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the glimmering of light beyond. Even lower, therefore, than the school-room at Doctor Milner's, from which he had been taken to his literary toil, he thought himself now descended; and in a sudden sense of misery more intolerable, might have cried with Edgar,

O gods! who is 't can say 'I am at the worst'?

I am worse than e'er I was.

He returned to Doctor Milner's.

If ever again to return

to Literature, to embrace it for choice and with a braver heart endure its worst necessities.

There came that time; and when, eighteen months after the present date, he was writing the Bee, he thus turned into pleasant fiction the incidents now described. 'I was once induced to shew my indignation against the 'public, by discontinuing my endeavours to please; and was bravely resolved, like Raleigh, to vex them by burn'ing my manuscripts in a passion. Upon recollection, however, I considered what set or body of people would 'be displeased at my rashness. The sun after so sad an accident, might shine next morning as bright as usual; men might laugh and sing the next day, and transact 'business as before; and not a single creature feel any ' regret but myself. Instead of having Apollo in mourn'ing, or the Muses in a fit of the spleen; instead of 'having the learned world apostrophising at my untimely 'decease; perhaps all Grub Street might laugh at my 'fate, and self-approving dignity be unable to shield me 'from ridicule.' Worse than ridicule had he spared

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himself, with timely aid of these better thoughts; but they came too late. He made his melancholy journey to Peckham, and knocked at Doctor Milner's door.

The schoolmaster was not an unkind or unfriendly man, and would in any circumstances, there is little doubt, have given Goldsmith the shelter he sought. It happened now that he had special need of him: sickness disabling himself from the proper school-attendance. So again installed poor usher, week passed over week as of old, with suffering, contempt, and many forms of care. Milner saw what he endured; was moved by it; and told him that as soon as health enabled himself to resume the duties of the school, he would exert an influence to place his usher in some medical appointment at a foreign station. He knew an East India Director through whom it might be done. It was what he desired before all things, said Goldsmith fervently.

And now, with something like the prospect of a settled future to bear him up against the uncongenial and uncertain present, what leisure he had for other than school labour he gave to a literary project of his own designing. This was natural: for we cling with a strange new fondness to what we must soon abandon, and it is the strong resolve to separate which has most often made separation impossible. Nor, apart from this, is there ground for the feeling of surprise, or the charge of vacillating purpose. His daily bread provided here, literature again presented itself to his thoughts as in his foreign wanderings; and to

have left better record of himself than the garbled page of Griffiths' Review, would be a comfort in his exile. Some part of his late experience, so dearly bought, should be freely told; with it could be arranged and combined, what store of literary fruit he had gathered in his travel; and no longer commanded by a bookseller, or overawed by an old woman, he might frankly deliver to the world some wholesome truths of the decay of letters and the rewards of genius. In this spirit he conceived the Enquiry into the Present State of Polite Learning in Europe. And if he had reason bitterly to feel, in his own case, that he had failed to break down the barriers which encircled the profession of literature, here might a helping hand be stretched forth to the relief of others, still struggling for a better fate in its difficult environments.

With this design another expectation arose that the publication, properly managed, might give him means for the outfit his appointment would render necessary. And he bethought him of his Irish friends. The zeal so lately professed might now be exerted with effect, nor plague their pockets or his pride. In those days, and indeed till the Act of Union was passed, the English writer had no copyright in Ireland: it being a part of the independence of Irish booksellers to steal from English authors, and of the Irish parliament to protect the theft: just as, not twenty years before this date, that excellent native parliament had, on the attempt of a Catholic to recover estates which in the manner of the booksellers a Protestant had

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seized, voted all barristers, solicitors, attorneys and proc'tors, who should be concerned for him,' public enemies! But that serviceable use might be made of the early transmission to Ireland of a set of English copies of the Enquiry, by one who had zealous private friends there, was Goldsmith's not unreasonable feeling; and he would try this, when the time came. Meanwhile he began the work; and it was probably to some extent advanced, when, with little savings from the school, and renewed assurances of the foreign appointment, Doctor Milner released him from duties which the necessity (during the Doctor's illness) of flogging the boys as well as teaching them, had made more intolerable to the child-loving usher. The Rev. Mr. Mitford knew a lady whose husband had been at this time under Goldsmith's cane; with no very serious consequence.

Escape from the school might not have been so easy, but for the lessening chances of Doctor Milner's recovery making more permanent arrangements advisable. Some doubt has been expressed indeed, whether the worthy schoolmaster's illness had not already ended fatally; and if the kindness I have recorded should not rather be attributed to his son and successor in the school, Mr. George Milner. But other circumstances clearly invalidate this. In August 1758, Goldsmith again claimed facilities for decent correspondence, among the Graingers and Kippises and other tavern acquaintance, at the Temple Exchange Coffee House, Temple Bar.

Grainger, his friend Percy, and others of the Griffiths' connection, were at this time busy with a new magazine: begun with the present year, and dedicated to the 'great 'Mr. Pitt,' whose successful coercion of the king made him just now more than ever the darling of the people. Griffiths was one of the publishing partners in The Grand Magazine of Universal Intelligence and Monthly Chronicle of our own Times: and perhaps on this account, as well as for the known contributions of some of his acquaintance, traces of Goldsmith's hand have been sought in the work: in my opinion without success. In truth the first number was hardly out when he went back to the Peckham school; and on his return to London, though he probably eked out his poor savings by casual writings here and there, it is certain that on the foreign appointment his hopes continued steadily fixed, and that the work which was to aid him in his escape from literature (the completion of the Enquiry into the State of Polite Learning, or, as he called it before publication, the Essay on the Present State of Taste and Literature), occupied nearly all his thoughts. He was again in London, and again working with the pen; but he was no longer the bookseller's slave, nor was literary toil his impassable and hopeless doom. Therefore, in the confidence of swift liberation, and the hope of the new career that brightened in his sanguine heart, he addressed himself cheerily enough to the design in hand, and began solicitation of his Irish friends.

Edward Mills he thought of first, as a person of some

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