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

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

London. It was a place with which, apparently, he was already familiar, since he locates the Club of Authors in "The Citizen of the World" at the sign of The Broom, in that neighbourhood, and, in all likelihood, he had visited Newbery in his apartments at Canonbury House, of which nothing now remains but the dilapidated tower. He may even have lived in the tower itself previous to this date, for Francis Newbery, Newbery's son, affirmed that he lodged for some time in the upper story, "the situation so commonly devoted to poets." But that he came to Islington at the close of 1762 is clear from the Newbery papers, to which, when they wrote their respective lives of Goldsmith, Mr. John Murray permitted both Mr. Forster and Mr. Prior to have access. He had a room in a house kept by a Mrs. Elizabeth Fleming, who, like his Fleet Street landlady, was a friend or relative of Newbery. The bookseller, indeed, was paymaster in the business, deducting, with business-like regularity, the amount for Goldsmith's keep and incidental expenses, from the account current between the poet and himself. The "board and lodging" were at the rate of £50 per annum, and Goldsmith stayed at Mrs. Fleming's from Christmas, 1762, until June, 1764, or later, the only break being from December, 1763, to March in the following year, when he appears to have rented, but not occupied, his Islington hermitage.

It is curious in these days to study the chronicle of Goldsmith's frugal disbursements and hospitalities. Not many luxuries come within the range of Mrs. Fleming's recording pen. Once there is a modest "pint of Mountain" at a shilling, and twice "a bottle of port" at two shillings. A

continually recurrent entry is the humble diet drink called "sassafras,” more familiar perhaps as the "saloop," which, even at the beginning of this century, was still sold at street corners, prompting a characteristic page of Charles Lamb's "Praise of Chimney Sweepers," and surviving later in "Sketches by Boz." Pens and paper are naturally frequent items, and the "Newes man's " account, to wit, for Public Ledgers, London Chronicles, Advertisers, and the like, reaches the unprecedented sum of 16s. 10%1⁄2d. On the other hand, "Mr. Baggott" and "Doctr. Reman (Dr. Wm. Redmond, says Prior), who seem to have been occasionally entertained with dinner or tea, have "O. O. O.," against their names. Obviously, Goldsmith must either have shared his own meal with his guests, or Mrs. Fleming must have been a person whose generosities, however stealthy, did not blush to find themselves proclaimed in her bills. The only remaining items worth noting are the price of "a Post Letter," which, as now, was a penny, and that of "The Stage Coach to London," which was sixpence.

During most of the time over which these documents extend, Goldsmith must have been working for Newbery. The total amount paid by the bookseller from October, 1761, when Goldsmith purchased from him a set of Johnson's Idler, down to Idler, down to October 10, 1763, was LII Is. 6d. At this date £63 had been earned by Goldsmith for "Copy of different kinds," leaving a balance against him of £48 1s. 6d., for which he gave a promissory note. The record of ascertained work for 1763 is very bare, so that the "copy" must chiefly have been prefaces, as for example, that to Brookes's "System of