more of that. I find that Colman has gained his lawsuit. I am glad of it. I suppose you often meet. I will soon be among you, better pleased with my situation at home than I ever was before. And yet I must say, that if any thing could make France pleasant, the very good women with whom I am at present would certainly do it. I could say more about that, but I intend showing them this letter before I send it away. What signifies teazing you longer with moral observations when the business of my writing is over. I have one thing only more to say, and of that I think every hour in the day, namely, that I am your most sincere and most affectionate friend, OLIVER GOLDSMITH. Direct to me at the Hôtel de Danemarc, Rue Jacob, Fauxbourg St. Germains."

Little more is to be added of this excursion. It was not made more agreeable to Goldsmith by an unexpected addition to the party in the person of Mr. Hickey (the 'special attorney' who is niched into Retaliation), who joined them at Paris, and whose habit of somewhat coarse raillery was apt to be indulged too freely at Goldsmith's expense. One of the stories Hickey told on his return, however, seems to have been true enough. Goldsmith sturdily maintained that a certain distance from one of the fountains at Versailles was within reach of a leap, and tumbled into the water in his attempt to establish that position. It was also told of him, in proof of his oddity, that on Mrs. Horneck desiring him more than once, when they had no place of protestant worship to attend, to read them the morning service, his uniform answer was, 'I should be happy to oblige you, my dear madam, but 'in truth I do not think myself good enough.' This,

Thou guide, by which the nobler arts excel,
Thou nurse of every virtue, fare thee well!

Apollo and the Muses forbid! was the general critical cry. What shall the writer of such a poem as this, 'the 'subject of a young and generous king, who loves, che'rishes and understands the fine arts, shall he be obliged to 'drudge for booksellers, shall he be starved into abandon'ment of poetry?' Even so. There was no help for it; and it became him to be grateful that there were booksellers to drudge for. No author can be poor who understands the 'arts of booksellers. Without this necessary knowledge, 'the greatest genius may starve; and with it, the greatest dunce live in splendour. This knowledge I have pretty 'well dipped into.' Thus, in this very month of May 1770, the most eager young aspirant for literary fame that ever trod the flinty streets of London, was writing home to his country friends. But, alas! his lip was not wetted with the knowledge he fancied he had dipped so deep into. With Goldsmith it was otherwise. He had drank long and weary draughts; had tasted alike the sweetness and the bitterness of the cup; and, no longer sanguine or ambitious, had yet reason to confess himself not wholly discontented. In many cases it is better to want than to have, and in almost all it is better to want than to ask. At the least he could make shift, as he said to Lord Lisburn, to eat, and drink, and wear good clothes. The days which had now come to him were not splendid, but neither were they starving days; and they had also brought him such respectful hearing,

that of what his really starving days had been he could now dare to speak out, in the hope of saving others. He lost no opportunity of doing it. Not even to his Natural History did he turn, without venting upon this sorrowful theme, in sentences that sounded strangely amid his talk of beasts and birds, what lay so near his heart. "The lower race ' of animals, when satisfied, for the instant moment, are 'perfectly happy; but it is otherwise with man. His mind 'anticipates distress, and feels the pang of want even before 'it arrests him. Thus the mind being continually harassed 'by the situation, it at length influences the constitution, ' and unfits it for all its functions. Some cruel disorder, 'but no way like hunger, seizes the unhappy sufferer; so 'that almost all those men who have thus long lived by 'chance, and whose every day may be considered as an happy escape from famine, are known at last to die in reality, of a disorder caused by hunger, but which, in the common 'language, is often called a broken heart. Some of these I 'have known myself when very little able to relieve them; ' and I have been told, by a very active and worthy magis'trate, that the number of such as die in London for want, is much greater than one would imagine; I think he 'talked of two thousand in a year.' If this was written now, as he afterwards told Langton these earlier portions of the Animated Nature were, Goldsmith little imagined the immortal name which was now to be added to the melancholy list. The writer of the sanguine letter I have quoted was doomed to be the next victim. He had not

been in London many days, when he so supposed he had mastered the booksellers; and in little less than three months after those hopeful tidings home, he yielded up his brain to the terrible disorder of which Goldsmith had seen so much: so unlike hunger, though hunger-bred. Gallantly had he worked in those three months: projected histories of England, and voluminous histories of London; written for Magazines, Registers, and Museums endless, the London, the Town and Country, the Middlesex Freeholders', the Court and City; composed a musical burlesque burletta; launched into politics on both sides; contributed sixteen songs for ten and sixpence; received gladly two shillings for an article; lived on a halfpenny roll, or a penny tart, and a glass of water a-day, enjoying now and then a sheep's tongue; invented all the while brave letters about his happiness and success to the only creatures that loved him, his grandmother, mother, and sister at Bristol; even sent them, out of his so many pence a-day, bits of china, fans, and a gown and then, one fatal morning, after many bitter disappointments (one of them precisely what Goldsmith had himself undergone, in as desperate distress), having gone some three days without food, and refused his poor landlady's invitation to dinner, he was found dead in his miserable room, the floor thickly strewn with scraps of manuscripts he had destroyed, a pocket-book memorandum lying near him to the effect that the booksellers owed him eleven pounds, and the cup which had held arsenic and water still grasped in his hand. It was in a wretched little street

out of Holborn; the body was taken to the bone-house of St. Andrew's, but no one came to claim it; and in due time the Shoe Lane pauper-burial-ground received what remained of Chatterton. The marvellous boy! The sleepless soul who perished in his pride!' He was not eighteen. The tragedy had all been acted out before Goldsmith heard of any of its incidents. I am even glad to think that during the whole of the month which preceded the catastrophe, he was absent from England.

He had gone on a visit to Paris in the middle of July. "The Professor of History,' writes the daughter of the Academy keeper (telling Fuseli, at Rome, how disappointed the literary people connected with the new institution had been, not to receive diplomas of membership like the painters), is comforted by the success of his Deserted 'Village, which is a very pretty poem, and has lately put 'himself under the conduct of Mrs. Horneck and her fair daughters, and is gone to France: Doctor Johnson sips 'his tea, and cares not for the vanity of the world.' Goldsmith himself, with pleasant humour, has described what happened to the party up to their lodgment at the Calais Hôtel d'Angleterre, in a letter to Sir Joshua Reynolds. They had not arrived many hours when he wrote to his 'dear friend' to say that Mrs. Horneck, the young ladies, and himself, had had a very quick passage from Dover to Calais, which they performed in three hours and twenty minutes; and that all of them had been extremely sea-sick, 'which 'must necessarily have happened as my machine to prevent