THE CRAZY BRIDGE.

Some years ago there was a bridge at Bath, in so crazy a condition that cautious persons chose rather to make a long circuit than run the risk of crossing it. One day, however, a very nervous lady, hurrying home to dress for the evening, came suddenly upon the spot without, till that moment, remembering the danger. The sight of the bridge reminded her of its ruinous state, just as she was about to set her foot upon it. But what was she to do? If she went on, the frail arch might give way under her; to go round would be fatiguing, and attended with much loss of time. She stood for some minutes trembling in anxious hesitation; but at last a lucky thought occurred to her-she called for a sedan-chair, and was carried over in that conveyance!

You may laugh, perhaps, at this good lady's odd expedient for escaping danger by shutting out the view of it. But is not something of this kind happening around you every day? Those people who are alarmed and perplexed at the danger of having to judge for themselves in religious matters, think to escape that danger by choosing to take some guide as an infallible one, and believe or disbelieve as he bids them. What is this but crossing the crazy bridge in a sedan-chair? In determining to believe whatever their guide affirms, they are in reality choosing to make every single exercise of faith which follows that original determination; and they are choosing to believe him infallible into the bargain. There are at least as many chances of error as before against every single article of faith in the creed which they adopt upon their guide's authority; and there are also additional chances against that authority itself. Thus, in order to get over more safely, they put not only their own weight, but that of the sedan-chair also, upon the tottering arch.

THE LIGHT-HOUSE.

A ship was about to sail for a certain harbor, without the captain, who had been usually the commander, but who was then called to serve elsewhere. He came on board to take leave, and to warn the officers and others of the dangerous rocks and shoals which, to his knowledge, beset the entrance; exhorting them to keep a good lookout, and also to inquire carefully into the character of any pilot who might offer his services; as some, he was certain, were in league with wreckers, and would purposely steer the ship on rocks,

And if we were told, that all this time there was, to his knowledge, a light-house erected there as a sure landmark, and a ship could not go wrong that did but steer straight for that; should we not at once exclaim that, since he said not a word of this, he must be either a fool or a knave? And, on being assured that he was an eminently wise and good man, and thoroughly well-informed, we should say, "Then this story of the light-house must be a fiction."

And now look at Paul's farewell-Acts xx, 2931-to the elders at Miletus. We find him warning them that even from the midst of their own body-" of their own selves will arise men teaching a perverted gospel to draw away disciples after them."

Now, if there had been provided by the Most High any such safeguard as we have alluded to, if Paul had known of any order of men, any prelate, any particular Church, or general council, designed by Providence as an infallible guide, and a sure remedy against errors and corruptions, would he not have been sure, on such an occasion as this, to have given notice of it to his hearers? If, when he foresaw a perilous navigation for the vessel of the Church, he had known of a safe port, just at hand, and readily accessible, is it credible that he would have never alluded to it, but have left them exposed to the storms? Would he have been in that case "pure," as he declares he was, "from the blood of all men?" Can any one seriously think, that against the dangers which he had been warning them of, and weeping over, for three years, he knew of a complete safeguard, and yet was so wanting in his duty, so careless of their well-being, as never to make the slightest mention of any thing of the kind? To suppose this would be to suppose him destitute not only of all faithfulness in his high office, but of common prudence and rationality.

And yet if any such provision really had been made by the Author of our faith, it is utterly inconceivable that the apostle Paul should have been-and that too on such an occasion as thisleft in utter ignorance of its existence. Whatever may be the precise meaning of our Lord's promise, "Lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world," it is at least perfectly clear what it could not mean; it could not relate to something either unknown to Paul, or kept back by him from his hearers. All that he knew, and that it was for their benefit to learn, he had, as he solemnly declares, taught to them; and this was no less, he assures them, than "the whole counsel and design of God." "I take you to record this

day that I am pure from the blood of all men. For I have not shunned to declare unto you all the counsel of God. Take heed, therefore, unto yourselves, and to all the flock, over which the Holy Ghost hath made you overseers, to feed the Church of God, which he hath purchased with his own blood. For I know this, that after my departing shall grievous wolves enter in among you, not sparing the flock. Also of your own selves shall men arise, speaking perverse things, to draw away disciples after them. Therefore watch, and remember, that by the space of three years I ceased not to warn every one night and day with tears."

