fantoccini! 'He went home with Mr. Burke to supper, and broke his shin by attempting to exhibit to the company how much better he could jump over a stick 'than the puppets.' The anecdote is too pleasant to be gravely objected to; but might he not only mean that the puppets jumped even worse than he did? The actual world and the puppet-show are moreover so much alike, that what was meant for a laugh at the world might have passed for an attack on the puppet-show. And here it will be perhaps worth adding, that from one who, in the larger of the two theatres, and with notable reference to those very puppets of Versailles, was afterwards doomed to be busy in both pulling and snapping the strings, Goldsmith received this year a quite voluntary tribute to his fame. A correspondent in the humble station of an officer of excise,' sent him a pamphlet memorial of the case of his brother officers; told him that the literary fame of Doctor Goldsmith (whom he addresses Honoured Sir) had induced him to present it; said that he had some few questions to trouble Doctor Goldsmith with, and should esteem his company for an hour or two, to partake of a bottle of wine or anything else, as a singular favour; and added that the Doctor's unknown humble servant and admirer would take the liberty of waiting on him in a day or two. The writer was Thomas Paine, whom this pamphlet on excise introduced to Franklin, whom Franklin within twelve months sent to America, who transacted memorable business in the establishment of a republic there, and who became subsequently citizen of

another as famous republic, and Deputy in its National Convention for the department of Calais.

Goldsmith had suffered severe illness in the summer from a disease induced by sedentary habit; on its return in the autumn, had obtained such relief from the fashionable. fever medicine of the day, as to become almost as great a bigot as Horace Walpole to the miraculous powers of James's powders; and now, after visits to Mr. Cradock, Lord Clare, and Mr. Langton, was settled for the winter in London. This was the year when Northcote became Reynolds's pupil, and he remembered none of the Leicester Square visitors of the time so vividly as Goldsmith. He had expressed great eagerness to see him; soon afterward he came to dine; and this is Doctor Goldsmith,' said Sir Joshua, 'pray why did you wish to see him?' Confused by the suddenness of the question, which was put with designed abruptness, the youth could only stammer out 'because he is a notable man;' whereupon (the word in its ordinary sense appearing oddly misapplied) both Goldsmith and Reynolds burst out laughing, and the latter protested that in future his friend should always be the notable man. Northcote explains that he meant to say he was a man of note, or eminence; and adds that he was very unaffected and good-natured, but seemed totally ignorant of the art of painting, and indeed often confessed as much with great gaiety. Nevertheless, he used at Burke's table to plunge into art discussions with Barry, when the latter returned from abroad the year following this; and

would punish Barry's dislike of Sir Joshua, manifested

even so early, by disputing the subtlest dogmas with that irritable genius. With Burke himself, Northcote says, he overheard him sharply disputing one day in Sir Joshua's painting room about the character of the king; when, so grateful was he for some recent patronage of his comedy (it was a few months after the present date), and so outrageous and unsparing was Burke's anti-monarchical invective, that, unable any longer to endure it, he took up his hat and left the room. Another argument which Northcote overheard, at Sir Joshua's dinner-table, was between Johnson and Goldsmith; when the latter put Venice Preserved next to Shakespeare for its merit as an acting play, and was loudly contradicted by the other. Pooh!' roared Johnson.

There are not forty decent lines in the whole of it. What 'stuff are these!' And then he quoted, as prose, Pierre's scornful reproach to the womanish Jaffier. 'What femi'nine tales hast thou been listening to, of unair'd shirts, 'catarrhs, and tooth-ache, got by thin-soled shoes?' To which the unconvinced disputant sturdily replied, 'True! 6 To be sure! That is very like Shakespeare.' Goldsmith had no great knowledge of the higher secrets of criticism, and was guilty of occasional heresies against the masterpoet; but here his notion was right enough. He meant to say that Shakespeare had the art possessed only by the greatest poets, of placing in natural connection the extremes of the familiar and imaginative: which Garrick would have done well to remember before he began to botch Hamlet.

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Another impression which remained with Northcote's old age, derived from these scenes of his youth, was that the 'set' at Sir Joshua's were somewhat intolerant of such as did not belong to their party, jealous of enlarging it, and chary of admitting merit to any new comer. Thus he remembered a new poem coming out that was sent to Reynolds, who had instructed his servant Ralph to bring it in after dinner when presently Goldsmith laid hold of it, fell into a rage with it before he had read a dozen lines, and exclaiming, 'what wretched stuff is here! what cursed nonsense that is!' kept all the while marking the passages with his thumb nail as if he would cut them in pieces. 'Nay, 'nay,' said Sir Joshua, snatching the volume, 'don't do so : 'you shall not spoil my book, neither.' In like manner, Northcote adds, he recollects their making a dead set at Cumberland. They never admitted him as one of themselves; they excluded him from the Club; Reynolds never asked him to dinner; and from any room where he was, Goldsmith would have flung out as if a dragon had been there. It was not till his life was just about to close that he became tolerant of the condescending attentions of the fretful Cumberland.

To these recollections of Northcote, some by Mr. Cradock may be added. When it was proposed one day to go down to Lichfield, and, in honour of Johnson and Garrick, act the Beaux Stratagem among themselves there, all the famous people of the Club taking part in it, 'then,' exclaimed Goldsmith, 'I shall certainly play Scrub. I should like of

'all things to try my hand at that character.' One would have liked no less to have seen him play it, and heard the roar that would have given a personal turn to the cunning serving-man's famous assertion, 'I believe they talked of me, for they laughed consumedly. But his brogue would have been a difficulty. Even Burke's brogue was no small disadvantage to him; and Goldsmith had hardly improved his, since those Dunciad days when he would object to the exquisite bad rhyming of key with be ('let key be called kee, and then it will rhyme with be,' said one of his Griffith's criticisms, but not otherwise'): indeed, says Cooke, he rather cultivated his brogue than got rid of it. Malone's authority would have us doubt, too, whether his emphasis, even for Scrub, would always have been right; seeing he gave an example one day to prove that poets ought to read verses better than other men, by beginning the ballad At Upton on the Hill with a most emphatic ON. Farquhar's humour, nevertheless, might have gained as much as it lost; and the private play could not have spared such an actor. Richard Burke reinforced the party soon after this with his wit and his whim ('now breaking a jest and now breaking a limb '); Garrick having succeeded, where Edmund supposed that his own influence had failed, in getting him a year's leave of absence from Grenada: and his return led to a temporary dining-club at the St. James's coffee-house, the limited numbers of the Gerrard Street Club excluding both him and Garrick from present membership there. Cumberland, who became afterwards an occasional guest, correctly