1758. school of Ashford in Kent," and having the consequence and Et. 30. pretension of a so-called learned man, we are not going, said

Goldsmith, "to permit an ostentation of learning pass for "merit, nor to give a pedant quarter on the score of his "industry alone, even though he took refuge behind Arabic, or powdered his head with Hieroglyphics."+

In the garret of Griffiths, he would hardly have conceded so much; and since then, the world had not been teaching him literary charity. These Ovid translations had not unnaturally turned his thoughts upon the master of the art; on him who was the father of authorship by profession; and the melancholy image which arose to a mind so strongly disposed to entertain it then, of great "Dryden ever poor," and obliged by his miseries to suffer fleeting performances to be "quartered on the lasting merit of his name," did not the more entitle to any mercy which truth could not challenge for them, these gentlemen of a more thriving profession who had thrust themselves uninvited and unqualified on the barren land of authorship. "But let "not the reader imagine," he said, "we can find pleasure "in thus exposing absurdities which are too ludicrous for "serious reproof. While we censure as critics, we feel as

The second title of his translation runs thus: "Being part of a poetical or "oratorical lecture, read in the grammar-school of Ashford, in the county of "Kent; and calculated to initiate youth in the first rudiments of taste." + Critical Review, vii. 38, January 1759.

I am glad to record that, amid many heresies that forbid me to claim the merit of a sound or deep critical faculty for Goldsmith, he had a well-grounded and steady admiration for Dryden, which he often justified in language worthy of it. "The English tongue," he said, in the eighth number of the Bee, "is greatly his "debtor. It was his pen that formed the Congreves, the Priors, and the "Addisons, who succeeded him; and had it not been for Dryden, we never "should have known a Pope, at least in the meridian lustre he now displays. "But Dryden's excellencies, as a writer, were not confined to poetry alone. There 'is, in his prose writings, an ease and elegance that have never yet been so well "united in works of taste or criticism."

men, and could sincerely wish that those whose greatest 1758. "sin is, perhaps, the venial one of writing bad verses, would Et. 30.

regard their failure in this respect as we do, not as faults

"but foibles: they may be good and useful members of

society, without being poets. The regions of taste can "be travelled only by a few, and even those often find "indifferent accommodation by the way. Let such as have "not got a passport from nature be content with happiness, "and leave the poet the unrivalled possession of his misery, "his garret, and his fame.

"We have of late seen the republic of letters crowded "with some, who have no other pretensions to applause but industry, who have no other merit but that of reading

many books and making long quotations; these we have “heard extolled by sympathetic dunces, and have seen "them carry off the rewards of genius; while others, who 'should have been born in better days, felt all the wants of "poverty, and the agonies of contempt.* Who, then, that

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* Critical Review, vii. 37-8, January 1759. Let me add an admirable passage from a later essay (Citizen of the World, letter xciii) in which Goldsmith speaks out for the profession of the writer: "For my own part, were I to "buy a hat, I would not have it from a stocking-maker, but a hatter; were "I to buy shoes, I should not go to the tailor's for that purpose. It is just so with regard to wit: did I, for my life, desire to be well served, I would apply only to those who made it their trade, and lived by it. You smile at the oddity of my opinion; but be assured, my friend, that wit is in 66 some measure mechanical, and that a man long habituated to catch at even "its resemblance, will at last be happy enough to possess the substance. By a long habit of writing he acquires a justness of thinking, and a mastery “of manner, which holiday writers, even with ten times his genius, may vainly attempt to equal. How then are they deceived, who expect from title, "dignity, and exterior circumstances, an excellence, which is in some measure acquired by habit, and sharpened by necessity! You have seen, like me, many literary reputations promoted by the influence of fashion, which have "scarcely survived the possessor; you have seen the poor hardly earn the "little reputation they acquired, and their merit only acknowledged when "they were incapable of enjoying the pleasures of popularity: such, however, is the reputation worth possessing; that which is hardly earned is

M

1758.

Et. 30.

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"has a regard for the public, for the literary honour of our "country, for the figure we shall one day make among posterity, that would not choose to see such humbled as "are possessed only of talents that might have made good "cobblers, had fortune turned them to trade?" So will truth force its way, when out of Irish hearing. The friends, the esteem, and the conveniences, of the poet's life, are briefly summed up here. His misery, his garret, and his fame.

