SPECTATOR'S LIBRARY.

Biouttarnr,

The Life and Adventures of Oliver Goldsmith ; a Biography, in four books. By John Forster, of the Inner Temple, Banister ; Author of the "Lives of Statesmen of the Commonwealth." Chapman and Ball.

TUTTLE',

Travels in Siberia ; including Excursions Northwards down the Obi to the Polar Circle, and Southwards to the Chinese Frontier. By Adolph Erman. Translated from the German, by William Desborough Cooley. In two volumes. FICTION, Longman and Co. The Wanderings and Fortunes of some German Emigrants. By Frederick Gers- tsacker. Translated by David Black Bogue. sir Theodore Broughton, or Laurel Water. By G. P. IL James, Esq., Author of The convict," "Russell," &c. &e. In three volumes Smith and Elder.

FORSTER'S LIFE AND ADVENTURES OF OLIVER GOLDSMITH.

HAD the genius of Goldsmith as a poet and essayist been less than it was, he must always have filled a place in literary history, from connect- ing in his own person the old " author " and the modern "man of letters." At an earlier period, Pope, indeed, had taken advantage of the spirit of patronage in an age when the individual patron was passing away, and proved that poetical genius could by its exercise secure a competent for- tune without compromise of personal independence : but Pope started with the advantage of a settled home and a sufficient livelihood. Johnson experienced all the difficulties and distress that any of the most wretched scribes commemorated in satire had undergone. He had felt hunger ; he bad fled or faced the bailiff; he had slept on a bulk ; and, according to record, his clothes might have vied with the much-enduring garments of Settle—

"Known by the band and suit that Settle wore, His only suit for twice three years before."

But Johnson's pen never procured him more than a bare subsistence "for the day that was passing over him,"—and a very bare subsistence too : except for the pension that was granted in the afternoon of life, his age might have been as penury-stricken and his death as miser- able as any of that long roll of writers who have furnished examples of the ills that embitter "the scholar's life" or darken its close. Gold- smith had stru,4 led through poverty as great as ever beset man; while his brogue, his manners, and his ignorance of London life, exposed him to insults and contempt, from which an Englishman, especially a burly one like Johnson, would be free. But Goldsmith also lived to procure an income by his pen, which, small as it may seem compared with what his successors have obtained, was sufficient to have furnished him with personal luxuries, and to have rendered him independent of the world. Such, in fact, became' the influence of his name with the publishers and with those who trust, that Reynolds thought his debts at his death were 2,000/.: a mere nothing in our days of superfluous capital and reckless speculation, but a large sum at that time, and enormous for " an author " to be permitted to contract. " Was ever poet so trusted before! "

This position was not a matter of accident, or of his age. Goldsmith was the firstpopular writer. The dramatists and lyrists (if we really had any lyrists) of necessity appeal to the people ; the lyrist by music and the living voice, the dramatist by the personal presence of his dramatis persona; : but print with them was a sequence of success. Dryden, Pope, Addison, and their innumerable followers, addressed a pub- lic instead of a class ; but they required from their readers some sort of artificial cultivation by letters, conversation, fashion, or the world. Goldsmith alone addressed the people; unless his contemporaries Fielding and Smollett may be said to have led the way. All who could read, and were not brutalized by their vices, or rendered sordid by a love of gain, could feel the Vicar of Walleteld ; the very school-girl could ap- preciate the Deserted Village; and the lower middle class, indifferent to more refined or profound lucubration, could relish the humour, the wisdom, or the satire of Goldsmith's Essays. Popular compendiums he originated ; and carried to an excellence which has never been attained since. New views in learning and new discoveries in science may or will supersede his Histories and his Animated Nature; but the easy order of his arrangement, the acumen in the selection of his facts, the grace- ful naturalness of his style, and the imagination that animated the whole, will not easily be matched.

