subscription, being perhaps the best of them. The rest, careless, yet suspicious; vain, whether rich or poor; extravagant in everything but honourable action; pretending, vulgar; and priding themselves on nothing so much as the keeping better company, wearing finer clothes, and living more genteely, than their neighbours. Among such there was little chance of decent consideration, truly, if a garret, shabby clothes, and conversation with the meanest company, were set seriously and hopelessly forth as his only and inextricable doom. The real error lay in the giving faith of any kind to this external aid; since it weakened the help that rested in himself. When the claim of ten pounds for his appointment-warrant came upon him, it found him less prepared because of vague expectations raised on these letters to Mills and the Lauders. But any delay might be fatal; and in that condition of extremity, whose 'wants,' alas, are anything but 'capricious,' he bethought him of the Critical Review, saw promise in its rivalry to Griffiths, and went to its proprietor Mr. Archibald Hamilton.

The bookseller, who had just made a large fortune out of Smollett's History, was a shrewd man, and perhaps already conscious of the value of Griffiths' discarded writer. He made him a small advance, and received three papers for the Critical. for the Critical. One appeared before the close of the year, and the others were in the new year number. All three had relation to a special subject; and, as connected with such a man's obscurest fortunes,

have an interest hardly less than that of writings connected with his fame. An author is seen in the effulgence of established repute, or discovered by the cries of struggling distress. By both 'you shall know ' him.'

Ovid was the leading topic in all three. His Fasti, translated by a silly schoolmaster named Massey; his Epistles, translated by a pedantic pedagogue named Barrett; and an antidote to his Art of Love, in an Art of Pleasing by Mr. Marriott; were the matters taken in hand. The Art of Pleasing so far suggested comparison with the Roman poet, 'that as one performance of Ovid 'was styled Tristia from the subject, Mr. Marriott's pro'duction should be styled Tristia from the execution; ' while the English Fasti induced not only hearty sorrow 'that our poor friend, Ovid, should send his Sacred Calendar to us by the hands of Mr. William Massey, 'who, like an ignorant footman, has entirely forgot his 'master's message, and substituted another in its room 6 very unlike it,' but a hope not less hearty that the said Mr. Massey would not for the future injure those poor 'ancients who never injured him, by pestering the world ' with translations that even his own schoolboys should 'be whipped for.' Nor with less just severity was the last of these unhappy gentlemen rebuked. With very lively power he dissected the absurdities of the English version of his poor classical friend's Epistles: a classic to all appearance, doomed, he humorously interposed, 'to success

' in Metamorphoses: being sometimes transposed by 'schoolmasters unacquainted with English, and sometimes 'transversed by ladies unacquainted with Latin: alter'nately wearing the dress of a pedant or a rake, and ' either crawling in humble prose or having hints ex'plained into unbashful meaning.' He shewed that Mr. Barrett was a bad critic, and no poet; and he passed from lofty to low in his illustrations, with very amusing effect. 'Parenthetically clapping one sentence within another,' seemed Mr. Barrett's great accomplishment; and this, said Goldsmith, 'contributes not a little to obscurity; and obscurity, we all know, is nearly allied to admiration. 'Thus, when the reader begins a sentence which he finds 'pregnant with another, which still teems with a third, ' and so on, he feels the same surprise which a country'man does at Bartholomew fair. Hocus shows a bag, in appearance empty; slap, and out come a dozen new laid eggs; slap again, and the number is doubled; but what ' is his amazement, when it swells with the hen that laid 'them!' The poetry and scholarship shared their fate. of the thriving grammar-school of Ashford in Kent, and having the consequence and pretension of a so-called learned man, we are not going,' said Goldsmith, 'to 'permit an ostentation of learning to pass for merit, nor 'to give a pedant quarter on the score of his industry, 'even though he took refuge behind Arabic, and pow'dered his hair with Hieroglyphics.'

criticism disposed of, the

Mr. Barrett being master

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 rose 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 men; and could sincerely 'wish that those whose greatest sin is perhaps the venial one of writing bad verses, would 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. For who that has a regard for the public, for the literary honour of our country, for the figure we shall 'one day make among posterity, 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? 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.' 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.

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; its miserable wretchedness was replaced by the decent comfort of a stable. The houses, crumbling and tumbling in Goldsmith's day, were fairly rotted down some twelve or fifteen years since; and it became necessary, for safety sake, to remove what time had spared. But