goodness" and his Goldsmith family traits, there is a foretaste of some of the most charming characteristics of the vicar of Wakefield; while in the picture of the pinched and tarnished little beau, with his mechanical chatter about the Countess of All-Night and the Duke of Piccadilly, set to the forlorn burden of "lend me half-acrown," he adds a character-sketch, however lightly touched, to that immortal gallery which contains the finished full-lengths of Parson Adams and Squire Western, of Matthew Bramble and "my Uncle Toby." From the fact that he omitted the third of the "Beau Tibbs" series from the later " Essays" of 1765, it would seem that he thought the other two the better. It may be that they are more finely wrought; but the account of the party at. Vauxhall, with the delightful sparring of the beau's lady and the pawnbroker's widow, and the utter breakdown in the decorum of the latter, when, constrained by goodmanners to listen to the faded vocalization of Mrs. Tibbs, she is baulked of her heart's desire, the diversion of the waterworks, is as fresh in its fidelity to human nature, and as eternally effective in its artistic oppositions. of character, as any of the best efforts of the great masters. of fiction.

One of the stories in "The Citizen of the World," that of "Prince Bonbennin and the White Mouse," has, rightly or wrongly, been connected with a ludicrous incident in Goldsmith's own career. Among his many hangers-on was a certain Pilkington,-the son, in fact, of Swift's Lætitia of that name,-who, on one occasion, called upon him with a cock-and-bull story about some white mice, which he, the said Pilkington, had (he alleged)

been commissioned to obtain for a lady of quality, the Duchess of Manchester or Portland being mentioned. "The mice had been secured; the ship that bore them lay in the river; and nothing-so ran Pilkington's romancewas wanting but a paltry two guineas to buy a cage, and enable the importer to make a decent appearance before his patroness. He accordingly applied to his old collegefellow, Goldsmith, who, not having the money, was, of course, easily cajoled into letting his necessitous friend pawn his watch. As might be expected, neither watch nor Pilkington was ever seen again, and Goldsmith was fain to console himself by composing a little apologue in his "Chinese Letters," in which white mice played a leading part. Another anecdote of this time is connected more with the study of manners which produced "The Citizen of the World" than with any particular utterance of Lien Chi Altangi. Once, when strolling in the gardens of White Conduit House at Islington, he came upon three ladies of his acquaintance, to whom he straightway proffered the entertainment of tea. The invitation was accepted, and the hospitality enjoyed, when, to Goldsmith's intense discomfiture, he suddenly discovered that he could not pay the bill. Luckily some friends arrived, who, after maliciously enjoying his embarrassment, at length released him from his quandary.

Upon the same day as The Citizen of the World" was published, appeared the first instalment of another of those compilations for Newbery which Goldsmith, having tasted that dangerous delight of money advances for unexecuted work, was tempted to undertake. This was a "Compendium of Biography" for young people, the

opening volumes of which were based upon Plutarch's "Lives." It was intended to continue them indefinitely; but seven volumes, the last of which was published in November, were all that appeared, "The British Plutarch" of Dilly proving a fatal rival. Before the fifth volume was finished Goldsmith fell ill, and it was completed by a bookseller's hack of the name of Collier. Whether Collier also did the sixth and seventh volumes does not appear. But Goldsmith's ill-health, caused mainly by the close application which had succeeded to the vagrant habits he had formed in early life, had now become confirmed, and he spent some part of this year at Tunbridge and Bath, then the approved resorts of invalids.1 Early in the year one of Newbery's receipts shows that he had agreed to write, or had already written, a “Life of Richard Nash," the fantastic old Master of the Ceremonies at Bath. The book, which was published in October, is a gossipping volume of some two hundred and thirty pages, pleasantly interspersed with those anecdotes which Johnson thought essential to biography, and containing some interesting details upon the manners and customs of the old city, so dear to the pages of Anstey and Smollett. The price paid for it by Newbery, according to the receipt above mentioned, was fourteen guineas.

With one exception, nothing else of importance occurred to Goldsmith in 1762. This exception was the sale by him to a certain Benjamin Collins, printer, of Salisbury, for the sum of twenty guineas, of a third share

"And once in seven years I'm seen
At Bath or Tunbridge to careen."

GREEN'S Spleen.

of a new book, in "2 vols., 12mo.," either already written or being written, and entitled "The Vicar of Wakefield." The sale took place on the 28th October, and the circumstance, first disclosed by Mr. Charles Welsh in the memoir of Newbery which he published in 1885, under the title of "A Bookseller of the Last Century," throws a new, if somewhat troubled, light upon the early history of the "Vicar," as related by Goldsmith's biographers. This question, however, will be more fitly discussed in a future chapter.

W

CHAPTER VI.

HETHER the transaction referred to at the end

of the last chapter took place at Salisbury, or whether Benjamin Collins made his investment in London, are points upon which there is no information. But it is not at all improbable that Goldsmith may have visited Salisbury in the autumn of 1762, and that the sale of the "Vicar " may have been the result of a sudden "lack of pence." Collins had business relations with Newbery. He was part-proprietor of that famous Fever Powder of Dr. James, upon which, in the sequel, Goldsmith so disastrously relied; and in Mr. Welsh's "Bookseller of the Last Century," he is also stated to have held shares in The Public Ledger, the idea of which he claimed to have originated. It is most likely therefore that, being known to Newbery, he was known to Goldsmith, and Goldsmith's appeal to Collins, when finding himself in the town in which Collins lived, would be a natural and intelligible step.

To pass however from conjecture to certainty, there is no doubt that, towards the end of 1762, Goldsmith, for the time at all events, transferred his residence from Wine Office Court to Islington, then a countrified suburb of