Imágenes de páginas
PDF
EPUB

1767.

Goldsmith's with Garrick's. The one, he tells us, played to Et. 39. please the boy, the other as though to please himself;* and not even Foote, with his knowing broad grin, his snuffbegrimed face, and his unvarying salutation of "blow your nose child," was to him half so humourous as Goldsmith, of whose tenderness of course he had nothing. The poet

would at any time, for amusement of the nursery, dance a mock minuet, sing a song, or play the flute; and thought little of even putting on his best wig the wrong side foremost. One of these childish reminiscences will bear relating in detail. Drinking coffee one evening with Colman, on one of his first visits to Richmond, Goldsmith took little George upon his knee to amuse him; and being rewarded for his pains by a spiteful slap in the face, summary paternal punishment was inflicted by solitary confinement in an adjoining dark room. But here, when matters seemed desperate with the howling and screaming little prisoner, the door was unexpectedly unlocked and opened. "It

66

was the tender-hearted Doctor himself" pursues the teller of the story, "with a lighted candle in his hand, "and a smile upon his countenance, which was still par

66

66

66

tially red from the effects of my petulance. I sulked "and sobbed, and he fondled and soothed, till I began to brighten. Goldsmith, who in regard to children was like the Village Preacher he has so beautifully described, for‘their "welfare pleased him, and their cares distressed,' seized "the propitious moment of returning good humour; so he put down the candle, and began to conjure. He placed

66

[ocr errors]

* "All this was very kind and condescending, but it wanted the bonhommie of "Goldsmith, who played to please the boy, whereas Garrick always seemed playing to please himself, as he did in a theatre. . . he diverted and dazzled me, "but never made me love him; and I had always this feeling for him, though I was too young to define it." George Colman's Random Records, i. 117-118.

66

"three hats which happened to be in the room, upon the 1767.

66

66

66

66

66

[ocr errors]

66

carpet, and a shilling under each; - the shillings, he told At. 39. "me, were England, France, and Spain. Hey, presto, "cockolorum! cried the Doctor; and lo! on uncovering the shillings, which had been dispersed each beneath a separate hat, they were all found congregated under one. I was no Politician at five years old, and therefore might not have "wondered at the sudden revolution which brought England, France, and Spain all under one crown; but as I was also no Conjuror, it amazed me beyond measure. Astonish"ment might have amounted to awe for one who appeared "to me gifted with the power of performing miracles, if the "good-nature of the man had not obviated my dread of the magician; but from that time, whenever the Doctor came "to visit my father 'I pluck'd his gown to share the good ""man's smile,' a game of romps constantly ensued, and we "were always cordial friends and merry playfellows." * The little hero of the incident was a child of only five years old, but we have evidence in the letters of Garrick to his father, that he used at this time to imitate Garrick showing Charles Dibdin how to act Lord Ogleby, and that even a full year and a half earlier he had entertained Mrs. Garrick with a whole "budget" of stories and songs, had delivered the ditty of the Chimney Sweep with exquisite taste as a solo, and, in the form of a duet with Garrick himself, Old Rose and Burn the Bellows. We shall be perfectly safe therefore in accepting it on his authority that Oliver Goldsmith in 1767 was neither more nor less than a conjuror.

* Colman's Random Records, i. 110-113.

+ Letter dated 15th July 1766, in Peake's Memoirs of the Colman Family, i. 186-7. And see Colman's Posthumous Letters, 296-7.

CHAPTER XVII.

1767.

THE WEDNESDAY-CLUB.

1767.

BUT more serious affairs than conjuring again claim Et. 39. Goldsmith's attention, and ours. His comedy cannot, in the most favourable expectation, appear before Christmas; and his necessities are hardly less pressing, meanwhile, than in his most destitute time. The utmost he received this year from the elder Newbery, for his usual task-work, would seem to have been about ten pounds for a compilation on a historical subject (The British Empire). The concurrent advance of another ten pounds on his promissory note, though side by side with the ominous shadow of the yet unpaid note of four years preceding, shows their friendly relations subsisting still;* but the present illness of the publisher, from which he never recovered, had for some months interrupted the ordinary course of his business, and its management was gradually devolving on his nephew.

