courage; that open heart and liberal hand; that eager readiness to love or to hate, to strike or to embrace; had passed away for ever. Nine days earlier, his antagonist Hogarth had gone the same dark journey; and the reconciliation that would surely, even here, have sooner or later vindicated their common genius, the hearty English feeling which they shared, and their common cordial hatred of the falsehoods and pretences of the world, was left to be accomplished in the grave. Be it not the least shame of the profligate politics of these three disgraceful years, that, arraying in bitter hostility one section of a kingdom against the other, they turned into unscrupulous personal enemies such men as these; made a patriot of Wilkes; statesmen of Sir Francis Dashwood, Lord Sandwich, and Bubb Dodington; and, of the free and vigorous verse of Churchill, a mere instrument of perishable party. Not without reason on that ground did Goldsmith condemn and scorn it. It was that which had made it the rare mixture it so frequently is, of the artificial with the natural and impulsive; which so fitfully blended in its author the wholly and the partly true; which impaired his force of style with prosaical weakness; and controlled by the necessities of partizan satire, his feeling for nature and for truth. Yet should his critic and fellow-poet have paused before, in this dedication to the Traveller, he branded him as a writer of lampoons. To Charles Hanbury Williams, but not to Charles Churchill, such epithets belong. The senators who met to decide the fate of turbots were not worthier

of the wrath and the scourge of Juvenal, than the men who, reeking from the gross indulgences of Medmenham Abbey, drove out William Pitt from the Cabinet, sat down by the side of Bute, denounced in the person of Wilkes their own old profligate associate, and took the public morality into keeping. Never, that he might merely fawn upon power or trample upon weakness, had Churchill let loose his pen. There was not a form of mean pretence or servile assumption, which he did not use it to denounce. Low, pimping politics, he abhorred; and that their worthless abettors, to whose exposure his works are so incessantly devoted, have not carried him into oblivion with themselves, argues something for the sound morality and permanent truth expressed in his manly verse. By these the new poet was to profit; as much as by the faults which perished with the satirist, and left the lesson of avoidance to his successors. In the interval since Pope's and Thomson's death, since Collins's faint sweet song, since the silence of Young, of Akenside, and of Gray, no such easy, familiar, and vigorous verse as Churchill's, had dwelt in the public ear. The less likely was it now to turn away, impatient or intolerant of the Traveller.

Johnson pronounced it a poem to which it would not be easy to find anything equal, since the death of Pope. This was praise worth coveting, and was honestly deserved. The elaborate care and skill of the verse, the exquisite choice and selectness of the diction, at once recalled to others, as to Johnson, the master so lately absolute in

the realms of verse; and with these there was a mellow harmony of tone, a softness and simplicity of touch, a happy and playful tenderness, which belonged peculiarly to the later poet. With a less pointed and practised force of understanding than in Pope, and in some respects less subtle and refined, the appeal to the heart in Goldsmith is more gentle, direct, and pure. The predominant impression of the poem is of its naturalness and facility; and then is felt the surpassing charm with which its every-day genial fancies invest high thoughts of human happiness. The serene graces of its style, and the rich mellow flow of its verse, take us captive, before we feel the enchantment of its lovely images of various life, reflected from its calm still depths of philosophic contemplation. Above all do we perceive that it is a poem built upon nature; that it rests upon honest truth. It does not cry to the moon and the stars for impossible sympathy, or deal with other worlds, in fact or imagination, than the writer has lived in and known. Wisely had he avoided, what, in the falseheroic versifiers of his day, he had wittily condemned; the practice, even commoner since, of building up poetry on fantastic unreality, of clothing it in harsh inversions of language, and of patching it out with affectations of byegone vivacity: as if the more it was unlike prose, the 'more it would resemble poetry.' His own poetical language is unadorned yet rich, select yet exquisitely plain, condensed yet home-felt and familiar. He has considered, as he says himself of Parnell, 'the language of poetry as

'the language of life, and conveys the warmest thoughts ' in the simplest expression.'

In what way the Traveller originated, the reader has seen. It does not seem necessary to discuss in what precise proportions its plan may have risen out of Addison's Letter from Italy, or been shaped by Thomson's remark in one of his letters to Bubb Dodington 'that a poetical 'landscape of countries, mixed with moral observations on 'their characters and people, would not be an ill-judged undertaking.' It had been, eminently and in a peculiar degree, written from personal feeling and observation; and the course of its composition has been traced with the course of its author's life. When Boswell came back to London some year or so after its appearance, he tells us with what amazement he had heard Johnson say that 'there had not been so fine a poem since Pope's time;' and then amusingly explains the phenomenon by remarking, that 'much, no doubt, both of the sentiments and expression

were derived from conversation' with the great lexicographer. What the great lexicographer really suggested was a title, The Philosophic Wanderer; rejected for something simpler; as, if offered, the Johnsonian sentiment and expression would, I suspect, have been. But Garth did 'not write his own Dispensary,' and Goldsmith had still less chance of obtaining credit for his. The rumour that Johnson had given great assistance, is nevertheless contradicted by even Hawkins; where he professes to relate the extreme astonishment of the Club, that a newspaper essayist

and bookseller's drudge should have written such a poem. Undoubtedly that was his own feeling; and others of the members shared it, though, it is to be hoped, in a less degree. Well,' exclaimed Chamier, I do believe he wrote this poem himself; and let me tell you, that is 'believing a great deal.' Goldsmith had left the Club early that night, after 'rattling away as usual.' In truth he took little pains himself, in the thoughtless simplicity of those social hours, to fence round his own property and claim. Mr. Goldsmith,' asked Chamier, at the next meeting of the Club, 'what do you mean by the last word ' in the first line of your Traveller?

"Remote, unfriended, melancholy, slow."

'Do you mean tardiness of locomotion?' Johnson, who was near them, took part in what followed, and has related it. Goldsmith, who would say something without con'sideration, answered "Yes." I was sitting by, and said, 666 No, sir, you did not mean tardiness of locomotion; you

666

mean that sluggishness of mind which comes upon ""a man in solitude." "Ah!' exclaimed Goldsmith, 'that was what I meant.' Chamier,' Johnson adds, 'believed then that I had written the line, as much as if 'he had seen me write it.'

The lines which he really contributed he pointed out himself to Boswell, when laughing at the notion that he

had taken any more important part in it.

They were the

line which now stands 420th in the poem; and, omitting