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after the Bee. He was writing for the Lady's Magazine, started not many days later, by persevering Mr. Wilkie, in the hope of propping up the Bee. He had taken his place, and would go to his journey's end. Since the Pleasure stage coach had not opened its door to him, he had mounted the waggon of Industry; not yet despairing, it might be, to be overtaken again by his old Vanity Whim; and, with such help, even hopeful to come up with the landau of Riches, and find lodgment at last in the Fame Machine. We note this pleasant current of his thoughts in the Bee's fifth number. There, in that last conveyance he places Addison, Steele, Swift, Pope, and Congreve; and, vainly stretching out a number of his own little blue-backed book to entice the goodly company, resolves to be useful since he may not be ambitious, and to earn by assiduity what merit does not open to him. But not the less cheerfully does he concede to others, what for himself he may not yet command. He shuts Fame's door, indeed, on Arthur Murphy, but opens it to Hume and to Johnson: he closes it against Smollett's History, but opens it to his Peregrine Pickle and his Roderick Random. And with this paper, I doubt not, began his first fellowship of letters in a higher than the Grub-street region. Shortly after this, I trace Smollett to his door; and, for what he had said of the author of the Rambler, Johnson soon grasped his hand. "This was a very grave personage, whom at some distance I took for one of the 'most reserved and even disagreeable figures I had seen;

'but as he approached, his appearance improved; and 'when I could distinguish him thoroughly, I perceived 'that in spite of the severity of his brow, he had one ' of the most goodnatured countenances that could be 'imagined.' In that sentence lay the germ of one of the pleasantest of literary friendships.

The poor essayist's habits, however, know little change as yet. His single chair and his window-bench have but to accommodate Mr. Wilkie's devil, waiting for proofs; or Mr. Wilkie himself, resolute for arrears of copy. The landlady of Green Arbour Court remembered one festivity there, which seems to have been highly characteristic.

gentleman' called on a certain evening, and asking to see her lodger, went unannounced up stairs. She then heard Goldsmith's room door pushed open, closed again sharply from within, and the key turned in the lock; after this, the sound of a somewhat noisy altercation reached her; but it soon subsided; and to her surprise, not unmingled with alarm, the perfect silence that followed continued for more than three hours. It was a great relief to her, she said, when the door was again opened, and the 'gentleman,' descending more cheerfully than he had entered, sent her out to a neighbouring tavern for some supper. Mr. Wilkie or Mr. Pottinger had obtained his arrears, and could afford a little comforting reward to the starving author.

Perhaps he carried off with him that mirthful paper on the Clubs of London, to which a pleasant imagination most

loved to pay festive visits on solitary and supperless

days. Perhaps that paper on Public Rejoicings for Victory which described the writer's lonely wanderings a few nights before, from Ludgate Hill to Charing Cross, through crowded and illuminated streets, past Punch houses and Coffee houses, and where excited shoe-makers, thinking wood to be nothing like leather, were asking with frightful oaths what ever would become of religion if the wooden-soled French papishes came over! Perhaps that more affecting lonely journey through the London streets, which the Bee soon after published with the title of the City Night Piece, in which there was so much of the past struggle and the lesson it had left, so much of the grieftaught sympathy, so much of the secret of the genius, of tolerant, gentle-hearted Goldsmith. What he was to the end of his London life, when miserable outcasts had cause with the great and learned to lament him, this paper shews him to have been at its beginning. The kind-hearted man would wander through the streets at night, to console and reassure the misery he could not otherwise give help to. While he thought of the rich and happy who were at rest; while he looked even up to the wretched roof that gave shelter to himself; he could not bear to think of those to whom the streets were the only home. Stran'gers, wanderers, and orphans,' too destitute for redress, too wretched for pity. 'Poor shivering girls' who had seen happier days, and been flattered into beauty and into sin. Poor houseless creatures,' to whom the world,

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responsible for their guilt, gives reproaches but will not give relief. These were teachers in life's truths, who

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spoke with a sterner and wiser voice than that of mere personal sorrow. 'The slightest misfortunes of the great, 'the most imaginary uneasiness of the rich, are aggravated 'with all the power of eloquence to engage attention;

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poor weep unheeded, persecuted by every subordinate species of tyranny, and every law which gives others 'security becomes an enemy to them.' In thoughts like these, and in confirmed resolution to make the poor his clients and write down those tyrannies of law, the night

wanderings of the thoughtful writer not unprofitably ended.

It was a resolution very manifest in his next literary labour. On the 29th of November, the Bee's brief life closed, with its eighth number; and in the following month its editor was sought out both by Doctor Smollett and by Mr. John Newbery of St. Paul's Churchyard. But as he had meanwhile made earnest application to Mr. David Garrick for his interest in an election at the Society of Arts, it will be best to describe at once the circumstances involved in that application, and its result on the poor author's subsequent intercourse with the rich manager and proprietor of Drury Lane.

Goldsmith was passionately fond of the Theatre. In prosperous days, it will ring with his humour and cheerfulness; in these struggling times, it was the help and refuge of his loneliness. We have seen him steal out of his garret to hear Columba sing: and if she fell short of the good old music he had learnt to love at Lissoy, the other admiration he was taught there, of happy human faces, at the theatre was always in his reach. If there is truth in what was said by a wise writer, that being happy, and seeing others happy, for two hours, is a duration of bliss not at all to be slighted by so short-lived a creature as man, it is certain that he who despises the theatre adds short-sightedness to short life. If he is a rich man, he will be richer for hearing there of what account the poor may be; if he is a poor man, he will not be poorer

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