1765. Æt. 37. 66 6 66 6 "Ireland,* and that, hearing that I was a native of that 66 fortunes, and put back the hand that was held out to assist "him! Other offers of a like kind he either rejected or "failed to improve, contenting himself with the patronage "of one nobleman, whose mansion afforded him the delights "of a splendid table, and a retreat for a few days from the "metropolis."+ The incident related may excuse the comment attached to it. Indeed, the charge of idiotcy in the affairs of the Hawkins-world, may even add to the pleasure with which we contemplate that older-world picture beside it, of frank simplicity and brotherly affection. This poor poet, who, incomprehensibly to the Middlesex magistrate, would thus gently have turned aside to the assistance of his poorer brother the hand held out to assist himself, had only a few days before been obliged to borrow fifteen shillings and sixpence "in Fleet-street," of one of those "best friends" with whose support he is now fain to be contented. But the reader has already seen that since the essay on Polite Learning was written, its author's personal experience had * The earl was already lord-lieutenant, and held that office till Grenville's ministry went out. + Life of Johnson, 419. sufficed to alter his view as to the terms and relations on which literature could hereafter hope to stand with the great; and the precise value of Lord Northumberland's offer seems in itself somewhat doubtful. Percy, indeed, took a subsequent opportunity of stating that he had discussed the subject with the earl; and had received an assurance that if the latter could have known how to serve Goldsmith (it does not seem to have occurred to Percy that one mode had already been suggested without any effect), if he had been made aware, for example, that he wished to travel," he would have procured him a sufficient salary on the Irish establishment, and have had it con"tinued to him during his travels."* But this was not said till after Goldsmith's death; when many ways of serving him, meanwhile, had been suffered to pass by unheeded; and when his poor struggling brother, for whom he begged thus explicitly the earl's patronage, had also sunk unnoticed to the grave. The booksellers, on the other hand, were patrons with whom success at once established claims, independent and incontrovertible; and the Traveller, to a less sanguine heart than its writer's, already seemed to separate, with a broad white line, the past from that which was to come. No Griffiths bondage could again await him. He had no longer any personal bitterness, therefore, to oppose to Johnson's general allegiance to the "trade;" though, at the same time, with Johnson, he made special and large reservations. For instance, there was old Gardener the bookseller. Even Griffiths, by the side of Gardener, looked less illfavoured. This was he who had gone to Kit Smart in the depths of his poverty, and drawn him into the most astounding agreement on record. It was not discovered till 1765. Æt. 37. 1765. poor Kit Smart went mad; and Goldsmith had but to Æt. 37. remember how it was discovered, to forgive all the huffing speeches that Johnson might ever make to him! "I wrote, 66 sir," said the latter, "for some months in the Universal "Visitor for poor Smart, not then knowing the terms on "which he was engaged to write, and thinking I was doing "him good. I hoped his wits would soon return to him. "Mine returned to me, and I wrote in the Universal Visitor "no longer." It was a sixpenny weekly-pamphlet; the agreement was for ninety-nine years; and the terms were that Smart was to write nothing else, and be rewarded with one-sixth of the profits! It was undoubtedly a thing to remember, this agreement of old Gardener's. The most thriving subject in the kingdom of the booksellers could hardly fail to recall it now and then. And the very man to remind Goldsmith of it, in good-natured contrast to the opportunity he had lost, was the companion with whom he left Northumberland-house that day. Nevertheless he left it with greater cheerfulness, and a better-founded sense of independence, than if he had consented to substitute a reliance on the promises of great men." *Boswell, v. 288. CHAPTER XI. GOLDSMITH IN PRACTICE AND BURKE IN OFFICE. 1765. 1765. THE "nobleman" to whom Sir John Hawkins refers, at the close of his anecdote last related, as having vouchsafed to be t. 37. Oliver Goldsmith's solitary patron, was not yet ennobled; nor could the relation he had opened with the poet on the appearance of the Traveller be properly described as one of "patronage," though it doubtless at times afforded him the delights of a splendid table and a retreat for a few days from the metropolis. Mr. Robert Nugent, the younger son of an old and wealthy Westmeath family, was a jovial Irishman and man of wit, who proffered hearty and "unsolicited" friendship to Goldsmith at this time as a fellow patriot and poet,* and maintained ever after an easy intercourse with him. In early life he had written an ode to Pulteney, which contains the masterly verse introduced by Gibbon in his character of Brutus; ("What though the good, the brave, the wise, To break the eternal doom! Though Cato lived, though Tully spoke, Though Brutus dealt the god-like stroke, Yet perished fated Rome!") + So good in Gray's opinion, that "Mr. Nugent sure did not write his own Ode," he says to Walpole. Works, iii. 90. 1765. and had attached himself to the party of the Prince of Wales, Et. 37. whom he largely assisted with money. In the imaginary Leicester-house administrations commemorated by Bubb Dodington, he was always appointed to office; and had held appointments more substantial as comptroller of the prince's household, a lord of the treasury, and vice-treasurer of Ireland. He talked well, though coarsely, “ with a vivacity "of expression often bordering on the Irish bull," and was a great favourite with women. His first wife, Lord Fingal's daughter, brought him a good fortune, and bore him a son; by his second wife, to whom he was the third husband, the sister and heiress of Secretary Craggs (Pope's friend), and described as "a good-humoured, pleasant, fat woman," he had no issue, but obtained large landed estates, one of the finest domains in Essex, and the mansion of Gosfield Hall;: and from a third less lucky marriage, with Elizabeth Drax the Countess Dowager of Berkeley, sprang the daughter (its 66 * Plunket, the attainted earl. + Gent. Mag. lix. 406. "Returning to England in the summer of 1776," says Wraxall, in his Historical Memoirs (i. 126), "I went down soon afterwards on a visit to Lord Nugent, at "Gosfield in Essex; a seat which has since, in the revolutionary events of the 66 present times, afforded a temporary asylum to the august representative of the Capetian line, when expelled from a country over which his ancestors had "reigned, in uninterrupted male succession, for above eight hundred years." In another passage Sir Nathaniel calls the "house and estate" at Gosfield "one "of the finest domains in Essex;" yet the present condition of the inclosure, or paddock, before the mansion, would rather seem to confirm the origin of the name as derived from Goosefield. Lord Nugent appears so pleasantly in Goldsmith's life, and Wraxall's sketch of him is so characteristic, that I subjoin one or two passages. "Of an athletic frame, and a vigorous constitution, though very far "advanced in years," [Wraxall is writing two years after Goldsmith's death] "he was exempt from infirmity; possessing a stentorian voice, with great animal "spirits, and vast powers of conversation. He was indeed a man of very con"siderable natural abilities, though not of a very cultivated mind. . . To a perfect "knowledge of the world, he joined a coarse, and often licentious, but naturally "strong and ready wit, which no place, nor company, prevented him from "indulging; and the effect of which was augmented by an Irish accent that never "forsook him. When a bill was introduced into the House of Commons for better "watching the metropolis, in order to contribute towards effecting which object |