regularly as on the Mondays or Fridays in Gerrard-street, 1767. and seems to have "played the fool" as agreeably as when he Et. 39. had no reputation to be damaged by the folly. Songs sung after supper were the leading attraction at this club; and I derive my principal knowledge of it from a collection of songs and poems of the time which belonged to one of the members, a hanger-on at the theatres, familiarly known by most of the actors, and to whom we owe a little book called Mackliniana. This worthy "William Ballantyne" had solaced his old age with manuscript notes on the amusements of his youth; and the book, so annotated, passed into the possession of my friend Mr. Bolton Corney, who placed it at my disposal.

Whether Macklin belonged to the club appears to be doubtful, but among the least obscure members were King the comedian (whose reputation Lord Ogleby had established); little Hugh Kelly, a young Irishman of eight-and-twenty, who had lately shown some variety of cleverness and superficial talent, and now occupied chambers near Goldsmith's, in the Temple; Edward Thompson, whom Garrick assisted. with his interest to promotion in the navy, and who is still remembered for his songs and his edition of Andrew Marvel; and another Irishman, named Glover, also a protégé of Garrick's, and named on an earlier page,* who had been bred a doctor, figured afterwards as an actor, and now earned scanty subsistence as a sort of Grub-street Galen. The anecdotes of Goldsmith which appeared on his death in the Annual Register (with the signature G), and some of which

*Ante, i. 60, and 71. "He is a most skilful, worthy man, a good writer, "and a steady friend to Government. I have known him long; he is much beloved, and the worst thing I ever heard of him was, that, by his skill in his "profession, he recovered a thief, after he had hung half-an-hour, and which "thief, before he had healed the circle the rope had made, picked Glover's pocket "by way of gratitude, and never thanked him for his good offices." Garrick to Lord Rochford, recommending Glover for a Surgeoncy in the Essex Militia.

1767.

reappeared in the Dublin edition (1777) of his poems by Et. 39. Malone, to be afterwards adopted into Evans's biographical sketch and transferred to the Percy Memoir, were written by this Glover; who was one of the many humble Irish clients whom Goldsmith's fame drew around him, and who profited by every scantiest gleam of his prosperity. It is he who says (and none had better cause to say it), " Our Doctor," as Goldsmith was now universally called, "had a constant levee of his "distrest countrymen, whose wants, as far as he was able, he "always relieved; and he has been often known to leave "himself even without a guinea, in order to supply the neces"sities of others."* It is to be added of Glover, however, who was notorious for his songs and imitations, that he was addicted to practical jokes; and often rewarded his patron's generosity with very impudent betrayal of his simplicity. It was he who, in one of their summer rambles over Hampstead, took Goldsmith into a cottage at West-end, through the open window of which they saw a little party assembled at tea, of whom in reality he knew nothing though he undertook to introduce his friend, and who actually, to the poet's awkward horror and mal-address when he saw the trick, imposed himself on the party assembled as a pretended old acquaintance, on the host as known to the guests and on the guests as familiar with the host, and coolly sat down to tea with them.

Hugh Kelly seems to have been a greater favourite than Glover with good Mr. Ballantyne. "Much," says one of his notes, "as I esteemed Mr. Kelly, when a member of the "Wednesday-club, at the Globe in Fleet-street, called Gold"smith's, who was seldom absent-I respected him because "he was always unassuming-this" (the note is appended to a poem of Kelly's called Meditation), " had I then known him

Preface to the Poems (Ed. 1777), vi.

"to be the author of it, would have made me adore him." 1767. The poem nevertheless is poor enough; and, though Kelly Et. 39. was certainly popular with his nearer friends, and had many kindly qualities, his unassumingness may be doubted. He had lately emerged to notoriety, out of a desperate and obscure struggle, by somewhat questionable arts. His youth had been passed in Dublin as a stay-maker's apprentice, and making sudden flight from this uncongenial employment, he was obliged to resume it in London to save himself from starvation; but he succeeded afterwards in hiring himself as writer to an attorney, from this got promotion to Grubstreet, and had laboured meanly, up to the present year, in hack work for the magazines and newspapers (Newbery having given him employment on the Public Ledger), when it occurred to him to make profit of Churchill's example and set up as a satirist and censor of the stage. This he did after the usual fashion of an imitator, and in his Thespis caricatured the Rosciad. Poor Mrs. Dancer he called a

