to him; and few so well as Goldsmith had reason to know the great heart which beat so gently under those harsh manners. The friendship of Johnson was his first relish of fame; he repaid it with affection and deference of no ordinary kind; and so commonly were they seen together, now that Johnson's change of fortune brought him more into the world, that when a caricature of the Idler was threatened this summer by the Haymarket Aristophanes, the Citizen of the World was to be a puppet too. 'What is the common price of an oak stick, sir?' asked Johnson, when he heard of it. 'Sixpence,' answered Davies. Why then, sir, give me leave to send your 'servant to purchase me a shilling one. I'll have a 'double quantity; for I am told Foote means to take me off, as he calls it, and I am determined the fellow shall 'not do it with impunity.' The Orators came out without the attraction promised: attacking, instead, a celebrated Dublin printer, George Faulkner, who consoled himself (pending his prosecution of the libeller) by pirating the libel and selling it most extensively; while the satirist had the more doubtful consolation of reflecting, three years later, that his 'taking off' of Faulkner's one leg would have been much more perfect, could he have waited till the surgeon had taken off his own. It was the first dramatic piece, I may add, in which actors were stationed among the audience, and spoke from the public boxes. It had been suggested by a debating society called the Robin Hood, somewhat famous in those days, which used to meet near Temple Bar; with which the connection of Burke's earliest eloquence may make it famous still, since it had numbered among its members that eager Temple student, whose public life was now at last beginning with under-secretary Hamilton in Dublin; and to which Goldsmith was introduced by Samuel Derrick, his acquaintance and countryman. Struck by the eloquence and imposing aspect of the president, who sat in a large gilt chair, he thought Nature had meant him for a lord chancellor. 'No, no,' whispered Derrick, who knew him to be a wealthy baker from the city, only for a master of the rolls.' Goldsmith was little of an orator; but till Derrick went away to succeed Beau Nash at Bath, seems to have continued his visits, and even spoke occasionally; for he figures in an account of the members published at about this time, as a candid disputant, with a clear 'head and an honest heart, though coming but seldom to 'the society.' The honest heart was worn upon his sleeve, whatever his society might be. He could not even visit the three Cherokees, whom all the world were at this time visiting, without leaving the savage chiefs a trace of it. He gave them some 'trifle' they did not look for; and so did the gift, or the manner of it, please them, that with a sudden embrace they covered his cheeks with the oil and ochre that plentifully bedaubed their own, and left him to discover, by the laughter which greeted him in the street, the extent and fervour of their gratitude. Not always so grateful, however, did Goldsmith find the objects of his always ready kindness. One of the members of this Robin Hood was Peter Annet, a man, who, though ingenious and deserving in other respects, became unhappily notorious by a kind of fanatic crusade against the Bible, for which (publishing weekly papers against the Book of Genesis) he stood twice this year in the pillory, and was now undergoing imprisonment in the King's Bench. To Annet's rooms in that prison we trace Goldsmith. He had brought Newbery with him to conclude the purchase of a child's book on grammar by the prisoner, hoping so to relieve his distress; but on the prudent bookseller suggesting that no name should appear on the title page, and Goldsmith agreeing that circumstances made this advisable, Annet accused them both of cowardice and rejected their assistance with contempt. What the amount of Newbery's assistance would have been, or how much he was likely to have given for the Child's Grammar, it is difficult to say. For the 'completion of a History of England,' he had just given Goldsmith two guineas: which munificent payment was exactly contemporaneous with the completion of another kind of history, on more expensive terms, by Paymaster Henry Fox; from whom twenty-five thousand pounds had gone in one morning, at the formal rate of £200 a vote, to patriotic voters for the Peace. There is reason to believe (from another of the bookseller's memoranda) that the two guineas was for 'seventy-nine leaves' of addition to a school history, comprising the reign of George the Second, and paid at the rate of eight shillings a sheet. This payment, with what has before been mentioned, and an addition of five guineas for the assignment and republication of the Chinese Letters (to which Newbery assented reluctantly, and only because Goldsmith would else have printed them for the author'), are all the profits of his drudgery which can be traced to him in the present year. It needed to have a cheerful disposition to bear him through; nor was nature chary to him now of that choicest of her gifts. He had some bow of promise shining through his dullest weather. It is supposed that he memorialised Lord Bute, soon after Johnson's pension, with the scheme we have seen him throw out hints of in his review of Van Egmont's Asia; and nothing is more probable than that the notion might have revived with him, on hearing Johnson's remark to Langton in connection with his pension. Had this happened twenty years 'ago, I should have gone to Constantinople to learn 'Arabic as Pocock did.' But what with Samuel Johnson might be 'noble ambition,' with little Goldy was but theme for a jest; and nothing so raised the laugh against him, a few years later, as Johnson's notice of the old favourite project he was still at that time clinging to, that sometime or other, 'when his circumstances should be easier,' he would like to go to Aleppo, and bring home such arts peculiar to the East as he might be able to find there. 'Sir,' said Johnson, he would bring home a grinding 'barrow, which you see in every street in London, and think that he had furnished a wonderful improvement.' F But brighter than these visionary fancies were shining for him now. There is little doubt, from allusions which would most naturally have arisen at the close of the present year, that, in moments snatched from his thankless and ill-rewarded toil for Newbery, he was at last secretly indulging in a labour, which, whatever its effect might be upon his fortunes, was its own thanks and its own reward. He had begun the Vicar of Wakefield. Without encouragement or favour in its progress, and with little hope of welcome at the close of it; earning meanwhile, apart from it, his bread for the day by a full day's labour at the desk; it is his shame in crowds, his solitary pride' to seize and give shape to its fancies of happiness and home, before they pass for ever. Most affecting, yet also most cheering! With everything before him in his hard life that the poet has placed at the Gates of Hell, Pallentesque habitant Morbi, tristisque Senectus, he is content, for himself, to undergo the chances of them all, that for others he may open the neighbouring Elysian Gate. Nor could the effort fail to bring strength of its own, and self-sustained resource. In all else he might be weak and helpless, dependant on other's judgment and doubtful of his own; but, there, it was not so. He took his own course in that. It was not for Mr. Newbery he was writing then. Even the poetical fragments which began in Switzerland are lying still in his desk |