at last done with. I cannot help saying, that I am very sick of the stage; and though I believe I shall get three tolerable benefits, yet I shall on the whole be a loser, even in a pecuniary light; my ease and comfort I certainly lost while it was in agitation. I am, my dear Cradock, your obliged and obedient servant, OLIVER GOLDSMITH. P. S. Present my most humble respects to Mrs. Cradock.'

This anticipates a little; seeing that some touches to the loss of ease and comfort are yet to be added. There were but a few days left before the comedy was to be acted, and no name had been found for it. We are all in labour,' says Johnson, whose labour of kindness had been untiring throughout, 'for a name to Goldy's play.' What now stands as the second title, The Mistakes of a Night, was originally the only one; but it was thought undignified for a comedy. The Old House a New Inn was suggested in place of it, but dismissed as awkward. Reynolds then announced what he thought so capital a title, that he threatened, if it were not adopted, he should go and help to damn the play; and he triumphantly named it The Belle's Stratagem. This name was still under discussion, and had well nigh been. snatched from Mrs. Cowley, when Goldsmith hit upon She Stoops to Conquer. Graver troubles remained, which he could not remedy; and he left the last rehearsal with a heavy heart. His probable failure had been made matter of such common gossip, that it was even announced in the box-office to the servant who was engaging a box for the Duke of Gloucester; and a very angry remonstrance with Colman followed. Up to this time he had not been able

1

to muster courage to begin the printing of his play; but
in a kind of desperation he now went to Newbery, and,
in redemption of the debt between them which had lately
cost him some anxiety, offered him the chances of the
copyright. And yet to tell you the truth' he added,
'there are great doubts of its success.' Newbery thought
it best to accept the offer, by which he afterwards very
largely profited.

The eventful day arrived (Monday the 15th of March), and Goldsmith's friends were summoned to a tavern dinner, arranged and to be presided over by Johnson. George Steevens was one; and in calling on his way to the tavern to take up the old zealous philosopher, found him ready dressed, but in coloured clothes.' There was a court mourning at the time, for the King of Sardinia; and being reminded of this, Johnson hastened with reiterated thanks to change his dress, profuse in his gratitude for being saved from an appearance so improper in the front row of a front box,' and protesting that he would not for ten pounds' have seemed 'so retrograde to any general observance.' At this dinner, beside Johnson and Steevens, Burke and his brother were present, with Sir Joshua Reynolds, Caleb Whitefoord, and (he would himself have us believe) Cumberland and a party of Scotch friends. But, for the presence of Cumberland and his friends, his own Memoirs (little better than an amusing collection of apocryphal things) is the only authority: and not only has he described a jumble of a party that could never have

It

assembled (putting in poor Fitzherbert as a guest, though he had already destroyed himself), but, in giving every body a ludicrous air of patronising superiority to Goldsmith, and declaring their only desire to have been to obtain a triumph 'not only over Colman's judgment but 'their own,' he has so unblushingly misstated the known opinions of Johnson and the rest in connection with the play, that his whole scene proclaims itself romance. is a Sir Fretful good-humouredly describing the success of a brother dramatist. He says that he and his friends had little hope of success, but were perfectly determined to struggle hard for their author; that they assembled their strength at the Shakespeare Tavern (it is much more likely to have been the St. James's Coffee House), where Johnson took the chair at the head of a long table, and was the life 'and soul of the corps'; that though his jokes, and his raillery of Goldsmith, were the better comedy of the two, and much the most attractive, they started in good time for their duty at the theatre, taking with them a band of determined North British claqueurs; that they distributed themselves at separate and allotted posts, with preconcerted signals for applause, elaborately communicating each with the other; that his own station was as flapper to a simple Scotch worthy with a most contagious roar of a laugh, but with no notion how to use it, who, from laughing upon signal where he found no joke, proceeded to find a joke and a roar on his own account in almost everything said; and that though these mal-a-propos bursts of friendly

thunder gave umbrage now and then to the pit, the success of (not the comedy, but) 'our manœuvres' was complete, and the curtain fell to a triumph. Alas! while Cumberland, writing more than thirty years after the event, would have us thus believe that hardly anybody was laughing but himself and his friends, the papers of the day report to have seen him as manifestly miserable in one box, as Hugh Kelly and Ossian Macpherson showed themselves in another: not only when Woodward came on, in mourning, to speak Garrick's satirical prologue against the sentimentalists, but while the laughter as the comedy went on seemed to peal the death knell of their school; and particularly when one hearty shout went up for Tony's friend at the Jolly Pigeons, the bear-leader who never danced his bear but to the very genteelest of tunes, Water Parted or the Minuet in Ariadne. Mr. Day was present, and gives the weight of his judicial authority against Cumberland. He says that he and some friends, knowing the adverse expectations entertained of the comedy, had assembled in great force in the pit to protect it; but they found no difficulty to encounter, for it was 'received throughout with the greatest 'acclamations.' Indeed all the probabilities are against Cumberland's account; and only one sentence in it, confirmed by every other authority, can be pronounced unquestionable. All eyes were upon Johnson,' he says, 'who 'sat in a front row in a side box; and when he laughed, everybody thought himself warranted to roar.'

Goldsmith had not come with his friends to the theatre.

During the dinner, as Sir Joshua afterwards told Northcote, not only did he hardly speak a word, but 'was so 'choked that he could not swallow a mouthful;' and when the party left for the theatre, he went an opposite way. A friend found him sauntering between seven and eight o'clock in the Mall of St. James's Park (struggling to be brave, it may be, with the reflection of what an illustrious line of Ben Jonsons, Websters, Fletchers, Dekkers, Drydens, Congreves, and Fieldings, are comprised in the company of stage-damned'); and it was only on that friend's earnest representation of how useful his presence might be, should sudden alteration be found necessary in any scene, he was prevailed upon to go to the theatre. He entered the stage door at the opening of the fifth act, and heard a solitary hiss at the improbability of Mrs. Hardcastle, in her own garden, supposing herself forty miles off on Crackscull common (a trick, nevertheless, which Sheridan actually played off on Madame de Genlis). What's that?' he cried out, alarmed not a little at the sound. Psha! Doctor,' said Colman, who was standing at the side-scene, doubtless well pleased to have even so much sanction for all his original forebodings, 'don't be afraid of a squib, when we 6 have been sitting these two hours on a barrel of gun'powder.' Cooke, who gives the best version of this anecdote, corrects assertions elsewhere made that it had happened at the last rehearsal; tells us Goldsmith himself had related it to him; and adds that he never forgave it to Colman to the last hour of his life.' To all the