book had become a fashion, and East and West were moved alike. Mr. Dodsley offered him £650 for a second edition and two more volumes; Lord Falconberg gave him a curacy of £150 a year; Mr. Reynolds painted his portrait; and Warburton, not having yet pronounced him an 'irre'coverable scoundrel,' went round to the bishops and told them he was the English Rabelais. They had never 'heard of such a writer,' adds the sly narrator of the incident. One is invited to dinner where he dines,' said Gray, 'a fortnight beforehand;' and he boasted, himself, of dinner engagements fourteen deep: even while he declared the way to fame to be like that to heaven, through much tribulation; and described himself, in the midst of his triumphs, ' attacked and pelted from cellar and garret.' Perhaps he referred to Goldsmith, from whose garret in Green Arbour Court the first heavy blow was levelled at him; but there were other assailants, as active though less avowed, in cellars of Arlington Street and garrets of Strawberry Hill. Walpole may yet more easily be forgiven than Goldsmith, in such a case. The attack in the Citizen of the World was aimed, it is true, where the work was most vulnerable; and it was not ill done to protest against the indecency and affectation, which doubtless had largely contributed to the so sudden popularity, as they found promptest imitators: but the humour and wit ought surely to have been admitted; and if the wisdom and charity of an uncle Toby, a Mr. Shandy, or a Corporal Trim, might anywhere have claimed frank and immediate recognition, it should have

been in that series of essays which Beau Tibbs and the Gentleman in Black have helped to make immortal.

ness.

Most charming are these two characters. Addison would have admired, and Steele delighted in them. Finery and poverty, surliness and good-nature, were never brought together with more playful wit, or a more tender sweetFielding's majestic Major, who will hear of nothing less than the honour and dignity of a man, and is caught in an old woman's bedgown warming his sick sister's posset, is not a nobler specimen of manhood than the one; Steele's friend at the Trumpet Club, that very insignificant fellow but exceeding gracious, who has but a bare subsistence yet is always promising to introduce you into the world, who answers to matters of no consequence with great circumspection, maintains an insolent benevolence to all whom he has to do with, and will desire one of ten times his substance to let him see him sometimes, hinting that he does not forget him, is not more delicious in his vanity than the other. The country ramble of the Man in Black, wherein, to accompaniment of the most angry invective, he performs acts of the most exquisite charity; where with harsh loud voice he denounces the poor, while with wistful compassionate face he relieves them; where, by way of detecting imposture, he domineeringly buys a shilling's worth of matches, receives the astonished beggar's whole bundle and blessing, and, intimating that he has taken in the seller and shall make money of his bargain, bestows them next moment on a tramper with an objur

gation; is surely never to be read unmoved. For Beau Tibbs, who has not laughed at and loved him, from the first sorry glimpse of his faded finery? Who has not felt, in the airs of wealth and grandeur with which his amusing impudence puffs up his miserable poverty, that he makes out a title to good-natured cheerfulness and thorough enjoyment, which all the real wealth might have purchased cheaply? What would his friends Lords Muddler and Crump, the Duchess of Piccadilly or the Countess of Allnight, have given for it? Gladly, for but a tithe of it, might the lords have put up with his two shirts, and uncomplainingly the ladies assisted Mrs. Tibbs in seeing them through the wash-tub. It is an elegant little dinner he talks of giving his friend, with bumpers of wine, a turbot, an ortolan, and what not: but who would not as soon have had the smart bottled-beer which was all he had to give, with the nice pretty bit of ox-cheek, piping-hot, and dressed with a little of Mrs. Tibbs' Own sauce which his grace' was so fond of? It is supposed that this exquisite sketch had a living original in one of Goldsmith's casual acquaintance; a person named Thornton, once in the army.

This is not improbable, any more than that the beau's two shirts might have been copied from Goldsmith's own: for everywhere throughout the Letters actual incidents appear, and the 'White Mouse and Prince Bonbennin' had an origin whimsical as the story itself. Mr. Newbery's two guineas a-week would seem to have attracted weekly

levies, in a double sense, from Grub Street; at which Pilkington, son of the notorious Lætitia, was most assiduous. But with other than his usual begging aspect, he appeared in Green Arbour Court one day; for good luck had dawned on him at last, he said, and his troubles were over. Two guineas (and he ran about the room for joy of the announcement) were all he wanted to make his fortune. There was a great duchess who gave the most astonishing prices for curious animals, and a friend had sent him over two white mice from India for which her grace had expressed a fancy; they were on board a ship in the river; the duchess was waiting for them; and two guineas would buy a cage, as well as a coat to present them in. But what was to be done, for Goldsmith had only half a guinea? The anxious client pointed to a watch, with which his poor patron (indulging in a luxury which Johnson did not possess till he was sixty) had lately enriched himself; timidly suggested one week's loan as a solution of the difficulty; and carried it off with the last half-guinea. And though Goldsmith never again had tidings of either, or of the curious white mice, till a paragraph in the Public Ledger informed him of certain equivocal modes whereby 'Mr. P-lk-g-on was endea'vouring to raise money;' yet a messenger, not long afterward, carried to the poor starving creature's deathbed a guinea from Mr. Goldsmith.'

The same journal (by the favour of an old friend, Kenrick) described for the public at the same time an amusing adventure in White Conduit Gardens, of which

no other than 'Mr. G-d-th' himself was the hero. Strolling through that scene of humble holiday, he seems to have met the wife and two daughters of an honest tradesman who had done him some service, and invited them to tea; but after much enjoyment of the innocent repast he discovered a want of money to discharge the bill, and had to undergo some ludicrous annoyances, and entertain his friends at other expense than he had bargained for, before means were found for his release. Another contemporary anecdote reverses this picture a little, and exhibits him paymaster, at the Chapter Coffee House, for Churchill's friend Charles Lloyd, who in his careless way, without a shilling to pay for the entertainment, had invited him to sup with some friends of Grub Street. A third incident of the same date presents him with a similar party at Blackwall, where so violent a dispute arose about Tristram Shandy at the dinner-table, that personalities led to blows, and the feast ended in a fight. Why, sir,' said Johnson, laughing, when Boswell told him some years later of a different kind of fracas in which their friend had been engaged, 'I believe it is the first time he has beat;

he may have been beaten before. This, sir, is a new 'plume to him.' If the somewhat doubtful surmise of the beating be correct, the scene of it was Blackwall; and if the story Hawkins tells about the trick played off by Roubiliac (which, like all such tricks, tells against both the parties to it) be also true, this was the time when it happened. The 'little' sculptor, as he is called in the

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