owe to his genius, be it still with admission of its native and irreversible penalties. His generous warmth of heart, his transparent simplicity of spirit, his quick transitions from broadest humour to gentlest pathos, and that delightful buoyancy of nature which survived in every depth of misery, -who shall undertake to separate these from the Irish soil in which they grew, in which impulse still reigns predominant over conscience and reflection, where unthinking benevolence yet passes for considerate goodness, and the gravest duties of life are overborne by social pleasure, or sunk in mad excitement. Manful, in spite of all, was Goldsmith's endeavour, and noble its result. He did not again draw back from the struggle in which at last he had engaged; unaided by a helping hand, he fought the battle out; and much might yet have been retrieved when death arrived so as a general item only less important than the sum paid the "Newes Man." It is here printed verbatim. 1767. Et. 39. 24. Nov. 8. 6 Neckcloths 1 Cap 1767. Æt. 39. suddenly. Few men live at present, properly speaking; but are preparing to live at another time, which may or may not arrive.* The other time was cut from under Goldsmith; and out of such labour as his in the present, few men could have snatched time to live. "Ah!" he exclaimed to a young gentleman of fortune, who showed him a very elaborate manuscript: "Ah, Mr. Cradock! think of me, "that must write a volume every month!" Think of him, too, who wrote always in the presence of craving want, and, from his life's beginning to its end, had never known the assistance of a home. It was said of Burke that his every care used to vanish, from the moment he entered under his own roof; of himself Goldsmith could say no better, than that at home or abroad, in crowds or in solitude, he was still carrying on a conflict with unrelenting care.‡ * It is Pope, I think, who says something of this kind in one of his admirable letters. Let us humbly remember what sacred authority we have, too, that the will may sometimes be accepted for the deed. "And the Lord," says Solomon, "said unto David my father, Whereas it was in thine heart to build an house unto "mine name, thou didst well that it was in thine heart." Kings, Book i. viii. 18. "Goldsmith truly said I was nibbling about elegant phrases, whilst he was obliged to write half a volume." Cradock's Memoirs, iv. 288. Mr. De Quincey appears to think that he differs from me in these views, but the results at which he arrives are substantially the same, though I cannot take so cheerful a view of the general tenor of Goldsmith's life, nor bring myself to believe that his disposition was not eminently one which the domestic influences would have saved from the worst temptations (now to be described) that beset his latter life. A happy marriage would have brought within the tranquillising centre of home, all his desultory tastes, his unsettled habits, his too diffused affections, and eager cravings for applause. But let us hear Mr. De Quincey. "He enjoyed two great "immunities from suffering that have been much overlooked; and such immuni"ties that, in our opinion, four in five of all the people ever connected with "Goldsmith's works, as publishers, printers, compositors (that is, men taken at 66 random), have very probably suffered more, upon the whole, than he. The 'immunities were these: 1st, from any bodily taint of low-spirits. He had a con"stitutional gaiety of heart, an elastic hilarity, and, as he himself expresses it, "'a knack of hoping,'-which knack could not be bought with Ormus and with "Ind, nor hired for a day with the peacock throne of Delhi... Another immunity he "had of almost equal value, and yet almost equally forgotten by his biographers, "viz from the responsibilities of a family. Wife and children he had not. They "it is that, being a man's chief blessings, create also for him the deadliest of his But one friend he had that never wholly left him, that in his need came still with comfort. Nature, who smiled upon him in his cradle, in this "garret" of Garden Court had not deserted him. Her school was open to him even here; and, in the crowd and glare of streets, but a step divided him from her cool and calm refreshments. Among his happiest hours were those he passed at his window, looking over into the Temple-gardens. Steam and smoke were not yet so all prevailing, but that, right opposite where he looked, the stately stream which washes the garden-foot might be seen, as though freshly "weaned from her "Twickenham Naiades," flowing gently past. Nor had the benchers thinned the trees in those days; for they were that race of benchers loved of Charles Lamb, who refused to pass in their treasurer's account "twenty shillings to the gardener "for stuff to poison the sparrows." So there he sat, with the noisy life of Fleet-street shut out, and made country music for himself out of the noise of the old Temple rookery.* "anxieties, that stuff his pillow with thorns, that surround his daily path with *So far Goldsmith had at least the advantage of Gray, who in one of the most delightful of all his letters, and which, for its whimsical cordial humour and quiet gaiety, at once contrasts with his pensive contemplative moods and yet takes a certain colour from them too (just as it is the charm of his wit and satire that you can never divorce them from his manly truth and even kindness of feeling), thus compares Norton Nicholls's country refreshments with his own : "Pembroke College, "June 24, 1769. And so you have a garden of your own, and you plant and transplant, and are dirty and amused! Are not you ashamed of yourself? Why, I have no such thing, you monster, nor ever shall be either dirty or amused as long as "I live. My gardens are in the windows, like those of a lodger up three pair of "stairs in Petticoat Lane or Camomile street, and they go to bed regularly under "the same roof that I do. Dear, how charming it must be to walk out in one's own garding, and sit on a bench in the open air, with a fountain and leaden 66 1767. Æt. 39. 1767. Luther used to moralise the rooks; and Goldsmith had Et. 39. illustrious example for the amusement he now took in their habits, as from time to time he watched them. He saw the rookery, in the winter deserted, or guarded only by some five or six, "like old soldiers in a garrison," resume its activity and bustle in the spring; and he moralised, like the great reformer, on the legal constitutions established, the social laws enforced, and the particular castigations endured for the good of the community, by those black-dressed and black-eyed chatterers. "I have often amused myself," he says, "with observing their plans of policy from my window "in the Temple, that looks upon a grove where they have "made a colony in the midst of the city."* Nor will we doubt that from this wall-girt grove, too, came many a thought that carried him back to childhood, made him free of solitudes explored in boyish days, and re-peopled deserted villages. It was better than watching the spiders amid the dirt of Green Arbour Court; for though his grove was city planted, and scant of the foliage of the forest, there was Fancy to piece out for him, transcending these, far other groves and other trees, Annihilating all that's made To a green thought in a green shade. Let us leave him to this happiness for a time; before we pass to the few short years of labour, enjoyment, and sorrow, in which his mortal existence closed. "statue, and a rolling stone, and an arbour: have a care of sore throats, though, END OF THIRD BOOK. |