[ H—gg—ns.] Perhaps, suggests Bolton Corney, this was the Captain Higgins who assisted at Goldsmith’s absurd ‘fracas’ with Evans the bookseller, upon the occasion of Kenrick’s letter in The London Packet for March 24, 1773. Other accounts, however, state that his companion was Captain Horneck (Prior, Life, 1837, ii. 411–12). This couplet is not in the first version.
[Such dainties to them, etc.] The first version reads:—
Such dainties to them! It would look like a flirt,
Like sending ’em Ruffles when wanting a Shirt.
Cunningham quotes a similar idea from T. Brown’s Laconics, Works, 1709, iv. 14. ‘To treat a poor wretch with a bottle of Burgundy, or fill his snuff-box, is like giving a pair of lace ruffles to a man that has never a shirt on his back.’ But Goldsmith, as was his wont, had already himself employed the same figure. ‘Honours to one in my situation,’ he says in a letter to his brother Maurice, in January, 1770, when speaking of his appointment as Professor of Ancient History to the Royal Academy, ‘are something like ruffles to a man that wants a shirt’ (Percy Memoir, 1801, 87–8). His source was probably, not Brown’s Laconics, but those French ‘ana’ he knew so well. According to M. J. J. Jusserand (English Essays from a French Pen, 1895, pp. 160–1), the originator of this conceit was M. Samuel de Sorbieres, the traveller in England who was assailed by Bishop Sprat. Considering himself inadequately rewarded by his patrons, Mazarin, Louis XIV, and Pope Clement IX, he said bitterly—‘They give lace cuffs to a man without a shirt’; a ‘consolatory witticism’ which he afterwards remodelled into, ‘I wish they would send me bread for the butter they kindly provided me with.’ In this form it appears in the Preface to the Sorberiana, Toulouse, 1691.
a flirt is a jibe or jeer. ‘He would sometimes . . . cast out a jesting flirt at me.’ (Morley’s History of Thomas Ellwood, 1895, p. 104.) Swift also uses the word.
[An under-bred, fine-spoken fellow, etc.] The first version reads—
A fine-spoken Custom-house Officer he,
Who smil’d as he gaz’d on the Ven’son and me.
[but I hate ostentation.] Cf. Beau Tibbs:—‘She was bred, but that’s between ourselves, under the inspection of the Countess of All-night.’ (Citizen of the World, 1762, i. 238.)
[We’ll have Johnson, and Burke.] Cf. Boileau, Sat. iii. ll. 25–6, which Goldsmith had in mind:—
Molière avec Tartufe y doit jouer son rôle,
Et Lambert, qui plus est, m’a donné sa parole.