interest of his friend more, none regarded his own less.”

Among his disappointments, at this period, are to be numbered an unsuccessful application for a Gresham Lectureship, and Garrick’s refusal of the “Good-Natured Man.” But Colman put the drama on the stage, January 29th, 1768, and the Professorship of Ancient History in the Royal Academy was agreeably bestowed. His “Roman History,” published in 1769, was received with favour; and in the May of 1770, the “Deserted Village” appeared.

In that year, Gray travelled through a part of England and South Wales, and Mr. Norton Nichols was with him at Malvern when he received the new poem, which he desired his friend to read to him. He listened with fixed attention, and soon exclaimed, “This man is a Poet.” In twelve days the poem was reprinted, and before the 5th of August the public admiration exhausted a fifth impression. His comedy, the “Mistakes of a Night” (represented March 15th, 1773), obtained a success, of its kind, not inferior. Johnson said that it answered the great end of a comedy—“making an audience merry.” For an impertinent letter in the “London Packet,” Goldsmith caned the editor; having found, was the remark of a friend, a new pleasure, for he believed that it was the “first time he had beat,” though “he may have been beaten before.”

I may add, that the Ballad of “Edwin and Angelina,” having been privately printed for the amusement of the Countess ofxv Northumberland, was inserted in the “Vicar of Wakefield,” when that charming fiction first came out, March 27th, 1766, to delight the young by its adventures, and the old by its wisdom. For two years the manuscript had lain in the desk of the Publisher, until the fame of the “Traveller” encouraged him to send it to the press.

xv

He was now engaged in the compilation of the “History of the Earth and Animated Nature,” for which he was to receive eight hundred guineas; and about this time, according to Percy, he wrote “the ‘Haunch of Venison,’ ‘Retaliation,’ and some other little sportive sallies, which were not printed until after his death.” Mr. Peter Cunningham1 has, for the first time, related the true story of “Retaliation,” in the original words of Garrick:—A party of friends, at the St. James’s Coffee House, were diverting themselves with the peculiar oddities of Goldsmith, who insisted upon trying his epigrammatic powers with Garrick. Each was to write the other’s epitaph. Garrick immediately spoke the following lines:—

lines:—

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