vial society; contributed largely to its enjoyments by solidity of information and the naïveté and originality of his character; talked often without premeditation and laughed loudly without restraint. 66 Being then a young man I felt myself much flattered by the notice of so celebrated a person. He took great delight in the conversation and society of Grattan whose brilliancy in the morning of life furnished full earnest of the unrivalled splendour which awaited his meridian; and finding us dwelling together in Essex Court near himself where he frequently visited my immortal friend, his warm heart became naturally prepossessed towards the associate of one whom he so much admired. 66 'Just arrived as I then was from College, full freighted with Academic gleanings, our Author did not disdain to receive from me some opinions and hints towards his Greek and Roman* histories, light and superficial works, not composed for fame, but compiled for the more urgent purpose of recruiting his exhausted finances. So in truth was his Animated Nature.' His purse replenished by labours of this kind, the season of relaxation and pleasure took its turn in attending the Theatres, Ranelagh, Vauxhall, and other scenes of gayety and amusement, which he continued to frequent as long as his supply held out. He was fond of exhibiting his muscular little person in the gayest apparel of the day, to which was added a bag wig and sword. 6 Gold "This favourite costume, involved him one morning in a short but comical dialogue in the Strand with two coxcombs, one of whom pointing to Goldsmith called to his companion in allusion to the Poet's sword to look at that fly with a long pin stuck through it.' smith instantly cautioned the passengers aloud against that brace of disguised pickpockets,' and having determined to teach those gentlemen that he wore a sword as well for defence from insolence as for ornament, he retired from the footpath into the coachway which admitted of more space and freedom of action, and half-drawing his sword beckoned to the witty gentleman armed in like manner, to follow him; but he and his companion thinking prudence the better part of valour, declined the invitation and sneaked away amid the hootings of the spectators. "Whenever his funds were dissipated, and they fled more rapidly from being the dupe of many artful persons, male and female, who practised upon his benevolence, he returned to his literary labours, and shut himself up from society to provide fresh matter for his boodseller and fresh supplies for himself. "I was in London when the Deserted Village came out. Much had been expected from the Author of the Traveller, and public expectation and impatience were not disappointed. In fact it was received with universal admiration, as one of the most fascinating and beautiful effusions of British genius. 66 His beautiful little Hermit,' which by some persons had been * Here probably there is an error. The Roman History must have been in the press previous to the commencement of the acquaintance. fathered upon Johnson, and reputed to have been given by him to his protégé to help the Vicar of Wakefield into popularity, was by this time restored to the owner by the public, who had discovered ere now that he excelled in the art of poetry even his eminent patron. "His broad comedy She Stoops to Conquer,' was received with scarcely less applause, though his friends Garrick and Colman had many misgivings of its success. His friends, of whom I was one, assembled in great force in the pit to protect it; but we had no difficulty to encounter; for it was received throughout with the greatest acclamations, and had afterwards a great run. "I was also among those who attended his funeral, along with my friend John Day, Hugh Kelly, and a few others who were summoned together rather hastily for the purpose. It had been intended that this ceremony should be of an imposing kind, and attended by several of the great men of the time, Burke, Reynolds, Garrick, and others. This determination was altered, I imagine, from the pecuniary embarrassment of the deceased Poet; the last offices were therefore performed in a private manner, without the attendance of his great friends. He was interred in the Temple burial ground. Hugh Kelly, with whom he had not been on terms of intercourse for some years, shed tears over his grave, which were no doubt sincere; he did not then know that he had been slightly mentioned in 'Retaliation;' nor would he have been so noticed there, could the deceased have anticipated this proof of good feeling. Slight circumstances often separate even the most deserving persons; nor are they perhaps conscious of the worth of each other until accidental circumstances produce the discovery.-1 have the honour (in great haste) to be, dear Sir, "Your faithful and obedient servant, "ROB. DAY. "I have been in town almost ever since I had the pleasure of receiving your memorandum; and beg pardon for sending you so slovenly and hurried an answer to it. Some things have no doubt escaped my notice at present which may hereafter occur to recollection." CHAPTER XXII. Table-talk and literary opinions.-Abridgment of Roman History.-Letter from Thomas Paine.-Anecdotes at Barton.-Westminster Magazine.-Comedy of She Stoops to Conquer. LITTLE of his conversation at this period is preserved, and that little meager and unsatisfactory. The business of Boswell as he expressly tells us, was with that of Johnson alone, and therefore so much only is given of the remarks of others as serve to make those of his principal not only intelligible, but forcible and triumphant. Thus, few associates of the moralist appear to advantage in his society, even such as were distinguished by talents, extent of knowledge, and conversational readiness; not because they did not exhibit brilliant powers on the immediate topics of discussion, but because so extensive a record was not within the plan, aud frequently not within the power of the biographer, however well disposed his inclination, or accurate his memory, to accomplish. Neither had he, as we find from the accurate investigation of Mr. Croker, so many opportunities of hearing these conversations as might be imagined from a cursory perusal of these volumes: of such moments indeed he made the best use; and it is our business not to lament that he did not do more, but to be grateful for his having done so much. Goldsmith therefore, notwithstanding the latent disinclination towards him already noticed, fares little worse than Burke, and so many other celebrated men, in being shorn of some of their interlocutory honours; and we may be permitted to regret that no other person among the circle of their acquaintance, excepting in a slight degree Mrs. Piozzi, found time or inclination to add much to Boswell's labours. One of the opinions hazarded by Goldsmith in conversation, though no where noticed by either of those writers, was a lower estimate of our older dramatists than most persons of poetical taste and judgment now entertain. Ben Jonson, Beaumont, Massinger, and others, he more than once said were little more than