involve him, and he often spoke with great asperity of his dependence on what he called moonshine." Feeble as the light was, however, there are other proofs of his having followed it in these last melancholy months of his life. Lord Shelburne's member and protégé, Townshend, was at this time Lord Mayor of London; and by his fiery liberalism and really bold resolution, quite careless of those "Malagrida" taunts against his patron with which the sarcasm of "Junius" had supplied ministerial assailants, was now exasperating the Court to the last degree. Yet Goldsmith did not hesitate to praise the "patriotic magistrate," and to avow that he had done so. "Goldsmith, the other day," writes Beauclerc to Lord Charlemont, "put a paragraph into the newspapers in praise of Lord Mayor Townshend. The same night we happened to sit next to Lord Shelburne, at Drury Lane. I mentioned the circumstance of the paragraph to him, and he said to Goldsmith that he hoped he had mentioned nothing about Malagrida in it. 'Do you know,' answered Goldsmith, 'that I never could conceive the reason why they call you Malagrida, FOR Malagrida was a very good sort of man.' You see plainly what he meant to say; but that happy turn of expression is peculiar to himself. Mr. Walpole says that this story is a picture of Goldsmith's whole life."

Ah! so it might seem to men whose whole life had been a holiday. No slavish drudgery, no clownish traits, no scholarly loneliness had befallen them; and how to make allowance in others for disadvantages never felt by ourselves is still the great problem for all of us. Poor Goldsmith's blunder was only a false emphasis. He meant that he wondered Malagrida, being the name of a good sort of a man, should be used as a term of reproach. But his whole life was a false emphasis, says Walpole. In his sense perhaps it was So. He had been emphatic throughout it, where Walpole had only been indifferent; and what to the wit and man

1 Letter dated 20th November, 1773, in Hardy's Life of Lord Charlemont,

of fashion had been a scene for laughter, to the poet and man of letters had been fraught with serious suffering. "Life is a comedy to those who think and a tragedy to those who feel." Democritus laughed and Heraclitus wept.

Beauclerc told Lord Charlemont in the same letter just quoted that Goldsmith had written a prologue for Mrs. Yates which she was to speak that night at the Operahouse. "It is very good. You will see it soon in all the newspapers, otherwise I would send it to you." The newspapers have, nevertheless, been searched in vain for it, though it certainly was spoken; and it seems probable that Colman's friends had interfered to suppress it. Mrs. Yates had quarrelled with the Covent Garden manager; and one object of the "poetical exordium" which Goldsmith had thus written for her was to put before that fashionable audience the injustice of her exclusion from the English theatre. He had great sympathy for Mrs. Yates, thinking her the first of English actresses; and it is not wonderful that he should have lost all sympathy with Colman. Their breach had lately widened more and more. Kenrick, driven from Drury Lane, had found refuge at the other house; and, on the very night of Mrs. Yates's prologue, Colman suffered a new comedy, by that libeller of all his friends, to be decisively damned at Covent Garden. If Goldsmith could have withdrawn both his comedies upon this he would probably have done it; for at once he made an effort to remove the first to Drury Lane, which he now had the right to do. But Garrick insisted on his original objection to Lofty, and justified it by reference to the comparative coldness with which, though strengthened by the zealous Lee Lewes in that part (Lewis had not yet assumed it), the comedy had been received during the run of "She Stoops to Conquer" in the summer. He would play the "Good-natured Man" if that objection could be obviated, not otherwise. Here the matter rested for a time; the only result from what passed

1 Letters to Mann, ii. 63.

? See vol. iii. 106.

being Goldsmith's discovery that Newbery had failed to observe his promise in connection with the unpaid bill remaining in Garrick's hands. This was hardly generous, since the copyright of "She Stoops to Conquer" had passed in satisfaction of all claims between them, and was already promising Newbery the ample profits beyond his debt which it subsequently realized. These are said to have amounted to upwards of three hundred pounds; and the play was still so profitable after several years' sale that when the booksellers engaged Johnson for their first scheme of an edition and memoir, the project was defeated by a dispute about the value of the copyright of "She Stoops to Conquer."

