1766.

Æt. 38.

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perhaps any man at his first appearance ever gained before. "His speeches have filled the town with wonder."

Ten days after the date of this letter came out an advertisement in the St. James's Chronicle, which affected the town with neither wonder nor curiosity, though not without matter for both to the members of the club.

" In

a few days will be published," it said, "in two volumes, "twelves, price six shillings bound, or five shillings sewed, "The Vicar of Wakefield. A tale, supposed to be written

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by himself. Printed for F. Newbery at the Crown in "Paternoster Row." This was the manuscript story sold to Newbery's nephew fifteen months before; and it seems impossible satisfactorily to account for the bookseller's delay. Johnson says that not till now had the Traveller's success made the publication worth while; but eight months were passed, even now, since the Traveller had reached its fourth edition. We are left to conjecture; and the most likely supposition will probably be, that the delay was consequent on business arrangements between the younger and elder Newbery. Goldsmith had certainly not claimed the interval for any purpose of retouching his work; and can hardly have failed to desire speedy publication, for what had been to him a labour of love as rare as the Traveller itself. But the elder Newbery may have interposed some claim to a property in the novel, and objected to its appearance contemporaneously with the Traveller. He often took part in this way in his nephew's affairs; and thus, for a translation of a French book on philosophy which the nephew published

* Boswell, ii. 320-1.

+ My opinion on this point is strengthened by a communication of Doctor Farr's to Percy. The Doctor, mentioning some instances of haste or carelessness in the Vicar, was told by Goldsmith that it was not from want of time they had not been corrected ("as Newbery kept it by him in manuscript two years before he published

after the Vicar, and which Goldsmith at this very time was labouring at, we find, from the summer account handed in by the elder Newbery, that the latter had himself provided the payment.* He gave Goldsmith twenty pounds for it; and had also advanced him, at about the time when the Vicar was put in hand (it was printed at Salisbury, and was nearly three months in passing through the press), the sum of eleven guineas on his own promissory note. The impression of a common interest between the booksellers is confirmed by what I find appended to all Mr. Francis Newbery's advertisements of the novel in the various papers of the day ("of whom may be had The Traveller, or a Prospect of "Society, a poem by Doctor Goldsmith. Price 18. 6d."); and it seems further to strengthen the surmise of Mr. John Newbery's connection with the book, that he is himself niched into it. He is introduced as the philanthropic bookseller in St. Paul's-churchyard, who had written so many little books for children ("he called himself their friend, "but he was the friend of all mankind "); and as having published for the Vicar against the deuterogamists of

the age.

So let the worthy bookseller, whose philanthropy was always under watchful care of his prudence, continue to live with the Whistonian controversy; for the good Doctor Primrose, that courageous monogamist, has made both immortal.

"it"), but for another reason. "He gave me (I think he said) £60 for the copy; "' and had I made it ever so perfect or correct, I should not have had a shilling 666 more."" Percy Memoir, 62.

* See post, chap. xiv. The book was a History of Philosophy and Philosophers, by Formey, whose Philosophical Miscellanies Goldsmith already had noticed in the Critical Review; see ante, 186.

1766.

Æt. 38.

APPENDIX TO VOLUME I.

A. (PAGE 12.)

DOCTOR STREAN AND THE REVEREND EDWARD MANGIN.

Strean was a physician who had taken orders. He died eleven years ago, at nearly ninety years of age. He then held the perpetual cure of St. Peter's in Athlone; but had in his early life succeeded Henry Goldsmith in the curacy of Kilkenny West, which the latter occupied at the period of his death, and, as he is careful to tell us, in its emoluments of £40 a-year," which was not only his salary, but continued to "be the same when I, a successor, was appointed to that parish." His relative by marriage, the Rev. Edward Mangin, to whose intelligent inquiries (the answers to which are published in an Essay on Light Reading, 12mo. 1808), we owe much of our knowledge of the poet's youth, still lives in Bath.

Thus far I had written in a note appended to my first edition, since when, on the 17th of October 1852, the life of Mr. Mangin closed at the ripe age of eighty-one. A "friend of forty years" thus wrote of him in the Standard newspaper of a few evenings later:

"Descended from a Huguenot family, who took refuge in Ireland from the "persecutions in the time of Louis XIV., and who rose to opulent and important "stations in their adopted country, Mr. Mangin had much of the manners of both "France and Ireland-foreign acuteness of conversation, with a remarkable share "of the pleasantry and good humour of the Irish gentleman.