The great popularity of Goldsmith, his genial good-nature, and the peculiarities of manner and of mind which lowered Wee in the social esti- mation of those who were unable to penetrate beyond externals, caused a very large amount of biographical materials to be collected concerning him, in the shape of anecdotes and reminiscences, as well as the more regu- lar " life." The pertinacious industry and research of Mr. Prior have since hunted out all that is now to be recovered concerning him, from valuable correspondence down to tailors' bills. As regards facts, a life of Gold- smith was scarcely perhaps necessary ; still, those facts might be pat into a more connected form, and faller light be thrown upon them and their Inoue, so as to present a more artistical biography, which should be welcome if not absolutely wanted. This Mr. Forster has done. By dwelling upon Goldsmith's early years and subsequent struggles with the world and its distresses, he indicates how the national character, a wild Irish home, and an unregulated Irish life, with the bitter poverty he afterwards underwent, accounted for much that was crude in his manners and imprudent in conduct; while the biographer shows that all these evil Influences only affected his interests—they never hardened the heart, soured the temper, or lowered the character of Goldsmith. By a close compari- son of dates and facts, Mr. Forster either throws fuller light upon the days of Goldsmith's obscurity, or shows where there is darkness. By well marking Goldsmith's gradual steps towards eminence, and that his fame was not fully established till the close of his life, if even then, he explains the cause of his social depreciation—that few of his com- panions, except Johnson, really understood his genius : it was for some time a matter of astonishment with Boswell what John- Son could see in " Goldy" to like so much, and still more, what made

him submit to retorts that he would hardly have borne from any one else. This idea of a literary adventurer with no wonderful merit was not dis- sipated till the appearance o 'the Deserted Village. Hence, the stories told about him and the socia 'estimate generally formed of him, were not of the genius Goldsmith such as posterity regards him, but as the ready writer, the author o fame popular essays, of a not remarkably successful comedy, ("The Good-natured Man,") and or " The Traveller, a Poem" which it was wonderful how he came to write. After his death, this estimate was greatly changed, and people took a pride in having known him' or having something to tell about him : but still the leaven of their original feeling remained. Had Gold- smith suddenly attained his literary rank and walked into society famous, much would have been ascribed to " eccentricity " that was set down to folly or mean passions.

It is a mark of merit to have so used old facts as to throw a new and interesting light upon them. The great feature, however, of Mr. Forster's Oliver Goldsmith, a Biography, is the sentiment let pervades it. Without extenuating recklessness or imprudence, or underrating the evils of embarrassment or distress, the biographer fixes his attention more than is usual with most writers upon the inward rather than the outward—upon what we feel rather than upon what we have or get. This spirit, which operates throughout, is fully exhibited in the preface, in a passage which presents in brief compass the essence of the life and moral of Goldsmith's career.

" Oliver Goldsmith, whose life and adventures should be known to all who know his writings, must be held to have succeeded in nothing that the world would have had him succeed in. He was intended for a clergyman, and was re- jected when he applied for orders; he practised as a physician, and never made what would have paid for a degree. The world did not ask him to write; but he wrote, and paid the penalty. His existence was a continued privation. The days were few in which he had resources for the night, or dared to look forward to the morrow. There was not any miserable want in the long and sordid catalogue which in its turn and in all its bitterness he did not feel. The experience of those to whom he makes affecting reference in his Animated Nature, people who die really of hunger, in common language of a broken heart,' was his own. And when he succeeded at the last, success was but a feeble sunshine on a rapidly approaching decay, which was to lead him by its flickering and uncertain light to an early grave. " Self-benefit seems out of the question here; the way to happiness distant in- deed from this. But if we look a little closer, we shall see that he passes through it all without one enduring stain upon the childlike purity of his heart. Much misery vanishes when that is known; when it is remembered, too, that in spite of it a Vicar of Wakefield was written; nay, that without it, in all human proba- bility, a Vicar of Wakefield could not have been written. Fifty-six years after its author's death, a great German thinker and wise man recounted to a friend how much he had been indebted to the celebrated Irishman. ' It is not to be de- scribed,' wrote Goethe to Zeller, in 1830, the effect that Goldsmith's Vicar had upon me, just at the critical moment of mental development. That lofty and benevolent irony, that fair and indulgent view of all infirmities and faults, that meekness under all calamities, that equanimity under all changes and chances, and the whole train of kindred virtues, whatever names they bear, proved my best education; and in the end,' he added with sound philosophy, 'these are the thoughts and feelings which have reclaimed us from all the errors of life.' " And why were they so enforced in that charming book, but because the writer had undergone them all; because they had reclaimed himself, not from the world's errors only, but also from its suffering and care; and because his own life and adventures had been the same chequered and beautiful romance of the tri- umph of good over evil.

