With the opening of 1769, we find Goldsmith busily engaged upon new projects, his Roman History completed; and it was now, Percy tells us, that Johnson took him to Oxford, and obtained for him, ad eundem, the degree of M.B. The fact must rest on the bishop's authority; for the present Oxford registrar, though disposed to think it correct, finds a chasm in the University register which leaves it without positive corroboration. They were at this time much together, it is certain; and if Johnson's opinion of the genius of Goldsmith was now at its highest, it was repaid with very hearty affection. 'Look,' said Gray, as in walking this year with a friend through a crowded street of the city, he saw a large uncouth figure 'polling' before them look, look, Bonstetten, the Great Bear! 'There goes Ursa Major!' It was Johnson. Ah!' said Goldsmith, when such expressions were repeated to him, they may say that. Johnson, to be sure, has a roughness ' of manner, but no man alive has a more tender heart. 'He has nothing of the bear but his skin.' Their entertainer at Oxford was the accomplished lawyer, Chambers, at this time Vinerian Professor, and five years later a judge in India; in whose rooms his more celebrated townsman Scott (both were Newcastle men) was afterwards introduced to Johnson, and who had lately been admitted a member of the Gerrard Street Club. : His election took place on the resignation of Hawkins; and it seems doubtful if I have not, in a former page, antedated Percy's election. The records of the early years of the Club are, in truth, so scanty and imperfect, that it is difficult to ascertain the simplest fact in connection with it. But it is certain that the original number of ten had now been enlarged to twelve; and, as a result of the resignation of Hawkins, and of Beauclerc's forfeiture by continued nonattendance, four vacancies had to be filled. To the first Percy was elected; the second was re-claimed by Beauclerc (whose recent marriage with Lady Di Spencer, on her divorce from Lord Bolingbroke, sufficiently explained his temporary withdrawal); and the third and fourth were filled by Chambers and George Colman. It was on the occasion of this slight increase that Goldsmith seems to have urged the expediency of a larger infusion of new men: 'it would give the Club an agreeable variety,' he thought; there could now be nothing new among the members, for they had travelled over each other's minds.' This nettled Johnson; being too much in his own way. Sir,' he said, 'you have not travelled over my mind, I ' promise you.' Nevertheless Reynolds agreed with Goldsmith, thinking that life wanted colour and diversity as much as his own canvasses; and immediately before Goldsmith died, the number was increased to twenty: but from that time Johnson took little interest in the meetings. Almost all the rising men of the day were Whigs (bottomless Whigs, as he called Burke); and the spectacle of Charles Fox in the chair, quoting Homer and Fielding to the astonishment of Joe Warton, was one he could not get reconciled to. Within three years, he was himself the advocate of a yet further increase to thirty; and the form the Club then assumed was precisely what he wished to bring it to: 'a mere miscellaneous collection of conspicuous men, without any determinate character.' So, to the present day, it has continued. Colman's election seemed a studied slight to Garrick, but his claim was not inconsiderable. It was a choice between rival managers and rival wits; eager little figures both; both social and most agreeable men; and the scale was easily turned. Langton describes a Club incident soon after Colman's admission. He says that Goldsmith, on the occasion of a play brought out by Mrs. Lennox (a very ingenious, deserving, and not very fortunate woman, who wrote the clever novel of the Female Quixote, and a somewhat silly book about Shakespeare, to which Johnson, a great friend of hers, was suspected to have contributed), told Johnson at the Club that a person had advised him to go and hiss it, because she had attacked Shakespeare in her book called Shakespeare Illustrated. And did you not tell him,' returned Johnson sharply, 'that he was a 'rascal?' 'No, sir,' said Goldsmith, 'I did not. Perhaps he might not mean what he said.' 'Nay, sir,' was the reply, if he lied, it is a different thing.' Colman was sitting by while this passed; and dropping his voice out of Johnson's hearing, slily remarked to Langton, 'Then 'the proper expression should have been, Sir, if you don't lie, you're a rascal.' The play was produced at Colman's theatre with the title of the Sister, and encountered so strong an opposition that it was never repeated: but that the audience was not impartial, may be suspected from Langton's anecdote; and it is borne out by a reading of the comedy itself. Though with too much sentiment, it is both amusing and interesting; and the Strawbery Hill critics who abused it, and afterwards pronounced Burgoyne's Heiress 'the finest comedy in the English language,' might have had the justice to discover that three of the characters of the fashionable General were stolen from this very Sister of poor Mrs. Lennox. Goldsmith, however, had nothing to reproach himself with. He not only refrained from joining the dissentients, but assisted the comedy (perhaps first disposed to sympathy with it because Garrick had rejected it) by an epilogue written in his liveliest strain, and spoken by pretty Mrs. Bulkley. He has had few competitors in that style of writing. His prologues and epilogues are the perfection of the vers de société. Formality and ill-humour are exorcised by their cordial wit, which transforms the theatre to a drawing-room, and the audience into friendly guests. There is a playful touch, an easy, airy elegance, which, when joined to terseness of expression, sets it off with incomparable grace and finished beauty; but few of our English poets have written that style successfully. The French, who invented the name for it, have been almost its only practised cultivators. Goldsmith's genius for it will nevertheless bear comparison with even theirs. He could be playful without childishness, humorous without coarseness, and sharply satirical without a particle of anger. Enough remains, for proof, in his collected verse; but in private letters that have perished, many most charming specimens have undoubtedly been lost. For with such enchanting facility it flowed from him, that with hardly any of his friends in the higher social circle which he now began to enter, did it fail to help him to more gracious acceptance, to warmer and more cordial intimacy. It takes but the touch of nature to please highest and lowest alike: and whether he thanked Lord Clare, or the manager of Ranelagh; answered an invitation to the pretty Miss Hornecks, or supplied author or actor with an epilogue; the same exquisite tact, the same natural art, the same finished beauty of humour and refinement, recommended themselves to all. Her The Miss Hornecks, girls of nineteen and seventeen, were acquaintances of this year; and soon ripened into friends. They were the daughters of Mrs. Horneck, Captain Kane Horneck's widow; whose Devonshire family connected her with Reynolds, and so introduced her to Goldsmith. only son Charles, the Captain in Lace as they now fondly called him, had entered the Guards in the preceding year, and seems to have been as cordial and good-natured, as her daughters were handsome and young. The eldest, Catherine, Little Comedy as she was called, was already engaged to Henry William Bunbury (second son of a baronet of old family in Suffolk, whose elder son Charles had lately succeeded to the title), who is still remembered as 'Geoffrey Gambado,' and as one of the cleverest amateur |