* Here (Newbery MSS., Prior, ii. 155) is the memorandum to which I refer : "1764, Oct. 29. Dr. Goldsmith on account of English Lives, 8l. 88.; Taylor's "Works, 128. 1765, Sept. 12th, for half the copy of Essays, 101. 10s. 1767, "July 13th, for British Empire, 10l.; Promissory note, Oct. 11th, 1763, "481. 18. 6d. Ditto, July 7th, 1767, 107. [Total] 871. 118. 6d." In a subsequent memorandum of nearly the same date, the following interesting doubt occurs: "Query-Whether the money had at the Society was 41. 4s."

e

No less a person than Tom Davies, however, came to Goldsmith's relief.

[ocr errors]

66

Tom's business had thriven since he left the stage, and he determined to speculate in a history. Goldsmith's anonymous Letters from a Nobleman to his Son continued to sell; and still to excite curiosity, whether or not Lord Lyttelton had really written them. "I asked Lord L. himself," writes the learned Mrs. Carter to the less learned Mrs. Vesey,*" who "assured me that he had never read them through, and moreover seemed to be very clearly of opinion that he did not write them. Seriously, you may deny his being the author with the fullest certainty. It seems they were writ "by Lord Cork." All this sort of gossip (with no more foundation in the latter case than that Lord Cork and Orrery had addressed to his son a translation of Pliny's as well as other letters, and was no longer alive to contradict the rumour) was better known to Davies than to any one; and the sensible suggestion occurred to him of a History of Rome from the same hand, in the same easy, popular, unlearned manner. An agreement was accordingly drawn up, in which Goldsmith undertook to write such a book in two volumes, and if possible to complete it in two years, for the sum of two hundred and fifty guineas; an undertaking of a somewhat brighter complexion than has yet appeared in these pages; rife with future promise, it may be, in that respect; and certainly very creditable to Davies. It is alleged by Seward and Isaac Reed, that, shortly before this agreement, Goldsmith's necessities had induced him to apply for the Gresham lectureship on Civil Law; an office of small remuneration and smaller responsibility, which the death of a Mr. Mace had vacated and to which a Mr. Jeffries

* Mrs. Carter's Letters (Feb. 19th, 1766), iii. 274-5. + Percy Memoir, 78.

1767.

Æt. 39.

1767.

was elected; but his name does not seem to have been Et. 39. formally entered as a candidate, and it is more certain that shortly after the agreement with Davies he had again taken lodgings in his favourite Islington, and was busy writing there.

Goldsmith's resource, in the midst of labour, as in his brief intervals of leisure, was still the country-haunt, the club, and the theatre; nor should what was called his Wednesday-club, which has hitherto escaped all his biographers, fail to find commemoration here. The social dignities of Gerrard-street had not sufficed for his "clubable" propensities. Wholly at his ease there, he could not always be; and it will happen to even those who are greatest with their great friends, to find themselves pleasantest with their least. The very year before Doctor Johnson died he expressed his own strong sense of this, in founding the modest club to which he invited Reynolds (" the terms are lax, and the expenses light... we meet thrice "a week, and he who misses forfeits twopence ");* and, if it were a want to Johnson to have occasional admixture of inferior intellects to be at ease with, how much more to Goldsmith! His shilling-rubber club at the Devil-tavern (scene of that earliest of clubs for which Ben Jonson wrote his Latin rules), has been already named; and he frequented. another of the same modest pretension, in the parlour of the Bedford in Covent Garden. But what most consoled him for the surrendered haunts of his obscurer days, was a minor club (known afterwards by his own name) at the Globe-tavern in Fleet-street; where he attended every Wednesday as

Letter to Sir Joshua, dated Dec. 4, 1783. I regret that Reynolds declined. Among the members was Cooke, so often quoted in this memoir. See Boswell,

viii. 250.

« AnteriorContinuar »