" Though what is called worldly success, then, was not attained by Goldsmith, it may be that the way to happiness was not missed wholly."

There is, however, more in Mr. Forster's volume than we have yet mentioned : it might have been entitled " The Life and Times of Gold- smith " ; for we have sketches of the age as well as of the man, and kit- kat portraits if not full-lengths of his contemporaries, from Burke and Johnson down to some of the lowest scribblers of the day. These em hibit very considerable knowledge of the literary and social history of the times, and are full of a carious interest in themselves • but they some times interfere with the progress of the narrative. This is more felt a. Mr. Forster's plan partakes almost as much of the essay as of the formal narrative ; so that the Life itself is freely discursive, and the style some- times loses by over-dilution the strength which its author could impart to it.

Our extracts will be as much from the Times as the Life, since they are probably the newest to the reading public.

PUBLISHING, A CENTURY AGO. 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 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 Cham- pion; 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 Grab 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 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 be- gan, 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 9aasi Popish principles, than when the first number, sent forth under the editorship of Smollett in 17.56, was on those very grounds as- sailed. 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 piaci- pal contributor being Samuel Johnson, at this time wholly devoted to it. A MAN OF LETTERS circa 1768.

Paul Heffernan, already mentioned as one of his Grab Street protégé's, of the Pardon and Pilkington class. He was an eccentric, drunken, idle, Irish crea- ture; 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 amusiqg were its attempts to discover more: nor was it till after his death that his where- about 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 'cri- tical and convivial displays, which made his company attractive afterplay-hours, was always sure of a closing entertainment at the Black Lion in Russell Street, or the Cyder Cellar in Maiden Lane.

REYNOLDS'S DINNERS.

They were the first great example that had been given in this country of a cordial intercourse between persons of distinguished pretensions of all kinds; poets, physicians, lawyers, deans, historians, actors, temporal and spiritual Peers, House of Commons men, men of science, men of letters, painters, philosophers, and lovers of the arts, meeting on a ground of hearty ease, good-humour, and plea- santry, which exalts my respect for the memory of Reynolds. It was no prim fine table be set them down to. There was little order or arrangement; there was more abundance than elegance; and a happy freedom thrust conventionalism aside. Often was the dinner board, preps red for seven or eight, required to accommodate itself to fifteen or sixteen; for often, on the very eve of dinner, would Sir Joshua tempt afternoon visitors with intimation that Johnson, or Garrick, or Goldsmith, was to dine there. Nor was the want of seats the only difficulty. A want of knives and forks, of plates and glasses, as often succeeded. In something of the same style, too, was the attendance: the kitchen had to keep pace with the visit- era; and it was easy to know the guests beat acquainted with the house, by their never failing to call instantly for beer, bread, or wine, that they might get them before the first coarse was over and the worst confusion began. Once was Sir Joshua prevailed upon to furnish his table with dinner glasses and decanters; and some saving of time they proved; yet as they were demolished in the course of service, he could never be persuaded to replace them. "But these trifling em- barrassments," added Mr. Conrtenay, describing them to Sir James Macintosh, " only served to enhance the hilarity and singular pleasure of the entertainment." It was not the wine, dishes, and cookery, not the fish and venison, that were talked of or recommended: those social hours, that irregular convivial talk, had mat- ter of higher relish, and far more eagerly enjoyed. And amid all the animated bustle of his guests, the host sat perfectly composed ; always attentive to what was said, never minding what was eat or drank, and leaving every one at perfect liberty to scramble for himself. Though so severe a deafness had resulted from cold caught on the Continent in early life as to compel the use of a trumpet, Rey- nolds profited by its use to hear or not to hear, or, as he pleased, to enjoy the pri- vileges of both, and keep his own equanimity undisturbed.

