rooms on a floor, its garden and all, covered considerably less than half an acre. The friends would occasionally drive down to this retreat, even after dining in London, Mr. Bott being one of those undoubtedly respectable men who kept a horse and gig: and a curious letter is said to be in existence written by Goldsmith shortly before his death, thanking Bott again and again for timely pecuniary help, rendered in his worst straits; saying it is to Bott he entirely owes that he can sit down in safety in his chambers without the terrors of arrest hanging momentarily over him; and recalling such whimsical scenes of past days as when they used to drive down the Edgeware Road at night, and, both their necks being brought to imminent peril by the gig's descent into a ditch, the driver (Bott) would exhaust all his professional eloquence to prove that at that instant they were exactly in the centre of the road.

Here the History of Rome, undertaken for Davies, was at leisure proceeded with; here the new poem, worked at in the adjoining lanes, and in pleasant strolls along the shady hedges, began to grow in importance; and here, so engaged, Goldsmith seems to have passed the greater part of the summer, apparently not much moved by what was going on elsewhere. Walpole, mourning for the loss of his Lady Hervey and his Lady Suffolk, was reading his tragedy of the Mysterious Mother to his lady friends who remained, and rejoicing that he did not need to expose himself to the impertinencies of that jackanapes Garrick, who lets nothing appear but ' his own wretched stuff, or that of creatures still duller,

'who suffer him to alter their pieces as he pleases: ' but Goldsmith's withers are unwrung. Hume was receiving a considerable increase to his pension, with significant intimation of the royal wish that he should apply himself to the continuation of his English History; great lords were fondly dandling Robertson into the good graces of the booksellers, the Chief Justice admiringly telling the Duke of Bedford that £4500 was to be paid him for his Charles the Fifth History, and Walpole reasonably sneering at this worship of Scotch puffing and partiality: but the humbler historian at Edgeware pursues his labours unbribed and undisturbed. The Sentimental Journey was giving pleasure to not a few; even Walpole was declaring it 'infinitely preferable to the tiresome Tristram Shandy ;' while within a few months, at a grand dinner table round which were seated two dukes, two earls, Mr. Garrick, and Mr. Hume, a footman in attendance was announcing Sterne's lonely death in a common lodging house in Bond Street: but Goldsmith does not yet see the shadow of his own early decay. Gray, who had in vain solicited the Oxford professorship of Modern History while he yet had the health it would have given him spirit to enjoy, and was now about to receive it from the Duke of Grafton when no longer able to hold it, was wondering at a new book about Corsica, in which he found a hero pourtrayed by a green goose, and where he had the comfort of feeling that what was wise in it must be true, for the writer was too great a fool to invent it: but Goldsmith has never been much interested in Boswell,

and Paoli is not very likely to increase his interest. Having made this unavailing effort to empty his head of Corsica, Boswell himself had visited London in the spring, had followed Johnson to Oxford, and was now making him the hero of dinner parties at the Crown and Anchor in the Strand, where Percy was worried, Robertson slighted, and Davies turned into ridicule: but Goldsmith is doubtless well content, for a time, to escape his chance of being 'tossed and gored.' Kindness he could not escape so easily, if Reynolds had it in his gift. For this, too, was the year when the great painter, entering the little room where a party of his brother artists were in council over a plan for an 'Academy of Arts,' was instantly, all of them rising to a man, saluted 'president;' and the year had not closed before the royal patronage was obtained for the scheme, and that great institution set on foot which has since so greatly flourished, yet has had no worthier or more famous entry on its records than the appointment of Samuel Johnson as its first Professor of Ancient Literature, and of Oliver Goldsmith as its first Professor of History.

Whether the clamour of politics, noisiest when emptiest, failed meanwhile to make its way into the Shoemaker's Paradise, may be more doubtful. A year of such profligate turmoil perhaps never degraded our English annals. The millenium of rioters as well as libellers seemed to have come. The abandoned recklessness of public men was seen in reaction through all the grades of society; and in the mobs of Stepney Fields and St. George's, were reflected

the knaves and bullies of White's and St. James's. Having glanced at the causes that had made inevitable some such consequence, it only remains to state it. The election for a new Parliament, the old one dying of its seventh year in March, let loose every evil element; and Wilkes found his work half done before he threw himself into it. His defeat for London, his daring and successful attempt on Middlesex, his imprisonment pending the arguments on his outlawry, the result of those arguments, his election as Alderman, and clumsy alternations of rage and fear in his opponents, confirmed him at last the representative of Liberty; and amid tumult, murder, and massacre, the sacred cap was put upon his head. Mobs assembled round his prison to offer him help, and succeeded so far as to involve Scotch soldiers, and their ministerial defenders, in firing fatally upon unarmed men. The laws seemed to have lost their terror, the magistracy their means of enforcing them. In one part of London there was a riot of Irish coal-heavers which lasted nine hours, and in which eighteen persons were killed, before the guards arrived upon the scene. The merchant sailors on the river rose to the number of four thousand, for an increase of wages; and stopped outward-bound ships from sailing till their demands were compromised. The Thames watermen, to the best of their ability, followed the example; so did the journeymen hatters, with what assistance they could give to the general confusion; and even a riot of journeymen tailors threatened to be formidable, till

Sir John Fielding succeeded in quelling it. Walpole has connected these various disturbances with the favorable Wilkes season,' and tells us that in all of them was heard the cry of Liberty and its champion. Liberty by itself, to not a few of its advocates, seemed to have ceased to convey any meaning. I take the Wilkes-and-liberty to inform you,' wrote a witty merchant to his correspondents. It was now that Whitfield put up prayers for Wilkes before his sermons; that Dukes were made to appear in front of their houses and drink his health; that city voters in a modest way of trade, refused to give him their votes unless he'd take a gift of money as well, in one instance as much as £20; and that the most notoriously stately and ceremonious of all the ambassadors (the Austrian) was tumbled out of his coach head over heels, to have his heels chalked with Number 45. In the midst of a Wilkes mob the new houses met. 'Good God,' cried the Duke of Grafton, when the Duke of Richmond laughed at Lord Sandwich's proposition to send and see if the riots had ceased; 'is it matter for laughter when mobs come to join 'the name of Wilkes with the sacred sound of liberty!' The poor Duke saw none of the causes that had brought this about, nor dreamt of connecting them with the social disorganization all around: with the seat of government in daily disorder, Ireland insurrectionary, the colonies on the eve of rebellion, and the continent overbearing and arrogant ; while to himself a woman or a horse-race had been first in the duties of life, and his allies the Bedfords, while