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I entirely general in its intention, we were surprised to hear that this gentleman had imagined himself in any ' degree pointed at; as we conceive nothing can be more ' illiberal in a writer, or more foreign to the character of a literary journal, than to descend to the meanness of 'personal reflection.' Pity might be reasonably given to men humiliated thus; but Goldsmith withheld forgiveness. Private insults could not so be retracted; nor could imputations which sink deepest in the simplest and most honourable natures, be thus easily purged away. Mr. Griffiths was left to the consolation of reflecting, that he had himself eaten the dirt which it would have made him far happier to have flung at the Citizen of the World.

In what different language, by what different men, how highly and justly this book has since been praised, for its fresh original perception, its delicate delineation of life and manners, its wit and humour, its playful and diverting satire, its exhilarating gaiety, and its clear and lively style, need not be repeated. What is to be said of it here, will have more relation to the character than to the genius of its writer. The steadier direction of his thoughts, and the changing aspect of his fortunes, are what I would now turn back to read in it.

One marked peculiarity its best admirers have failed to observe upon; its detection and exposure, not simply of the foibles and follies which lie upon the surface, but of those more pregnant evils which rankle at the heart, of society. The occasions were frequent in which the

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Chinese citizen so lifted his voice that only in a later generation could he find his audience; and they were not few, in which he has failed to find one even yet. He warned the all-powerful English of their insecure tenure of the American colonies; telling them, with a truth as prophetic, that England would not lose her vigour when those colonies obtained their independence. He unveiled the social pretences, which, under colour of protecting female honour, are made the excuse for its violation. He denounced that evil system which left the magistrate, the country justice, and the squire, to punish transgressions in which they had themselves been the guiltiest transgressors. He laughed at the sordidness which makes penny shows of our public temples, turns Deans and Chapters into importunate 'beggars,' and stoops to pick up half-pence at the tombs of our patriots and poets. He protested earnestly against the insufficient pretexts that availed for the spilling of blood, in the contest then raging between France and England. He inveighed against the laws which meted out, in so much gold or silver, the price of a wife's or daughter's honour. He ridiculed the prevailing nostrums current in that age of quacks; doubted the graces of such betailing and bepowdering fashions, as then made beauty hideous, and sent even lads cockedhatted and wigged to school; and had sense and courage to avow his contempt for that prevailing cant of connoisseurship (your Raffaelles, Correggios, and Stuff') at which Reynolds shifted his trumpet. The abuses of

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church patronage did not escape him; any more than the tendency to superstition and imposture' in the 'bonzes and priests of all religions.' He thought it a fit theme for mirth, that holy men should be content to receive all the money, and let others do all the good; and that preferment to the most sacred and exalted duties should wait upon the whims of members of parliament, and the wants of younger branches of the nobility. The incapacities and neglect thus engendered in the upper clergy, he also connected with that disregard of the lower, which left a reverend Trulliber undisturbed among his pigs, and a parson Adams to his ale in Lady Booby's kitchen. Yet as little was he disposed to tolerate any false reaction from such indifference; and at the ascetic saints of the new religious sect, which had risen to put down cheerfulness and could find its only music in a chorus of sighs and groans, he aimed the shafts of his wit as freely, as at the over-indulging, gormandising priests of the Bishop's visitation-dinner, face to face with whom, gorged and groaning with excess, he brought the hungry beggar, faint with want, to ask of them the causes of his utter destitution, body and soul. Nor did he spare that other dignified profession, which, in embarrassing what it professed to make clear, in retarding with cumbrous impediments the steps of Justice, in reserving as a luxury for the rich what it pretended to throw open to all, in fencing round Property with a multiplicity of laws and exposing Poverty without a guard to whatever threatened or assailed it, countenanced and practised no less a false

hood. Almost alone in that age of indifference, the Citizen of the World raised his voice against the penal laws which then, with wanton severity, disgraced the statute book; insisted that the sole means of making death an efficient, was to make it an infrequent, punishment; and warned society of the crime of disregarding human life and the temptations of the miserable, by visiting petty thefts with penalties of blood.

He who does not read for amusement only, may also find in these delightful letters, thus published from week to week, a comment of special worth on casual incidents of the time. There was in this year a city campaign of peculiar cruelty. A mob has indiscriminate tastes for blood, and after hunting an Admiral Byng to death will as eagerly run down a dog. On a groundless cry of hydrophobia, dogs were slaughtered wholesale, and their bodies literally blocked up the streets. "The dear, ' good-natured, honest, sensible creatures!' exclaimed Horace Walpole; 'Christ! How can anybody hurt them?' But what Horace said to his friend, Goldsmith said to everybody publicly denouncing the cruelty; in a series of witty stories, ridiculing the motives alleged for it; and pleading with eloquent warmth for the honest associate Nor was this the only mad-dog-cry of the year. The yell of a Grub Street mob as fierce, on a false report of the death of Voltaire, brought Goldsmith as warmly to the rescue. With eager admiration, he asserted the claims of the philosopher and wit; told the world it was

of man.

its lusts of war and sycophancy which unfitted it to receive such a friend; set forth the independence of his life, in a country of Pompadours and an age of venal oppression; declared (this was before the Calas family) the tenderness and humanity of his nature; and claimed freedom of religious thought for him and all men. 'I

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am not displeased with my brother because he happens 'to ask our father for favours in a different manner from 'me.' As we read the Chinese Letters with this comment of the time, those actual days come vividly back to us. Earl Ferrers glides through them again, with his horrible passion and yet more ghastly composure. The theatres again contend with their Pollys and Macheaths, and tire the town with perpetual Beggars' Operas. Merry and fashionable crowds repeople White Conduit and Vauxhall. We get occasional glimpses of even the stately commoner and his unstately ducal associate. Old George the Second dies, and young George the Third ascends the throne. Churchill makes his hit with the Rosciad; and Sterne, having startled the town with the humour and extravagance of his Tristram Shandy, comes up from country quiet to enjoy popularity.

How sudden and decisive it was, need not be related. No one was so talked of in London this year, no one so admired, as that tall, thin, hectic-looking Yorkshire parson. He who was to die within eight years, unheeded and untended, in a common lodging-house, was everywhere the honoured guest of the rich and noble. His

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