdote was published. "The most delightful man," according to the old lady's account to Haydon, when she was gathering up the memories of her youth, was Goldsmith. She saw him and Garrick keep an Garrick sat on "immense party laughing till they shrieked. "Goldsmith's knee; a table-cloth was pinned under Garrick's chin, "and brought behind Goldsmith, hiding both their figures. Garrick "then spoke, in his finest style, Hamlet's speech to his father's "ghost. Goldsmith put out his hands on each side of the cloth, "and made burlesque action, tapping his heart, and putting his "hand to Garrick's head and nose, all at the wrong time." Here the reader will observe, the actors had not only reversed their parts, but were rejoicing in a better audience than they appear to have had at Beauclerc's. "For how could one laugh," protests Horace Walpole, after describing the thing as he saw it there, "when one had expected this for four hours?" So perhaps he, and Beauclerc, and Lord Edgecumbe fell back once again on what this had interrupted, and closed up the night with the pleasanter mirth of playing off head and arms in a more mischievous game. "It was the night of a new comedy," says Walpole, "called the "School for Wives, which was exceedingly applauded, and which "Charles Fox says is execrable. Garrick had at least the chief "hand in it; and I never saw anybody in a greater fidget, nor more vain when he returned." Here, then, with Garrick full of the glories of a new play, in some degree aimed against the broadly-laughing school of Goldsmith,—its author publicly reported to be Major (afterwards Sir William) Addington, and by some suspected to be Horace Walpole himself,-its first night's success already half-threatening a sudden blight to the hard-won laurels of Young Marlow and Tony Lumpkin,-here surely were all the materials of undeniable sport; and who will doubt that such a joke, if started, was in such company more eagerly enjoyed than the other more harmless Christmas game? or that the courtly and sarcastic Beauclerc was not only too happy in the opportunity it afterwards gave him of writing to his noble correspondent: "We "have a new comedy here which is good for nothing; bad as it "is, however, it succeeds very well, and almost killed Goldsmith "with envy." Cradock's account of what was really killing him is somewhat different from Beauclerc's, and will perhaps be thought more authentic. Although, according to the same letter of the Beau's, all the world but himself and a million of vulgar people were then in the country, Cradock had come up to town to place his wife under the care of a dentist, and had taken lodgings in Norfolk-street to be near his friend. He found Goldsmith much altered, he says; at times, indeed, very low; and he passed his mornings with him. He induced him once to dine in Norfolkstreet; but his usual cheerfulness had gone, "and all was forced." The idea occurred to Cradock that money might be raised by a |