1757. and game, could also on occasion be forgotten in what a Et. 29. 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 something. What shall it be? Will you have some apples? "Sam," added Goldsmith, suddenly, "have you seen my 66 66 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 "had fixed upon the spot the print was to occupy as 66 66 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." 66 66 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 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.t 66 6 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 66 6 66 6 66.6 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 66 6 66 64 The most important of those sent was a notice of a book by Professor Mallet, to be hereafter described, which was printed in the April number of the review, with this note prefixed: "The following paper was sent in by the gentleman who signs D, and who, we hope, will excuse our striking out a few paragraphs, for "the sake of brevity." In the next number of the review Goldsmith's contribution is of course not marked by any signature or prefatory notice. He had become part of the establishment. + The agreement is correctly enough described in the Percy Memoir (60), but is dated a year later than that in which it was really entered into. 1757. Et. 29. 1757. Æt. 29. "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. 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 the liberty of choice, in sheer and bare necessity, calling after calling having slipped from him, 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; and Johnson, within some half-dozen months, had been tenant of a spunginghouse. No man throve that was connected with letters, unless he were also connected with their trade and merchandise, and, like Richardson, could print as well as write books. "Had some of those," cried Smollett, in his bitterness, "who were pleased to call themselves my friends, been at "any pains to deserve the character, and told me ingenu"ously what I had to expect in the capacity of an author, "when I first professed myself of that venerable fraternity, "I should in all probability have spared myself the incre"dible labour and chagrin I have since undergone."* "I 1757. "don't think," said Burke, in one of his first London letters to his Irish friends, written seven years before this t. 29. date, "there is as much respect paid to a man of letters "on this side the water as you imagine. I don't find that "Genius, the 66 'rathe primrose, which forsaken dies,' "is patronised by any of the nobility . . . writers of the first "talents are left to the capricious patronage of the public. After all, a man will make more by the figures of arithmetic "than the figures of rhetoric, unless he can get into the "trade wind, and then he may sail secure over Pactolean "sands." It was, in truth, one of those times of transition which press hardly on all whose lot is cast in them. The patron was gone, and the public had not come; the seller of books had as yet exclusive command over the destiny of those who wrote them, and he was difficult of access-without certain prospect of the trade wind, hard to move. "The "shepherd in Virgil," wrote Johnson to Lord Chesterfield,† "grew acquainted with love, and found him a native "of the rocks." Nor had adverse circumstances been without their effect upon the literary character itself. Covered with the blanket of Boyse, and sheltered by the night-cellar of Savage, it had forfeited less honour and self-respect than as the paid client of the ministries of Walpole and Henry Pelham. As long as its political services were acknowledged by offices in the state; as long Letter to his school-fellow, Matthew Smith. Life, i. 38. If any one would see a sketch, by the hand of a master, of what the career of the man generally was who lived by literature in this wretched interval, let him turn to Macaulay's Essays, i. 379-81. Ed. 1853 (3 vols. 12mo.) 1757. as the coarse wit of Prior could be paid by an embassy, or Et. 29. the delicate humour of Addison win its way to a secretaryship; while Steele and Congreve, Swift and Gay, sat at ministers' tables, and were not without weight in cabinet councils; its slavery might not have been less real than in later years, yet all externally went well with it. Though even flat apostacy, as in Parnell's case, might in those days lift literature in rank, while unpurchaseable independence, as in that of De Foe, depressed it into contempt and ruin ; -though, for the mere hope of gain to be got from it, such nobodies as Mr. Hughes and Mr. Philips were worth propitiating by dignified public employments;-still, it was esteemed by the crowd, because not wholly shut out from the rank and consideration which worldly means could give to it. "The middle ranks," said Goldsmith truly, in speaking of that period,* “generally imitate the great, and applauded "from fashion if not from feeling." But when another state of things succeeded; when politicians had too much shrewdness to despise the helps of the pen, and too little intellect to honour in any way its claims or influence; when it was thought that to strike at its dignity, was to command its complete subservience; when corruption in its grosser forms had become chief director of political intrigue, and it was less the statesman's office to wheedle a vote than the minister's business to give hard cash in return for it;— literature, or the craft so called, was thrust from the house of commons into its lobbies and waiting-rooms, and ordered to exchange the dignity of the council-table for the comforts of the great man's kitchen. The order did not of necessity make the man of genius a servant or a parasite: its sentence upon him simply was, In his Inquiry into Polite Learning, Chap. x. |