1766.

Duke of Bedford's, her Grace the Duchess's, and the whole Et. 38. House of Woburn's.* Every month, every week, had its

periodical calumny. The unwieldy column of quarto and octavo, the light squadron of pamphlet and flying sheet, alike kept up the fire. "Faction only fills the town with "pamphlets," wrote Johnson soon after this date," and

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greater subjects are forgotten in the noise of discord." "Politics and abuse," confesses one who stood behind the scenes, "have totally corrupted our taste. We might as "well be given up to controversial divinity. Nobody thinks "of writing a line that is to last beyond the next fortnight;" or of listening, he might have added, to a line so written. The same authority, a politician and man of rank, left an account of the literature of the day, in which half a line is given to Goldsmith as the correct author of the Traveller," § another to Smollett as a profligate hireling and abusive Jacobite writer, and a third to Johnson as a lumber of mean opinions and prostituted learning: but in which Mrs. Macauley's History is compared to Robertson's, Mr. Richard Bentley's Patriotism thought next in merit to the Dunciad, and Mr. Dalrymple's Rodondo counted hardly inferior to Hudibras; in which Mr. Hoole is discovered to be a poet, and an elegant five shilling quarto which had appeared within the last few months with the title of the New Bath Guide, is proclaimed to have distinguished and marked out its writer from all other men, for possession of the easiest wit, the most genuine

* See Walpole's George III, iii. 115.

+ Boswell, iii. 244. Horace Walpole to Conway. Coll. Lett. v. 263. § Walpole couples Goldsmith with Anstey, as both "poets of great merit" who "meddled not with politics." Mem. Geo. III, iii. 172. Some account of the pamphleteers and party writers of this and the next few years will be found in Stephens's Life of Horne Tooke, i. 352-60; but to be taken cum grano.

humour, the most inoffensive satire, the most unaffected poetry, and the most harmonious melody in every kind of metre.*

Is not the fashion as well as faction of the time thus reflected to us vividly? Now, all excepting Christopher Anstey are forgotten, of these admired ones; nor is it likely that even Anstey would have been noticed with anything but a sneer, if, besides being a scholar and a wit, he had not also been a member of parliament. Beyond the benches of the houses, too, or the gossip of St. James's, this influence

* See Chapter "on the Literature of the early part of the Reign," in Horace Walpole's Memoirs of the Reign of George III, iii. 164. I need not perhaps remind the reader that in the brief space of time of which Walpole thus professes to sketch the distinguishing literature, all Sterne's writings had been produced, the best of Smollett's, and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's Letters; that, not to mention the Idler or the Vicar of Wakefield, Johnson had published his edition of Shakspeare, Percy his Reliques, and Reid his Inquiry; and that some of Foote's best farces had been acted, with Colman's Jealous Wife, and the Clandestine Marriage. Not a word does Walpole vouchsafe to any of them. Omitting some hesitating praise to Churchill, some abuse of Wilkes, a mention as Franklin's of the Farmer's Letters from Pennsylvania which were not Franklin's, and a few words to Ossian, place is given in the text to all he thinks worthy of mention; except that, in a subsequent part of the Memoirs (iv. 328), he has the inconceivable bad taste to characterise the delightful Humphrey Clinker as "a party novel, written by the profligate hireling Smollett, to "vindicate the Scots and cry down juries!" I may add that, in the same complimentary spirit, in a letter to Mason dated 21st July 1772, he thus, after sneering at Garrick, Sir William Chambers, Sir John Dalrymple, and Lord Lyttelton, sums up the literary glories of the age: "What a library of poetry, taste, good sense, veracity, "and vivacity! ungrateful Shebbeare! indolent Smollett! trifling Johnson! piddling "Goldsmith how little have they contributed to the glory of a period in which all "arts, all sciences, are encouraged and rewarded." Mitford's Correspondence of Walpole and Mason, i. 32. "Indolent" in this passage is, I doubt not, a misprint for "insolent;" for these letters do not appear to have been corrected at all as they went through the press. As I have touched upon the subject, it may perhaps be worth quoting another of Walpole's querulous complainings as to the utter absence of all merit in the age, its literature, history, poetry, eloquence, morality, and statesmanship, since it contains the germ of a more famous and felicitous passage by a celebrated living writer. "For my part, I take Europe "to be worn out. When Voltaire dies, we may say, 'Good night!'... The next Augustan age will dawn on the other side of the Atlantic. There will, "perhaps, be a Thucydides at Boston, a Xenophon at New York, and, in time, a "Virgil at Mexico, and a Newton at Peru. At last, some curious traveller from "Lima will visit England, and give a description of the ruins of St. Paul's, like "the editions of Balbec and Palmyra." Letters to Mann, ii. 297-301.