was one of the fellow-students of Goldsmith at Edinburgh. He was now secure from want; but to judge from the descriptions he has left of the calling in his writings, it was of all his shifts the most painful and degrading. "The usher," he wrote in the Bee, "is generally the laughing-stock of the school. Every trick is played upon him; the oddity of his manners, his dress, or his language, is a fund of eternal ridicule; the master himself now and then can not avoid joining in the laugh, and the poor wretch, eternally resenting his ill-usage, lives in a state of war with all the family."

The sketch of the usher he has drawn in the Bee, is a palpable self-portrait, and it is a mark of his simplicity, that he has generalized traits

THERE

VER GOLDSMITH.

HERE was an anomaly in Goldsmith's character, which has existed in no other celebrated personage in an equal degree. An Irishman by birth, he had most of the virtues, and not a few of the failings, which distinguish many of his nation-their love of low festivities, their blundering, their gullibility, their boastfulness, their vanity, their improvidence, and, above all, their hospitality and benevolence. But with this Hibernian disposition he was an author after the purest and soberest models-chaste in his style and language, and calm and rational in his opinion. Those who lived with him found it hard to believe that one so weak in his conduct and conversation could display much power in his writings, and, as we learn from Dr. Johnson, "it was with difficulty that his friends could give him a hearing." Posterity, on the other hand, who reverse the process, and judge him from his books, have been reluctant to acknowledge that the man "who wrote like an angel could have talked like poor Poll;" and there has been a tendency, of late years, to accuse his cotemporaries of combining to exaggerate his absurdities. But whatever be the explanation of the contradiction, there is abundant evidence that it was real. His works remain to speak for themselves; and the account of his foibles comes to us from such a variety of quarters, that to deny the likeness would be to undermine the foundations of biography itself. Even if traits originally ludicrous, were made broader in the repetition, the general temptation to indulge in a caricature of his weakness is itself a proof that the qualities existed in excess.

OLIVER AS USHER.

The early part of 1757 found him usher at the academy of Dr. Milner, of Peckham, whose son

doubtless often treated with disrespect, but the laugh which went round the juvenile circle, and extended itself to the solemn central figure of the group, was especially provoked by the diverting originalities which distinguished Goldsmith from the rest of mankind. The oddity of language to which he alludes in the Bee was his Hibernian dialect, and it was remarked by his friend, Mr. Cooke, that to the close of his life he was careful to retain it in all its original force. A curious instance of his ignorance of English pronunciation occurs in one of his early reviews, in which he takes a poet to task for making key rhyme with be. He had then no idea that it had any other sound than his native Irish kay.

OLIVER RETALIATES.

The tricks which the pupils played off upon Oliver, he retaliated upon the footman, who was weak in intellect and ludicrously vain. As he prided himself upon his eating and drinking feats, Goldsmith rolled some white cheese into the shape of a candle-end, and inserting a bit of blackened paper for a wick, he placed it by the remnant of a true tallow dip.

"You eat that piece of candle," he said to the footman, "and I will eat this."

Goldsmith set the example, and with a wry face ate up his cheese by mouthfuls. When he had nearly done, the footman swallowed his own piece of candle at a single desperate gulp, and began to triumph over the protracted nausea of his antagonist.

"Why, truly, William," replied Goldsmith, "my bit of candle was no other than a bit of very nice Cheshire cheese, and therefore, William, I was unwilling to lose the relish of it."

