'Philosophy, considered in its present state of improve

'ment;' 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 entered in Newbery's memoranda as made in connection with that Society, to have contributed sundry reports and disquisitions on its proceedings and affairs, to a new commercial and agricultural magazine in which the busy publisher had engaged. It was certainly not an idle year with him; though what remains in proof of his employment is scant and indifferent enough. Johnson's blind pensioner, Miss Williams, had for several months been getting together a subscription volume of Miscellanies, to which he had promised a poem; and complains that she found him always too busy to redeem his promise, and was continually put off with a ' Leave it 'to me.' Nor was Johnson, who had made like promises, much better. Well, we'll think about it,' was his form of excuse. With Johnson, in truth, a year of most unusual exertion had succeeded his year of visitings, and he had at last completed, nine years later than he promised it, his Edition of Shakespeare. It came out in October, in eight octavo volumes; and was bitterly assailed (nor, it may be admitted, without a certain coarse smartness) by Kenrick, who, in one of the notes to his attack, coupling 'learned doctors of Dublin,' with doctorial dignities ' of Rheims and Louvain,' may have meant a sarcasm at Goldsmith. I have indicated the latter place as the

probable source of his medical degree; and, three months before, Dublin University had conferred a doctorship on Johnson, though not until ten years later, when Oxford did him similar honour, did he consent to assume the title. He had now, I may add, left his Temple chambers, and become master of a house in one of the courts in Fleet Street which bore his own name; and where he was able to give lodging on the ground floor to Miss Williams, and in the garret to Robert Levet. It is remembered as a decent house, with stout old-fashioned mahogany furniture. Goldsmith appears meanwhile to have got into somewhat better chambers in the same (Garden) court where his library stair-case chambers stood; which he was able to furnish more decently; and to which we shortly trace (by the help of Mr. Filby's bills, and their memoranda of altered suits) the presence of a man-servant.

So passed the year 1765. It was the year in which he had first felt any advantage of rank arising from Literature; and it closed upon him as he seems to have resolved to make the most of his growing importance, and enjoy it in all possible ways. Joseph Warton, now preparing for the head mastership of Winchester school, was in London at the opening of 1766, and saw something of the society of the Club. He had wished to see Hume; but Hume, though he had left Paris (where he had been secretary of the embassy to Lord Hertford, recalled and sent to Dublin by the new administration), was not yet in London. A strange Paris 'season' it had been, and odd

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and ill-assorted its assemblage of visitors. There had Sterne, Foote, Walpole, and Wilkes, been thrown together at the same dinner-table. There had Hume, with his broad Scotch accent, his unintelligible French, his imbecile fat face, and his corpulent body, been the object of enthusiasm without example, and played the Sultan in pantomimic tableaux to the prettiest women of the time. There had the author of the Heloise and the Contrat Social, half crazed with the passionate admiration which had welcomed his Emile, and flattered out of the rest of his wits by the persecution that followed it, stalked about with all Paris at his heels, in a caftan and Armenian robes, and so enchanted the Scotch philosopher, to whom he seemed a sort of better Socrates, that he had offered him a home in England. There was the young painter student, Barry, writing modest letters on his way to Rome, where William and Edmund Burke had subscribed out of their limited means to send him. There was the young lion-hunting Boswell, more pompous and conceited than ever; as little laden with law from Utrecht, where he has studied since we saw him last, as with heroism from Corsica, where he has visited Pascal Paoli, or with wit from Ferney, where he has been to see Voltaire; pushing his way into every salon, inflicting himself on every celebrity, and ridiculed by all. There, finally, was Horace Walpole, twinged with the gout and smarting from political slight, revenging himself with laughter at every body around him and beyond him: now with aspiring Geoffrin and the philosophers, now with

blind Du Deffand and the wits, ('women who violated all 'the duties of life and gave very pretty suppers'); lumping up in the same contempt, Wilkes and Foote, Boswell and Sterne; proclaiming as impostors in their various ways, alike the jesuits, the methodists, the philosophers, the politicians, the encyclopedists, the hypocrite Rousseau, the scoffer Voltaire, the Humes, the Lyttletons, the Grenvilles, the atheist tyrant of Prussia, and the mountebank of history Mr Pitt; and counting a ploughman who sows, reads his almanack, and believes the stars but so many farthing candles created to prevent his falling into a ditch as he goes home at night, wiser, more rational, and honester than any of them. Such was the winter society of Paris; let Joseph Warton describe what he saw of Literature in London. I dined with Johnson,' he writes to his brother, who seemed cold and indifferent, ' and scarce said anything to me. Perhaps he has heard 'what I said of his Shakespeare. Of all solemn cox'combs, Goldsmith is the first; yet sensible; but affects 'to use Johnson's hard words in conversation. We had a

Mr. Dyer, who is a scholar and a gentleman. Garrick ' is entirely off from Johnson, and cannot, he says, forgive 'him his insinuating that he withheld all his old ' editions.'

What Garrick could with greater difficulty forgive (the Preface to Shakespeare is referred to) was the absence of any mention of his acting. He had not withheld his old plays; he had been careful, through others, to let

Johnson understand (too notoriously careless of books, as he was, to be safely trusted with rare editions) that the books were at his service, and that in his absence abroad the keys of his library had, with that view solely, been entrusted to a servant : but this implied an overture from Johnson, who thought it Garrick's duty, on the contrary, to make overtures to him; who knew that the other course involved acknowledgments he was not prepared to make; and who laughed at nothing so much, on Davy's subsequent loan of all his plays to George Steevens, as when he read this year, in the first publication of that acute young Mephistophelean critic, that Mr. Garrick's zeal would 'not permit him to withhold anything that might ever so ' remotely tend to show the perfections of that author who ' only could have enabled him to display his own.' Johnson could not hit off a compliment of such satirical nicety; he must have praised honestly, if at all, and it went against his grain to do it. He let out the reason to Boswell eight years afterward. 'Garrick has been liberally paid, sir, for anything he has done for Shakespeare. If I should 'praise him, I should much more praise the nation who 'paid him.' With better reason he used to laugh at his managerial preference of the players' text (which it is little to the credit of the stage that the latest of the great actors should have been the first to depart from), and couple it with a doubt if he had ever examined one of the original plays from the first scene to the last. Nor did Garrick take all this quietly. The king had commanded