rival and opposing doctrines to the practical test of the Life and Death it has recorded. To that they are now left; with such illustrative comment from the nature and the claims of Goldsmith's writings, and the peculiarities of his character, as already I have amply supplied. Let this alone be added. The debt which Lord Camden proclaimed due to genius (though, from his conduct on the only occasion when they met, he probably did not think it due to Goldsmith), has to this date been amply paid in the fame of the Vicar of Wakefield, the Citizen of the World, the Deserted Village, and the Traveller. Goldsmith died in the prime of his age and his powers, because his strength had been overtasked and his mind was ill at ease; but, by this, the world's enjoyment of what he left has been in no respect weakened or impaired. Nor was his lot upon the whole an unhappy one, for him or for us. Nature is vindicated in the sorrows of her favourite children; for a thousand enduring and elevating pleasures survive, to redeem their temporary sufferings. The acquisition of wealth, the purchase of tranquillity and worldly ease, so eagerly coveted and unscrupulously toiled for, are not themselves obtained without attendant losses; and not without much to soften the harshness of anxiety and poverty, to show what gains may be saved out of the greatest apparent disadvantage, and to render us all some solid assistance out of even his thriftless imprudent insolvent circumstances, had Goldsmith lived and died. He worthily did the work that was in him to do; proved himself in his garret a gentleman of nature; left the world no ungenerous bequest; and went his unknown way. Nor have posterity been backward to acknowledge the debt which his contemporaries left them to discharge; and it is with calm, unruffled, joyful aspect on the one hand, and with grateful, loving, eager admiration on the other, that the creditor and his debtors at length stand face to face. All this is to the world's honour as well as gain; which has yet to consider, notwithstanding, with a view to its own larger profit in both, if its debt to the man of genius might not earlier be discharged, and if the thorns that only become invisible beneath the laurel that overgrows his grave, should not rather, while he lives, be plucked away. It is not an act of parliament which can determine this; even though it were an act to restore to the man of letters the rights of which the legislature has thought fit to deprive him. The world must exercise those higher privileges which legislation follows and obeys, before the proper remedy can be found for literary wrongs. Mere wealth would not have supplied it in Goldsmith's day, and does not supply it now. It must flow from a higher sense than has at any period yet prevailed in England, of the duties and responsibilities assumed by the public writer; and of the social consideration and respect that their effectual discharge should have undisputed right to claim. The world will be greatly the gainer, when such time shall arrive; and when the biography of the man of genius shall no longer be a picture of the most harsh struggles and mean necessities to which man's life is subject, exhibited as in shameful contrast to the calm and classic glory of his fame. But with society itself rests the advent of that time. THE MEN WHO TO THE WORLD MOST GOOD HAVE BROUGHT, ADVERTISEMENT, NOTES, AND CORRECTIONS. OCCASIONAL kindness and service rendered to this biography have been referred to in the course of it. The diligent labour, enthusiasm, and ability displayed by Mr. Prior, in his edition and elaborate memoir published twelve years ago, laid every subsequent writer under weighty obligations to him. The author has to add, with grateful acknowledgment, that three of the designs in this volume are friendly contributions to it from Mr. Stanfield and Mr. Maclise; that for three others he has to thank the ready kindness of Mr. Leech and Mr. Richard Doyle; that the rest of the designs have been supplied by Mr. R. J. Hamerton; and that for the engraved head on the title-page he is indebted to the courtesy of Mr. Longman. It appeared in that edition of the Poetical Works which had the benefit of Mr. Bolton Corney's care and judgment in its preparation; and which, apart from the grace and beauty of the illustrations contributed to it by the Etching Club, is by far the most correct and careful of the existing editions of Goldsmith's Poetry. 58, LINCOLN'S INN FIELDS, March, 1848. PASE 1. Pallas is often written Pallice, or Pallis, and seems to have been so written by Goldsmith's father. 5. Strean was a physician who had taken orders. He died eleven years ago, at nearly ninety years of age. He then held the perpetual cure of St. Peter's, in Athlone; but had formerly succeeded Henry Goldsmith in the curacy the latter occupied at the period of his death (probably that of Kilkenny West). His relative by marriage, the Rev. Edward Mangin, to whose intelligent enquiries we owe much of our knowledge of the poet's youth, still lives in Bath. 7. The Biographical Preface, for which the materials had been collected by Percy, Malone, and other friends, was drawn up in the first instance by Percy's friend, Doctor Campbell; it then received ample correction from Percy, whose remarks and interlineations were engrafted into PAGE the text; but on its being handed to the publishers of the Miscellaneous Works, a disagreement sprang up with Mr. Rose (Cowper's friend), employed as their editor, and Percy ultimately declined to sanction the publication. His correspondence with Malone shows ample traces of this quarrel, and of his dissatisfaction with Mr. Rose, whom he accuses of impertinently tampering with the memoir. 