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reached. It was social rank that had helped Anstey, for this poem of the New Bath Guide, to no less a sum than two hundred pounds; it was because Goldsmith had no other rank than as a man of letters, depressed and at that time very slowly rising, that his Traveller had obtained for him only twenty guineas. Even David Hume, though now accepted into the higher circles, undisturbed any longer by the "factious barbarians," and somewhat purified of late from history and philosophy by employment as undersecretary of state, had not lost that painful sense of the social differences between Paris and London which he expressed twelve months before the present date. "If a man have the misfortune in London to attach himself to letters, even if he succeeds, I know not with whom he is "to live, nor how he is to pass his time in a suitable society. "The little company there, that is worth conversing with,

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are cold and unsociable, or are warmed only by faction "and cabal; so that a man who plays no part in public "affairs becomes altogether insignificant, and if he is not

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rich, he becomes even contemptible... But in Paris a man "that distinguishes himself in letters, meets immediately "with regard and attention."* He complains in another letter that the best company in London are in a flame of politics; and he declines an introduction to Mr. Percy because it would be impracticable for him to cultivate his friendship, as men of letters have in London no place of rendezvous, and are indeed "sunk and forgot in the general torrent of the world." Only one such man there was who would not be so sunk and forgot; his own unluckily chosen protégé Rousseau. That horrible English habit of indifference, Jean Jacques conceived to be a conspiracy to destroy him

*

Burton's Life of Hume, ii. 268.

Burton, ii. 385.

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(for how could he live without being talked about?); and so, 1766. straightway resolving to make fight against it, he surrendered, Et. 38. on the instant, all claim to be considered a Socrates,* and,in the self-same judgment which not a year before had thus honourably characterised him, and had praised his mildness, modesty, gentleness, and good-nature, became a compound of whim, affectation, wickedness, vanity, inquietude, madness, ingratitude, ferocity, and lying, as well as "the blackest and most atrocious villain beyond comparison "that now exists in the world." For he had first indicted Hume as the leader of the conspiracy, and brought him forward to answer the indictment in the St. James's Chronicle; and next had fallen foul of Horace Walpole as Hume's supposed vicious instrument, Bishop Warburton crying out with delight to see "so seraphic a madman" attack "so insufferable a coxcomb." Nothing of a literary sort, indeed, made so much noise or amusement at the close of the year as these mad libels of Rousseau, and the caricatures made of them: unless it were the news

* So Hume had written to Blair in December 1765, and to Madame de Boufflers in January 1766 (Private Correspondence, 130), with the reservation that his friend suffered by the comparison. And see Warburton's Letters, 386-7.

+ So wrote Hume to Adam Smith in October 1766. The reader will find more than enough of this quarrel in the fifth volume of Walpole's Letters; in the Private Correspondence of Hume (4to. 1820), particularly at pp. 142-67, 169-208, and 212-230; in the 2nd vol. (295-380) of Mr. Burton's Life of Hume; in the same editor's Letters of Eminent Persons to Hume (1849), passim; and in the preface to Hume's Philosophical Works (Ed. 1825, i. xxix-cxix): but the most brief and compact account of Hume's conduct in it, with a very pleasing sketch of his general character, is, I think, in Hardy's Life of Lord Charlemont, 120-124. I may add that, a year or two after his return to France, Rousseau admitted that he had been to blame in the quarrel, and characteristically ascribed it to a mental affliction produced by the foggy climate of England. See Brougham's Men of Letters of George III, i. 231. The same thing is repeated in other terms in Hume's Private Correspondence, 225-6, 241-2, and 246.

"There is even a print engraved of it," writes Hume to the Countess de Boufflers. "M. Rousseau is represented as a Yahoo, newly caught in the woods; "I a am represented as a farmer, who caresses him and offers him some oats to eat, "which he refuses in a rage; Voltaire and d'Alembert are whipping him up

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paper cross readings, which, with the witty signature. of Papyrius Cursor,* Caleb Whitefoord published in December (wherein the public were informed that "this "morning the Rt. Hon. the Speaker was convicted of "keeping a disorderly house," that "Lord Chatham took "his seat and was severely handled by the populace," and that "yesterday Doctor Jones preached at St. James's and "performed it with ease in less than fifteen minutes,” with other as surprising items of information), and at which the whole town is described to have wept with laughter. † Goldsmith envied nothing so much, we are assured, as the authorship of this humourous sally; and would gladly have exchanged for it his own most successful writings. Half sad, and half satirical, perhaps he thus contrasted its reception with theirs.

The young German student to whom allusion has been made, speaking from his judgment of the book that so enchanted him, had thought its author must have reason

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thankfully to acknowledge he was an Englishman, and to "reckon highly the advantages which his country and nation "afforded him." But would Goethe without limitation have said this, if there had lain before him the two entries from a bookseller's papers wherewith the biographer of the author of the Vicar of Wakefield must close the year 1766 and open the year 1767? "Received from Mr. Newbery," says the first, dated the 28th of December, "five guineas for writing a short English grammar. OLIVER GOLDSMITH." "To

cash," says the second, dated the 6th of January, "lent "Doctor Goldsmith one pound one. JOHN NEWBERY.”

"behind; and Horace Walpole making him horns of papier maché. The idea is "not altogether absurd." Priv. Cor. 234.

* A real name, which made its aptness so whimsical.

+ Coll. Lett. v. 175.

Northcote's Life of Reynolds, i. 217.