How small, of all that human hearts endure,
That part which laws or kings can cause or cure.
Still to ourselves in every place consign'd,

Our own felicity we make or find:

With secret course, which no loud storms annoy,
Glides the smooth current of domestic joy.
The lifted axe, the agonising wheel,

Luke's iron crown, and Damiens' bed of steel,
To men remote from power but rarely known,
Leave reason, faith, and conscience, all our own.

I When Tom Davies, at the request of Granger, asked Goldsmith about this line, Goldsmith referred him for an explanation of "Luke's iron crown" to a book called "Géographie Curieuse," and added,, that by "Damiens' bed of steel" he meant the rack. See GRANGER's Letters, 8vo, 1805, p. 52.

George and Luke Dosa were two brothers who headed an unsuccessful revolt against the Hungarian nobles at the opening of the sixteenth century; and George (not Luke) underwent the torture of the red-hot iron-crown, as a punishment for allowing himself to be proclaimed king of Hungary, 1513, by the rebellious peasants.-See Biographie Universelle, xi. 604. The two brothers belonged to one of the native races of Transylvania called Szecklers, or Zecklers. -FORSTER'S Goldsmith, i. 395, (ed. 1854.)

Robert François Damiens was put to death with revolting barbarity, in the year 1757, for an attempt to assassinate Louis XV. "What the miserable man suffered, is not to be described. When first seized, and carried into the guard-chamber, the garde-des-sceaux and the Duc d'Ayen ordered the tongs to be heated, and pieces of flesh torn from his legs, to make him declare his accomplices. The industrious art used to preserve his life was not less than the refinement of torture by which they meaned to take it away. The inventions to form the bed on which he lay (as the wounds on his legs prevented his standing) that his health might in no shape be affected, equalled what a refining tyrant would have sought to indulge his own luxury."-WALPOLE, Memoirs of George II., vol. ii. p. 282, ed. 1846.

EDWIN AND ANGELINA.

A Ballad.

1764.

Written 1764, and privately printed the same year, "for the amusement of the Countess of Northumberland"—and first published in 1766, in "The Vicar of Wakefield," vol. i. p. 70-7. The text here given is that of "The Vicar of Wakefield," compared with the poem as printed by Goldsmith in 1767, in his "Poems for Young Ladies," and the edition of Goldsmith's Miscellaneous Works, published in 1801, under the unacknowledged superintendence of Bishop Percy.

Goldsmith himself entitled it "Edwin and Angelina," but it is most generally known as "The Hermit." I have restored Goldsmith's own title. For Goldsmith's Letter "To the Printer of the St. James'■ Chronicle," respecting the alleged origin of this ballad, see "Lettera," in Vol. IV. of this edition.