"Educated at Oxford, for the Church, obtaining preferment in Ireland at an "early age, and always disposed to literature and society, no man could commence "his career under happier auspices, and no man enjoyed it with more manly "gratification. Possessing all the allowable indulgences of life without trouble, "and thus wanting the great stimulus to exertion, he published but little, and that "little rather as the overflow of a remarkably ingenious mind, than as the labour

"of study or the effort of invention. The lightness of such works naturally "destines them to float away with the current of authorship; but some of "Mr. Mangin's publications on Manners, Travel, and Character, will be preserved, "and now form the melancholy pleasure of friends, who retrace in them the liveliness, point, and force of his conversation.

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Marrying early, but soon left a widower, with an only daughter, worthy of him, and to whom he was affectionately attached through life; after a long "interval he married again, and has left two sons, like himself educated at "Oxford, and now in the Church.

Residing for many years in Bath, writing occasionally, and associating with all "the intelligent in that intelligent city; easy in fortune, and scarcely visited by the 66 common casualties of life, he rather glided through years than felt them.

"His death was like his life-tranquil. He walked out the day before, sat "with his family during the evening, retired to rest with no appearance of an "increase of illness, and slept undisturbed during the night. In that sleep, "between seven and eight next morning, he expired."

It will not, I trust, be thought unbecoming, notwithstanding its expressions complimentary to myself, to subjoin a letter on the subject of Goldsmith with which Mr. Mangin favoured me shortly after the publication of this book. Its personal information and anecdote may not be unwelcome to my readers.

BATH, Monday April 24, 1848.

SIR, I trust you will kindly pardon my freedom in venturing to "trouble you with this, for which the least bad apology I can offer is "the circumstance of your having kindly mentioned the writer in your "lately published delightful work The Life and Adventures of Oliver "Goldsmith.

"Your book will, beyond doubt, be generally sought for and relished; "and indeed cannot, I should imagine, fail of a place in the collection "of every one who has a taste for genuine poetry, and discernment "sufficient to approve of your labours in behalf of Goldsmith's renown.

"Excuse my pointing out a minute oversight in the early part of "your most interesting volume. I refer to a passage in which you "state my having addressed my inquiries to Doctor Strean 'twenty"'five years ago.' I lament to say that more than forty years have passed since I put my queries to the Doctor; whose letter in reply is, I observe, dated on the closing day of the year 1807, and was "introduced into a brief forgotten Essay on Light Reading published "in the spring of 1808.

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'Upon a different occasion, I have said that when he died, Strean's age was almost ninety: this is probably not correct; but I remember asking him once how old he was, and his saying that he could not answer me exactly, but that what he recollected longest was his "mother's giving him, when in a child's dress, a black ribbon to wear

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"round his waist, and repeating to him that it signified mourning for "King George's death. This, we know, occurred in 1760, when we may suppose the boy about seven years old; so, if born in 1753, or 1754, and living till 1837, he was certainly above four-score. He was a man of considerable attainments, and sundry resources; he was a well-grounded Greek and Latin scholar, and, which is more rare in Ireland, a good prosodian. He had a thoroughly mechanical "genius; he sometimes bound his own books; and had made, in a very workman-like manner, many articles of furniture in his parson66 age-house. He was an expert mathematician, and was valued as such 'by the learned Bishop Law, of Elphin, with whom he corresponded 66 on their favourite science. The good bishop had, besides, a high opinion of him as a regular and conscientious pastor.

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Through Strean, I made acquaintance, in 1798, with an old friend "of his, Anthony Devenish, who had been, I believe, Goldsmith's "school-fellow, and used to enlarge on the Bard's dexterity in the craft "of ball-playing.

"I also, in those times, met at Athlone a Doctor Nelligan, a cheerful, "shrewd little man, with much humour; and of him this story was in "circulation :-Some one argued in his hearing, that Goldsmith must "have written the Deserted Village in England, because the nightingale "is sketched in as a feature in his rural picture, and it is supposed that "there are not any nightingales in Ireland.

Nelligan's retort was, that his opponent's logic was defective; for, by his mode of drawing an inference, it might be shown that when "Paradise Lost was written the immortal author must have been in "Hell.

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"As to the name of the birth-place of the poet of Auburn, it is unquestionably Pallis; the word, so spelled, was transcribed from a "leaf of the Goldsmith family Bible; and the entry is concluded to be "in the hand-writing of Oliver's father.

"Your analysis of the Life and 'Strange surprising' Adventures of "Goldsmith appears to me most ingeniously devised and executed; "the idea strikes me as being eminently happy and new; and your "book might well have been announced as the history of Oliver Gold"smith's mind, for such it really is.

"You rather intimate, to my great gratification, that you do not "conceive Goldsmith to have been understood by the persons among "whom he usually moved; I own I have always thought he was not, "and that his ordinary deportment and powers of conversation are grossly misrepresented by several who have talked and scribbled so flippantly about his peculiarities and blunders. We had formerly at "Upham's Library here (once Bull's), an assistant in the establishment "of the name of Crute or Croot. He had filled the situation for many

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