A more scrupulous and patient writer corrects some inaccuracies of the lively little lady, and professes to give the anecdote authentically from Johnson's own exact narration. I received one morning,' Boswell represents Johnson to have said, 'a message from poor Goldsmith 'that he was in great distress, and, as it was not in his 'power to come to me, begging that I would come to him 'as soon as possible. I sent him a guinea, and promised 'to come to him directly. I accordingly went as soon as I was dressed, and found that his landlady had

'arrested him for his rent, at which he was in a violent 'passion. I perceived that he had already changed my 'guinea, and had got a bottle of madeira and a glass

'before him. I put the cork into the bottle, desired he 'would be calm, and began to talk to him of the means 'by which he might be extricated. He then told me that ' he had a novel ready for the press, which he produced to ( me. I looked into it, and saw its merit; told the land'lady I should soon return; and having gone to a book'seller, sold it for sixty pounds. I brought Goldsmith 'the money, and he discharged his rent, not without rating 'his landlady in a high tone for having used him so ill.'

Nor does the rating seem altogether undeserved, since there cannot be a doubt that Mrs. Fleming was the landlady. The attempt to clear her fails. Tracing the previous incidents minutely, it is impossible to disconnect her from this consummation of them, with which, at the same time, every trace of Goldsmith's residence in her house is brought to a close. The incident itself has nothing startling for the reader who is familiar with what has gone before it. It is the old story of distress, with the addition of a right to resent it which poor Goldsmith had not felt till now; and in the violent passion, the tone of indignant reproach, and the bottle of madeira, one may see that recent gleams of success and worldly consideration have not strengthened the habits of endurance. The arrest is plainly connected with Newbery's reluctance to make further advances; and of all Mrs. Fleming's accounts found among his papers, the only one unsettled is that for the summer months preceding the arrest. The manuscript of the novel (of which more hereafter) seems by both statements, in which the

discrepancies are not so great but that Johnson himself may be held accountable for them, to have been produced reluctantly, as a last resource; and it is possible, as Mrs. Thrale intimates, that it was still regarded as 'unfinished :' but if strong adverse reasons had not existed, Johnson would surely have carried it to Newbery. He did not do this. He went with it to Francis Newbery the nephew; does not seem to have given any very brilliant account of the 'merit' he had perceived in it (four years after its author's death he told Reynolds that he did not think it would have had much success); and rather with regard to Goldsmith's immediate want, than to any confident sense of the value of the copy, asked and obtained the sixty pounds. 'And Sir,' he said afterward, 'a sufficient price 'too, when it was sold; for then the fame of Goldsmith 'had not been elevated, as it afterwards was, by his 'Traveller; and the bookseller had faint hopes of profit by his bargain. After the Traveller, to be sure, it was accidentally worth more money.'

On the poem, meanwhile, the elder Newbery had consented to speculate; and this circumstance may have made it hopeless to appeal to him with a second work of fancy. For on that very day of the arrest, the Traveller lay completed in the poet's desk. The dream of eight years, the solace and sustainment of his exile and poverty, verged at last to fulfilment or extinction; and the hopes and fears which centered in it, doubtless mingled on that miserable day with the fumes of the madeira! In the excitement

of putting it to press, which followed immediately after, the nameless novel recedes altogether from the view; but will reappear in due time. Johnson approved the verses more than the novel; read the proof-sheets for his friend; substituted here and there, in more emphatic testimony of general approval, a line of his own; prepared a brief but hearty notice for the Critical Review, which was to appear simultaneously with the poem; and as the day of publication approached, bade Goldsmith be of good cheer.

'This day is published,' said the Public Advertiser of the 19th of December, 1764, price one shilling and sixpence, The Traveller; or a Prospect of Society, a Poem. 'By Oliver Goldsmith, M.B. Printed for J. Newbery in 'St. Paul's Church Yard.'

It was the first time he had

announced his name in connection with anything he had

written; and with it he had resolved to associate his brother Henry's name. To him he dedicated the poem. From the midst of the poverty which Henry could least alleviate, and turning from the celebrated men with whose favour his own fortunes were bound up, he addressed the friend and companion of his infancy, to whom, in all his sufferings and wanderings, his heart, untravelled and unsullied, had still lovingly gone back. The friendship 'between us can acquire no new force from the ceremonies ' of a Dedication,' he said; but as a part of this poem

'was formerly written to you from Switzerland, the whole

can now, with propriety, be only inscribed to you. It 'will also throw light upon many parts of it, when the

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'reader understands that it is addressed to a man, who,

despising fame and fortune, had retired early to happiness ' and obscurity, with an income of forty pounds a year. I now perceive, my dear brother,' continued Goldsmith, with affecting significance, the wisdom of your humble 'choice. You have entered upon a sacred office, where 'the harvest is great and the labourers are but few; while

you have left the field of ambition, where the labourers are many and the harvest not worth carrying away.' Such as the harvest was, however, he was at last himself about to gather it in. He proceeded to describe to his brother the object of his poem, as an attempt to show that there may be equal happiness in States that are differently governed from our own; that every State has a particular principle of happiness, and that this principle in each may be carried to a mischievous excess: but expressed a strong doubt, since he had not taken a political 'side,' whether its freedom from individual and party abuse would not wholly bar its

success.

While he wrote, he might have quieted that fear. As the poem was passing through the press, Churchill died. It was he who had pressed poetry into the service of party, and for the last three years, to apparent exclusion of every nobler theme, made harsh political satire the favoured utterance of the Muse. But his rude strong spirit had suddenly given way. Those unsubdued passions; those principles, unfettered rather than depraved; that real manliness of soul, scorn of conventions, and unquestioned

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