penury or affluence, serious or gay, I am ever wholly thine.

London, Temple Exchange Coffee-house,

Temple Bar, Aug. 14, 1758.

OLIVER GOLDSMITH.

Give my-no, not compliments neither, but something [the] most warm and sincere wish that you can conceive, to your mother, Mrs. Bryanton, to Miss Bryanton, to yourself; and if there be a favourite dog in the family, let me be remembered to it.

LETTER IX.

TO MRS. JANE LAWDER.1

If you should ask why, in an interval of so many years, you never heard from me, permit me, Madam, to ask the same question. I have the best excuse in recrimination. I wrote to Kilmore from Leyden in Holland, from Louvain in Flanders, and Rouen in France, but received no answer. To what could I attribute this silence but to displeasure or forgetfulness? Whether I was right in my conjecture I do not pretend to determine; but this I must ingenuously own, that I have a thousand times in my turn endeavoured to forget them whom I could not but look upon as forgetting me. I have attempted to blot their names from my memory, and, I confess it, spent whole days in efforts to tear their image from my heart. Could I have succeeded, you had not now been troubled by this renewal of a discontinued correspondence; but, as every effort the restless make to procure sleep serves but to keep them waking, all my attempts contributed to impress what I would forget deeper on my imagination. But this subject I would willingly turn from, and yet, " for the soul of me," I can't till I have said all.

1 Goldsmith's cousin, daughter to uncle Contarine. Among the more doubtful verse attributed to the poet are some lines "To a Young Lady on Valentine's Day," which are supposed to have been addressed to Jane Contarine when Goldsmith was a youth.-ED.

I was, Madam, when I discontinued writing to Kilmore, in such circumstances, that all my endeavours to continue your regards might be attributed to wrong motives. My letters might be looked upon as the petitions of a beggar, and not the offerings of a friend; while all my professions, instead of being considered as the result of disinterested esteem, might be ascribed to venal insincerity. I believe indeed you had too much generosity to place them in such a light, but I could not bear even the shadow of such a suspicion. The most delicate friendships are always most sensible of the slightest invasion, and the strongest jealousy is ever attendant on the warmest regard. I could not-I own I could not-continue a correspondence; for every acknowledgment for past favours might be considered as an indirect request for future ones, and where it might be thought I gave my heart from a motive of gratitude alone, when I was conscious of having bestowed it on much more disinterested principles.

It is true, this conduct might have been simple enough, but yourself must confess it was in character. Those who know me at all know that I have always been actuated by different principles from the rest of mankind, and while none regarded the interest of his friend more, no man on earth regarded his own less. I have often affected bluntness to avoid the imputation of flattery, have frequently seemed to overlook those merits too obvious to escape notice, and pretended disregard to those instances of good nature and good sense, which I could not fail tacitly to applaud; and all this lest I should be ranked amongst the grinning tribe, who say 99 very true to all that is said, who fill a vacant chair at a tea-table, whose narrow souls never moved in a wider circle than the circumference of a guinea, and who had rather be reckoning the money in your pocket than the virtue of your breast. All this, I say, I have done, and a thousand other very silly though very disinterested things in my time, and for all which no soul cares a farthing about me. God's curse, Madam! is it to be wondered, that he should once in his life forget you, who has been all his life forgetting himself?

66

However, it is probable you may one of these1 days see 1 Prior prints "one of those days."-ED.

me turned into a perfect hunks, and as dark and intricate as a mouse-hole. I have already given my landlady orders for an entire reform in the state of my finances. I declaim against hot suppers, drink less sugar in my tea, and check1 my grate with brick-bats. Instead of hanging my room with pictures, I intend to adorn it with maxims of frugality. Those will make pretty furniture enough, and won't be a bit too expensive; for I shall draw them all out with my own hands, and my landlady's daughter shall frame them with the parings of my black waistcoat. Each maxim is to be inscribed on a sheet of clean paper, and wrote2 with my best pen; of which the following will serve as a specimen :-"Look sharp ;"" Mind the main chance;" "Money is money now;" ;""If you have a thousand pounds you can put your hands by your sides, and say you are worth a thousand pounds every day of the year;" "Take a farthing from a hundred, and it will be a hundred no longer.' Thus, which way soever I turn my eyes, they are sure to meet one of those friendly monitors; and as we are told of an actor who hung his room round with looking-glass to correct the defects of his person, my apartment shall be furnished in a peculiar manner, to correct the errors of my mind.

a

Faith! Madam, I heartily wish to be rich, if it were only for this reason, to say without a blush how much I esteem you; but, alas! I have many a fatigue to encounter before that happy time comes, when your poor old simple friend may again give a loose to the luxuriance of his nature, sitting by Kilmore fire-side, recount the various adventures of a hard-fought life, laugh over the follies of the day, join his flute to your harpsichord, and forget that ever he starved in those streets where Butler and Otway starved before him.1

1 Or perhaps Goldsmith wrote "cheek," in allusion to the "cheeks ” put into fire-places to reduce the consumption of coal.-ED.

