us remember what burden of knowledge those grandiloquent sentences of Gibbon had to carry ; what reach of empire they had to cover! Here be no pigmies, predicating the outcome of little factions, no discourse about the smallness of wordmeanings; but vast populations are arrayed under our eye. We cannot talk of the stars in their courses as we talk of the will-o'-wisps of politicians. Rome marching to its dissolution, with captive nations in its trail,* must put a lofty strain upon the page that records her downfall.

Through all, this corpulent, learned, dainty, keen-eyed, indefatigable little man, is cool-over cool; he has no enthusiasms but the enthusiasm of knowing things. No wrongs that he records seem to chafe him; his blood has no boilingpoint; his love no flame; his indignation no scorching power. A great, imposing, processional array of sovereigns, armies, nations-of the wise, the vicious, the savage, the learned, the good; but not a figure in it all, however pure or innocent, which kindles his sympathies into a glow; not one

*See, for instance, account of Julian's march, and of the taking of Constantinople.

so profligate as to make his anger burn; not one so lofty or so true as to give warmth to his expressions of reverence.

Yet notwithstanding, if any of my young readers are projecting the writing of a history, I strongly advise them to avoid the subject of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

Oliver Goldsmith.

And now we come to another member of our club, who reaped far fewer of the substantial rewards of life. Who, with any relish for the beatitudes of letters, has not tender reverence for the memory of Goldsmith? He was the youngest member of the club at its start, and yet the thirtyfour years he then counted had been full of change and adventure: he had wandered away early from the beautiful paternal home of Lissoy in Ireland; had studied in Scotland and in Leyden; had idled in both; had been vagrant over Europe; had tried medicine, tried flute-playing, tried school-keeping, tried proof-reading for the old shopkeeper, Samuel Richardson, and had finally landed in a court not

far from Johnson's, where he did work for the booksellers. Amongst this work were certain essays which attracted the old Doctor's attention by their rare literary qualities; and the old gentleman had befriended the author-all the more when he found him a man who did not befriend himself; and who, if he had only sixpence in his pocket (and he was not apt to have more), would give the half of it to a beggar. A little over-love for wine, too—when the chance of a tavern dinner came to him-was another weakness which the great Doctor knew how to pardon; and so Goldsmith became one of the original clubmen; Reynolds, with all his courtly ceremony, growing to love the man; so did Burke; but Boswell was always a little jealous of him, and Goldsmith caught at any occasion for giving a good slap to that sleek self-consequence which shone out all over Boswell

even to his knee-buckles and his silken hose. I do not suppose that Goldsmith contributed much to the weightier debates of the club, and can imagine him sulking somewhat if he found no good opening in the troubled waters in which to feather his dainty oar. Again there was an awk

wardness, partly self-consciousness, partly organic tremor, which put him at bad odds in promiscuous talk; to say nothing of the irascibility which he had not learned to control, and which sometimes put a stammer to the tongue; hence, Boswell says, "poorest of talkers;" but around in his chambers, with one or two sympathetic listeners only, and perhaps a bottle of Canary flanking him, and with a topic started that chimed with the emotional nature of the man, and I am sure he would have talked out a whole chapter of a new Vicar of Wakefield.

But whatever the tongue might do, there was no doubt about the pen; we find him even undertaking discourses upon Animated Nature,

and history of Greece or of Rome. Has he

then the plodding faculty, and is he a man of research? No; but he has the aptitude to seize upon the plums in the researches of others, and embody them in the amber of his language. He poaches all over the fields of history and science, and bags the bright-winged birds which the compilers have never seen, or which, if seen, they have classed with the gray and the dun of the spar

rows. His poetry, when he makes it, may not have so much of polished clang and witty jingle as the verse of Pope; it may lack the great ground-swell of rhythmic cadence which belongs to Johnson; but somewhere between the lines, and subtly pervading every pause and flow-there is a tenderness, a suave, poetic perfume, a caressing touch of both mind and heart which we cannot describe nor forget.

Of the original club-men, Goldsmith* died first, in 1774, at Brick-court in the Temple; he was forty-five years old, and yielded to a quick, sharp illness at the last, into which all the worries of a much worried life seemed to crowd him. He had been plotting new works, and a new life too; a getting away (if it might be) from the smirch that hung about him in the Temple corridors, out to the Edgware farmery, where primroses and hedges grew, and where there was a scent upon the air, of that old country home of Lissoy :

"I still had hopes my latest hours to crown,
Amidst those humble bowers to lay me down;

* Oliver Goldsmith, b. 1728; d. 1774. Fullest and best Life, that of John Forster.