strong an opposition that it was never repeated: but that the audience was not impartial, may be suspected from Langton's anecdote; and it is borne out by a reading of the comedy itself. Though with too much sentiment, it is both amusing and interesting; and the Strawbery Hill critics who abused it, and afterwards pronounced Burgoyne's Heiress 'the finest comedy in the English language,' might have had the justice to discover that three of the characters of the fashionable General were stolen from this very Sister of poor Mrs. Lennox. Goldsmith, however, had nothing to reproach himself with. He not only refrained from joining the dissentients, but assisted the comedy (perhaps first disposed to sympathy with it because Garrick had rejected it) by an epilogue written in his liveliest strain, and spoken by pretty Mrs. Bulkley. He has had few competitors in that style of writing. His prologues and epilogues are the perfection of the vers de société. Formality and ill-humour are exorcised by their cordial wit, which transforms the theatre to a drawing-room, and the audience into friendly guests. There is a playful touch, an easy, airy elegance, which, when joined to terseness of expression, sets it off with incomparable grace and finished beauty; but few of our English poets have written that style successfully. The French, who invented the name for it, have been almost its only practised cultivators. Goldsmith's genius for it will nevertheless bear comparison with even theirs. He could be playful without childishness, humorous without coarseness, and sharply

satirical without a particle of anger. Enough remains, for proof, in his collected verse; but in private letters that have perished, many most charming specimens have undoubtedly been lost. For with such enchanting facility it flowed from him, that with hardly any of his friends in the higher social circle which he now began to enter, did it fail to help him to more gracious acceptance, to warmer and more cordial intimacy. It takes but the touch of nature to please highest and lowest alike: and whether he thanked Lord Clare, or the manager of Ranelagh; answered an invitation to the pretty Miss Hornecks, or supplied author or actor with an epilogue; the same exquisite tact, the same natural art, the same finished beauty of humour and refinement, recommended themselves to all.

The Miss Hornecks, girls of nineteen and seventeen, were acquaintances of this year; and soon ripened into friends. They were the daughters of Mrs. Horneck, Captain Kane Horneck's widow; whose Devonshire family connected her with Reynolds, and so introduced her to Goldsmith. Her only son Charles, the Captain in Lace as they now fondly called him, had entered the Guards in the preceding year, and seems to have been as cordial and good-natured, as her daughters were handsome and young. The eldest, Catherine, Little Comedy as she was called, was already engaged to Henry William Bunbury (second son of a baronet of old family in Suffolk, whose elder son Charles had lately succeeded to the title), who is still remembered as 'Geoffrey Gambado,' and as one of the cleverest amateur

artists and social caricaturists of his day. The youngest, Mary, had no declared lover till a year after Goldsmith's death, nor was married till three years after that engagement, to Colonel Gwyn; but already she had the loving nick-name of the Jessamy Bride, and exerted strange fascination over Goldsmith. Heaven knows what impossible dreams may at times have visited the awkward, unattractive man of letters! But whether at any time aspiring to other regard than his genius and simplicity might claim, at least for these the sisters heartily liked him; and perhaps the happiest hours of the later years of his life were passed in their society. Burke, who was their guardian, tenderly remembered in his premature old age the delight they had given him from their childhood; their social as well as personal charms are uniformly spoken of by all ; and when Hazlitt met the younger sister in Northcote's painting-room some twenty years ago (she survived Little Comedy upwards of forty years, and died little more than seven years since!), she was still talking of her favourite Doctor Goldsmith, with recollection and affection unabated by time. Still, too, she was beautiful, beautiful even in years. The Graces had triumphed over age. 'I could 'almost fancy the shade of Goldsmith in the room,' says Hazlitt, looking round with complacency.'

Soon had the acquaintance become a friendship. To a dinner-party given this year by their mother's friend and Reynolds's physician, Doctor (afterwards Sir George) Baker, the sisters appear at the last moment to have taken

on themselves to write a joint invitation to Goldsmith, to which he replied with some score of humorous couplets, at the top of which was scrawled, 'This is a poem! This is a copy of verses!'

Your mandate I got,

You may all go to pot;
Had your senses been right,
You'd have sent before night...
So tell Horneck and Nesbitt,
And Baker and his bit,

And Kauffman beside,

And the Jessamy Bride,

With the rest of the crew,

The Reynoldses two,

Little Comedy's face,

And the Captain in Lace...
Tell each other to rue
Your Devonshire crew,
For sending so late
To one of my state.
But 'tis Reynolds's way
From wisdom to stray,
And Angelica's whim
To be frolick like him;

But, alas! your good worships, how could they be wiser
When both have been spoil'd in to-day's Advertiser ?

Does not this life-like humour re-furnish the hospitable table, re-animate the pleasant circle around it, and set us down again with Reynolds and his Angelica? The most celebrated of the woman painters had found no jealousy in the leading artist of England. His was the first portrait that made Angelica Kauffman famous here; to him she owed her introduction to the Conways and Stanhopes; he befriended her in the misery of her first thoughtless marriage, now not many months dissolved, though himself (it was said) not unmoved by tenderer thoughts than of friendship; and he placed her in the list of the members of the new Academy. It was little wonder that their names should have passed together into print, and become a theme for the poet's corner of the Advertiser.

In the same number of that journal was an advertisement of the Roman History, which had been first announced in the preceding August, and was issued in the May of the present year. It was in two octavo volumes of five hundred pages each, was described as for the use of schools and colleges, and obtained at once a very large sale. What he has given as his reason for writing it, that other histories of the period were either too voluminous for common use, 'or too meanly written to please,' will suffice to explain its success. It was a compact and not a big book, and it was charmingly written. The critics received it well; and one of them had the grace to regret that 'the author of 'one of the best poems that has appeared since those of 'Mr. Pope, should not apply wholly to works of imagina'tion.' Johnson thought, on the other hand, that the writer's time had been occupied worthily; and when, a year or two after this, in a dinner conversation at Topham Beauclerc's, he was putting Goldsmith in the first class, not only as poet and comic writer but also as historian, and Boswell exploded a protest in behalf of the Scotch writers of history, Johnson more decisively roared out his preference for his friend over the verbiage of Robertson and the 'foppery of Dalrymple.' Hume he had never read, because of his infidelity; but Robertson, he protested, might have put twice as much into his book as he had done, whereas Goldsmith had put into his as much as the book would hold. This, he affirmed, was the great art: for the man who tells the world shortly what it wants to know, will,