Magazine. Griffiths, aided by Ralph, Kippis, Langhorne, Grainger, and others, followed with the earliest regular Review which can be said to have succeeded, and, in 1749, began, on Whig principles, that publication of the Monthly which lasted till our own day. Seven years later, the Tories opposed it with the Critical, which, with slight alteration of title, existed to a very recent date, more strongly tainted with high-church advocacy and quasi-popish principles than when the first number, sent forth under the editorship of Smollett in March 1756, was on those very grounds assailed. In the May of that year of Goldsmith's life to which I have now arrived, another review, the Universal, began a short existence of three years, its principal contributor being Samuel Johnson, at this time wholly devoted to it. Such were a few of the examples that, if the least liberty of choice had been his, might have raised or depressed the sanguine heart of Oliver Goldsmith, when, under the watchful eye of Mr. and Mrs. Griffiths, now providers of his bed and board, he sat down in the bookseller's parlour in Paternoster Row, somewhat sarcastically faced with the sign of The Dunciad, to begin his engagement on the Monthly Review. END OF FIRST BOOK. THE means of existence, long sought, seemed thus to be found, when, in his twenty-ninth year, Oliver Goldsmith sat down to the precarious task work of Author by Profession. He had exerted no control over the circumstances in which he took up the pen: nor had any friendly external aid, in an impulse of kindness, offered it to his hand. To be swaddled, rocked, and dandled into Authorship is the lot of more fortunate men : it was with Goldsmith the stern and last resource of his struggle with Adversity. As in the country-barn he would have played Scrub or Richard; as he prescribed for the poorer than himself at Bankside, until worse than their necessities drove him to herd with the beggars in Axe Lane; as in Salisbury Court he corrected the press among Mr. Richardson's workmen, on Tower Hill doled out physic over Mr. Jacob's counter, and at Peckham dispensed the more nauseating dose to young gentlemen of Doctor Milner's academy: he had here entered into Mr. Griffiths' service, and put on the livery of the Monthly Review. The He was man-of-letters, then, at last; but had gratified no passion, and attained no object of ambition. hope of greatness and distinction, day-star of his wanderings and his privations, was at this hour, more than it had ever been, dim, distant, cold. A practical scheme of literary life had as yet struck no root in his mind; and the assertion of later years, that he was past thirty before he was really attached to literature and sensible that he had found his vocation, is no doubt true. What the conditions of his present employment were, he knew well : that if he had dared to indulge any hopes of finer texture, if he had shewn the fragments of his poem, if he had produced the acts of the tragedy read to Richardson, Mr. and Mrs. Griffiths must have taken immediate counsel on the expenses of his board. He was there, as he had been in other places of servitude, because the dogs of hunger were at his heels. He was not a strong man, as I have said; but neither was his weakness such, that he shrank from the responsibilities it brought. When suffering came, in whatever form, he met it with a quiet, manful endurance: no gnashing of the teeth, or wringing of the hands. Among the lowest of human beings he could take |