1757.

He was not a strong man, as I have said; but neither was his weakness such that he shrank from the responsibilities Et. 23. it brought. When suffering came, in whatever form, he met

it with a quiet, manful endurance: no gnashing of the teeth,

66

'mean on which he 'conveyed' his person and free-agency to the uses of the said "Griffiths (or his assigns ?)—do not appear to have been much more dignified than "Smart's in the quality of the conditions, though considerably so in the duration “of the term; Goldsmith's lease being only for one year, and not for ninety-nine, "so that he had (as the reader perceives) a clear ninety-eight years at his own 'disposal. We suspect that poor Oliver, in his guileless heart, never congratulated "himself on having made a more felicitous bargain. Indeed, it was not so bad, "if everything be considered: Goldsmith's situation at that time was bad; and "for that very reason the lease (otherwise monstrous) was not bad. He was to have "lodging, board, and a small salary,' very small, we suspect; and in return for "all these blessings, he had nothing to do, but to sit still at a table, to work hard "from an early hour in the morning until 2 P. M., (at which elegant hour we pre"sume that the parenthesis of dinner occurred,) but also—which, not being an "article in the lease, might have been set aside, on a motion before the King's "Bench-to endure without mutiny the correction and the revisal of all his MSS. "by Mrs. Griffiths, wife to Dr. G. the lessee. This affliction of Mrs. Dr. G. "surmounting his shoulders, and controlling his pen, seems to us not at all less "dreadful than that of Sindbad, when indorsed with the old man of the sea; and "we, in Goldsmith's place, should certainly have tried how far Sindbad's method "of abating the nuisance had lost its efficacy by time, viz., the tempting our "oppressor to get drunk once or twice a-day, and then suddenly throwing "Mrs. Dr. G. off her perch. From that bad eminence,' which she had "audaciously usurped, what harm could there be in thus dismounting this 'old 66 woman of the sea?" And as to an occasional thump or so on the head, which "Mrs. Dr. G. might have caught in tumbling, that was her look-out; and might "besides have improved her style. For really now, if the candid reader will "believe us, we know a case, odd certainly, but very true, where a young man, an "author by trade, who wrote pretty well, happening to tumble out of a first-floor "in London, was afterwards observed to grow very perplexed and almost unintelli"gible in his style; until some years later, having the good fortune (like Wallenstein "at Vienna) to tumble out of a two-pair of stairs window, he slightly fractured his "skull, but on the other hand, recovered the brilliancy of his long fractured "style. Some people there are of our acquaintance who would need to tumble "out of the attic story before they could seriously improve their style.

"Certainly these conditions the hard work, the being chained by the leg to "the writing-table, and, above all, the having one's pen chained to that of "Mrs. Dr. Griffiths, do seem to countenance Mr. F.'s idea, that Goldsmith's period "was the purgatory of authors. And we freely confess that excepting Smart's "ninety-nine years' lease, or the contract between the Devil and Dr. Faustus, we "never heard of a harder bargain driven with any literary man. Smart, Faustus, "and Goldsmith, were clearly over-reached. Yet, after all, was this treatment in "any important point (excepting as regards Dr. Faustus) worse than that given "to the whole college of Grub Street, in the days of Pope? The first edition of the

1757.

or wringing of the hands. Among the lowest of human Et. 29. beings he could take his place, as he afterwards proved his right to sit among the highest, by the strength of his affectionate sympathies with the nature common to all. And so sustained through the scenes of wretchedness he passed, he had done more, though with little consciousness of his own, to achieve his destiny, than if, transcending the worldly plans of wise Irish friends, he had even clambered to the bishops' bench, or out-practised the whole college of physicians.

The time is at hand in his history, when all this becomes clear. Outside the garret-window of Mr. Griffiths, by the light which the miserable labour of the Monthly Review will let in upon the heart-sick labourer, it may soon be seen. Stores of observation, of feeling, and experience, hidden from himself at present, are by that light to be revealed. It is a thought to carry us through this new scene of suffering, with new and unaccustomed hope.

Goldsmith never publicly avowed what he had written in the Monthly Review; any more than the Roman poet talked of the millstone he turned in his days of hunger. Men who have been at the galleys, though for no crime of their own committing, are wiser than to brag of the work they performed there. All he stated was, that all he wrote was tampered with by Griffiths or his wife. Smollett has depicted this lady as an antiquated female critic; and when " illiterate,

bookselling" Griffiths declared unequal war against that potent antagonist, protesting that the Monthly Review

"Dunciad dates from 1727; Goldsmith's matriculation in Grub Street dates "from 1757 —just thirty years later; which is one generation. And it is "important to remember that Goldsmith, at this time in his twenty-ninth year, 'was simply an usher at an obscure boarding-school; had never practised "writing for the press, and had not even himself any faith at all in his own capa"city for writing." North British Review, ix. 198-200.

