Dear mercenary beauty,
What annual offering shall I make,
Expressive of my duty?'
He has the works of Voltaire, Diderot, Fontenelle, Marmontel, Voiture; he has the plays of Brueys, La Chaussée, Dancourt, Destouches; he has many of the madrigalists and minor verse-men,—all of which possessions tend to corroborate that suspected close study of Gallic authors from which, as many hold, he derived not a little of the unfailing perspicuity of his prose, and most of the brightness and vivacity of his more familiar verse. Of his own works—and the fact is curious when one remembers some of his traditional characteristics—there are practically no examples, at least there is none catalogued. Their sole representative is an imperfect set of the 'History of the Earth and Animated Nature,' which had only recently been completed, and was published posthumously. Not a single copy of 'The Vicar,' of 'She Stoops to Conquer,' of 'The Citizen of the World,' of 'The Deserted Village'! Not even a copy of that rarest of rarities, the privately printed version of 'Edwin and Angelina,' which its author told his friend Cradock 'could not be amended'—although he was always amending it! Of course it is possible that his own writings had been withdrawn from Mr. Good's catalogue, or that they are included in the 'and others' of unspecified lots. But this is scarcely likely, and it may be accepted as a noteworthy fact that one of the most popular authors of his day did not, at his death, possess any of his own performances, with the exception of an incomplete specimen of his most laborious compilation.*
* Racine was in similar case. In the inventory of his
effects, discovered some time since, there is not a single
copy of his works.
Besides this, the only volumes that bear indirectly upon his work are the 'Memoirs' of the Cardinal de Retz, which he had used in 'The Bee,' the 'Lettres Persanes' of Montesquieu, which perhaps prompted 'The Citizen of the World,' and the 'Roman Comique' of M. Paul Scarron, which he had been translating in the latter months of its life—an accident which has left its mark in his last poem, the admirable 'Retaliation':
'Of old, when Scarron his companions invited,
Each guest brought his dish, and the feast was united.'
It may be that he had intended to prefix a biographical sketch or memoir to his version of the 'Comic Romance,' since the reference here is plainly to those famous picnic suppers in the Marais, to which, according to Scarron's biographer, M. Charles Baumet, came as guests—but * 'chacun apportant son plat'—the pink of dames, of courtiers, and of men of letters.
Where did they go, these books and household goods of 'Dr. Goldsmith, deceased'? It is to be presumed that he did not boast a book-plate, for none, to our knowledge, has ever been advertised, nor is there any record of one in the late Lord de Tabley's well-known 'Handbook,' so that the existing possessors of those precious volumes, in the absence of any autograph inscription, must entertain their treasures unawares. Of his miscellaneous belongings, the only specimens now well-known do not seem to have passed under the hammer of the Fleet Street auctioneer. His favourite chair, a dark, hollow-seated, and somewhat penitential looking piece of furniture, is preserved at South Kensington, where, not many years since, it was sketched, in company with his cane—perhaps the very cane that once crossed the back of Evans the bookseller—by Mr. Hugh Thomson, the clever young Irish artist to whom we are indebted for the most successful of recent illustrated editions of the | Vicar of Wakefield.' *