After practical jokes like these from a man of twenty-nine, it was an inevitable consequence that

usher Oliver and footman William should be treated by the boys with about equal respect. But the old halo of benevolence which surrounds him every-where shines out here, and his salary was usually spent, the very day it was paid, in charity to beggars, and gifts to the smaller boys. "You had better, Mr. Goldsmith," said Mrs. Milner, at last, "let me keep your money for you, as I do for some of the young gentlemen."

'In truth, madam," he replied, "there is equal need."

FINANCIAL TROUBLES.

His examination at Surgeons' Hall soon involved him in an additional misery. He had no clothes in which he could venture to appear before a tribunal composed of the grandees of the medical profession. He opened a negotiation with Griffiths, who, in return for four articles contributed to the "Monthly Review" of December, became security to a tailor for the requisite suit, which was to be paid for, or returned, on a stated day. The stated day came, and found the clothes in pawn, and the four books which Griffiths had sent him to review in pledge to a friend. The occasion which reduced him to this breach of his word, was the arrest of the landlord of his wretched lodging, to whom he was in arrear. The bookseller sent to demand the goods or their value, and, as Goldsmith could return neither, Griffiths wrote him word that he was a "sharper and a villain." In an answer full of woe, the miserable debtor begs to be consigned to jail. "I have seen it," he says, "inevitable, these three or four weeks, and request it as a favor-as a favor that may prevent somewhat more fatal." He denies the villainy, but owns that he has been guilty of imprudence, and of "the meanness which poverty unavoidably brings with it." The wrath of Griffiths was appeased by Goldsmith undertaking to furnish a "Life of Voltaire" for twenty pounds, from which the debt was to be substracted. The memoir, which was finished in a month, he himself called "a catchpenny," and it is certainly unworthy both of the author and the subject. Here closed forever his ill-starred alliance with the bookseller, who was the first to start him in his literary career, and the first to make him feel the bitter bondage of the calling.

HOW HE TOOK TO LITERATURE.

It was through the very excess of the darkness which had gathered around him that he worked his way into day. He ceased to indulge in the tantalizing expectations which had balked him so often, and, without further distractions, sullenly

assigned himself to the only business for which he was fitted. If he had succeeded in entering the Church, he would soon have sunk in the eyes of his parishioners to the level of his clerk. If he had satisfied the examiners at Surgeons' Hall that he could set a bone, he would still, we may be sure, have been a bungling operator, and the tormentor of his patients. He once threatened, when a Mrs. Sidebotham rejected his advice, and adopted that of her apothecary, to leave off prescribing for his friends.

"Do so, my dear Doctor," replied Beauclerk; "whenever you undertake to kill, let it only be your enemies."

This was one of the true words which are spoken in jest. Johnson summed up the case when he said that his genius was great, but his knowledge was small. "No man," ," he remarked again, "was wiser when he had a pen in his hand, or more foolish when he had not." He had never been a student, and he had not that aptitude for facts, and that tenacity of memory, which enables many desultory readers to furnish their minds without steady toil. The materials for his charming compilations were hastily gathered for the occasion, and, being merely transplanted, as Johnson said, from one place to another, without settling in his mind, he was ignorant of the contents of his own books. Thus in common things he was below mediocrity, and he was driven to be either a literary genius or nothing.

PICTURE OF GRUB-STREET.

The most complete picture which, perhaps, we possess of Grub-street life, has come down to us in connection with Goldsmith. The majority of distressed authors were too obscure to find a biographer. Those of greater pretensions had either started from a respectable position, or had quickly reached a higher eminence. A single unwieldy figure, in the person of Johnson, was seen moving for years among the crowd of ill-dressed, ill-fed, badly-lodged, and insulted tribe who provided the ephemeral literature and party pamphlets of the day, but maintaining, in the midst of his poverty, such unshaken fortitude, such lofty principles, and such ragged independence, that the characteristics of the class were very imperfectly shadowed forth in him. The portrait drawn by Mr. Forster, of the moral heroism and robust benevolence of this illustrious man, is one of the most attractive episodes in his book. Goldsmith, on the contrary, had the habits and tastes of the class. After he had emerged from his condition of obscurity, and had acquired celebrity, and was admitted to the society of men like Burke, Fox, Reynolds, and

former haunts.

