Library.

LETTER S.

Of California.

LETTER 1.

TO ROBERT BRIANTON, ESQ. AT BALLYMAHON, IRELAND.

EDINBURGH, September 26, 1753.

MY DEAR BOB,- How many good excuses (and you know I was ever good at an excuse) might I call up to vindicate my past shameful silence! I might tell how I wrote a long letter at my first coming hither that business (with business, you know, I was always pestered) had never given me time to finger a pen. But I suppress that, and twenty more equally plausible, and as easily invented, since they might all be attended with a slight inconvenience,― of being known to be lies. Let me then speak truth. An hereditary indolence (I have it from the mother's side) has hitherto prevented my writing to you, and still prevents my writing at least twenty-five letters more, due to my friends in Ireland. No turnspit gets up into his wheel with more reluctance than I sit down to write. Yet no dog ever loved the roast meat he turns better than I do him I now address. Yet what shall I say, now I am entered? Shall I tire you with a description of this unfruitful country, where I must lead you over their hills all brown with heath, or their valleys scarcely able to feed a rabbit? Man alone seems to be the only creature who has arrived to the natural size in this poor soil. Every part of the country presents the same disinal landscape. No grove nor brook lend their music to cheer the stranger, or make the inhabitants forget their poverty. Yet with all these disadvantages, enough to call him down to humility, a Scotchman is one of the proudest things alive. The poor have pride ever ready to relieve them. If mankind should happen to despise them, they are masters of their own

admiration, and that they can plentifully bestow upon themselves. From their pride and poverty, as I take it, results one advantage this country enjoys; namely, the gentlemen here are much better bred than among us. No such character here as our fox-hunter; and they have expressed great surprise when I informed them, that some men of a thousand pounds a-year, in Ireland, spend their whole lives in running after a hare, drinking to be drunk, and getting every girl with child that will let them. And truly, if such a being, equipped in his hunting dress, came among a circle of Scots gentlemen, they would behold him with the same astonishment that a countryman does King George on horseback. The men here have generally high cheek bones, and are lean and swarthy, fond of action, dancing in particular. Though, now I have mentioned dancing, let me say something of their balls, which are very frequent here. When a stranger enters the dancinghall, he sees one end of the room taken up by the ladies, who sit dismally in a group by themselves. On the other end stand their pensive partners that are to be. But no more intercourse between the sexes than there are between two countries at war. The ladies indeed may ogle, and the gentlemen sigh; but an embargo is laid on any closer commerce. At length, to interrupt hostilities, the lady directress, or intendant, or what you will, pitches on a gentleman and lady to walk a minuet, which they perform with a formality that approaches to despondence. After five or six couple have thus walked the gauntlet, all stand up to country dances; each gentleman furnished with a partner from the aforesaid lady directress: so they dance much, say nothing, and thus concludes our assembly. I told a Scotch gentleman, that such profound silence resembled the ancient procession of the Roman matrons in honour of Ceres; and the Scotch gentleman told me (and faith I believe he was right) that I was a very great pedant for my pains. Now I am come to the ladies, and to shew that I love Scotland, and every thing that belongs to so charming a country, I insist on it, and will give him leave to break my head that denies it, that the Scotch ladies are ten thousand times finer and handsomer than the Irish. To be sure now, I see your sisters Betty and Peggy vastly surprised at my partiality; but tell them flatly I don't value them a potato, their fine skin or eyes, or good sense, or for I say and will maintain it; and as a convincing proof (I am in a great passion) of what I assert, the Scotch ladies say it themselves. But to be less serious, where will you find

a language so prettily become a pretty mouth as the broad Scotch? And the women here speak it in its highest purity; for instance, teach one of the young ladies at home to pronounce the "Whoar wull I gong?" with a becoming widening of mouth, and I'll lay my life they'll wound every hearer. We have no such character here as a coquette; but, alas! how many envious prudes! Some days ago, I walked into my Lord Kilcoubry's,* (don't be surprised, my lord is but a glover) when the Duchess of H. (that fair who sacrificed her beauty to ambition, and her inward peace to a title and gilt equipage) passed by in her chariot; her battered husband, or more properly, the guardian of her charms, sat beside her. Straight envy began, in the shape of no less than three ladies who sat with me, to find faults in her faultless form. my part," says the first, "I think, what I always thought, that the duchess has too much of the red in her complexion."

"For

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"Madam, I am of your opinion," says the second; " I think her face has a palish cast, too much on the delicate order."—" And let me tell you," adds the third lady, whose mouth was puckered up so as scarcely to admit a pea," that the duchess has fine lips, but she wants a mouth." At this, every lady drew up her mouth, as if going to pronounce the letter P. But how ill, my Bob, does it become me to ridicule women with whom I have scarcely any correspondence? There are, 'tis certain, handsome women here; and 'tis as certain, they have handsome men to keep them company. An ugly and a poor man is society only for himself; and such society the world lets me enjoy in great abundance. Fortune has given you circumstances, and Nature a person to look charming in the eyes of the fair. Nor do I envy, my dear Bob, such blessings, while I may sit down and laugh at the world, and at myself, the most ridiculous object in it. But you see I am grown downright splenetic, and perhaps the fit may continue till I hear from you. And yet I know you can't send much news from Ireland; but such as it is, send it all. Every thing you write will be agreeable to Yours, &c.

