The preface was discerningly written. That a man who had diffused society and made manners more cheerful and refined, should have claims to attention from his own age, while his pains in pursuing pleasure, and his solemnity in adjusting trifles, were a claim to even the smile of posterity, was so set forth as to reassure the stateliest reader; and if somewhat thrown back by the biographer's bolder announcement in the opening of his book, that a page of Montaigne or Colley Cibber was worth more than the most grandiose memoirs of immortal statesmen already forgotten,' he had but to remember after how many years of uninterrupted power the old Duke of Newcastle had just resigned, to think that as grave a lesson might really await him in the reign of an old minister of fashion.

The latter quality in its

In truth the book is neither uninstructive nor unamusing; and it is difficult not to connect some points of the biographer's own history with its oddly mixed anecdotes of silliness and shrewdness, taste and tawdriness, blossom-coloured coats and gambling debts, vanity, carelessness, and good-heartedness. hero was foiled by a want of prudence which deprived it of half its value: and the extenuation is so frequently and so earnestly set forth in connection with the fault, as, with what we now know of the writer, to convey a sort of uneasy personal reference. Remembering, indeed, that what we know now was not only unknown then, but even waiting for what remained of Goldsmith's life to develop

and call it forth, this Life of Beau Nash is in some respects a curious, and was probably an unconscious, revelation of character. Hitherto careless in his wardrobe, and unknown to the sartorial books of Mr. William Filby, he gravely discusses the mechanical and moral influence of dress, in the exaction of respect and esteem. Quite ignorant, as yet, of his own position among the remarkable men of his time, he dwells strongly on that class of impulsive virtues, which, in a man otherwise distinguished, are more adapted to win friends than admirers, and more capable of raising love than esteem. A stranger still to the London whist table, even to the moderate extent in which he subsequently sought its excitement and relief, he sets forth with singular pains the temptation of a man who has 'led a life of expedients, ' and thanked chance for his support,' to become a stranger to prudence, and fly back to chance for those 'vicissitudes of rapture and anguish,' in which his character had been formed. With light and shade that might seem of any choosing but his, he exhibits the moral qualities of Nash, as of one whose virtues, in almost every instance, received some tincture from the follies most nearly neighbouring them; who, though very poor, was very fine, and spread out the little gold he had as thinly and far as it would go, but whose poverty was the more to be regretted, that it denied him the indulgence not only of his favourite follies, but of his favourite virtues; who had pity for every creature's distress, but wanted

prudence in the application of his benefits, and in whom this ill-controlled sensibility was so strong, that, unable to witness the misfortunes of the miserable, he was always borrowing money to relieve them; who had notwithstanding done a thousand good things, and whose greatest vice was vanity. The self-painted picture will appear more striking as this narrative proceeds; and it would seem to have the same sort of unconscious relation to the future, that one of Nash's friends is mentioned in the book to have gone by the name of The Good-natured Man. Nor should I omit the casual evidence of acquaintanceship between its hero and his biographer that occurs in a lively notice of the three periods of amatory usage which the beau's long life had witnessed, and in which not only had flaxen bobs been succeeded by majors, and negligents been routed by bags and ramilies, but the modes of making love had varied as much as the periwigs. The only way to 'make love now, I have heard Mr. Nash say, was to take 'no manner of notice of the lady.'

Johnson's purchase of this book, which is charged to him in one of Newbery's accounts, shews his interest in whatever affected Goldsmith at this opening of their friendship. His book purchases were never abundant ; though better able to afford them now than at any previous time, for the May of this year had seen a change in his fortunes. Bute's pensions to his Scottish crew shewing meaner than ever in Churchill's daring verse, it occurred to the shrewd and wary Wedderburne (whose sister had

married the favourite's most intimate friend) to advise, for a set-off, that Samuel Johnson should be pensioned. Of all the wits at the Grecian or the Bedford, Arthur Murphy, who had been some months fighting the North Briton with the Auditor, and was now watching the Courts at Westminster preparatory to his first circuit in the following year, was best known to Bute's rising lawyer; and Arthur was sent to Johnson. It was an abode of 'wretchedness,' said this messenger of glad tidings, describing on his return those rooms of Inner Temple Lane where a visitor of some months before had found the Author of the Rambler and Rasselas, now fifty-three years old, without pen, ink, or paper, 'in poverty, total 'idleness, and the pride of literature.' Yet great as was the poverty, and glad the tidings, a shade passed over Johnson's face. 'He asked if it was seriously intended.' Undoubtedly. His Majesty, to reward literary merit, and with no desire that the author of the English Dictionary should dip his pen in faction' (these were Bute's own words), had signified through the Premier his pleasure to grant to Samuel Johnson three hundred pounds a year. 'He fell into a profound meditation; and his own defini'tion of a pensioner occurred to him.' He was told that he, at least, did not come within the definition;' but it was not till after dinner with Murphy at the Mitre on the following day, that he consented to wait on Bute and accept the proffered bounty. To be pensioned with the fraudulent and contemptible Shebbeare, so lately pillo

ried for a Jacobite libel on the Revolution of '88; to find himself in the same Bute list with a Scotch Court Architect, with a Scotch Court painter, with the infamous David Mallet, and with Johnny Home, must have chafed his pride a little; and when, in a few more months, as author of another English Dictionary, old Sheridan the actor received two hundred a year (because his theatre had suffered in the Dublin riots, pleaded Wedderburne; because he had gone to Edinburgh to teach Bute's friend to talk English, said Wilkes), it had become very plain to him that Lord Bute knew nothing of literature. But he had compromised no independence in the course he took, and might afford to laugh at the outcry which followed. 'I wish my pension were twice as large, sir,' he said afterwards at Davies's, 'that they might make 'twice as much noise.'

Thomas Davies had now (with his 'very pretty wife') left the stage and taken wholly to bookselling, which he had recently, and for the second time, attempted to combine with acting. The Rosciad put a final extinguisher on his theatrical existence. He never afterwards mouthed a sentence in one of the kingly and heavy parts he was in the habit of playing, that Churchill's image of cur and bone did not confuse the sentence that followed; his eye never fell upon any prominent figure in the front row of the pit, that he did not tremble to fancy it the brawny person of Churchill. What he thus lost in self-possession, Garrick meanwhile lost in temper; and matters came to a breach,