he told all his friends it would be damned, I positively aver; and, from such ungenerous insinuations, without a dramatic merit, it rose to public notice, and it is now the ton to go and see it, though I never saw a person that either liked it or approved it, any more than the absurd plot of Home's tragedy of 5 Alonzo. Mr. Goldsmith, correct your arrogance, reduce your vanity, and endeavor to believe, as a man, you are of the plainest sort, — and as an author, but a mortal piece of mediocrity. "Brise le miroir° infidèle Qui vous cache la vérité.

"TOM TICKLE."

10

It would be difficult to devise a letter more calculated to wound the peculiar sensibilities of Goldsmith. The attacks upon him as an author, though annoying enough, he could have tolerated, but then the allusion to his "grotesque" person, to his studious 15 attempts to adorn it; and, above all, to his being an unsuccessful admirer of the lovely H-k (the Jessamy Bride), struck rudely upon the most sensitive part of his highly sensitive nature. The paragraph, it is said, was first pointed out to him by an officious friend, an Irishman, who told him he was bound 20 in honor to resent it; but he needed no such prompting. He was in a high state of excitement and indignation, and, accompanied by his friend, who is said to have been a Captain Higgins, of the marines, he repaired to Paternoster Row, to the shop of Evans, the publisher, whom he supposed to be the 25

editor of the paper. Evans was summoned by his shopman from an adjoining room. Goldsmith announced his name. "I have called," added he, "in consequence of a scurrilous attack made upon me, and an unwarrantable liberty taken with the name of a young lady. As for myself, I care little; 30 but her name must not be sported with."

Evans professed utter ignorance of the matter, and said he would speak to the editor. He stooped to examine a file of the paper, in search of the offensive article; whereupon Goldsmith's friend gave him a signal, that now was a favorable 35 moment for the exercise of his cane. The hint was taken as quick as given, and the cane was vigorously applied to the back of the stooping publisher. The latter rallied in an in

stant, and, being a stout, high-blooded Welshman, returned the blows with interest. A lamp hanging overhead was broken, and sent down a shower of oil upon the combatants; but the battle raged with unceasing fury. The shopman 5 ran off for a constable; but Dr. Kenrick, who happened to be in the adjacent room, sallied forth, interfered between the combatants, and put an end to the affray. He conducted Goldsmith to a coach, in exceedingly battered and tattered plight, and accompanied him home, soothing him with much mock 10 commiseration, though he was generally suspected, and on good grounds, to be the author of the libel.

Evans immediately instituted a suit against Goldsmith for an assault, but was ultimately prevailed upon to compromise the matter, the poet contributing fifty pounds to the Welsh 15 charity.

Newspapers made themselves, as may well be supposed, exceedingly merry with the combat. Some censured him severely for invading the sanctity of a man's own house; others accused him of having, in his former capacity of editor of a magazine, 20 been guilty of the very offences that he now resented in others. This drew from him the following vindication:

"To the Public

"Lest it should be supposed that I have been willing to correct in others an abuse of which I have been guilty myself, 25 I beg leave to declare, that, in all my life, I never wrote or dictated a single paragraph, letter, or essay in a newspaper except a few moral essays under the character of a Chinese, about ten years ago, in the Ledger, and a letter, to which I signed my name, in the St. James Chronicle. If the liberty of 30 the press, therefore, has been abused, I have had no hand in it.

"I have always considered the press as the protector of our freedom, as a watchful guardian, capable of uniting the weak against the encroachments of power. What concerns the public most properly admits of a public discussion. But, of late, 35 the press has turned from defending public interest to making inroads upon private life; from combating the strong to overwhelming the feeble. No condition is now too obscure for its

abuse, and the protector has become the tyrant of the people. In this manner the freedom of the press is beginning to sow the seeds of its own dissolution; the great must oppose it from principle, and the weak from fear; till at last every rank of mankind shall be found to give up its benefits, content with 5 security from insults.

"How to put a stop to this licentiousness, by which all are indiscriminately abused, and by which vice consequently escapes in the general censure, I am unable to tell; all I could wish is, that, as the law gives us no protection against the 10 injury, so it should give calumniators no shelter after having provoked correction. The insults which we receive before the public, by being more open, are the more distressing; by treating them with silent contempt we do not pay a sufficient deference to the opinion of the world. By recurring to legal redress 15 we too often expose the weakness of the law, which only serves to increase our mortification by failing to relieve us. In short, every man should singly consider himself as the guardian of the liberty of the press, and, as far as his influence can extend, should endeavor to prevent its licentiousness becoming at last 20 the grave of its freedom.