'I never,' writes Malone to Percy, in corroboration of his complaints, observed any of those grimaces or fooleries that the interpolator talks of. It should be added that many of the materials for a life which Percy had obtained from Goldsmith himself, were lost by being intrusted to Johnson, when the latter proposed to be his friend's biographer. But the failure of Johnson's design arose less from his own dilatoriness than from a dif PAGE ficulty started by Francis Newbery's surviving partner (Carnan), who held the copyright of She Stoops to Conquer, and who refused to join the other possessors of Goldsmith's writings in the Edition and Memoir' which Johnson had undertaken. 18. For Bernard,' read 'Barnard.' 34. For fifteen,' read 'seventeen.' 37. I subjoin the letter referred to in the text. It is dated Edinburgh, Sept. 26, 1753; and is addressed to Robert Bryanton at Ballymahon, Ireland. MY DEAR BOB, HOW many good excuses (and you know I was ever good at an excuse) might I call up to vindicate my past shameful silence. I might tell how I wrote a long letter on my first coming hither, and seem vastly angry at my not receiving an answer; I might allege that business (with business you know I was always pestered) had never given me time to finger a pen. But I suppress those, and twenty more as plausible, and as easily invented, since they might be attended with a slight inconvenience of being known to be lies. Let me then speak truth. An hereditary indolence (I have it from the mother's side) has hitherto prevented my writing to you, and still prevents my writing at least twenty-five letters more, due to my friends in Ireland. No turnspit dog gets up into his wheel with more reluctance than I sit down to write; yet no dog ever loved the roast meat he turns better than I do him I now address. Yet what shall I say now I am entered? Shall I tire you with a description of this unfruitful country; where I must lead you over their hills all brown with heath, or their valleys scarcely able to feed a rabbit? Man alone seems to be the only creature who has arrived to the natural size in this poor soil. Every part of the country presents the same dismal landscape. No grove, nor brook, lend their music to cheer the stranger, or make the inhabitants forget their poverty. Yet with all these disadvantages to call him down to humility, a Scotchman is one of the proudest things alive. The poor have pride ever ready to relieve them. If mankind should happen to despise them, they are masters of their own admiration; and that they can plentifully bestow upon themselves. From their pride and poverty, as I take it, results one advantage this PAGE country enjoys; namely, the gentlemen here are much better bred than among us. No such characters here as our fox-hunters; and they have expressed great surprise when I informed them, that some men in Ireland of one thousand pounds a year, spend their whole lives in running after a hare, drinking to be drunk, and.. Truly, such a being, equipped in his bunting dress, came among a circle of Scotch gentry, they would behold him with the same astonishment that a countryman does King George on horseback. The me here have generally high chees bones, and are lean and swarthy, fond of action, dancing in particular. Now that I have mentioned daneing, let me say something of their balls, which are very frequent here. When a stranger enters the daneing hall, he sees one end of the room taken up by the ladies, who sit dismally in a group by themselves in the other end stand their pensive partners that are to be: but no more intercourse be tween the sexes than there is between two countries at war. The ladies indeed may ogle, and the gentlemen sigh; but an embargo is laid on any closer commerce. At length, to interrupt hostilities, the lady directress, or intendant, what you will, pitches upon a lady and gentleman to walk a minuet: which they perform with a farmality that approaches to despotdence. After five or six couple have thus walked the gauntlet, all stand up to country dances; each gentleman furnished with a partner from the aforesaid lady directress; so they dance much, say nothing, and thus concludes our assembly. I told a Scotch gentleman that such profound silence resembled the ancient procession of the Roman matrons in honour of Ceres; and the Scotch gentleman told me (and faith, I believe he was right that I was a very great pedant for my pains. Now I am come to the ladies; and to show that I love Scotland, and everything that be longs to so charming a country, I insist on it, and will give hi leave to break my head that denies it, that the Scotch ladies are ten thousand times finer and handsomer than the Irish. To be sure, now, I see your sisters Betty and Peggy vastly surprised at my partiality: but tell them |