second-rate poets; even Shakspeare appeared in his eyes infinitely lowered by his defects, and once or twice he hinted he was probably estimated beyond his merits; an opinion in which however at variance with the usual decisions of criticism, Lord Byron, who was not aware of the coincidence, seems to join. This conclusion may have been owing less to the deliberate judgment, than to the wayward humour and occasionally hasty opinions of both; for both often said in conversation what the former more particularly would have hesitated to advance in public as his settled conviction. Thus we find no traces of such opinions in his writings; Shakspeare whenever mentioned, is mentioned with honour; and if the paper formerly noticed, "A Scale of Poets," written in 1758, be really his, he receives all the praise a judicious admirer can desire. Neither can this degree of praise be considered less equivocal by the lines in Retaliation, written when his taste had been long settled, in allusion to Garrick where he tells us "Those poets, who owe their best fame to his skill, Shall still be his flatterers, go where he will, Old Shakspeare receive him with praise and with love, That he honoured his genius though fully alive to his defects appears from a criticism written in 1759, where he says, in allusion to the bad taste exhibited in many of the dramas of the age of Elizabeth,- "Nothing less than a genius like Shakspeare's could make plays wrote to the taste of those times, pleasing now; a man whose beauties seem rather the result of chance than design; who while he laboured to satisfy his audience with monsters and mummery seemed to throw in his inimitable beauties as trifles into the bargain. Massinger however was not such a man; he seldom rises to any pitch of sublimity, and yet it must be owned is never so incorrigibly absurd as we often find his predecessor. His performances are all crowded with incident but want character, the genuine mark of genius in a dramatic poet." The comedies of Farquhar and Vanbrugh, particularly the former, rejecting their indelicacies, he considered the best on the English stage. Of Lord Kames's Elements of Criticism he said, "It is easier to write that book than to read it." Johnson admitted there was nothing new in the matter, but old things were told in a new way. Pope found in him, as in all the poets of the past age, and in Lord Byron and in many of the distingished names of the present, that warm admiration which his genius, vigour, variety and harmony must ever command from every reader of taste. The critical opinions of Warton, had failed to render his fallacies, although recent, a fashion, or to convince the judgment of the age he addressed, that the class of poetry to which that of Pope belongs, was necessarily of an inferior order, or that popularity formed, after the lapse of a reasonable time, no criterion of merit. Goldsmith estimated his genius scarcely inferior to that of Dryden; his judgment and versification some degrees higher. His character of Addison he quoted on several occasions as displaying a profound knowledge of the human heart. Toward the poetry of Gray he was, as has been already stated, less favourably disposed, though from no unworthy motive; and without mentioning names, it is indirectly expressed in the Vicar of Wakefield, where we find marked condemnation of redundancy of epithet, one of the admitted faults of that eminent poet. Goldsmith considered this blemish as bordering upon mere expletive; a symptom of want of variety of expression, or vigour of thought; and seems to have written the Hermit in proof of how successfully one man of genius could avoid what he considered so objectionable in others. That ballad is introduced in the novel with the remark, that whatever be its other defects, it is free at least from the one he censures: "It is remarkable that both the poets you mention (Ovid and Gray) have equally contributed to introduce a false taste into their respective countries by loading all their lines with epithet. Men of little genius found them most easily imitated in their defects, and English poetry like that in the latter empire of Rome, is nothing at present but a combination of luxuriant images without plot or connexion; a string of epithets that improve the sound without carrying on the sense." His opinion of portions of Gray's poetry seems corroborated by that of another contemporary poet, Langhorne, who thus figuratively expresses himself:-"How enchantingly beautiful was Gray's Muse when she wandered through the church-yard in her morning dress! But when she was arrayed in gorgeous attire, in a monstrous hoop and a brocade petticoat, I could gaze upon her indeed; she made an impression on my eye, but not on my heart."* It is said indeed, if we are to believe Mr. Cradock, who however wrote at a late period of life and whose reports of mere conversations must be received with some caution, that Goldsmith proposed even, we may believe in a jocular moment, to improve the Elegy-"You are so attached," he is made to say, "to Hurd, Gray, and Mason, that you think nothing good can proceed but out of that formal school. Now I'll mend Gray's Elegy by leaving out an idle word in every line The Curfew tolls the knell of day. The lowing herd winds o'er the lea, to which the narrator makes himself very promptly and reasonably object. He was fond of the amusement of a garden, and when on a visit in the country commonly passed several hours in it daily. At Lord Clare's he had been permitted to build an ice-house and hot-house on plans of his own; he volunteered to construct one of the former for Cradock, saying that as he had already built two, it should be perfect, and a pattern for the whole county. To this taste Beauclerc probably alludes when writing to Lord Charlemont, whom he jocularly urges to return to London for the following reasons 66 If you do not come here I will bring all the club over to Ireland to live with you, and that will drive you here in your own defence. Johnson shall spoil your books, Goldsmith pull your flowers, and Boswell talk to you." "When Boswell," adds Mr. Cradock, "was at Lichfield with Dr. Johnson he wrote a prologue to be spoken by some players who were performing there, and this caused a proposal that the comedy of the Beaux Stratagem should be got up in good style by amateurs. 'Then,' exclaimed Goldsmith, I shall certainly offer to play Scrub !' "Goldsmith used to rally me" continues the same writer "on my Cambridge pedantry, and I in turn hinted an illegitimate education. He truly said that I was nibbling about elegant phrases while he was obliged to write half a volume." This hint if ever really given respecting imperfect education seems scarcely to have been called for, when it is considered, what Cradock did not probably know or remember, that the Poet like himself had been member of a university. A question was started, how far people who disagree in a capital point can live in friendship together. Johnson said they might.Goldsmith said they could not, as they had not the idem velle atque *Correspondence of Hannah More, vol. i. p. 23. |