an eloquent baker, at the conclusion of one of which Goldsmith exclaimed to his companion, Derrick, "That man was meant by nature for a lord chancellor;" to which Derrick replied, "No, no, not so high; he was only intended for master of the rolls.' "The man actually became a magistrate in Middlesex, and, as was said, a firstrate one.

In 1762 Goldsmith quitted Wine-office-court, and took lodgings in the house of a Mrs. Elizabeth Fleming, in Islington. This was to be near his friend and publisher, Mr. Newbery, who resided at Canonbury-house, near to Mrs. Fleming's. Here he continued till 1764, chiefly employed upon job-work for his friend Newbery; amongst the most important, the Letters of a Nobleman to his Son, and the History of England. He used to relieve the monotony of his life by weekly visits to the Literary Club, of which Johnson, Burke, and Sir Joshua Reynolds, were principal members, and which was held at the Turk's Head, Gerrard-street, Soho.

Here, there is every reason to believe, occurred the event already alluded to, the threat of his arrest, and the sale of the manuscript of the Vicar of Wakefield, by Johnson, to liberate him. Of this story there have been various versions; Mrs. Piozzi, Sir John Hawkins, Cumberland, and Boswell, all relate it, all profess to have heard it from Johnson, and yet each tells it very differently. In all these stories, however, there is a landlady demanding arrears of rent, and bailiffs waiting to arrest if the money were not forthcoming. All agree that Goldsmith was drinking, most of them say Madeira, to drown his vexation; and Cumberland adds, that the landlady proposed the alternative of payment or marriage. Whether the latter point were really included in the demand is not likely ever to be known: but that Mrs. Fleming, who went by the name of Goldsmith's hostess, and is thus painted by Hogarth, was the woman in question, I think there can be little doubt; though Prior, the biographer, would fain exempt her from the charge, and suppose the scene to occur in some temporary lodging. There does not appear the smallest ground for such a supposition. All facts point to this place and person. Goldsmith had been here for at least a year and a half; for Prior himself gives the particulars of this landlady's bill reaching to June 22d. As it occurred in this year, and about this time,-for it is expressly stated that the Vicar of Wakefield was kept about two years by the bookseller unpublished, and it was not published till the end of March, 1766,-it could not possibly happen anywhere else. He could not have left Mrs. Fleming, or if he had, he could not have been away long enough to accumulate any alarming score. Here, on the contrary, everything indicates that he was in debt and difficulty. He had been at least a year and a half here, and might, and probably had, run a good way into his landlady's books. The biographer states expressly that Goldsmith was in great difficulties, and for some months was invisible,-said to have made a trip into Yorkshire. The biographer also shows that Newbery, the bookseller, generally paid the landlady for Goldsmith; but it comes out that Goldsmith was now also very far behind with Newbery, owing him

no less than 111.; and next comes an obvious dislocation with Newbery himself. It is a fact which does not seem to have struck the biographer, that when Johnson sold the manuscript of the Vicar of Wakefield, he did not sell it to Newbery, though Newbery was not only Goldsmith's publisher, but his own. He went and sold it to a nephew of Newbery's, Mr. Francis Newbery, of Paternosterrow. Now there must have been a reason for this; and what so likely as that Goldsmith having run too deeply into debt had alarmed Newbery-publishers are careful men-that he had not only refused to advance more, but had withdrawn his guarantee to the landlady. This being the case, Goldsmith would be at his wit's end. With long arrears of rent and board, for Mrs. Fleming found that too, the security withdrawn by Newbery, she would be alarmed, and insist on Goldsmith's paying. To Newbery he could not fly, and in his despair he sent for Johnson. Johnson sold the novel, but not to John Newbery. With him it would only have gone to reduce the standing claim, with another it could bring what was wanted, instant cash. What confirms this view of the case is, moreover, the fact that immediately after this Goldsmith did quit his old landlady, and return to London.

Canonbury-tower, or Canonbury-house, as it is indifferently called, is often said to have been a residence of Goldsmith; and the room is shown which he used to occupy, and where it is said he wrote the Deserted Village. The reason given for Goldsmith's going to live at Islington is, that it was a pleasant, rural situation, and that there he would be near Newbery, his publisher, who engaged with Goldsmith's landlady to pay the rent. Newbery had apartments in Canonbury-house, and here Goldsmith visited him. Anon, as his difficulties increased, he used to hide from his creditors in the tower, where he lay concealed for days and weeks. Very probably he was there all the time he was said to be gone into Yorkshire.

