studied thoroughly; most familiar had he reason to be with its lights and its shadows; very ample and various had been his personal experience of both; and whether anger or adulation should at last predominate, the reader of this narrative of his life has had abundant means of determining. But neither were visible in the character of Garrick. Indignation makes verses, says the poet; yet will the verses be all the better, in proportion as the indignation is not seen. The Garrick lines are quite perfect writing. Without anger, the satire is finished, keen, and uncompromising; the wit is adorned by most discriminating praise; and the truth is all the more merciless for exquisite good manners and good taste. The epitaph writers might well be alarmed. Dean Barnard and Whitefoord deprecated Goldsmith's wrath, in verses that still exist; and the flutter of fear became very perceptible. Retaliation,' says Walter Scott, 'had the effect of placing the author on a more equal 'footing with his society than he had ever before assumed.' Fear might doubtless have had that effect, if Goldsmith could have visited St. James' Street again: but a sterner invitation awaited him. Allusions to Kenrick show he was still writing his retaliatory epitaphs in the middle of February; such of them as escaped during his progress were limited to very few of his acquaintance; and when the publication of the poem challenged wider respect for the writer, the writer had been a week in his grave.

Here lies David Garrick, describe me who can,
An abridgment of all that was pleasant in man ;

Yet, with talents like these, and an excellent heart,
The man had his failings, a dupe to his art.
Like an ill-judging beauty, his colours he spread,
And beplaster'd with rouge his own natural red.
On the stage he was natural, simple, affecting;
'Twas only that when he was off he was acting.
As an actor, confess'd without rival to shine;
As a wit, if not first, in the very first line:
With no reason on earth to go out of his way,
He turn'd and he varied full ten times a day:
Though secure of our hearts, yet confoundedly sick
If they were not his own by finessing and trick:

He cast off his friends as a hunstman his pack,

For he knew when he pleased he could whistle them back.

Of praise a mere glutton, he swallowed what came,
And the puff of a dunce he mistook it for fame;
Till his relish grown callous, almost to disease,
Who pepper'd the highest was surest to please.
But let us be candid, and speak out our mind,
If dunces applauded, he paid them in kind.

Ye Kenricks, ye Kellys, and Woodfalls so grave,

What a commerce was yours, while you got and you gave!
How did Grub-street re-echo the shouts that you raised,
While he was be-Roscius'd, and you were be-praised!

But peace to his spirit, wherever it flies,

To act as an angel and mix with the skies:

Those poets, who owe their best fame to his skill,

Shall still be his flatterers, go where he will;

Old Shakespeare receive him with praise and with love,
And Beaumonts and Bens be his Kellys above.

Other brief passages of the poem which were handed about at the same time with this, Burke is said to have received under solemn injunctions of secrecy; which he promised to observe if they had passed into no other hands, but from which he released himself with all dispatch when told that Mrs. Cholmondely had also received a copy. It would be curious to know if his own epitaph, formerly

quoted, was in the manuscript confided to him. The plan of the poem, it is evident, grew far beyond its original purpose, as, 'with chaos and blunders encircling his head,' poor Goldsmith continued to work at it. It became something better than retaliation.' In the last lines, on which he is said to have been engaged when his fatal illness seized him, was the gratitude of a life. They will help to keep Reynolds immortal.

Here Reynolds is laid, and, to tell you my mind,
He has not left a wiser or better behind.

His pencil was striking, resistless, and grand;

His manners were gentle, complying, and bland;
Still born to improve us in every part,

His pencil our faces, his manners our heart.

To coxcombs averse, yet most civilly steering,

When they judged without skill he was still hard of hearing :
When they talked of their Raphaels, Correggios, and stuff,

He shifted his trumpet, and only took snuff.

By flattery unspoiled.

It is not unpleasing to think that Goldsmith's hand should have been tracing that unfinished line, when illness struck the pen from it for ever. It was in the middle of March 1774. Some little time before, he had gone to his Edgeware lodging, to pursue his labours undisturbed. Here, at length, he had finished the Animated Nature (his last letter was to a publisher, Mr. Nourse, who had bought Griffin's original interest, asking him to allow 'his friend Griffin' to purchase back a portion of the copyright; thanking him, at the same time, for an 'overpayment,' which in consideration of the completion, and its writer's necessities, Mr. Nourse had consented to make;

and throwing out an idea of extending the work into the vegetable and fossil kingdoms). Here, too, he was completing the Grecian History, making another Abridgement of English History for schools, translating Scarron's Comic Romance, revising (for the moderate payment of five guineas, vouchsafed by James Dodsley) a new edition of his Enquiry into Polite Learning, labouring to bring into shape the compilation on Experimental Philosophy which had been begun eight years before, writing his Retaliation, and making new resolves for the future. Such was the end, of unwearying and sordid toil, to which even his six years' term of established fame had brought him! The cycle of his life was complete; and in the same miserable labour wherein it had begun, it was to close.

Not without resolving' to the last, and still hoping to begin anew. He had bitterly felt a reproach which Johnson gave him at their latest interview before leaving London, when, having asked him and Reynolds to dinner at the Temple, to meet an old acquaintance to whom his Dictionary project had re-introduced him (Doctor Kippis, who tells the anecdote), Johnson silently reproved the extravagance of a too expensive dinner, by sending away a whole second course' untouched. Soon after that, he was taking measures to sell the lease of his Temple chambers; and here in Edgeware he was telling his farmer friends, that he should never again live longer than two months a year in London. One has a strange propensity,' says Boswell, describing a perpetual habit of his own, 'to

'fix upon some point of time from whence a better course ' of life may begin.' Ah, yes! It is so easy to settle that way what would otherwise never be settled, and comfort ourselves with a flattery of the future. We seem mended at once, without having taken the trouble of mending.' Unhappily it is from the same instinctive dislike of trouble that the after-failures of these formal resolutions come. Never will they cease, notwithstanding; till castle-building on the ground is as easy as to build castles in the air. The philosopher smiles at that word never, but to the last moment it is pronounced by us all. Here it was whispering to Goldsmith all sorts of enduring resolutions, when the sudden attack of an old illness warned him to seek advice in London. This was a local disorder that had grown from sedentary habits, and had required great care at every period of his life. It was 'neglect,' says Davies, which now brought it on. 'It was continual vexation ' of mind, arising from his involved circumstances; and 'Death, I really believe, was welcome to a man of his 'great sensibility.' In that case, the welcome visitor was

come.

Goldsmith arrived in London in the middle of March, obtained relief from the immediate attack of disease, but was left struggling with symptoms of low nervous fever. He seems to have been anxious to attend the Club on Friday the 25th (Charles Fox, Sir Charles Bunbury, George Steevens, and Doctor George Fordyce, had just obtained their election); but in the afternoon of that day he took to his bed,