hire; and though already author of the Dictionary, was too glad in this very year to have Robert Dodsley's guinea for writing paragraphs in the London Chronicle. Had you, 'sir, been an author of the lower class, one of those who are 'paid by the sheet,' remonstrated worthy printer Bowyer with an author who could pay, who did not need to be paid, and who would not be trifled with by the man of types. Of the lower class, unlike that dignitary Mr. John Jackson, still was Samuel Johnson; he was but a Grub Street man, paid by the sheet, when Goldsmith entered Grub Street, periodical writer and reviewer. Periodicals were the fashion of the day. They were the means of those rapid returns, of that perpetual interchange of bargain and sale, so fondly cared for by the present arbiters of literature; and were now, universally, the favourite channel of literary speculation. Scarcely a week passed in which a new magazine or paper did not start into life, to die or live as might be. Even Fielding had turned from his Jonathan Wild the Great, to his Jacobite Journal, True Patriot, and Champion; and from his Tom Jones and Amelia, sought refuge in his Covent Garden Journal. We have the names of fifty-five papers of the date of a few years before this, regularly published every week. A more important literary venture, in the nature of a review, and with a title expressive of the fate of letters, the Grub Street Journal, had been brought to a close in 1737. Six years earlier than that, for a longer life, Cave issued the first number of the Gentleman's Ꮮ 1756 Magazine. Griffiths, aided by Ralph, Kippis, Langhorne, Grainger, and others, followed with the earliest regular Review which can be said to have succeeded, and, in 1749, began, on Whig principles, that publication of the Monthly which lasted till our own day. Seven years later, the Tories opposed it with the Critical, which, with slight alteration of title, existed to a very recent date, more strongly tainted with high-church advocacy and quasi-popish principles than when the first number, sent forth under the editorship of Smollett in March 1756, was on those very grounds assailed. In the May of that year of Goldsmith's life to which I have now arrived, another review, the Universal, began a short existence of three years, its principal contributor being Samuel Johnson, at this time wholly devoted to it. Such were a few of the examples that, if the least liberty of choice had been his, might have raised or depressed the sanguine heart of Oliver Goldsmith, when, under the watchful eye of Mr. and Mrs. Griffiths, now providers of his bed and board, he sat down in the bookseller's parlour in Paternoster Row, somewhat sarcastically faced with the sign of The Dunciad, to begin his engagement on the Monthly Review. END OF FIRST BOOK. Wthorship by compulsion THE means of existence, long sought, seemed thus to be found, when, in his twenty-ninth year, Oliver Goldsmith sat down to the precarious taskwork of Author by Profession. He had exerted no control over the circumstances in which he took up the pen: nor had any friendly external aid, in an impulse of kindness, offered it to his hand. To be swaddled, rocked, and dandled into Authorship is the lot of more fortunate men: it was with Goldsmith the stern and last resource of his struggle with Adversity. As in the country-barn he would have played Scrub or Richard; as he prescribed for the poorer than himself at Bankside, until worse than their necessities drove him to herd with the beggars in Axe Lane; as in |