"OLIVER GOLDSMITH."

Boswell, who had just arrived in town, met with this article in a newspaper which he found at Dr. Johnson's. The Doctor was from home at the time, and Bozzy and Mrs. Williams, in a 25 critical conference over the letter, determined from the style that it must have been written by the lexicographer himself. The latter on his return soon undeceived them. "Sir," said he to Boswell, “Goldsmith would no more have asked me to have wrote such a thing as that for him than he would have 30 asked me to feed him with a spoon, or do anything else that denoted his imbecility. Sir, had he shown it to any one friend, he would not have been allowed to publish it. He has, indeed, done it very well; but it is a foolish thing well done. pose he has been so much elated with the success of his new 35 comedy, that he has thought everything that concerned him must be of importance to the public."

I sup

CHAPTER XXXIX

Boswell in Holy-Week. - Dinner at Oglethorpe's. - Dinner at Paoli's.The Policy of Truth. - Goldsmith affects Independence of Royalty. Paoli's Compliment. -Johnson's Eulogium on the Fiddle. Question about Suicide. - Boswell's Subserviency.

THE return of Boswell to town to his task of noting down the conversations of Johnson, enables us to glean from his journal some scanty notices of Goldsmith. It was now HolyWeek, a time during which Johnson was particularly solemn 5 in his manner and strict in his devotions. Boswell, who was the imitator of the great moralist in everything, assumed, of course, an extra devoutness on the present occasion. "He had an odd mock solemnity of tone and manner," said Miss Burney, (afterwards Madame D'Arblay,) "which he had acquired from 10 constantly thinking, and imitating Dr. Johnson." It would seem that he undertook to deal out some second-hand homilies, a la Johnson, for the edification of Goldsmith during HolyWeek. The poet, whatever might be his religious feeling, had no disposition to be schooled by so shallow an apostle. 15" Sir," said he in reply, "as I take my shoes from the shoemaker, and my coat from the tailor, so I take my religion from the priest."

Boswell treasured up the reply in his memory or his memorandum-book. A few days afterwards, the 9th of April, he 20 kept Good Friday with Dr. Johnson, in orthodox style; breakfasted with him on tea and cross-buns; went to church with him morning and evening; fasted in the interval, and read with him in the Greek Testament: then, in the piety of his heart, complained of the sore rebuff he had met with in the course of 25 his religious exhortations to the poet, and lamented that the latter should indulge in "this loose way of talking." "Sir," replied Johnson, "Goldsmith knows nothing — he has made up his mind about nothing."

This reply seems to have gratified the lurking jealousy of 30 Boswell, and he has recorded it in his journal. Johnson, how

ever, with respect to Goldsmith, and indeed with respect to everybody else, blew hot as well as cold, according to the humor he was in. Boswell, who was astonished and piqued at the continually increasing celebrity of the poet, observed some time after to Johnson, in a tone of surprise, that Goldsmith had 5 acquired more fame than all the officers of the last war who were not generals. Why, sir," answered Johnson, his old feeling of good-will working uppermost, "you will find ten thousand fit to do what they did, before you find one to do what Goldsmith has done. You must consider that a thing is valued ac- 10 cording to its rarity. A pebble that paves the street is in itself more useful than the diamond upon a lady's finger."

66

On the 13th of April we find Goldsmith and Johnson at the table of old General Oglethorpe, discussing the question of the degeneracy of the human race. Goldsmith asserts the fact, and 15 attributes it to the influence of luxury. Johnson denies the fact, and observes, that, even admitting it, luxury could not be the cause. It reached but a small proportion of the human race. Soldiers, on sixpence a day, could not indulge in luxuries; the poor and laboring classes, forming the great mass of mankind, 20 were out of its sphere. Wherever it could reach them, it strengthened them and rendered them prolific. The conversation was not of particular force or point as reported by Boswell; the dinner-party was a very small one, in which there was no provocation to intellectual display.

25

After dinner they took tea with the ladies, where we find poor Goldsmith happy and at home, singing Tony Lumpkin's song of the Three Jolly Pigeons, and another, called the Humors of Ballamaguery, to a very pretty Irish tune. It was to have been introduced in She Stoops to Conquer, but was left out, as 30 the actress who played the heroine could not sing.

It was in these genial moments that the sunshine of Goldsmith's nature would break out, and he would say and do a thousand whimsical and agreeable things that made him the life of the strictly social circle. Johnson, with whom conversa- 35 tion was everything, used to judge Goldsmith too much by his own colloquial standard, and undervalue him for being less provided than himself with acquired facts, the ammunition of the tongue and often the mere lumber of the memory; others, how