OLIVER GOLDSMITH.

* Kirkcudbright. He assumed the title in 1730, on the death of a distant relation; but though he always voted at the election of the Representative Peers, his title was not legally allowed till 1773, when it was restored to his son John. He used to stand in the lobby of the old Assembly Rooms, selling gloves to those who frequented this fashionable resort, except on the night of the Peers' Ball, when he assumed his sword, and took his place as a noble among those who, on other days, were his customers.-B.

LETTER II.

TO THE REV. THOMAS CONTARINE.

*

LEYDEN (no date).†

DEAR SIR,I suppose by this time I am accused of either neglect or ingratitude, and my silence imputed to my usual slowness of writing. But believe me, Sir, when I say, that till now I had not an opportunity of sitting down with that ease of mind which writing required. You may see by the top of the letter that I am at Leyden; but of my journey hither you must be informed. Sometime after the receipt of your last, I embarked for Bourdeaux, on board a Scotch ship called the St Andrews, Captain John Wall, master. The ship made a tolerable appearance, and, as another inducement, I was let to know that six agreeable passengers were to be my company. Well, we were but two days at sea when a storm drove us into a city of England called Newcastle-upon-Tyne. We all went ashore to refresh us after the fatigue of our voyage. Seven men and I were one day on shore; and on the following evening, as we were all very merry, the room door bursts open enters a sergeant and twelve grenadiers with their bayonets screwed, and puts us al. under the king's arrest. seems, my company were Scotchmen in the French service, and had been in Scotland to enlist soldiers for the French army. I endeavoured all I could to prove my innocence: however, I remained in prison with the rest a fortnight, and with difficulty got off even then. Dear Sir, keep this all a secret, or at least say it was for debt; for if it were once known at the university, I should hardly get a degree. But hear how Providence interposed in my favour: the ship was gone on to Bourdeaux before I got from prison, and was wrecked at the mouth of the Garonne, and every one of the crew were drowned. It happened the last great storm. There was a ship at that time ready for Holland: I embarked, and

It

* Mr Contarine had married Goldsmith's aunt, and it was by his generosity that the poet was enabled to prosecute his studies at Edinburgh and Leyden. This gentleman was Rector of Kilmore. He died in 1756. B.

+ This letter must have been written in the summer of 1754. — B. This proposal seems absurd, but it may account for the report mentioned by some of his biographers, of his having been, on his putting to hore, arrested for a debt contracted at Edinburgh, &c.

in nine days, thank my God! I arrived safe at Rotterdam; whence I travelled by land to Leyden, whence I now write.

You may expect some account of this country; and though I am not well qualified for such an undertaking, yet shall I endeavour to satisfy some part of your expectations. Nothing surprised me more than the books every day published descriptive of the manners of this country. Any young man who takes it into his head to publish his travels, visits the countries he intends to describe; passes through them with as much inattention as his valet de chambre; and, consequently not having a fund himself to fill a volume, he applies to those who wrote before him, and gives us the manners of a country, not as he must have seen them, but such as they might have been fifty years before. The modern Dutchman is quite a different creature from him of former times: he in every thing imitates a Frenchman, but in his easy disengaged air, which is the result of keeping polite company. The Dutchman is vastly ceremonious, and is perhaps exactly what a Frenchman might have been in the reign of Louis XIV. Such are the better bred. But the downright Hollander is one of the oddest figures in nature: upon a head of lank hair he wears a half-cocked narrow hat, laced with black ribbon; no coat, but seven waistcoats, and nine pair of breeches; so that his hips reach almost up to his arm-pits. This well-clothed vegetable is now fit to see company, or make love. But what a pleasing creature is the object of his appetite! Why, she wears a large fur cap with a deal of Flanders lace; and for every pair of breeches he carries, she puts on two petticoats.

A Dutch lady burns nothing about her phlegmatic admirer but his tobacco. You must know, Sir, every woman carries in her hand a stove with coals in it, which, when she sits, she snugs under her petticoats; and at this chimney dozing Strephon lights his pipe. I take it that this continual smoking is what gives the man the ruddy healthful complexion he generally wears, by draining his superfluous moisture, while the woman, deprived of this amusement, overflows with such viscidities as tint the complexion, and give that paleness of visage which low fenny grounds and moist air conspire to cause. A Dutch woman and Scotch will well bear an opposition. The one is pale and fat, the other lean and ruddy the one walks as if she were straddling after a go-cart, and the other takes too masculine a stride. I shall not endeavour to deprive either country of its share of beauty; but must say, that, of al objects on this earth, an English farmer's daughter is most