With the opening of 1769, we find Goldsmith busily engaged upon new projects, his Roman History completed; and it was now, Percy tells us, that Johnson took him to Oxford, and obtained for him, ad eundem, the degree of M.B. The fact must rest on the bishop's authority; for the present Oxford registrar, though disposed to think it correct, finds a chasm in the University register which leaves it without positive corroboration. They were at this time much together, it is certain; and if Johnson's opinion of the genius of Goldsmith was now at its highest, it was repaid with very hearty affection. Look,' said Gray, as in walking this year with a friend through a crowded street of the city, he saw a large uncouth figure 'polling' before them look, look, Bonstetten, the Great Bear! 'There goes Ursa Major!' It was Johnson. Ah!' said Goldsmith, when such expressions were repeated to him, they may say that. Johnson, to be sure, has a roughness ' of manner, but no man alive has a more tender heart. 'He has nothing of the bear but his skin.' Their entertainer at Oxford was the accomplished lawyer, Chambers, at this time Vinerian Professor, and five years later a judge in India; in whose rooms his more celebrated townsman Scott (both were Newcastle men) was afterwards introduced to Johnson, and who had lately been admitted a member of the Gerrard Street Club.

His election took place on the resignation of Hawkins; and it seems doubtful if I have not, in a former page, antedated Percy's election. The records of the early years of

the Club are, in truth, so scanty and imperfect, that it is difficult to ascertain the simplest fact in connection with it. But it is certain that the original number of ten had now been enlarged to twelve; and, as a result of the resignation of Hawkins, and of Beauclerc's forfeiture by continued nonattendance, four vacancies had to be filled. To the first Percy was elected; the second was re-claimed by Beauclerc (whose recent marriage with Lady Di Spencer, on her divorce from Lord Bolingbroke, sufficiently explained his temporary withdrawal); and the third and fourth were filled by Chambers and George Colman. It was on the occasion of this slight increase that Goldsmith seems to have urged the expediency of a larger infusion of new men: it would give the Club an agreeable variety,' he thought; there could now be nothing new among the 'members, for they had travelled over each other's minds.' This nettled Johnson; being too much in his own way. 'Sir,' he said, 'you have not travelled over my mind, I promise you.' Nevertheless Reynolds agreed with Goldsmith, thinking that life wanted colour and diversity as much as his own canvasses; and immediately before Goldsmith died, the number was increased to twenty: but from that time Johnson took little interest in the meetings. Almost all the rising men of the day were Whigs (bottomless Whigs, as he called Burke); and the spectacle of Charles Fox in the chair, quoting Homer and Fielding to the astonishment of Joe Warton, was one he could not get reconciled to. Within three years, he was himself

new tragedy, by Home; but so hateful had Wilkes again
made the Scotch, that its author's name had to be sup-
pressed, its own name anglicized, and a young English
gentleman brought up from Oxford to the rehearsals, to
personate the author. Goldsmith discovered the trick, and
is said by Davies to have proposed a hostile party against
the play; but this was the transient thought of a giddy
'man, who would as heartily have joined a party to sup-
'port the piece.' It was probably renewed spleen at
Garrick; whose recent patronage of Kenrick, for no
apparent reason than his means of mischief and his con-
tinued abuse of more successful men, had not tended to
oblivion of older offences. Kenrick's latest form of malice
was the epigram; but the wit was less apparent than the
venom, of connecting Goldsmith's with other names just
now rife in the playbills.

What are your Britons, Romans, Grecians,
Compared with thorough-bred Milesians?
Step into Griffin's shop, he 'll tell you,
Of Goldsmith, Bickerstaff, and Kelly. . .
And take one Irish evidence for t'other,

Ev'n Homer's self is but their foster-brother.

The last allusion was to a story the humbler wits were now telling against Goldsmith. Bickerstaff had invited a party to his house to hear one of his dramatic pieces read; and among the company were Goldsmith and one Paul Hiffernan, already mentioned as one of his Grub Street protégés, of the Purdon and Pilkington class. He was an eccentric, drunken, idle, Irish creature; educated for a

physician, and not without talents and even scholarship; but a continual victim to what he called impecuniosity, and so unprovided with self-help against the disease, that he lived altogether upon the help of other people. Where he lived, however, nobody could ever find out: he gave his address at the Bedford; and beyond that, curiosity was baffled, though many and most amusing were its attempts to discover more: nor was it till after his death that his whereabout was found, in one of the wretched little courts out of St. Martin's Lane. He wrote newspaper paragraphs in the morning; foraged for his dinner; slept out the early part of the night in one of the theatres; and, in return for certain critical and convivial displays which made his company attractive after play-hours, was always sure of a closing entertainment at the Black Lion in Russell Street, or the Cyder Cellar in Maiden Lane. Latterly, he had taken altogether to dramatic criticism, for which he had some talent (his earliest Irish efforts in that line, when he ought to have been practising his profession, had been thought mighty pleasant by Burke, then a lad at Dublin College); and this, with its usual effect upon the Drury Lane manager, had lately obtained him a sort of pension from Garrick. It was the great actor's worst weakness to involve himself thus with the meaner newspaper men; and it was only this very year he was warned by a letter from Foote, of its danger in the case of Hiffernan. Upon the whole,' wrote that master in the art of literary libel (there is nothing like the voice of a Gracchus

for a good complaint against sedition), 'it is, I think, 'worthy of consideration, whether there is not something immoral, as well as impolitic, in encouraging a fellow, who, without parts, principles, property, or profession, 'has subsisted for these twenty years by the qualities of a ' literary footpad.' Precisely that newspaper jobbery it was, however, to whose success the absence of parts, principles, property, and profession is essential, which had procured Hiffernan his invitation to the reading of Bickerstaff's play. A good dinner preluded the reading; and much justice was done to this, and to the glass which circulated for half an hour afterward, by 'Hiff:' but his judgment, and enjoyment, of the play, were much less clearly evinced; and when the first batch of opinions were collected at the end of the first act, Very well, by well!' was all -, very that could be got from him. Alas for what followed! 'About the middle of the second act,' says the teller of the anecdote, 'he began to nod; and in a little time afterwards 'to snore so loud that the author could scarcely be heard. 'Bickerstaff felt a little embarrassed; but raising his voice, ( went on. Hiffernan's tones, however, increased; till at last 'Goldsmith could hold out no longer, but cried out, "Never "“mind the brute, Bick! go on. So he would have served "Homer if he was here, and reading his own works.”’

Nothing so easy for Kenrick as to turn this into a comparison of Bickerstaff to Homer; and no laugh was heartier than Garrick's at the new proof of Goldsmith's folly. But for his countenance of the libeller he was doomed to be