'plainly what he meant to say; but that happy turn of 'expression is peculiar to himself. Mr. Walpole says that 'this story is a picture of Goldsmith's whole life.' Ah! so it might seem to men whose whole life had been a holiday. No slavish drudgery, no clownish straits, no scholarly loneliness, had befallen them; and how to make allowance in others for disadvantages never felt by ourselves, is still the great problem for us all. Poor Goldsmith's blunder was only a false emphasis. He meant that he wondered Malagrida, being the name of a good man, should be used as a term of reproach. But his whole life was a false emphasis, says Walpole. In his sense, perhaps it was so. He had been emphatic throughout it, where Walpole had only been indifferent; and what to the wit and man of fashion had been a scene for laughter, to the poet and man of letters had been fraught with serious suffering. Life is a comedy 'to those who think, and a tragedy to those who feel.' Democritus laughed, and Heraclitus wept.

Beauclerc told Lord Charlemont in the same letter, that Goldsmith had written a prologue for Mrs. Yates, which she was to speak that night at the Opera-house. It is very good. You will see it soon in all the newspapers, other'wise I would send it to you.' The newspapers have nevertheless been searched in vain for it, though it certainly was spoken; and it seems probable that Colman's friends had interfered to suppress it. Mrs. Yates had quarrelled with the Covent Garden manager; and one object of the 'poetical exordium' which Goldsmith had written for her,

was to put before that fashionable audience the injustice of her exclusion from the English theatre. He had great sympathy for Mrs. Yates, thinking her the first English actress; and it is not wonderful that he should have lost all sympathy with Colman. Their breach had lately widened more and more. Kenrick, driven from Drury Lane, had found refuge at the other house; and on the very night of Mrs. Yates's prologue, Colman suffered a new comedy, by that libeller of all his friends, to be decisively damned at Covent Garden. If Goldsmith could have withdrawn both his comedies upon this, he would probably have done it; for at once he made an effort to remove the first to Drury Lane, which he had now the right to do. But Garrick insisted on his original objection to Lofty; and justified it by reference to the comparative coldness with which the comedy had been received in the summer, though with the zealous Lee Lewes in that part (Lewis had not yet assumed it). He would play the Good Natur'd Man if that objection could be obviated, not otherwise. Here the matter rested for a time. But in the course of what passed, Goldsmith found that Newbery had failed to observe his promise in connection with the unpaid bill still in Garrick's hands. This was hardly generous; since the copyright of She Stoops to Conquer had passed in satisfaction of all claims between them, and already promised Newbery the ample profits which it subsequently realised beyond his debt. These are said to have amounted to upwards of three hundred pounds; and the play was still so profitable after several years' sale,

that when the booksellers engaged Johnson for their first scheme of an Edition and Memoir, the project was defeated by a dispute about the value of the copyright of She Stoops to Conquer.

The other larger debt to 'the trade,' which had suggested to Goldsmith his project of a Dictionary, he had now no means of discharging but by hard, drudging, unassisted labour. His so favourite project, though he had now obtained promises of co-operation from Johnson, Burke, and Reynolds, had been finally rejected. Davies, who represented the craft on the occasion, whose own business had not been very prosperous, and many of whose copyrights had already passed to Cadell, gives us the reason of their adverse decision. He says that though they had the best opinion of the Doctor's abilities, yet they were startled at the bulk, importance, and expense of so great an undertaking, the fate of which was to depend upon the industry of a man with whose indolence of temper and method of procrastination they had long been acquainted. He adds, in further justification of the refusal, that upon every emergency halfa-dozen projects would present themselves to Goldsmith's mind, which, straightway communicated to the men they were to enrich, at once obtained him money on the mere faith of his great reputation: but the money was generally spent long before the new work was half finished, perhaps before it was begun; and hence arose continual expostulation and reproach on the one side, and much anger and vehemence on the other. Johnson described the same trans

actions, after all were over, in one of his emphatic sentences. 'He had raised money and squandered it, by every artifice ' of acquisition and folly of expense. But let not his frailties be remembered: he was a very great man.'

Hopeless of the scheme on which he had built so much, the alteration of his first comedy for Garrick, even upon Garrick's own conditions, would now seem to have suddenly presented itself as one of these artifices of acquisition.' He wrote to the manager of Drury Lane. The letter has by chance survived, is obligingly communicated to me by its present possessor (Mr. Bullock of Islington), and of the scanty collection so preserved is probably the worst composed and the worst written. As well in the manner as the matter of it, the writer's distress is very painfully visible. It has every appearance, even to the wafer hastily thrust into it, of having been the sudden suggestion of necessity; it is addressed, without date of time or place, to the Adelphi (where Garrick had lately purchased the centre house of the newly built terrace); nor is it unlikely to have been delivered there by the messenger of a sponginghouse. A fac-simile of its signature, which may be compared with Goldsmith's ordinary hand-writing in a previous page, will shew the writer's agitation, and perhaps account for the vague distraction of his grammar.

MY DEAR SIR, Your saying you would play my Good-natured Man makes me wish it. The money you advanced me upon Newbery's note I have the mortification to find is not yet paid, but he says he will in two or three days. What I mean by this letter is to

lend me sixty pound for which I will give you Newbery's note, so that the whole of my debt will be an hundred for which you shall have Newbery's note as a security. This may be paid either from my alteration if my benefit should come to so much, but at any rate I will take care you shall not be a loser. I will give you a new character in my comedy and knock out Lofty which does not do, and will make such other alterations as you direct.

The letter is indorsed in Garrick's handwriting as 'Goldsmith's parlaver.' But though it would thus appear to have inspired little sympathy or confidence, and the sacrifice of Lofty had come too late and been too reluctant, Garrick's answer, begged so earnestly, was not unfavourable. He evaded the altered comedy; spoke of the new one already mentioned between them; and offered the money required on Goldsmith's own acceptance. The small security of one of Newbery's notes (though the publisher, with his experience of the comedy in hand, would doubtless gladly have taken his chance of the renovated comedy), he had some time proved. Poor Goldsmith was enthusiastic in acknowledgment. Nor let it be thought he is acting unfairly to Newbery, in the advice he sends with his thanks. The