ciency. Not with any sense of triumph over living competitors, did he listen to the praise he loved; not of being better than Hogarth, or than Gainsborough, or than his old master Hudson, was he thinking continually, but of the glory of being one day placed by the side of Vandyke and of Rubens. Undoubtedly he must be said to have overrated the effects of education, study, and the practice of schools; and it is matter of much regret that he should never have thought of Hogarth but as a moral satirist and man of wit, or sought for his favourite art the dignity of a closer alliance with such philosophy and genius. But the difficult temper of Hogarth himself cannot be kept out of view. His very virtues had a stubbornness and a dogmatism that repelled. What Reynolds most desired, to bring men of their common calling together, and by consent and union, by study and co-operation, establish claims to respect and continuance, Hogarth had been all his life opposing; and was now, at the close of life, standing of his own free choice apart and alone. Study the great works of the great masters for ever, said Reynolds; there is only one school, cried Hogarth, and that is kept by Nature. What was uttered on the one side of Leicester Square, was pretty sure to be contradicted on the other; and neither would make the advance which might have reconciled the views of both. Be it remembered, at the same time, that Hogarth, in the daring confidence of his more astonishing genius, kept himself at the farthest extreme. 'Talk of sense, and study, and all

'that,' he said to Walpole, 'why, it is owing to the good 'sense of the English that they have not painted better. 'The most ignorant people about painting are the painters 'themselves. There's Reynolds, who certainly has genius; 'why but t' other day he offered a hundred pounds for a 'picture that I would not hang in my cellar.' Reynolds might have some excuse if he turned from this with a smile, and a supposed confirmation of his error that the critic was himself no painter. Thus these great men lived separate to the last. The only feeling they shared in common may have been that kindness to Oliver Goldsmith, which, after their respective fashion, each manifested well, The one, with his ready help and robust example, would have strengthened him for life, as for a solitary warfare which awaited every man of genius; the other, more gently, would have drawn him from contests and solitude, from discontents and low esteem, to the sense that worldly consideration and social respect might gladden even literary toil. While Hogarth was propitiating and painting Mrs. Fleming, Reynolds was founding the Literary Club.

It did not receive that name till many years later: but that Reynolds was its Romulus, and this the year of its foundation, is unquestionable; though the meetings did not begin till winter. Johnson caught at the notion eagerly; suggested as its model a club he had himself founded in Ivy Lane some fourteen years before, and which the deaths or dispersion of its members had now

interrupted for nearly seven years; and on this suggestion being adopted, the members, as in the earlier club, were limited to nine, and Mr. Hawkins, as an original member of the Ivy Lane, was invited to join. Topham Beauclerc and Bennet Langton were asked and welcomed earnestly; and, of course, Mr. Edmund Burke. He had lately left Dublin and politics for a time, and returned to literature in Queen Anne Street; where a solid mark of his patron's satisfaction had accompanied him, in a pension on the Irish Establishment of £300 a year. Perhaps it was ominous of the mischances of this pension, that it was entered in the name of William Birt: the name which was soon to be so famous, having little familiarity or fame as yet. The notion of the Club delighted Burke; and he asked admission for his father-in-law Doctor Nugent, an accomplished Roman Catholic physician, who lived with him. Beauclerc in like manner suggested his friend Chamier, then undersecretary at war. Oliver Goldsmith completed the number. But another member of the original Ivy Lane, Samuel Dyer, making unexpected appearance from abroad in the following year, was joyfully admitted; and though it was resolved to make election difficult, and only for special reasons permit addition to their number, the limitation. at first proposed was thus of course done away with. Twenty was the highest number reached during Goldsmith's life; and this in the course of ten years. The place of meeting was the Turk's Head tavern in Gerrard Street

Soho, where, the chair being taking every Monday night at seven o'clock by a member in rotation, all were expected to attend and sup together. In the ninth year of their existence, they changed their day of meeting to Friday; and in place of their weekly supper, resolved to dine together once a fortnight during the meeting of parliament. Each member present was to bear his share of the reckoning; and conversation, from which politics only were excluded, was kept up always to a late hour.

So originated and was formed that famous Club, which had made itself a name in literary history long before it received, at Garrick's funeral, the name of the Literary Club by which it is now known. Its meetings were noised abroad; the fame of its conversations received eager addition from the difficulty of obtaining admission to it; and it came to be as generally understood that Literature had fixed her social head-quarters here, as that Politics reigned supreme at Wildman's or the Cocoa Tree. With advantage, let me add, to the dignity and worldly consideration of men of letters themselves. 'I believe

Mr. Fox will allow me to say,' remarked the Bishop of Asaph, when the society was not more than fifteen years old, 'that the honour of being elected into the Turk's Head Club is not inferior to that of being the repre'sentative of Westminster or Surrey.' The bishop had just been elected; but into such lusty independance had the Club sprung up thus early, that bishops, even Lords Chancellors, were known to have knocked for admission

unsuccessfully; and on the night of St. Asaph's election, Lord Camden and the Bishop of Chester were blackballed. Shall we wonder if distinction in a society such as this, should open a new life to Goldsmith?

His claim to enter it would seem to have been somewhat canvassed, at first, by one of the members. 'As he 'wrote for the booksellers,' says Hawkins, we at the Club 'looked on him as a mere literary drudge, equal to the 'task of compiling and translating, but little capable of 'original, and still less of poetical composition: he had, 'nevertheless, unknown to us'. . . I need not anticipate what it was that so startled Hawkins with its unknown progress: the reader has already intimation of it. It is, however, more than probable, whatever may have been thought of Goldsmith's drudgery, that this extremely low estimate of his capacity was limited to Mr. Hawkins, whose opinions were seldom popular with the other members of the Club. Early associations clung hard to Johnson, and, for the sake of these, Hawkins was borne with to the last; but in the newly-formed society, even Johnson admitted him to be out of place. Neither in habits nor opinions did he harmonise with the rest. He had been an attorney for many years, affecting literary tastes, and dabbling in music at the Madrigal Club; but, four years before the present, so large a fortune had fallen to him in right of his wife, that he withdrew from the law, and lived and judged with severe propriety as a Middlesex magistrate. Within two years he will be

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