66

was not written by "physicians without practice, authors

66

66

1757.

without learning, men without decency, or writers without Et. 29. "judgment," Smollett retorted in a few broad unscrupulous lines on the whole party of the rival publication. "The "Critical Review is not written," he said, "by a parcel of "obscure hirelings, under the restraint of a bookseller and his "wife, who presume to revise, alter, and amend the articles occasionally. The principal writers in the Critical Review "are unconnected with booksellers, unawed by old women, "and independent of each other."* Commanded by a bookseller, awed by an old woman, and miserably dependent, one of these obscure hirelings desired and resolved, as far as it was possible, to remain in his obscurity; but a copy of the Monthly which belonged to Griffiths, and in which he had privately marked the authorship of most of the articles, withdraws the veil. It is for no purpose that Goldsmith could have disapproved, or I should scorn to assist in calling to memory what he would himself have committed to neglect. The best writers can spare much; it is only the worst who have nothing to spare.

The first subject I may mention first, though it takes us back a little. It was the specimen-review which had procured Goldsmith his engagement; and if the book was furnished from the bookseller's stores, it was probably the least common-place of all they contained. This was the year (1757) in which, after six centuries of neglect, the great, dark, wonderful field of northern fiction began to be explored. Professor Mallet of Copenhagen had translated the Edda, and directed attention to the "remains" of

* Critical Review, vii. 151; in a notice of Dr. Grainger's Letter to Dr. Smollett Occasioned by his Criticism upon a late Translation of Tibullus.

The book was in Heber's library when Mr. Prior obtained access to it.

1757.

Æt. 29.

Scandinavian poetry and mythology and Goldsmith's first effort in the Monthly Review was to describe the fruits of these researches, to point out resemblances to the inspiration of the East, and to note the picturesqueness and sublimity of the fierce old Norse imagination. "The learned on this "side the Alps," he began, "have long laboured at the "antiquities of Greece and Rome, but almost totally "neglected their own; like conquerors, who, while they

66

have made inroads into the territories of their neighbours, 66 have left their own natural dominions to desolation.' This was a lively interruption to the ordinary Monthly dulness, and perhaps the Percys, and intelligent subscribers of that sort, opened eyes a little wider at it. It was not long after, indeed, that Percy first began to dabble in Runic Verses from the Icelandic; before eight years were passed he had published his famous Reliques; and in five years more, during intimacy with the writer of this notice of Mallet, he produced his translation of Mallet's Northern Antiquities. In all this there was probably no connection: yet it is wonderful what a word in season from a man of genius may do; even when the genius is hireling and obscure, and labouring only for the bread it eats.

More common-place was the respectable-looking thin duodecimo with which Mr. Griffiths's workman began his next month's labour, but a duodecimo which at the time was making noise enough for every octavo, quarto, and folio in the shop. This was Douglas, a Tragedy, as it is acted at the Theatre Royal in Covent Garden. It was not acted at the Theatre Royal in Drury Lane, because Garrick, who shortly afterwards so complacently exhibited himself in Agis, in the Siege of Aquileia, and other ineffable dulness from

*Monthly Review, xvi. 377, April 1757. See ante, 91.

1757.

the same hand (wherein his quick suspicious glance detected no Lady Randolphs), would have nothing to do with the Et. 29. character of Douglas. What would come with danger from the full strength of Mrs. Cibber, he knew might be safely left to the enfeebled powers of Mrs. Woffington; whose Lady Randolph would leave him no one to fear but Barry at the rival house. But despairing also of Covent Garden when refused by Drury Lane, and crying plague on both their houses, to the north had good parson Home returned, and not till eight months were gone, sent back his play endorsed by the Scottish capital. There it had been acted; and from the beginning of the world, from the beginning of Edinburgh, the like of that play had not been known. The Poker Club* made their ecstacies felt from Hunter Square to Grub Street and St. James's, for no rise in the price of claret had yet imperilled the life of that excellent society. Without stint or measure to their warmth the cooling beverage flowed; and bottle after bottle (at eighteenpence a piece t) disappeared in honour of the Scottish Shakspeare, whom the most illustrious of the Pokers at once pronounced better than the English, because free from " unhappy barbarism; "—yes, because refined from the unhappy barbarism of our southern Shakspeare, and purged of the licentiousness of our poor London-starved Otway. It was veritably David Hume's opinion, and still

*The Poker Club was not so named till 1762. But the men spoken of in the text were precisely that select section of Edinburgh society, already existing as a club, which, on Scotland being refused a militia, called itself the Poker, "to "stir up the fire of the nation." See an account of it in Scott's notice of Home in his Prose Works (ed. 1835), xix. 283, and in Burton's Life of Hume, ii. 456.

+ Let me borrow here that exquisite burst of humour with which Johnson met Boswell's grave assurances that Scotch claret could really make a man drunk. "I assure you, sir, there was a great deal of drunkenness." "No, sir; there were people who died of dropsies, which they contracted in trying to get "drunk." Life, iv. 273.