discrepancies are not so great but that Johnson himself may be held accountable for them, to have been produced reluctantly, as a last resource; and it is possible, as Mrs. Thrale intimates, that it was still regarded as 'unfinished :' but if strong adverse reasons had not existed, Johnson would surely have carried it to Newbery. He did not do this. He went with it to Francis Newbery the nephew ; does not seem to have given any very brilliant account of the merit' he had perceived in it (four years after its author's death he told Reynolds that he did not think it would have had much success); and rather with regard to Goldsmith's immediate want, than to any confident sense of the value of the copy, asked and obtained the sixty pounds. And Sir,' he said afterward, 'a sufficient price " too, when it was sold; for then the fame of Goldsmith had not been elevated, as it afterwards was, by his Traveller; and the bookseller had faint hopes of profit by 'his bargain. After the Traveller, to be sure, it was 'accidentally worth more money.'

On the poem, meanwhile, the elder Newbery had consented to speculate; and this circumstance may have made it hopeless to appeal to him with a second work of fancy. For on that very day of the arrest, the Traveller lay completed in the poet's desk. The dream of eight years, the solace and sustainment of his exile and poverty, verged at last to fulfilment or extinction; and the hopes and fears which centered in it, doubtless mingled on that miserable day with the fumes of the madeira! In the excitement

of putting it to press, which followed immediately after, the nameless novel recedes altogether from the view; but will reappear in due time. Johnson approved the verses more than the novel; read the proof-sheets for his friend; substituted here and there, in more emphatic testimony of general approval, a line of his own; prepared a brief but hearty notice for the Critical Review, which was to appear simultaneously with the poem; and as the day of publication approached, bade Goldsmith be of good cheer.

"This day is published,' said the Public Advertiser of the 19th of December, 1764, price one shilling and six'pence, The Traveller; or a Prospect of Society, a Poem. 'By Oliver Goldsmith, M.B. Printed for J. Newbery in 'St. Paul's Church Yard.' It was the first time he had

announced his name in connection with anything he had written; and with it he had resolved to associate his brother Henry's name. To him he dedicated the poem. From the midst of the poverty which Henry could least alleviate, and turning from the celebrated men with whose. favour his own fortunes were bound up, he addressed the friend and companion of his infancy, to whom, in all his sufferings and wanderings, his heart, untravelled and unsullied, had still lovingly gone back. 'The friendship

'between us can acquire no new force from the ceremonies

' of a Dedication,' he said; 'but as a part of this poem

was formerly written to you from Switzerland, the whole can now, with propriety, be only inscribed to you. It 'will also throw light upon many parts of it, when the

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'reader understands that it is addressed to a man, who, despising fame and fortune, had retired early to happiness ' and obscurity, with an income of forty pounds a year. I 'now perceive, my dear brother,' continued Goldsmith, with affecting significance, the wisdom of your humble 'choice. You have entered upon a sacred office, where 'the harvest is great and the labourers are but few; while 'you have left the field of ambition, where the labourers ' are many and the harvest not worth carrying away.' Such as the harvest was, however, he was at last himself about to gather it in. He proceeded to describe to his brother the object of his poem, as an attempt to show that there may be equal happiness in States that are differently governed from our own; that every State has a particular principle of happiness, and that this principle in each may be carried to a mischievous excess: but expressed a strong doubt, since he had not taken a political side,' whether its freedom from individual and party abuse would not wholly bar its

success.

While he wrote, he might have quieted that fear. As the poem was passing through the press, Churchill died. It was he who had pressed poetry into the service of party, and for the last three years, to apparent exclusion of every nobler theme, made harsh political satire the favoured utterance of the Muse. But his rude strong spirit had suddenly given way. Those unsubdued passions; those principles, unfettered rather than depraved; that real manliness of soul, scorn of conventions, and unquestioned

courage; that open heart and liberal hand; that eager readiness to love or to hate, to strike or to embrace; had passed away for ever. Nine days earlier, his antagonist Hogarth had gone the same dark journey; and the reconciliation that would surely, even here, have sooner or later vindicated their common genius, the hearty English feeling which they shared, and their common cordial hatred of the falsehoods and pretences of the world, was left to be accomplished in the grave. Be it not the least shame of the profligate politics of these three disgraceful years, that, arraying in bitter hostility one section of a kingdom against the other, they turned into unscrupulous personal enemies such men as these; made a patriot of Wilkes; statesmen of Sir Francis Dashwood, Lord Sandwich, and Bubb Dodington; and, of the free and vigorous verse of Churchill, a mere instrument of perishable party. Not without reason on that ground did Goldsmith condemn and scorn it. It was that which had made it the rare mixture it so frequently is, of the artificial with the natural and impulsive; which so fitfully blended in its author the wholly and the partly true; which impaired his force of style with prosaical weakness; and controlled by the necessities of partizan satire, his feeling for nature and for truth. Yet should his critic and fellow-poet have paused before, in this dedication to the Traveller, he branded him as a writer of lampoons. To Charles Hanbury Williams, but not to Charles Churchill, such epithets belong. The senators who met to decide the fate of turbots were not worthier

of the wrath and the scourge of Juvenal, than the men who, reeking from the gross indulgences of Medmenham Abbey, drove out William Pitt from the Cabinet, sat down by the side of Bute, denounced in the person of Wilkes their own old profligate associate, and took the public morality into keeping. Never, that he might merely fawn upon power or trample upon weakness, had Churchill let loose his pen. There was not a form of mean pretence or servile assumption, which he did not use it to denounce. Low, pimping politics, he abhorred; and that their worthless abettors, to whose exposure his works are so incessantly devoted, have not carried him into oblivion with themselves, argues something for the sound morality and permanent truth expressed in his manly verse. By these the new poet was to profit; as much as by the faults which perished with the satirist, and left the lesson of avoidance to his successors. In the interval since Pope's and Thomson's death, since Collins's faint sweet song, since the silence of Young, of Akenside, and of Gray, no such easy, familiar, and vigorous verse as Churchill's, had dwelt in the public ear. The less likely was it now to turn away, impatient or intolerant of the Traveller.

Johnson pronounced it a poem to which it would not be easy to find anything equal, since the death of Pope. This was praise worth coveting, and was honestly deserved. The elaborate care and skill of the verse, the exquisite choice and selectness of the diction, at once recalled to others, as to Johnson, the master so lately absolute in