“The downright Hollander is one of the oddest figures in Nature. Upon a head of lank hair he wears a half-cockd narrow-leav’d hat, lacd with black ribon: no coat but seven waistcoats and nine pairs of breeches so that his hips reach almost up to his arm-pits. This well cloathed vegetable is now fit to see company or make love: but what a pleasing creature is the object of his appetite: why she wears a large friez cap with a deal of flanders lace and for every pair of breeches he carries, she puts on two petticoats. Is it not surprizing how things shoud ever come close enough to make it a match?”
Bishop Percy prints the whole of this letter, except that he delicately bowdlerised one or two phrases in it, and from the Percy version it has reappeared in every one of the succeeding biographies.
EARLY LETTERS FROM LONDON.
The second series of letters begins after Oliver had returned to England about a couple of years, and was “by a very little practice as a physician and a very little reputation as a poet making a shift to live,” as he describes it in a letter to his brother-in-law Daniel Hodson, dated from the Temple Exchange Coffee House, on 27 December, 1757. His brother Charles Goldsmith had paid Oliver a visit in London, and had informed him “of the fatigue you were at in soliciting a subscription to relieve me, not only among my friends and relations, but acquaintance in general. Tho my pride might feel some repugnance at being thus relieved, yet my gratitude can suffer no diminution.... Whether I eat or starve, live in a first floor or four pairs of stairs high, I still remember them [my friends] with ardour, nay my very country comes in for a share of my affection. Unaccountable fondness for country, this maladie du Pays, as the french call it.” He hopes that if he can be absent six weeks from London next summer “to spend three of them among my friends in Ireland. My design is purely to visit, and neither to cut a figure nor levy contributions—neither to excite envy nor solicit favour: in fact my circumstances are adapted to neither. I am too poor to be gazed at, and too rich to need assistance.”
Percy here omits what he calls “some mention of private family matters.” The letter is at this point frayed and imperfect, but these words can be made out:
“Charles is furnished with everything necessary, but why ... stranger to assist him. I hope he will be improved in his ... against his return [from Jamaica]. Poor Jenny! But it is what I expected. My mother too has lost Pallas! My dear Sir, these things give me real uneasiness, and I could wish to redress them. But at present there is hardly a Kingdom in Europe in which I am not a debtor” etc.
After an interval, Goldsmith had what was for him a real bout of letter-writing to a number of his kinsfolk and friends, to solicit their assistance in getting subscriptions for his “Enquiry into the Present State of Polite Learning in Europe” on which he was engaged, and which was about to be published. On 7 August, 1758, he wrote to his cousin and school-fellow Edward Mills that his “Essay on the Present State of Taste and Literature in Europe,” as it was then called, was “now printing in London, and I have requested Mr. Radcliff, Mr. Lawder, Mr. Bryanton, my brother Mr. Henry Goldsmith, and my brother-in-law Mr. Hodson, to circulate my proposals among their acquaintances.”
The letter to Dr. Radcliff is unknown: the date of that to Mrs. Lawder, asking her husband’s help, is 15 August, 1758; that to Bryanton is 14 August, 1758; the letter to Henry Goldsmith is lost, but a second letter to him on the same subject says “I shall the beginning of next month send over two hundred and fifty books.” As the work was published on 2 April, 1759, the date of this second letter to the Revd. Henry Goldsmith was probably February, 1759. (It has been preserved, but is not actually dated.)
Taking these several communications in the order of their date, the letter of 7 August, 1758, to Edward Mills, which I exhibit to-day, is a frank appeal for help in circulating the prospectus of Oliver’s new book, but otherwise contains nothing of importance. “Every book published here [London] the printers in Ireland republish there, without giving the Author the least consideration for his coppy. I would in this respect disappoint their avarice, and have all the additional advantages that may result from the sale of my performance there to myself.”
Neither Mills nor Lawder (to whom a similar request was made through the medium of his wife on the 15th of the same month of August, 1758) appears to have taken any notice of it, and in writing to his brother Henry at a later date—about February, 1759—Oliver says “The behaviour of Mr. Mills and Mr. Lawder is a little extraordinary: however, their answering neither you nor me is a sufficient indication of their disliking the employment which I assignd them. As their conduct is different from what I had expected so I have made an alteration in mine. I shall the beginning of next month send over two hundred and fifty books, which are all that I fancy, can be well sold among you.”