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 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, if he had been made aware, for example, that he wished to travel, he would have taken care to furnish 'him with sufficient means by a salary on the Irish esta'blishment.' But this was not said till after Goldsmith's death; and when many ways of serving him, meanwhile, had been suffered to pass by unheeded. 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 await him again. 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 Gardner the bookseller. Even Griffiths, by the side

U U

of Gardner, looked less ill-favoured. 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 poor Kit Smart went mad; and Goldsmith had but to remember how it was discovered, to forgive all the huffing speeches that Johnson might ever make to him! I wrote, 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 monthly 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 Gardner'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.

The nobleman to whom Hawkins refers at the close of his anecdote, was not yet ennobled; nor could the relation he had opened with Goldsmith on the appearance of the Traveller be properly described as one of patronage.' Mr. Robert Nugent, the younger son of an old and wealthy Westmeath family, was a jovial Irishman and man

of wit, who proffered hearty 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 one masterly

verse,

(What though the good, the brave, the wise,
With adverse force undaunted rise,

To break the eternal doom!

Though Cato lived, though Tully spoke,

Though Brutus dealt the god-like stroke,
Yet perished fated Rome,')

and had attached himself to the party of the Prince of Wales, 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, and was a great favourite with women. His first wife, Lord Fingal's daughter, brought him a good fortune, and bore him a son; with his second wife, the sister and heiress of Secretary Craggs (Pope's friend), though he had scanty felicity and no issue, he obtained one of the finest domains in Essex and the mansion of Gosfield Hall; and from a third more luckless marriage, with the Countess Dowager of Berkeley, sprang the daughter (its only issue he consented to recognise), in whose later union with the Marquis of Buckingham the names of Grenville and Nugent became blended. Richard Glover (the epic poet of Leicester

House) characterises him briefly as a jovial voluptuous Irishman who had left popery for the protestant religion, money, and widows; but Glover lived to see him surrender these favourites, and, not far from his eightieth year, go back to popery again. When his friendship with Goldsmith began, he was a tall, stout, vigorous man of nearly sixty, with a remarkably loud voice and a broad Irish brogue; whose strong and ready wit, careless decision of manner, and reckless audacity of expression, obtained him always a hearing from the house of commons, in which he had sat for four-and-twenty years. He was now watching with more than ordinary personal interest the turn of the political wheel. So was his new friend Goldsmith, and every member of the Gerrard-street Club.

The ministry which succeeded Bute's (that of George Grenville and the Bedfords, or, as they were called, the Bloomsbury gang) was coming to a close at last, after a series of impolitic blunders without parallel in the annals of statesmen. Early in March of the previous year ('64), after convulsing England from end to end with the question of general warrants and the ignoble persecution of Wilkes, the first attempt was made upon America which roused her to rebellion. In the autumn of that year, all her towns and cities were in loud and vehement protest; and before the year closed, Benjamin Franklin had placed in Grenville's hands a solemn protest of resistance on the part of his fellow colonists to any proposition to tax them without their consent. But as yet, this met with little

sympathy in England, and to the stubborn nature of Grenville, fear was as strange as wisdom. With only one division in the Commons, when the attendance was most paltry, and without a single negative in the Lords, he passed, at the opening of the present year, the act which created the Republic of America. Burke was under the commons' gallery during its progress (it had been his habit for some months to attend almost every discussion), and said, nine years afterward, that, far from anything inflammatory, he had never in his life heard so languid a debate. Horace Walpole described it to Lord Hertford as a 'slight day on the American taxes.' Barré, who had served in America and knew the temper of the people, was the only man whose language approached to the occasion; and as he had lately lost his regiment for his vote against general warrants, it was laughed at as the language of a disappointed man. Pitt was absent. On occasions less momentous he had come to the house on crutches, swathed in flannel; yet now he was absent. He afterwards prayed that some friendly hand could have laid him prostrate on the floor of the house to bear his testimony against the bill; but it is doubtful if the desire to see Grenville more completely prostrate, had not had more to do with his absence than either gout or fever. The minister's triumph in his Stamp Act, however, was brief. The king had hardly given it his glad assent, when the first slight seizure of the terrible malady which afterwards more sorely afflicted him, necessitated an act of regency; and the