GOLDSMITH'S MOURNERS.

When Burke was told, he burst into tears. Reynolds was in his painting-room when the messenger went to him: but at once he laid his pencil aside, which in times of great family distress he bad not been known to do; left his painting- room, and did not reenter it that day. Northcote describes the blow as the " se- verest Sir Joshua ever received." Nor was the day less gloomy for Johnson. "Poor Goldsmith is gone," was his anticipation of the evil tidings. "Of poor dear Doctor Goldsmith" he wrote three months later to Boswell, " there is little more to be told. He died of a fever, made, I am afraid, more violent by uneasiness of mind. His debts began to be heavy, rand all his resources were exhausted. Sir Joshua is of opinion that he owed not less than two thousand pounds. Was ever poet so trusted before? " He spoke of the loss for years, as with the tenderness of a recent grief; and in his little room hung round with portraits of his favourite friends, Goldsmith had the place of honour. " So your poor wild Doctor 'Goldsmith," wrote Mrs. Carter to Mrs. Vesey,- ' is dead. He died of a fever, poor man. I am sincerely glad to hear he has no fa- mily; so his loss will not be felt in domestic life." The respectable and learned old lady could not possibly know in what other undomestic ways it might be felt. The staircase of Brick Court It said to have been filled with mourners, the reverse of domestic; women without a home, without domesticity of any kind, with no friend but him they had come to weep for; outcasts of that great, solitary, -wicked city, to whom be had never forgotten to be kind and charitable. And he had domestic mourners too. His coffin was reopened at the request of Miss Horneck and her sister, (such was the regard he was known to have for them!) that a lock might be cut from his hair. It was in Mrs. Gwyn'a possession when she died, after nearly seventy years.

To criticize the particular works of Goldsmith, would merely involve an expansion of what we said formerly in noticing Mr. Prior's edition of the "Miscellaneous Writings." It may, however, be remarked, that Goldsmith died at a time when his genius appears to have been maturing; and he had opened a new vein of composition, that might have placed him among the first satirists of any age, while his spirit of fairness and good-nature would have been new to satire. His poetical epistle to Lord Clare, written without any view to publication, is unrivalled for the humour of its narrative, the felicity of its everyday illustra- tions, and a good-natured sarcasm. Retaliation was left unfinished ; but there is nothing finer in " Absolom and Achitophel," or in the most finished portraits of Pope, than the sketches of Burke and Garrick. Had Goldsmith lived, and could have added to his accurate appreciation a little of the disdainful indifference of Dryden or the contemptuous bitter- ness of Pope, his age would have trembled before him ; and posterity might have had portraits of the early times of George the Third, as pendants to Shaftesbury and the second Villiers, to Halifax and Hervey, Wharton, Addison, and Sarah Dutchess of Marlborough. If the Life and Adventures of Oliver Goldsmith, a Biography, were condensed and revised for a new edition, it would supersede all other books on the subject in point of popularity; for in no other single work have the facts been so fully brought together, or anywhere been exhibited with so much of the spirit of a philosophy kind yet critical. The artistical illustrations worthily support the text. Head-pieces indi- cate the leading outlines of Goldsmith's career, with fancy and truth; while many wood-cuts dramatically exhibit scenes in his life, distinguished for skill in the composition, spirit in the expression, and recognizable likeness in the persons.