"In truth," he said to Mr. Cooke, "one sacrifices something for the sake of good company, for here I'm shut out of several places where I used to play the fool very agreeably."

OLIVER AND THE WHITE MICE.

In evidence of his progress in detecting impositions, we are told that one Pilkington, who had long preyed upon the easiness of his nature, and had exasperated him by his conduct, burst into his room in ecstasies of joy. He apologized for the liberty, but his fortune was made, and he could not resist hurrying to impart the glad tidings to his best and earliest benefactor. The Duchess of Manchester had a mania for white mice. She possessed a pair, and for years had been offering enormous sums for a second. Pilkington had commissioned a friend in India, to send him two from the east; they were now in the river, on board the good ship "Earl of Chatham," and in proof of his story he pulled out the letter advising him of their dispatch. Nothing stood between him and independence, except the want of a suitable cage in which to present them, and he could no more raise the two guineas for the purpose than pay off the national debt. Goldsmith protested that a single half-guinea was all he had in the world.

"Ay," says Pilkington, "but you have a watch: if you could let me have that, I could pawn it across the way for two guineas, and be able to repay you with heart-felt gratitude in a few days.”

Pilkington must have resolved to have his jest, as well as his guineas, when he made poor Oliver the dupe of so gross a hoax. Two years elapsed, when he suddenly reappeared in a state of semiintoxication, at Goldsmith's chambers, and greeted him in the language of familiar friendship, at the unlucky moment when Topham Beauclerk and General Oglethorpe were honoring him with their company, and he was ashamed to seem intimate with the vulgar and disreputable importer of white mice. Pilkington had come to pay, not the guineas, but the "heart-felt gratitude."

"Here, my dear friend," he suddenly exclaimed, as he pulled a couple of little parcels out of his pocket, "is a quarter of a pound of tea, and half a pound of sugar, for though it is not in my power at present to return you the two guineas, you nor any man else shall ever have it to say that I want gratitude."

Oliver roused to anger, bid him begone; and he departed, carrying his tea and sugar with him. They never met again; but when Pilkington

CREDULITY OF OLIVER.

Mr. Cooke, who relates the anecdote of the white mice, has coupled with it another illustration of the extreme credulity of his friend. He appeared late and hungry at a club, and, having eaten no dinner, ordered a dish of mutton-chops for supper. His companions, to balk his eager appetite, drew their chairs from the table on the appearance of the dish, and gave sundry symptoms of disgust. Goldsmith asked anxiously if any thing was the matter with the chops; but they evaded the question, and it was only with much pressing that they were brought to tell him that the smell was offensive. He rang the bell, covered the waiter, who quickly caught up the jest, with abuse, and, for a punishment, insisted, at the suggestion of the company, that the man should eat the horrible viands himself. A fresh supper was prepared for Oliver, who, soon regretting the vengeance he had taken, ordered a "dram for the poor waiter, who might otherwise get sick from so nauseating a meal." What wild tales of things beyond his immediate cognizance would not a man believe who smelt the dish beneath his nose, by the assertions of his friends!

OLIVER CUTTING A FIGURE.

His enjoyment in all societies where he could freely give way to his natural impulses was immense. "He was always cheerful and animated," says Mr. Day, "often indeed boisterous in his mirth." He went to a dance at Macklin's, and was brought to such a pitch of ecstasy by this "frisking light in frolic measures," that he threw up his wig to the ceiling, exclaiming that "men were never so much like men as when they looked like boys." He prided himself on his dancing, which was not so graceful as it was hearty; and an Irish family of the name of Seguin, who were intimate with him at this period, were thrown into uncontrollable fits of laughter by seeing him go through a minuet. He loved to romp with children and join in their games. He would put the front of his wig behind to excite their merriment, play forfeits, and blind-man's buff, and show them tricks upon cards. younger Coleman remembered that when he was five years old, he had given Oliver a smart slap upon the face for taking him on his knee. The little vixen was locked up by his father in a dark room, whither Goldsmith soon followed with a candle, and wheedled Master Coleman back to

The

HISTORY OF ANIMATED NATURE.