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With part of the money received from Hamilton he moved into new lodgings: took "unrivalled possession" of a fresh garret, on a first floor. The house was number twelve, Green Arbour Court, Fleet-street, between the Old Bailey and the site of Fleet-market and stood in the right hand corner of the court, as the wayfarer approached it from Farringdon-street by an appropriate access of Break-neck Steps." Green Arbour Court is now gone for ever; and of its miserable wretchedness, for a little time replaced by the more decent comforts of a stable, not a vestige remains. The houses, crumbling and tumbling in Goldsmith's day, were fairly rotted down some nineteen years since; and it became necessary, for safety sake, to remove what time had spared. But Mr. Washington Irving saw them first, and with reverence had described them, for Goldsmith's sake. Through alleys, courts, and blind passages; traversing Fleet-market, and thence turning along a narrow street to the bottom of a long steep flight of stone steps; he made good his toilsome way up into

"hardly lost." Most true. He lived long enough himself to have some foretaste of this in his own case; we all of us now know it more completely. Let me not quit this subject without saying that Johnson held much the same opinion as Goldsmith about interlopers in literature. Boswell one day was full of regrets that some learned judge had left no literary monument of himself. 'Alas, sir," cried Johnson, "what a mass of confusion should we have, if every bishop, and every "judge, every lawyer, physician, and divine, were to write books!" Life, vi. 327.

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Green Arbour Court. He found it a small square of 1758. tall and miserable houses, the very intestines of which Et. 30. seemed turned inside out, to judge from the old garments and frippery that fluttered from every window. "It "appeared," he says, in his Tales of a Traveller, "to be a region of washerwomen, and lines were stretched about "the little square, on which clothes were dangling to dry." The disputed right to a wash-tub was going on when he entered; heads in mob-caps were protruded from every window; and the loud clatter of vulgar tongues was assisted by the shrill pipes of swarming children, nestled and cradled in every procreant chamber of the hive. The whole scene, in short, was one of whose unchanged resemblance to the scenes of former days I have since found curious corroboration, in a magazine engraving of the place nigh half a century old. Here were the tall faded houses, with heads out of window at every story; the dirty neglected children; the bawling slipshod women; in one corner, clothes hanging to dry, and in another the cure of smoky chimneys announced. Without question, the same squalid, squalling colony, which it then was, it had been in Goldsmith's time. He would compromise with the children for occasional cessation of their noise, by occasional cakes or sweetmeats, or by a tune upon his flute, for which all the court assembled; he would talk pleasantly with the poorest of his neighbours, and was long recollected to have greatly enjoyed the talk of a working watchmaker in the court; every night, he would risk his neck at those steep stone stairs; every day, for his clothes had become too ragged to

*

See the frontispiece to vol. xliii of the European Magazine.

+ Ward, in his London Spy, talks of "returning down stairs with as much care and caution of tumbling head-foremost, as he that goes down Green Arbour "Court steps in the middle of winter."

1758.

submit to daylight scrutiny, he would keep within his dirty, Et. 30. naked, unfurnished room, with its single wooden chair and window bench. And that was Goldsmith's home.

On a certain night in the beginning of November 1758, his ascent of Break-neck Steps must have had unwonted gloom. He had learnt the failure of his new hope: the Coromandel appointment was his no longer. In what way this mischance so unexpectedly occurred, it would now be hopeless to enquire. No explanation could be had from the dying Doctor Milner; none was given by himself; he always afterwards withheld allusion to it, with even studious care. It is quite possible, though no authority exists for the assertion, that doubts may have arisen of his competence to discharge the duties of the appointment; what followed a few months later, indeed, will be seen to give warrant for such a surmise; but even supposing this to have been the real motive, there is no ground for suspecting that such a motive was alleged. The most likely supposition would probably be, that failure in getting together means for his outfit with sufficient promptitude, was made convenient excuse for transferring the favour to another. That it was any failure of his own courage at the prospect of so long an exile, or that he never proposed more by his original scheme than a foreign flight for two or three years, has no other or better foundation than the Hodson letter: on which authority it would also follow, that he remained contented with what he already possessed, subdued his capricious wants, and turned to the friends, the esteem, the refined conversation, and all the conveniences of life, which awaited him in Green Arbour Court, with a new and virtuous resolve of quiet thankfulness.

Alas! far different were the feelings with which he now