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with great humility: 'I am very sorry; it was very foolish. 'I do recollect that something of the kind passed through my mind, but I did not think I had uttered it.' The anecdote is more creditable to Goldsmith than to Burke, to whose disadvantage it was probably afterwards remembered. It should be added that Burke had a turn for ridicule of this kind; and got up a more good-humoured trick against Goldsmith at his own house, not long after this, in which a lively kinswoman was played off as a raw Irish authoress, arrived expressly to see 'the great Goldsmith' and get his subscription to her poems, which with liberal return of praise (for she had read several out aloud) the simple poet gave, abusing them heartily the instant she was gone. Garrick founded a farce upon the incident, which with the title of the Irish Widow was played in 1772.

Not always at a disadvantage, however, was Goldsmith in these social meetings. At times he took the lead, and kept it, to even Johnson's annoyance. The misfortune ' of Goldsmith in conversation,' he would say on such occasions, is this: he goes on without knowing how he 'is to get off. His genius is great, but his knowledge is 'small. As they say of a generous man, it is a pity he is 'not rich, we may say of Goldsmith, it is a pity he is not 'knowing. He would not keep his knowledge to himself.' This is not the way to characterise the talk of an 'idiot.' Indeed sometimes, when the humour suited him, he would put even Burke's talk at the same disadvantage as Goldsmith's. Mentioning the latter as not agreeable, because it

was always for 'fame' (' and the man who talks to unburden his mind is the man to delight you'), he would add that Burke, too, was not so agreeable as the variety of his knowledge would otherwise make him, because he talked partly from ostentation; and before the words were forgotten (the next day, if in better humour), would not hesitate to put forth Burke's talk as emphatically the ebullition of his mind, as in no way connected with the desire of distinction, and indulged only because his mind was full. Such remarks and comparisons at the least make it manifest that Goldsmith's conversation was not the folly it is too often assumed to have been; though doubtless it was sometimes too ambitious, and fell short of the effort implied in it. Johnson laid its failure, on other occasions, with greater show of justice, rather to the want of temper than the want of power. 'Goldsmith should not,' he said, 'be for ever attempting to shine in conversation; 'he has not temper for it, he is so much mortified when he 'fails. Sir, a game of jokes is composed partly of skill, 'partly of chance; a man may be beat at times by one 'who has not the tenth part of his wit. Now Goldsmith 'putting himself against another, is like a man laying a 'hundred to one who cannot spare the hundred. It is not 'worth a man's while. When Goldsmith contends, if he 'gets the better it is a very little addition to a man of his ' literary reputation; if he does not get the better, he is 'miserably vexed.' It should be added that there were other causes than these for Goldsmith's frequent vexation.

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Miss Reynolds relates that she overheard a gentleman at her brother's table, to whom he was talking his best, suddenly stop him in the middle of a sentence with Hush! Hush! Doctor Johnson is going to say something.' The like was overheard at the first Academy dinner; when a Swiss named Moser, the first keeper appointed, interrupted him on seeing Johnson roll himself as if about to speak, and was paid back for his Toctor Shonson' zeal by Goldsmith's quick retort, and are you sure you'll comprehend what he says?' His happy rebuke of similar subserviency of Boswell's, that he was for turning into a monarchy what ought to be a republic, is recorded by Boswell himself (who adds, with that air of patronage which is now so exquisitely ludicrous, 'for my part I like very well to hear honest Goldsmith 'talk away carelessly '); and upon the whole evidence it seems clear enough, that his talk was not below the average of that of other celebrated men, and certainly did not deserve the Johnsonian antithesis which even goodhumoured Langton repeats so complacently: 'no man was

more foolish when he had not a pen in his hand, or more 'wise when he had.' Walpole said much the same thing of Hume, whose writings he thought so superior to his conversation that he protested the historian understood nothing till he had written upon it; and even of his friend Gray he said he was the worst company in the world, for he never talked easily: yet Walpole himself talked ill, and so did Gay; and so did Dryden, Pope, and Swift; and so did Hogarth and Addison.

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Nothing is recorded of those men, or of others as famous, so clever as the specimens of the talk of Goldsmith which Boswell himself has not cared to forget. Nay, even he goes so far as to admit, that he was often very fortunate in his 'witty contests, even when he entered the lists with Johnson 'himself.' An immortal instance was remembered by Reynolds. He, Johnson, and Goldsmith were together one day, when the latter said that he thought he could write a good fable; mentioned the simplicity which that kind of composition requires; and observed that in most fables the animals introduced seldom talk in character. 'instance,' said he, the fable of the little fishes who saw birds fly over their heads, and, envying them, petitioned 'Jupiter to be changed into birds. The skill,' he continued, consists in making them talk like little fishes.' At this point he observed Johnson shaking his sides and laughing; whereupon he made this home thrust. Why, 'Mr. Johnson, this is not so easy as you seem to think; 'for if you were to make little fishes talk, they would talk like WHALES.' This was what Garrick would call a forcible hug, and it shook laughter out of Johnson in his own despite. But in truth no one, as Boswell has admitted, could take such 'adventurous liberties' with the great social despot, and escape unpunished.' Beauclerc tells us that on Goldsmith originating, one day, a project for a third theatre in London solely for the exhibition of new plays, in order to deliver authors from the supposed tyranny of managers (a project often renewed since, and always sure

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to fail, for the simple reason that authors themselves become managers, and all authors cannot be heard), Johnson treated it slightingly: upon which the other retorted 'Aye,

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aye, this may be nothing to you, who can now shelter yourself behind the corner of a pension;' and Johnson bore it with perfect good humour. But the most amusing instance connected with the pension occurred a year or two afterward, when, on the appearance of Mason's exquisite Heroic Epistle, Goldsmith, delighted with it himself, carried it off to his friend, and was allowed to read it out to him from beginning to end with a running accompaniment of laughter, in which Johnson as heartily joined at the invocation to George the Third's selected (and in part pilloried) pensioners, as at the encounter of Charles Fox with the Jews.

witness, ye chosen train

Who breathe the sweets of his Saturnian reign;
Witness ye Hills, ye Johnsons, Scots, Shebbeares,
Hark to my call, for some of you have ears.

When one of the most active of the second-rate politicians, and the great go-between of the attempted alliance between the Chatham and Rockingham whigs, Tommy Townshend (so called not satirically, but to distinguish him from his father), anticipated in the present year that connection of Johnson's and Shebbeare's names (I formerly described them pensioned together, the He-Bear and the She-Bear' as some one humorously said), he did not get off so easily. But Johnson had brought these allusions on himself by plunging into party-war, at

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