As to his having written the Deserted Village there, that is quite likely. It is equally probable that he might write there The Traveller, which was published at the end of the very year he left Islington. The Deserted Village was not published for five years afterwards, or in 1769; and was, if written at Canonbury, the fruit of a subsequent residence there in 1767. His fixed abode was then in the Temple; but he had apartments for part of the summer in Canonbury-house, and was visited there by most of his literary friends. On many of these occasions they adjourned to a social dinner at the Crown tavern in the Lower-road, where tradition states them to have been very jovial. It is not improbable that he wrote part of the Vicar of Wakefield at Islington too, having, as we see, completed it at the time of his threatened arrest, that is, at the close of his residence at Islington.

Canonbury-tower, at the time Goldsmith used to frequent it, was a fine airy place, in a sweet rural neighbourhood. Geoffrey Crayon says: "It is an ancient brick tower, hard by 'merry Islington,' the remains of a hunting-seat of Queen Elizabeth, where she took the pleasure of the country when the neighbourhood was all woodland.

What gave it particular interest in my eyes was the circumstance that it had been the residence of a poet. It was here Goldsmith resided when he wrote his Deserted Village. I was shown the very apartment. It was a relic of the original style of the castle, with panelled wainscot and Gothic windows. I was pleased with its air of antiquity, and its having been the residence of poor Goldy." Irving located his "Poor Devil Author" in this room of Goldsmith's, but represents him as soon driven away by the troops of Londoners. Sunday came, and with it the whole city world, swarming about Canonbury-castle. I could not open my window but I was stunned with shouts and noises from the cricket-ground; the late quiet road beneath my windows was alive with the tread of feet and the clack of tongues; and, to complete my misery, I found that my quiet retreat was absolutely a show-house,' being shown to strangers at sixpence a head. There was a perpetual tramping up stairs of citizens and their families, to look about the country from the top of the tower, and to take a peep at the city through the telescope, to try if they could discern their own chimneys."

The reason why Irving located his "Poor Devil Author" in Canonbury-tower, no doubt, was because it had been the resort of several such, as well as men of greater note,-Smart; Chambers, author of the Cyclopædia; Humphries, author of Canons, a poem, Ulysses, an opera, &c.

"Here Humphries breathed his last, the Muses' friend,
And Chambers found his mighty labours end."

See on the distant slope, majestic shows
Old Canonbury's tower, an ancient pile
To various fates assigned; and where by turns
Meanness and grandeur have alternate reigned.
Thither in latter days hath genius fled

From yonder city to repine and die.

There the sweet Bard of Auburn sate, and tuned
The plaintive moanings of his village dirge.

There learned Chambers treasured lore for man,
And Newbery there his A B C for babes."

One of these citizens who took a particular pleasure in a visit to Canonbury-tower was William Hone. The view of the tower in his Every-Day Book is very correct, except that there is now an iron balustrade round the top, for greater security of those who ascend it for the prospect. His account of it is as follows:

"Canonbury-tower is sixty feet high, and seventy feet square. It is part of an old mansion which appears to have been erected, or, if erected before, much altered, about the reign of Elizabeth. The more ancient edifice was erected by the priors of the Canons of St. Bartholomew, Smithfield, and hence was called Canonbury, to whom it appertained until it was surrendered with the priory to Henry VIII.; and when the religious houses were dissolved, Henry gave the mansion to Thomas Lord Cromwell. It afterwards passed through other hands, till it was possessed by Sir John Spencer, an Alderman and Lord Mayor of London, known by the name of 'rich Spencer.' While he resided at Canonbury, a Dunkirk pirate came over in a shallop to Barking creek, and hid himself with some armed men in Islington

fields, near the path Sir John usually took from his house in Crosbyplace to this mansion, with the hope of making him prisoner; but as he remained in town that night, they were glad to make off, for fear of detection, and returned to France disappointed of their prey, and of the large ransom they calculated on for the release of his person. His sole daughter and heiress, Elizabeth,* was carried off in a baker's basket from Canonbury-house, by William, the second Lord Compton, lord president of Wales. He inherited Canonbury, with the rest of Sir John Spencer's wealth, at his death, and was afterwards created Earl of Northampton; in this family the manor still remains."