moon-eyed idiot; " talked of "Clive's weak head and "execrable heart;" libelled such men as Woodward and Moody; and lavished all his praise on the Hursts, Ackmans, and Bransbys. Yet though the manifest source of such inspiration was a well-known public house within a few doors of Drury Lane Theatre, where the fettered lions of the stage were always growling against their tamers, we find that "the talents for satire displayed in this work by Mr. Kelly, "recommended him at once to the notice of Mr. Garrick." What resulted from that notice will soon, with somewhat higher pretensions, re-introduce the object of it; and meanwhile he may be left with Mr. Ballantyne's praise, and with the remark, to counterbalance it, of Johnson, who made

* See Davies's Life of Garrick, ii. 140. And Taylor's Records, i. 95-102.

1767.

Æt. 39.

answer to Kelly's request for permission to converse with

66

him, Sir, I never desire to converse with a man who has "written more than he has read."*

Of the obscurer members of the Wednesday or Globe club our mention may be limited to a Mr. Gordon, who is remembered by Mr. Ballantyne in connection with the jovial and jocund song of Nottingham Ale. "Mr. Gordon," he says, "the largest man I ever kept company with, usually sung this song at the Globe-club; and it always very much pleased "Doctor Goldsmith, Doctor Glover, good Tom King the "comedian, and myself, William Ballantyne." Nor was the evening's amusement limited to songs, but had the variety of dramatic imitations, with occasional original epigram; and here was first heard that celebrated epitaph on Edward Purdon, which showed that Goldsmith had lately been reading Pope's and Swift's Miscellanies †

Here lies poor Ned Purdon, from misery freed,

Who long was a bookseller's hack ;

He led such a damnable life in this world,

I don't think he'll wish to come back.

* It is also said that on Kelly's first introduction to Johnson, after having sat a short time, he got up to take his leave with the remark that he feared a longer visit might be troublesome; whereto Johnson replied, "Not in the least, 'sir; I had forgotten that you were in the room." Boswell, viii. 411. Yet Mr. John Nichols, after describing Kelly to Boswell as a person "in whom vanity was "somewhat too predominant," added that Johnson "had a real friendship for him." The original of all is the epitaph on "La Mort du Sieur Etienne.

Il est au bout de ses travaux

Il a passé le Sieur Etienne ;

En ce monde il eut tant des maux

Qu'on ne croit pas qu'il revienne."

With this perhaps Goldsmith was familiar, and had therefore less scruple in laying felonious hands on the epigram in the Miscellanies (Swift, xiii. 372).

66

1767.

It was in the April of the present year that Purdon fitly closed his luckless life by suddenly dropping down dead in t. 39. Smithfield; and as it was chiefly Goldsmith's pittance that had saved him thus long from starvation, it was well that the same friend should give him his solitary chance of escape from oblivion. "Doctor Goldsmith made this epitaph," says William Ballantyne, "in his way from his chambers in "the Temple to the Wednesday evening's club at the Globe. I think he will never come back, I believe he said. I was sitting by him, and he repeated it more than twice. I "think he will never come back." Ah! and not altogether as a jest, it may be, the second and the third time. It is not without a certain pathos to me that he should so have repeated it. There was something in Purdon's fate, from their first meeting in college to that incident in Smithfield, which had no very violent contrast to his own; and remembering what Glover has said of his frequent sudden descents from mirth to melancholy, some such fitful change of temper would here have been natural enough. "His disappointments "at these times," Glover tells us, "made him peevish and "sullen; and he has often left a party of convivial friends

abruptly in the evening, in order to go home and brood "over his misfortunes." But a better medicine for his grief than brooding over it, was a sudden start into the country to forget it; and it was probably with a feeling of this kind he had in the summer revisited Islington, to which, after this Wednesday-club digression, we must now for a very brief space accompany him.

He had one room in the turret of Canonbury-house, which, since altered and subdivided, to within the last

Annual Register, xvii. 31. Life prefixed to Malone's edition (1777), ix.

VOL. II.

G