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

Dover, he said, because they hated to be imposed upon; and were in high spirits at coming to Calais, where they had been told that a little money would go a great way. There, upon stepping ashore from the ship, and landing two little trunks, which was all they carried with them, they were surprised to see fourteen or fifteen fellows all rushing down to the ship to lay their hands upon them: 'four got under each trunk, the rest surrounded and held