2 66

Wrote," for written, will be found several times in the Poetical Scale,' see our vol. iv., and elsewhere in Goldsmith.-ED.

3 This our author re-tells of an actor-supposed to be Sheridan, the father of the dramatist-in No. VI. of the Bee;" vol. ii., p. 407.-ED. 4 These and other unfortunate literary characters are similarly alluded to in 'Polite Learning,' chap. x., the 'Bee,' No. VIII. (The Augustan Age of England '), and the Citizen of the World,' Letter XCIII.—ED.

And now I mention those great names-my uncle!—he is no more that soul of fire as when I once knew him. Newton and Swift grew dim with age as well as he.1 But, what shall I say ?-his mind was too active an inhabitant not to disorder the feeble mansion of its abode; for the richest jewels soonest wear their settings. Yet who but the fool would lament his condition! He now forgets the calamities of life. Perhaps indulgent heaven has given him a foretaste of that tranquillity here, which he so well deserves hereafter.

2

But I must come to business; for business, as one of my maxims tells me, must be minded or lost. I am going to publish in London a book entitled 'The Present State of Taste and Literature in Europe.' The booksellers in Ireland republish every performance there without making the author any consideration. I would in this respect disappoint their avarice, and have all the profits of my labour to myself. I must therefore request Mr. Lawder to circulate amongst his friends and acquaintances a hundred of my proposals, which I have given the bookseller Mr. Bradley, in Dame Street, directions to send to him. If, in pursuance. of such circulation, he should receive any subscriptions, I entreat, when collected, they may be sent to Mr. Bradley, as aforesaid, who will give a receipt, and be accountable for the work, or a return of the subscription. If this request (which, if it be complied with, will in some measure be an encouragement to a man of learning) should be disagreeable or troublesome, I would not press it; for I would be the last man on earth to have my labours go a-begging; but if I know Mr. Lawder (and sure I ought to know him), he will accept the employment with pleasure. All I can say if he writes a book, I will get him two hundred subscribers, and those of the best wits in Europe.

Whether this request is complied with or not, I shall not be uneasy; but there is one petition I must make to him and to you, which I solicit with the warmest ardour,

At this time Mr. Contarine had become imbecile from age. He died a few months later, aged about seventy-four.-ED.

2 When published the work was titled An Enquiry into the Present State of Polite Learning in Europe.'-ED.

and in which I cannot bear a refusal.

I mean, dear

Madam, that I may be allowed to subscribe myself, Your ever affectionate, and obliged kinsman, OLIVER GOLDSMITH.

Now see how I blot and blunder, when I am asking a favour.

Temple Exchange Coffee House, Temple Bar

August 15, 1758.1

LETTER X.

TO DANIEL HODSON, ESQ., AT LISHOY, NEAR BALLYMAHON,

DEAR SIR,

IRELAND.2

[No date, but written about November, 1758.]

You cannot expect regularity in one who is regular in nothing. Nay, were I forced to love you by rule, I dare venture to say I could never do it sincerely. Take me, then, with all my faults. Let me write. when I please; for you see I say what I please, and am only thinking aloud when writing to you. I suppose you have heard of my intention of going to the East Indies. The place of my destination is one of the factories on the coast of Coromandel; and I go in quality of physician and surgeon, for which the Company has signed my warrant, which has already cost me ten pounds. I must also pay 501. for my

This letter was first published by Prior, 1837, from the MS. correspondence of Malone with Bishop Percy, in Mr. Mason's collection. Though it appears to have been copied for Percy in 1809, that editor did not use it in his second edition of the Memoir and Works, 1812. Perhaps the proximate death of the bishop, Sept. 80, 1811, at the age of eighty-three, will account for this. Prior says the letter was copied by Malone "at the house of his friend, Mr. Metcalf, at Brighton, in 1809, from one in the possession of Mr. Carleton, nephew to the nobleman of that name, given to him by Mr. Mills, who received it from the family of the lady to whom it was written."-ED.

2 First published in the Memoir by Percy, whence Prior and the other editors have it. Percy dates it "the summer of 1758," but Prior's estimate of "about November" is probably nearer being correct.-ED.