'the party obtained good air and exercise, good living, 'the example of simple manners, and good conversation.'

Truly, very innocent enjoyment; and shared not alone by Templars and small wits, but by humbler good fellows. One Peter Barlow, who acted now and then as amanuensis to Goldsmith; very poor, very proud in his way; who appeared always in one peculiar dress; who declared himself able to give only a specified small sum for his daily dinner, but who stood firmly on his ability to do this, and never permitted any one to do it for him; had made himself a great favourite with Goldsmith by his honest independence and harmless eccentricity, and had generally a place in the Shoemaker's Holiday. If the dinner cost even five shillings each, fifteenpence was still the limit of Peter's responsibility; and the balance was paid by Goldsmith. Many, too, were

there never was a man more benevolent and friendly; and that, so strongly was he affected by compassion, he had been known at midnight to abandon his rest, in order to procure relief and an asylum for a poor dying object, who was left destitute in the streets; proceeds thus: 'He is, 'however, supposed to have been often soured by jealousy or envy ; and many little instances are mentioned of this ' tendency in his character: but whatever appeared of this 'kind was a mere momentary sensation which he knew not 'how, like other men, to conceal. It was never the result ' of principle, or the suggestion of reflection; it never em'bittered his heart, nor influenced his conduct.' Let these emphatic words be the comment on any future record of such little instances; ' and when Johnson ridicules, hereafter, his friend's ignorance of things, let it be taken with Cooke's odd illustration of his supposed ignorance of words.

Henry Goldsmith's death would seem to have been made known to his brother shortly before we discover the latter to have gone into temporary retreat in a cottage eight miles down the Edgeware Road, at the bak of Canons.' He had taken it in connection with his Temple neighbour, Mr. Bott; and they kept it for some little time. It was very small, and very absurdly decorated; and, as a set off to his Shoemaker's Holiday, he used to call this his Shoemaker's Paradise, one of that craft having built it, and laid it out with flying Mercuries, jettes d'eau, and other preposterous ornaments, though the ground it stood upon, with its two

rooms on a floor, its garden and all, covered considerably less than half an acre. The friends would occasionally drive down to this retreat, even after dining in London, Mr. Bott being one of those undoubtedly respectable men who kept a horse and gig: and a curious letter is said to be in existence written by Goldsmith shortly before his death, thanking Bott again and again for timely pecuniary help, rendered in his worst straits; saying it is to Bott he entirely owes that he can sit down in safety in his chambers without the terrors of arrest hanging momentarily over him; and recalling such whimsical scenes of past days as when they used to drive down the Edgeware Road at night, and, both their necks being brought to imminent peril by the gig's descent into a ditch, the driver (Bott) would exhaust all his professional eloquence to prove that at that instant they were exactly in the centre of the road.

Here the History of Rome, undertaken for Davies, was at leisure proceeded with; here the new poem, worked at in the adjoining lanes, and in pleasant strolls along the shady hedges, began to grow in importance; and here, so engaged, Goldsmith seems to have passed the greater part of the summer, apparently not much moved by what was going on elsewhere. Walpole, mourning for the loss of his Lady Hervey and his Lady Suffolk, was reading his tragedy of the Mysterious Mother to his lady friends who remained, and rejoicing that he did not need to expose himself to 'the impertinencies of that jackanapes Garrick, who lets nothing appear but 'his own wretched stuff, or that of creatures still duller,

'who suffer him to alter their pieces as he pleases: ' but Goldsmith's withers are unwrung. Hume was receiving a considerable increase to his pension, with significant intimation of the royal wish that he should apply himself to the continuation of his English History; great lords were fondly dandling Robertson into the good graces of the booksellers, the Chief Justice admiringly telling the Duke of Bedford that £4500 was to be paid him for his Charles the Fifth History, and Walpole reasonably sneering at this worship of Scotch puffing and partiality: but the humbler historian at Edgeware pursues his labours unbribed and undisturbed. The Sentimental Journey was giving pleasure to not a few; even Walpole was declaring it 'infinitely preferable to the tiresome Tristram Shandy ;' while within a few months, at a grand dinner table round which were seated two dukes, two earls, Mr. Garrick, and Mr. Hume, a footman in attendance was announcing Sterne's lonely death in a common lodging house in Bond Street: but Goldsmith does not yet see the shadow of his own early decay. Gray, who had in vain solicited the Oxford professorship of Modern History while he yet had the health it would have given him spirit to enjoy, and was now about to receive it from the Duke of Grafton when no longer able to hold it, was wondering at a new book about Corsica, in which he found a hero pourtrayed by a green goose, and where he had the comfort of feeling that what was wise in it must be true, for the writer was too great a fool to invent it: but Goldsmith has never been much interested in Boswell,

and Paoli is not very likely to increase his interest. Having made this unavailing effort to empty his head of Corsica, Boswell himself had visited London in the spring, had followed Johnson to Oxford, and was now making him the hero of dinner parties at the Crown and Anchor in the Strand, where Percy was worried, Robertson slighted, and Davies turned into ridicule: but Goldsmith is doubtless well content, for a time, to escape his chance of being 'tossed and gored.' Kindness he could not escape so easily, if Reynolds had it in his gift. For this, too, was the year when the great painter, entering the little room where a party of his brother artists were in council over a plan for an Academy of Arts,' was instantly, all of them rising to a man, saluted 'president;' and the year had not closed before the royal patronage was obtained for the scheme, and that great institution set on foot which has since so greatly flourished, yet has had no worthier or more famous entry on its records than the appointment of Samuel Johnson as its first Professor of Ancient Literature, and of Oliver Goldsmith as its first Professor of History.

Whether the clamour of politics, noisiest when emptiest, failed meanwhile to make its way into the Shoemaker's Paradise, may be more doubtful. A year of such profligate turmoil perhaps never degraded our English annals. The millenium of rioters as well as libellers seemed to have come. The abandoned recklessness of public men was seen in reaction through all the grades of society; and in the mobs of Stepney Fields and St. George's, were reflected