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Goldsmith showed his gratitude by a long, and, it is said, a most delightful letter to Radcliffe, descriptive of his travels; now unhappily lost. He also wrote again to his more familiar Irish friends, but his letters were again unanswered. He went among the London apothecaries, and asked them to let him spread plaisters for them, pound in their mortars, run with their medicines: but they, too, asked him for a character, and he had none to give. At last a chemist of the name of Jacob took compassion upon him; and the late Conversation Sharp used to point out a shop at the corner of Monument Yard on Fish Street Hill, shown to him in his youth as this benevolent Mr. Jacob's. Ten or twelve years later, Goldsmith startled a brilliant circle at Sir Joshua's with an anecdote of When 'I lived among the beggars of Axe Lane,' just as Napoleon, fifty years later, appalled the party of crowned heads at Dresden with his story of When I was a lieutenant in the 'regiment of La Fère.' The experience with the beggars will of course date before that social elevation of mixing and selling drugs on Fish Street Hill.

Thus employed, he met one day an old fellow-student of the Edinburgh time. It was Sunday, and he was in the best clothes he had, but the friend of two years gone did not know him. 'Such,' he said, in relating this, 'is 'the tax the unfortunate pay to poverty.' He did not fail to leave to the unfortunate the lessons they should be taught by it. Doctor Sleigh (Foote's Doctor Sligo, honorably named in an earlier page of this narrative), recol

lected him at last; and, added Goldsmith, 'I found his 'heart as warm as ever.' With the help of this warm heart, he now rose from the apothecary's drudge to be physician, ' in a humble way,' in Bankside, Southwark. It was not a thriving business: Poor physician to the Poor: but it seemed a change for the better, and hope was strong in him.

An old Irish acquaintance and school-fellow (Beatty) met him in the streets. He was in a suit of green and gold, miserably old and tarnished; his shirt and neckcloth appeared to have been worn at least a fortnight; but he said he was practising physic, and doing very well! It is hard to confess failure to one's school-fellow.

Our next glimpse, though not more satisfactory, is more professional. The green and gold have faded quite out, into a rusty full-trimmed black suit: the pockets of which, like those of the poet in Garrick's farce, overflow with papers. The coat is second-hand velvet, legacy of a more successful brother of the craft; the cane, the wig, have served more fortunate owners; and the humble practitioner of Bankside is feeling the pulse of a patient humbler than himself, whose courteous entreaties to be allowed to relieve him of the hat he keeps pressed over his heart, he more courteously but firmly declines. Beneath the hat is a large patch in the rusty velvet, which he thus conceals.

But he cannot conceal the starvation which again threatens. Even the poor printer's-workman he attends, can see how hardly in that respect it goes with him; and finds courage one day to suggest that his master has been

kind to clever men before now, has visited Mr. Johnson in spunging-houses, and might be serviceable to a poor

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physician. For his master is no less than Mr. Samuel Richardson, of Salisbury Court and Parsons Green, printer, and author of Clarissa. The hint is successful: and Goldsmith, appointed reader and corrector to the press in Salisbury Court; admitted now and then to the parlour of Richardson himself; grimly smiled upon by its chief literary ornament, great poet of the day, the author of the Night Thoughts; sees hope in Literature once more.

He begins a tragedy. With what modest expectation; with what cheerful, simple-hearted deference to critical objection; another of his Edinburgh fellow-students will relate to us.

"From the time of Goldsmith's leaving Edinburgh, in the year 1754," says Dr. Farr, "I never saw him till 1756, when I was in London, attending the hospitals and lectures. He called upon me one morning before I was up, and on my entering the room, I recognised my old acquaintance, dressed in a rusty black suit with his pockets full of papers. After we had finished our breakfast, he drew from his pocket a part of a tragedy, which he said he had brought for my correction; in vain I pleaded inability; he began to read, and every part on which I expressed a doubt as to the propriety, was immediately blotted out. I then more earnestly entreated him not to trust to my judgment, but to the opinion of persons better qualified to decide on dramatic composition; on which he told me he had submitted his production, so far as he had written, to Mr. Richardson, the author of Clarissa; when I peremptorily declined offering another criticism upon the performance. The name and subject of the tragedy have unfortunately escaped my memory; neither do I recollect with exactness how much he had written, though I am inclined to believe he had not completed the third act. I never heard whether he afterwards finished it. In this visit, I remember his relating a strange Quixotic scheme he had in contemplation, of going to decipher the inscriptions on the Written Mountains; though he was altogether ignorant of Arabic, or the language in which they might be supposed to be written. The salary of £300 per annum, which had been left for the purpose, was the temptation."

Temptation indeed! The head may well be full of projects of any kind, when the pockets are only full of papers. But

not, alas, to decipher inscriptions on the Written Mountains; only to preside over pot-hooks at Peckham; was doomed to be the lot of Goldsmith. One Doctor Milner kept a school there; his son was among these young Edinburgh students come up to their London examinations; and thus it happened that the office of Assistant at the Peckham Academy befell. All my ambition now is to live,' he said, in the words of his Vagabond; and was installed. This was about the beginning of 1757. An attempt has been made to show that it was an earlier year, but on grounds too unsafe to oppose to known dates in the life. The good people of Peckham have also cherished traditions of Goldsmith House, as what was once the school is now fondly designated: which may not safely be admitted here. Broken window-panes have been religiously kept, for the supposed treasure of his hand-writing; and old gentlemen, once Doctor Milner's scholars, have claimed, against every reasonable evidence, the honour of having been whipped by the author of the Vicar of Wakefield. But nothing is with certainty known, save what the schoolmaster's daughter has related.

At the end of the century Miss Milner was still alive, and told what she recollected of their old usher. He was very good-natured, she said; played all kinds of tricks on the servants and the boys, of which he had no lack of return in kind; told entertaining stories; and amused every body with his flute. With his small salary, he was always in advance. It went for the most part, Miss Milner

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