“I suppose we may take it for granted that he has gone to the playhouse?” said Richard Burke.
“It is not wise to take anything for granted so far as Goldsmith is concerned,” said Steevens. “I think that the best course we can adopt is for some of us to go to the playhouse without delay. The play must be looked after; but for myself I mean to look after the author. Gentlemen, Oliver Goldsmith needs to be looked after carefully. No one knows what a burden he has been forced to bear during the past month.”
“You think it is actually possible that he has not preceded us to the playhouse, sir,” said Johnson.
“If I know anything of him, sir,” said Steevens, “the playhouse is just the place which he would most persistently avoid.” There was a long pause before Johnson said in his weightiest manner:
“Sir, we are all his friends; we hold you responsible for his safety.”
“That is very kind of you, sir,” replied Steevens. “But you may rest assured that I will do my best to find him, wherever he may be.”
While the rest of the party set out for Covent Garden Theatre, Steevens hurried off in the opposite direction. He felt that he understood Goldsmith's mood. He believed that he would come upon him sitting alone in some little-frequented coffee house brooding over the probable failure of his play. The cheerful optimism of the man, which enabled him to hold out against Colman and his sneers, would, he was convinced, suffer a relapse when there was no urgent reason for its exercise, and his naturally sanguine temperament would at this critical hour of his life give place to a brooding melancholy, making it impossible for him to put in an appearance at the theatre, and driving him far from his friends. Steevens actually made up his mind that if he failed to find Goldsmith during the next hour or two, he would seek him at his cottage on the Edgware road.
He went on foot from coffee house to coffee house—from Jack's, in Dean street, to the Old Bell, in Westminster—but he failed to discover his friend in one of them. An hour and a half he spent in this way; and all this time roars of laughter from every part of the playhouse—except the one box that held Cumberland and his friends—were greeting the brilliant dialogue, the natural characterisation, and the admirably contrived situations in the best comedy that a century of brilliant authors had witnessed.
The scene comes before one with all the vividness that many able pens have imparted to a description of its details. We see the enormous figure of Dr. Johnson leaning far out of the box nearest the stage, with a hand behind his ear, so as to lose no word spoken on the stage; and as phrase after phrase, sparkling with wit, quivering with humour and vivified with numbers of allusions to the events of the hour, is spoken, he seems to shake the theatre with his laughter.
Reynolds is in the opposite corner, his ear-trumpet resting on the ledge of the box, his face smiling thoughtfully; and between these two notable figures Miss Reynolds is seated bolt upright, and looking rather frightened as the people in the pit look up now and again at the box.