matter.

this work, indulged any pleasantry for thy entertainment, I shall here lay it down. The variety of matter, indeed, which I Variety of shall be obliged to cram into this book, will afford no room for any of those ludicrous observations which I have elsewhere made, and which may sometimes, perhaps, have prevented thee from taking a nap when it was beginning to steal upon thee. In this last book thou wilt find nothing (or at most very little) of that nature. All will be plain narrative only; and, indeed, when thou hast perused the many great events which this book will produce, thou wilt think the number of pages contained in it scarce sufficient to tell the story.

And now, my friend, I take this opportunity (as I shall have no other) of heartily wishing thee well. If I have been an entertaining companion to thee, I promise thee it is what I have desired. If in anything I have offended, it was really without any intention. Some things, perhaps, here said may have hit thee or thy friends; but I do most solemnly declare they were not pointed at thee or them. I question not but thou hast been told, among other stories of me, that thou wast to travel with a very scurrilous fellow; but whoever told thee so did me an injury. No man detests and despises scurrility more than myself; nor hath any man more reason; for none hath ever been treated with more; and what is a very severe fate, I have had some of the abusive writings of those very men fathered upon me, who, in other of their works, have abused me themselves with the utmost virulence.

All these works, however, I am well convinced, will be dead long before this page shall offer itself to thy perusal; for however short the period may be of my own performances, they will most probably outlive their own infirm author and the weakly productions of his abusive contemporaries.

BIBLIOGRAPHY.

Henry Fielding (Men of Letters Series).
Complete Works of Henry Fielding.

Hearty wellwishing.

BOOK VI.

GOLDSMITH.

Birth and parentage.

Goldsmith's arrival in London.

CHAPTER XVI.

OLIVER GOLDSMITH is another figure of the time among the most delightful; he was born in Ireland (which perhaps accounts for it) of Protestant parents. His father was a clergyman, his mother was the daughter of one. In Goldsmith's Dr. Primrose we may recognize the father; of his first school-teacher, Thomas Byrne, this may answer as the picture:

A man severe he was, and stern to view;
I knew him well, and every truant knew.
Well had the boding tremblers learnt to trace
The day's disasters in his morning face :
Full well they laughed with counterfeited glee
At all his jokes, for many a joke had he;
Full well the busy whisper, circling round,
Conveyed the dismal tidings when he frowned.
Yet he was kind, or, if severe in aught,
The love he bore to learning was in fault :
The village all declared how much he knew ;
'Twas certain he could write, and cipher too;
Land he could measure, terms and tides presage ;
And even the story ran that he could gauge.

Every biography of Goldsmith is interesting, but we must postpone his acquaintance to his arrival in London. He was twenty-seven years and three months old when he first set his foot in London streets, and he was to be a Londoner and nothing else all the rest of his life.

་

At that time, in 1756, the population of London was about 700,000. The reign of George II., which had London in 1756. already extended over nearly thirty years, was approaching its close. In home politics what was chiefly interesting was the persistence in office of the Duke of Newcastle's unpopular ministry-opposed, however, by Pitt (afterward Lord Chatham), and soon to give way. before the genius of that statesman, and to be succeeded by that blaze of Pitt's ascendancy which makes the last years of George II. so brilliant a period in British annals. For Britain and Frederick the Great of Prussia were already on an understanding with each other, and the Seven Years' War was beginning. Not till 1757, indeed, when Pitt became prime minister, did the alliance begin to promise its splendid results-Clive's conquests in India, Wolfe's in America, etc. Just at present, while Newcastle was in power, things had a blacker look. Byng's blundering at Minorca, the all but certain loss of Hanover, and the like-these were the topics for the 700,000 Londoners; unless they chose to talk rather of such matters nearer home as the building of the new chapel for Whitefield in Tottenham Court Road, or the opening of the Foundling Hospital, or the proposed taking down of the old houses on London Bridge.

A busy time in

To assist them to proper opinions on these and all other subjects there were the London newspapers— daily, weekly, and bi-weekly, Whig, Tory, and what not; as well as quite an abundance of critical journals, literature. reviews, and magazines. For it was beginning to be a very busy time in British literature. It was no longer on the court, or on Whig and Tory ministers, or on the casual patronage of noblemen of taste, that men of letters depended, but on the demand of the general public of

Authors congregated in London.

State of the

world of letters.

readers and book-purchasers, as it could be ascertained
and catered for by booksellers making publishing their
business. The center of this book-trade was naturally
London; and here, accordingly, hanging on the book-
sellers, and writing for the newspapers and magazines,
but with side glances also to the theaters and their man-
agers, were now congregated such a host of authors and
critics by profession as had never been known in London
before, many of them now dismissed into oblivion as
the smaller fry of this Grub Street world of London in
the latter days of George II. Amongst them was John-
son, then forty-seven years of age. The poet Young was
alive, in old age, and at least occasionally in London;
and Londoners confirmed were Richardson, approach-
ing his seventieth year, with all his novels published,
and Smollett, not past his thirty-seventh year, but with
some of his best novels published, and now working
hard at histories, reviews, and all sorts of things. Field-
ing had been dead two years, and Sterne, though some
years over forty, had not yet been heard of.
The poet
Collins was dying in madness at Chichester. Garrick,
Chesterfield, Warburton, Shenstone, Gray, Horace Wal-
pole, who were alive in England, could be and were in
London if they liked. Burke, who was Goldsmith's

junior, was already there.

Such was the state of the world of British letters at the end of the Second George's reign, when Goldsmith came to London. Colley Cibber was laureate, of whom

Johnson had written :

Great George's acts let tuneful Cibber sing,
For nature formed the poet for the king.

But Cibber, who was now eighty-four years of age, did
not live beyond 1757. He was succeeded by William
Whitehead, whose laureateship extended from 1757 to

1788. The whole of Goldsmith's literary career, as it happened, and large portions also of the lives of others whom we now associate with him, fell within this memorable period.

For a long time Goldsmith's life in London was one Hack-work and of mere drudgery and literary hack-work. In 1758 he drudgery. was living in No. 12, Green Arbour Court, Old Bailey -a dingy little old square, approached from Farringdon Street by a passage called Break-Neck Steps, now all demolished, and surviving only in Washington Irving's description of it when he visited it for Goldsmith's sake, and found it a colony of washerwomen, and slovenly with wash-tubs on the pavement and clothes hung to dry on lines from the windows.

About this time he writes in a letter to a friend :

Alas! I have many a fatigue to encounter before that happy time arrives when your poor old simple friend may again give a loose to the luxuriance of his nature, sitting by Kilmore fireside, recount the various adventures of a hard-fought life, laugh over the follies of the day, join his flute to your harpsichord, and forget that ever he starved in those streets where Butler and Otway starved before him.

It gives me some pain to think I am almost beginning the world at the age of thirty-one. Though I never had a day's illness since I saw you, I am not that strong, active man you once knew me. You scarcely can conceive how much eight years of disappointment, anguish, and study have worn me down. If I remember right, you are seven or eight years older than me; yet I dare venture to say that, if a stranger saw us both, he would pay me the honors of seniority. Imagine to yourself a pale, melancholy visage, with two great wrinkles between the eyebrows, with an eye disgustingly severe, and a big wig; and you have a perfect picture of my present appearI can neither laugh nor drink; have contracted a hesitating, disagreeable manner of speaking, and a visage that looks ill-nature itself; in short, I have thought myself into

ance.

world at thirtyBeginning the

one.