1

The other larger debt to "the trade" which had suggested to Goldsmith his project of a Dictionary he had now no means of discharging but by hard, drudging, unassisted labor. His so favorite project, though he had obtained promises of co-operation from Johnson, Burke, and Reynolds, had been finally rejected. Davies, who represented the craft on the occasion, whose own business had not been very prosperous, and many of whose copyrights had already passed to Cadell, gives us the reason of their adverse decision. He says' that though they had a very good opinion of the Doctor's abilities, yet they were startled at the bulk, importance, and expense of so great an undertaking, the fate of which was to depend upon the industry of a man with whose indolence of temper and method of procrastination they had long been acquainted. He adds, in further justification of the refusal, that upon every emergency half a dozen projects would present themselves to Goldsmith's mind, which, straightway communicated to the men they were to enrich, at once obtained him money on the mere faith of his great reputation; but the money was generally spent long before the new work was half finished, perhaps before it was begun; and hence arose continual expostulation and reproach on the one side and much anger and vehemence on the other. Johnson described the

1 See Appendix A to this volume.

2

Life of Garrick, ii. 167.

same transactions, after all were over, in one of his emphatic sentences. "He had raised money and squandered it, by every artifice of acquisition and folly of expense. But let not his frailties be remembered: he was a very great man.'

1 Boswell, v. 189. Mr. Filby's account against Goldsmith, as it appeared at his death, showed him indebted in the sum of £79 14s. A portion of this (£48 48. 6d.) was the unpaid balance of the preceding account. The latest half-year's supply, from July to December, 1773 (including two suits, charged respectively £9 15s. 6d. and £5 13s., and £2 198. 3d. for a greatcoat, amounted to £23 148. 9d.; and there was an additional item of £7 148. 9d. for a third suit, sent home a fortnight before his death. And having just quoted Johnson's mention of his extravagance, let me at least accompany this last appearance of poor Goldsmith's tailor's bills with his friend's excellent remark at Mrs. Thrale's one day, when somebody was denouncing "showy decorations of the human figure." "Oh," exclaimed Johnson, "let us not be found, when our Master calls us, ripping the lace off our waistcoats, but the spirit of contention from our souls and tongues! . . . Alas, sir! a man who cannot get to heaven in a green coat will not find his way thither the sooner in a gray one."-Mrs. Piozzi's Anecdotes, 109-110.

CHAPTER XIX

THE CLOUDS STILL GATHERING

1773

THE cherished project, then, of the Popular Dictionary of Arts and Sciences, the scheme on which Goldsmith had built so much, was an utter and quite hopeless failure; and under the immediate pang of feeling this, the alteration of his first comedy for Garrick, even upon Garrick's own conditions, would seem to have suddenly presented itself as one of those "artifices of acquisition" which Johnson alleges against him. He wrote to the manager of Drury Lane. The letter has by chance survived, is obligingly communicated to me by its present possessor,' and of the scanty collection so preserved is probably the worst composed and worst writ ten. As well in the manner as in the matter of it the writer's distress is very painfully visible. It has every appearance, even to the wafer hastily thrust into it, of having been the sudden suggestion of necessity; it is addressed, without date of time or place, to the Adelphi (where Garrick had lately purchased the centre house of the newly built terrace); nor is it unlikely to have been delivered there by the messenger of a sponging-house. A fac-simile of its signature, which may be compared with Goldsmith's ordinary handwriting in a previous page, will show the writer's agitation, and perhaps account for the vague distraction of his grammar.

"MY DEAR SIR,-Your saying you would play my 'Good-natured Man' makes me wish it. The money you advanced me upon Newbery's note I

'Then, Mr. Bullock, of Islington; but it has since been sold, and I do not know who now possesses it.