How often have I led thy sportive choir
With tuneless pipe beside the murmuring Loire !
Where shading elms along the margin grew,
And freshened from the wave the zephyr flew ;
And haply though my harsh note falt'ring still,
But mocked all tune, and marr'd the dancer's skill;
Yet would the village praise my wondrous power,
And dance forgetful of the noontide hour.

Alike all ages: Dames of ancient days

Have led their children through the mirthful maze,
And the gay grandsire, skill'd in gestic lore,
Has frisk'd beneath the burden of three-score."

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CHAPTER VI.

Landing in England.-Shifts of a man without money.-The pestle and mortar.-Theatricals in a barn.-Launch upon London.-A city night scene.-Struggles with penury.-Miseries of a tutor.-A doctor in the suburb.-Poor practice and second-hand finery.-A tragedy in embryo.— Project of the written mountains.

AFTER two years spent in roving about the continent, "pursuing novelty," as he said, "and losing content," Goldsmith landed at Dover early in 1756. He appears to have had no definite plan of action. The death of his uncle Contarine, and the neglect of his relatives and friends to reply to his letters, seem to have produced in him a temporary feeling of loneliness and destitution, and his only thought was to get to London, and throw himself upon the world. But how was he to get there? His purse was empty. England was to him as completely a foreign land as any part of the continent, and where on earth is a penniless stranger more destitute? His flute and his philosophy were no longer of any avail; the English boors cared nothing for music; there were no convents; and as to the learned and the clergy, not one of them would give a vagrant scholar a supper and night's lodg ing for the best thesis that ever was argued. "You may easily imagine," says he, in a subsequent letter to his brother-in-law, "what difficulties I had to encounter, left as I was without friends, recommendations, money, or impudence, and that in a

country where being born an Irishman was sufficient to keep me unemployed. Many, in such circumstances, would have had recourse to the friar's cord or the suicide's halter. But, with all my follies, I had principle to resist the one, and resolution to combat the other."

He applied at one place, we are told, for employment in th shop of a country apothecary; but all his medical science gathered in foreign universities could not gain him the management of a pestle and mortar. He even resorted, it is said, to the stage as a temporary expedient, and figured in low comedy at a country town in Kent. This accords with his last shift of the Philosophic Vagabond, and with the knowledge of country theatricals displayed in his "Adventures of a Strolling Player," or may be a story suggested by them. All this part of his career, however, in which he must have trod the lowest paths of humility, are only to be conjectured from vague traditions, or scraps of autobiography gleaned from his miscellaneous writings.

At length we find him launched on the great metropolis, or rather drifting about its streets, at night, in the gloomy month of February, with but a few half-pence in his pocket. The Deserts of Arabia are not more dreary and inhospitable than the streets of London at such a time, and to a stranger in such a plight. Do we want a picture as an illustration? We have it in his own works, and furnished, doubtless, from his own experience.

“The clock has just struck two; what a gloom hangs all around! no sound is heard but of the chiming clock, or the distant watch-dog. How few appear in those streets, which but some few hours ago were crowded! But who are those who make the streets their couch, and find a short repose from wretchedness at

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the doors of the opulent? They are strangers, wanderers, and orphans, whose circumstances are too humble to expect redress, and whose distresses are too great even for pity. Some are without the covering even of rags, and others emaciated with disease; the world has disclaimed them; society turns its back upon their distress, and has given them up to nakedness and hunger. These poor shivering females have once seen happier days, and been flattered into beauty. They are now turned out to meet the severity of winter. Perhaps now, lying at the doors of their betrayers, they sue to wretches whose hearts are insensible, or debauchees who may curse, but will not relieve them.

"Why, why was I born a man, and yet see the sufferings of wretches I cannot relieve! Poor houseless creatures! The

world will give you reproaches, but will not give you relief."

Poor houseless Goldsmith! we may here ejaculate to what shifts he must have been driven to find shelter and sustenance for himself in this his first venture into London! Many years afterwards, in the days of his social elevation, he startled a polite circle at Sir Joshua Reynolds's by humorously dating an anecdote about the time he "lived among the beggars of Axe Lane." Such may have been the desolate quarters with which he was fain to content himself when thus adrift upon the town, with but a few half-pence in his pocket.

The first authentic trace we have of him in this new part of his career, is filling the situation of an usher to a school, and even this employ he obtained with some difficulty, after a reference for a character to his friends in the University of Dublin. In the Vicar of Wakefield he makes George Primrose undergo a whimsical catechism concerning the requisites for an usher. "Have you been bred apprentice to the business ?" "No."

three in a bed ?"

"Then you won't do for a school. Can you dress the boys hair?" "No." "Then you won't do for a school. Can you lie "No." "Then you will never do for a school. Have you a good stomach ?" "Yes." "Then you will by no means do for a school. I have been an usher in a boarding school, myself, and may I die of an anodyne necklace, but I had rather be under-turnkey in Newgate. I was up early and late: I was browbeat by the master, hated for my ugly face by the mistress, worried by the boys."

Goldsmith remained but a short time in this situation, and to the mortifications experienced there, we doubtless owe the picturings given in his writings of the hardships of an usher's life. "He is generally," says he, "the laughing-stock of the school. Every trick is played upon him; the oddity of his manner, his dress, or his language, is a fund of eternal ridicule; the master himself now and then cannot avoid joining in the laugh; and the poor wretch, eternally resenting this ill usage, lives in a state of war with all the family."" He is obliged, perhaps, to sleep in the same bed with the French teacher, who disturbs him for an hour every night in papering and filleting his hair, and stinks worse than a carrion with his rancid pomatums, when he lays his head beside him on the bolster."

His next shift was as assistant in the laboratory of a chemist near Fish-street Hill. After remaining here a few months, he heard that Dr. Sleigh, who had been his friend and fellowstudent at Edinburgh, was in London. Eager to meet with a friendly face in this land of strangers, he immediately called on him; "but though it was Sunday, and it is to be supposed I was in my best clothes, Sleigh scarcely knew me—such is the tax the unfortunate pay to poverty. However, when he