In the intervals between his other engagements Goldsmith had, for some time, been continuing in his farm-house retreat the "History of Animated Nature." "It is about half-finished," he said to Langton in the letter of September, 1771, "and I will shortly finish the rest. God knows, I am tired of this kind of finishing, which is but bungling work." Boswell, in company with Mickle, the translator of the Lusiad, went to see him at his country lodging, in April, 1772. He was not at home, but they entered his apartment, and found curious scraps of descriptions of animals scrawled upon the wall with a black-lead pencil. Buffon was his principal storehouse for facts, and much of the work is an avowed translation from the eloquent Frenchman.

Goldsmith, sir," said Johnson, "will give us a very fine book on the subject, but, if he can distinguish a cow from a horse, that I believe may be the extent of his knowledge of natural history."

To observe for himself, and to recapitulate the observations of others, were such distinct operations, that, in spite of his want of a practical acquaintance with the science, he might easily be equal to a view of the popular parts of the study. He was a little credulous of marvels, and if his guides had gone astray, he of necessity copied their errors; but the volumes teem with delightful information, and of the literary merits of the narrative, it is enough to say that it was written by Goldsmith.

THE MONEY SPENT.

The purchase-money of the "History of Animated Nature" was spent before it was earned. The work was not finished till Goldsmith was within a foot of the grave, nor published till after his death, and throughout the interval which elapsed, from its commencement to its conclusion,

it continued to be one of his worst embarrassments. | He had still to provide for the wants of the passing hour, and numerous were the schemes he attempted or proposed. He was in arrears to the younger Newberry, to whom he made over the copy-right of "She Stoops to Conquer,” in partial satisfaction of a debt which he had previously promised to discharge, by another such tale as the "Vicar of Wakefield." The specimen which he furnished proved to be a narrative version of the "Good-Natured Man," and was declined by the publisher.

To

In some emergency in 1773 he borrowed forty pounds of Garrick, and not long afterward he sent him a note, which bears manifest marks of having been written in agitation and distress, in which he requests him to make the debt a hundred. propitiate his creditor he offered to remodel the "Good-Natured Man" in accordance with the original proposal of the manager when they quarreled upon the subject. "I will give you a new character," Goldsmith said, "and knock out Lofty, which does not do, and will make such other alterations as you suggest." Garrick promised the money, but gave no encouragement to the scheme for recasting the play. The thanks of Goldsmith were warm, and to show his gratitude, he added, "I shall have a comedy for you in a season or two, at farthest, that I believe will be worth your acceptance, for I fancy I will make it a fine thing." Both these notes are indorsed by Garrick, "Goldsmith's palaver;" and it is likely enough that his distresses enticed him into promises and professions, which, though meant at the moment, were quickly forgotten.

EPITAPH BY GARRICK.

In the midst of these shifts and sorrows, a trivial incident occurred which produced one of the happiest effusions of Goldsmith's pen, and afforded a fresh proof of the versatility of his talents. He insisted one evening, at the Literary Club, on competing with Garrick in epigram, and each agreed to write the other's epitaph. The actor exclaimed, on the instant, that his was ready, and he produced extempore the couplet which is as widely known as the name of Goldsmith himself:

"Here lies Nolly Goldsmith, for shortness call'd Noll, Who wrote like an angel, but talk'd like poor Poll.”

Abashed at the laugh which ensued, "poor Poll" was unable to produce a retort. The company pursued the idea which had been started, and either then or afterward several of them wrote epitaphs upon their standing butt in a similar vein. Goldsmith in the interim was not