It seems to me not unlikely that Percy’s opinion was sought as to the wording of the defence or disclaimer by Goldsmith “To the Public” which appeared in the Daily Advertiser of 31 March, 1773, as this also is printed in extenso in the Memoir of 1801 (pp. 107-8). Dr. Johnson had certainly no hand in its preparation, for on Saturday, 3 April, in response to an enquiry by the obsequious Boswell, he said: “Sir, Dr. Goldsmith would no more have asked me to have wrote such a thing as that for him, than he would have asked me to feed him with a spoon, or to do anything else that denoted imbecility.... He has indeed done it very well, but it is a foolish thing well done.” Percy says in the Memoir (p. 107): “The subject of this dispute was long discussed in the public papers, which discanted on the impropriety of attacking a man in his own house: and an action was threatened for the assault: which was at length compromised”: and here he leaves it, as we may well do.
One other matter connected with “She Stoops to Conquer” I must ask your permission to touch upon before I conclude. Four attempts were made at an Epilogue for the play, and the Percy documents enable us for the first time to understand the sequence of these. Two of them were printed (not quite textually) in Vol. II of the Memoir of 1801, and Percy, who set great store by them, complains to his correspondents that enough credit was not given to him by the publishers for them. He told Dr. Robert Anderson:
“The Dr. had likewise given him two original Poems that had never been printed. These are the two Epilogues printed in the second Volume, viz: that spoken by Mrs. Bulkley and Miss Catley, and that intended for Mrs. Bulkley. The latter [it] is said in a Note, was given in Manuscript to Dr. Percy by the Author, but no such mention is made of the former, tho’ it was also so given by him and delivered to the Publishers in his own writing.”
Percy was a little in doubt about the second of these Epilogues (which in the edition of 1801 he cut down from 58 lines to 42), for he invited George Steevens on 10 September, 1797, to ask Mrs. Bulkley if she remembered for what play it was intended: “He [Goldsmith] gave it me among a parcel of letters and papers, some written by himself, and some addressed to him, but with not much explanation” (Literary Illustrations, VII, 31). Steevens’ reply of 14 September, 1797, was in his usual caustic vein: “The lady you would have interrogated ceased to be at least seven years ago: and what would the public say could it be known that your Lordship, a Protestant Bishop, was desirous to send your sober correspondents into the other world a harlot-hunting?” (Ibid, 32).
It is a little surprising that the Bishop should not have at once recognised its obvious associations with “She Stoops to Conquer,” in view of the two lines at the end of the Epilogue:
“No high-life scenes, no sentiment: the creature
“Still stoops among the low to copy nature.”
But all these points, in their way interesting and even absorbing, are rather beyond the object with which I embarked upon this paper, viz.: to do justice to the affectionate side of Goldsmith’s warm Irish nature by bringing into relief the letters which, despite his repugnance to correspondence, he from time to time addressed to members of his own family with ardent and even pitiful appeals for news from Ireland. These appeals, it is to be feared, had no satisfactory response from the recipients of the letters which after their many adventures I have now had the privilege of exhibiting to you, and which I think serve to illustrate the truth of Dr. Johnson’s dictum: “Goldsmith was a man of such variety of powers and such felicity of performance, that he always seemed to do best that which he was doing: a man who had the art of being minute without tediousness, and general without confusion; whose language was copious without exuberance, exact without constraint and easy without weakness.”