added, on the day he received it; in relief to beggars,

This is putting the best face upon the matter, as it was natural Miss Milner should. But in sober fact, it was even his bitterest time, this Peckham time. He could think in after years of his beggary, but not of his slavery, without shame. Oh, that is all a holiday at Peckham,' said one of the Langtons carelessly, in the common proverbial phrase: but Goldsmith reddened, and asked if it was meant to offend him. Nor can we fail to recall the tone in which he afterwards alluded to this mode of life. When, two years later, he tried to persuade people that a schoolmaster was of more importance in the state than to be neglected and left to starve, he described what he had known too well. The usher is generally the laughing'stock of the school. Every trick is played upon him; 'the oddity of his manner, his dress, or his language, is a 'fund of eternal ridicule; the master himself now and then

'cannot avoid joining in the laugh; and the poor wretch, 'eternally resenting this ill usage, lives in a state of war 'with all the family. This is a very proper person, is it 'not, to give children a relish for learning? They must 'esteem learning very much, when they see its professors 'used with such ceremony?" So, too, and with more direct reason, was it understood to refer to the Peckham discomforts, when he talked of the poor usher obliged to sleep in the same bed with the French teacher, who 'disturbs him for an hour every night in papering and 'filleting his hair; and stinks worse than a carrion with 'his rancid pomatums, when he lays his head beside him. 'on the bolster.' Who will not think, moreover, of George Primrose and his cousin? Ay!' cried he, this 'is indeed a very pretty career that has been chalked out 'for you. I have been an usher at a boarding-school 'myself; and may I die by an anodyne necklace, but I 'had rather be under-turnkey in Newgate. I was up 'early and late: I was browbeat by the master, hated for 'my ugly face by the mistress, worried by the boys.' Finally, in the only anecdote that rests on other safe authority than Miss Milner's, there is quite sufficient reason in fact, for adoption of the same tone.

Mr. Samuel Bishop, whose sons have had distinction in the church, was a Peckham scholar, and Mr. Prior tells the story as he had it from one of the sons. 'When 'amusing his younger companions during play hours 'with the flute, and expatiating on the pleasures derived

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'from music, in addition to its advantages in society as a 'gentlemanlike acquirement, a pert boy, looking at his 'situation and personal disadvantages with something of 'contempt, rudely replied to the effect that he surely could 'not consider himself a gentleman: an offence which, ' though followed by chastisement, disconcerted and pained 'him extremely.' That the pain of this period of his life could yet on occasion be forgotten, in what a happy nature found better worth remembering, may be gathered from the same authority. When the despised usher was a celebrated man, young Bishop, walking in London with his newly-married wife, met his old teacher. Goldsmith recognised him instantly, as a lad he had been fond of at Peckham, and embraced him with delight. His joy increased when Mr. Bishop made known his wife; but the introduction had not unsettled the child's image in the kind man's heart. It was still the boy before him; still Master Bishop; the lad he used to cram with fruit and sweetmeats, to the judicious horror of the Milners. 'Come, my boy,' he said, as his eye fell upon a basketwoman standing at the corner of the street, Come, Sam, 'I am delighted to see you. I must treat you to some'thing. What shall it be? Will you have some apples?

Sam,' added Goldsmith, suddenly, 'have you seen my 'picture by Sir Joshua Reynolds? Have you seen it,

Sam? Have you got an engraving?' Not to appear negligent of the rising fame of his old preceptor, says the teller of the story, my father replied that he had not

'yet procured it; he was just furnishing his house; but 'he had fixed upon the spot the print was to occupy as 'soon as he was ready to receive it.' 'Sam,' returned Goldsmith with some emotion, if your picture had been 'published, I should not have waited an hour without 'having it.'

But let me not anticipate these better days. He is still the Peckham usher, and humble sitter at Doctor Milner's board; where it chanced that Griffiths the bookseller, who had started the Monthly Review eight years before, dined one April day. Doctor Milner was one of his contributors; there was opposition in the field; Archibald Hamilton the bookseller, with the powerful aid of Smollett, had set afloat the Critical Review; the talk of the table turned upon this, and some remarks by the usher attracted the attention of Griffiths. He took him aside: 'Could he furnish a few specimens of criticism?' The offer was accepted, and the specimens; and before the close of April, 1757, Goldsmith was bound by Griffiths in an agreement for one year. He was to leave Doctor Milner's, to board and lodge with the bookseller, to have a small regular salary, and to devote himself to the Monthly Review.

One sees something like the transaction in the pleasant talk of George Primrose. “Come, I see you are a lad ""of spirit and some learning, what do you think of commencing author, like me? You have read in books, ""no doubt, of men of genius starving at the trade: at

"" present I'll show you forty very dull fellows about town "that live by it in opulence. All honest, jog-trot men, ""who go on smoothly and dully, and write history and "politics, and are praised: men, sir, who, had they been ""bred cobblers, would all their lives have only mended ""shoes, but never made them." Finding that there was

no great degree of gentility affixed to the character of an 'usher, I resolved to accept his proposal; and having the 'highest respect for literature, hailed the antiqua mater ' of Grub Street with reverence. I thought it my glory 'to pursue a track which Dryden and Otway trod before 'me.' The difference of fact and fiction here will be, that glory had nothing to do with this matter. Griffiths and glory were not to be thought of together. The sorrowful road seemed the last that was left to him and he entered it.

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On this track, then, taken by few successfully, taken happily by few, though not on that account the less in every age the choice of men of genius, we see Goldsmith, in his twenty-ninth year, without choice, in sheer and bare necessity, launched for the first time. The prospect of unusual gloom might have damped the ardour of a more cheerful adventurer.

FIELDING had died in shattered hope and fortune, at what should have been his prime of life, three years before. Within the next two years, poor and mad, COLLINS was fated to descend to his early grave. SMOLLETT was toughly fighting for his every-day's existence. JOHNSON, within