to wrong motives-that is to say, to petitions for money —he goes on :—

"Those who know me at all, know that I have always been actuated by different principles from the rest of Mankind, and while none regarded the interests of his friends more, no man on earth regarded his own less. I have often affected bluntness to avoid the imputation of flattery, have frequently seem'd to overlook those merits, too obvious to escape notice, and pretended disregard to those instances of good nature and good sense which I could not fail tacitly to applaud; and all this lest I should be rank'd among the grinning tribe who say very true to all that is said, who fill a vacant chair at a tea table whose narrow souls never moved in a wider circle than the circumference of a guinea, and who had rather be reckoning the money in your pocket than the virtues of your breast; all this, I say, I have done and a thousand other very silly tho' very disinterested things in my time, and for all which no soul cares a farthing about me. Madam,

is it to be wondered that he should once in his life forget you who has been all his life forgetting himself?

"However it is probable you may one of these days see me turn'd into a perfect Hunks and as dark and intricate as a mouse-hole. I have already given my Lanlady orders for an entire reform in the state of my finances; I declaim against hot suppers, drink less sugar in my tea, and cheek my grate with brick-bats. Instead of hanging my room with pictures I intend to adorn it with maxims of frugality, these will make

pretty furniture enough, and won't be a bit too expensive; for I shall draw them all out with my own hands and my lanlady's daughter shall frame them with the parings of my black waistcoat; Each maxim is to be inscrib'd on a sheet of clean paper and wrote with my best pen, of which the following will serve as a specimen. 'Look Sharp. Mind the mean chance. Money is money now. If you have a thousand pounds you can put your hands by your sides and say you are worth a thousand pounds every day of the year. Take a farthing from an hundred pound and it will be an hundred pound no longer.' Thus which way so ever I turn my eyes they are sure to meet one of those friendly Monitors, and as we are told of an Actor who hung his room round with lookingglasses to correct the defects of his person, my appartment shall be furnishd in a peculiar manner to correct the errors of my mind.

I

"Faith, Madam, I heartily wish to be rich, if it were only for this reason, to say without a blush how much I esteem you, but alass I have many a fatigue to encounter before that happy time comes; when your poor old simple friend may again give a loose to the luxuriance of his nature, sitting by Kilmore fireside recount the various adventures of an hard fought life, laugh over the follies of the day, join his flute to your harpsicord and forget that ever he starv'd in those streets where Butler and Otway starv'd before him." 2

1 I.e., Thomas Sheridan, the father of the author of "The School for Scandal."

2 This extract is printed textually from a facsimile of the original letter in Griffin's "Works of Oliver Goldsmith," 1858.

58

LIFE OF GOLDSMITH.

And so, with a pathetic reference to his kind Uncle Contarine, now lapsed into "second childishness and mere oblivion," he winds into the business of his letter -the solicitation of subscriptions for the forthcoming book.

Three months after the date of this epistle the longdesired appointment has come, and he describes it to his brother-in-law Hodson. He is going in quality of physician and surgeon to a factory on the Coast of Coromandel. The Company have signed the warrant, which has already cost £10, and there will be other heavy expenses for passage and outfit. The salary of £100, it is true, is only trifling. Still the practice of the place (if he is rightly informed), "generally amounts to not less than £1,000 per annum, for which the appointed physician has an exclusive privilege." An East India exile, however, was not to be his fate. Why the project, with its executed warrant, and boundless potentialities, came to nothing, his biographers have failed to discover, nor did he himself ever reveal the reason. But in the absence of information upon this point, there is definite evidence upon another. In December of the same year, 1758, he presented himself at Surgeons' Hall to be examined for the humble office of hospital mate. The curt official record in the College books, first made public by Prior, runs as follows:

James Bernard, mate to an hospital. OLIVER GOLDSMITH, found not qualified for ditto."

CHAPTER IV.

Y this date Goldsmith had passed that critical time of life, after which, according to a depressing French axiom, whose falsity he was to demonstrate, no man that has hitherto failed can hope to succeed. His thirtieth birthday had gone by. In a letter written not many weeks after the disaster which closed the foregoing chapter, he gives a description of his appearance at the beginning of 1759. "Though I never had a day's sickness since I saw you, yet I am not that strong active man you once knew me. You scarcely can conceive how much eight years of disappointment, anguish, and study have worn. me down. . . . Imagine to yourself a pale melancholy visage, with two great wrinkles between the eyebrows, with an eye disgustingly severe, and a big wig; and you may have a perfect picture of my present appearance. I have passed my days among a parcel of cool designing beings, and have contracted all their suspicious manner in my own behaviour. I should actually be as unfit for the society of my friends at home, as I detest that which I am obliged to partake of here. I can neither laugh nor drink, have contracted an hesitating disagreeable manner of speaking, and a visage that looks ill-nature itself; in short, I have thought myself into a

...

settled melancholy, and an utter disgust of all that life brings with it." That this picture is strongly coloured by the depression of the moment is manifest. "Never," says Percy, commenting upon part of it, "was a character so unsuspicious and so unguarded as the writer's." But the life he had led was not calculated to soften his manners or modify his physical disadvantages.

About the end of 1758,—and probably, as Mr. Forster conjectures, with part of the money he had received for some articles in The Critical Review of Griffiths' rival, Hamilton,-Goldsmith had moved from his Salisbury Square garret into his now historic lodgings in Green Arbour Court. Green Arbour Court was a tiny square, which extended from the upper end of the Old Bailey into Sea-coal Lane, and was approached on that side by a steep flight of stone stairs (of which Ned Ward has chronicled the dangers) called Breakneck Steps. When Washington Irving visited it, before its demolition, he described it as a region of washerwomen, consisting of "tall and miserable houses, the very intestines of which seemed turned inside out, to judge from the old garments and frippery that fluttered from every window." In The European Magazine for January, 1803, the reader may see a contemporary print of the place, still to be identified on ancient maps of London. Goldsmith's room was on the first floor at No. 12; and here, solaced by the humours of a friendly watchmaker, or recreating the ragged infantry of the neighbourhood with his flute, working busily in the daytime, and creeping out stealthily at nightfall, he made his home from 1758 until the end of 1760.