In Hone's time a Mr. Symes, the bailiff of the manor under Lord Northampton, was residing in the tower. He had lived there for thirty-nine years. His mother-in-law, Mrs. Evans, wife to the former bailiff, told Mr. Symes that her aunt, Mrs. Tapps, a seventy year inhabitant of the tower, was accustomed to talk much about Goldsmith and his apartment. It was an old oak room on the first floor. Mrs. Tapps affirmed that he there wrote his Deserted Village, and slept in a large press bedstead placed in the eastern corner. Since Goldsmith's time the room has been much altered and subdivided. The house is still the residence of the bailiff of the manor.

Poor Hone lamented sorely over the changes going on in this once sweet neighbourhood. "I ranged the old rooms, and took perhaps a last look from the roof. The eye shrunk from the wide havoc below. Where new buildings had not covered the sward, it was embowelling for bricks, and kilns emitted flickering fire and sulphurous stench. Surely the dominion of the brick-and-mortar king will have no end; and cages for commercial spirits will be there, instead of every green thing."

"So, Canonbury, thou dost stand awhile;

Yet fall at last thou must; for thy rich warden
Is fast improving;' all thy pleasant fields
Have fled, and brick-kilns, bricks, and houses rise

At his command: the air no longer yields

A fragrance-scarcely health; the very skies

Grow dim and town-like; a cold creeping gloom

Steals into thee, and saddens every room;

And so realities come unto me,

Clouding the chambers of my mind, and making me-like thee."

One-and-twenty years have passed since Hone took this melancholy view of the changes going on round Canonbury-tower. There has been no pause in the process of housification since then. The whole neighbourhood is fast engulfing in one overflowing London. What a change since Queen Elizabeth used to come to this solitary tower, to hunt in the far-spreading woodlands around; or to take a view from its summit of her distant capital, and of the far-off winding Thames! What a change even since Goldsmith paced this old tower, and looked over green fields, and thick woods, and over the whole airy scene, full of solitude and beauty! There are still old gardens with their stately cedars, and lanes that show that they were

*For an account of this extraordinary woman, see "The Visits to Remarkable Places," vol. i. p. 318.

once in a rural district, and that Canonbury was a right pleasant place. But the goodly house of Sir Walter Raleigh, who grew enamoured of the spot from attending his royal mistress thither, is degraded to the Pied Bull, and long terraces of new houses extinguish one green field rapidly after another. Everything seems in a state of spreading and active advance, except the great tavern near the tower, whose cricketers and revellers used to din Washington Irving so much, and that now stands empty and ruinous; the very Sunday roisterers from the city have sought some more greenly suburban resort.

The last residences of Goldsmith in London were within the precincts of the Temple. He first took apartments on the library staircase, No. 2, Garden-court. This is now pulled down, and I suppose on the site stands the new library, for on going into the court you now find no No. 2, but only Nos. 3 and 4, looking odd and puzzling enough to the inquirer. Hence he removed to the King'sbench-walk; but the particular house does not appear to be known. Lastly, he removed to No. 2, Brick-court. His lodgings were on the second floor, on the right hand ascending the staircase; and are said to consist of three rooms, sufficiently airy and pleasant. With au imprudence which brought upon him deep anxiety, and probably hastened his end, he borrowed of the booksellers and of the occupier of the opposite rooms, Mr. Edmund Bott-a literary barrister, who was much esteemed by him, and became his principal creditor at his death, and the possessor of his papers-four hundred pounds, with which he furnished these apartments in an expensive manner. Here, also, he occasionally gave expensive suppers to his literary friends. Below Goldsmith, on the first floor, lived Sir William Blackstone, and is said there to have written his Commentaries. There were other barristers living in the Temple, especially a Mr. William Cooke, author of a work on Dramatic Genius, and called Conversation Cooke, with whom Goldsmith was on terms of intimacy. In this portion of his life, the accounts of him abound with the naïvetés of his talk and character, for which he is more famous with some people than for his genius. His bloom-coloured coat, with sky-blue linings, is still commented on by writers, who will never be able to comprehend the grand nobility of his nature. He was now visited by almost every man of note of the time; Johnson with his Boswell, Burke, Reynolds, Garrick, Percy, Sir Philip Francis, &c. Almost twenty years after his death these rooms became the scene of a tragical adventure, by a Miss Broderick shooting in them a Mr. Eddington, with whom she had formerly lived, and who took this desperate means of punishing his desertion.

These rooms are at the lower end of Brick-court, at the corner of the range of building on your right hand as you descend the court from Fleet-street. There seems to be a considerable mistake in Prior's account of them. Nearly all that he says appears to apply much more naturally to his rooms in Garden than in Brick court. In Garden-court, they most likely would be airy and pleasant, and there the anecdote of his watching the rooks might take place. It