[What say you—a pasty? It shall, and it must.] The first version reads—
I’ll take no denial—you shall, and you must.
Mr. J. H. Lobban, Goldsmith, Select Poems, 1900, notes a hitherto undetected similarity between this and the ‘It must, and it shall be a barrack, my life’ of Swift’s Grand Question Debated. See also ll. 56 and 91.
[No stirring, I beg—my dear friend—my dear friend.] In the first edition—
No words, my dear GOLDSMITH! my very good Friend!
Mr. Lobban compares:—
‘Good morrow, good captain.’ ‘I’ll wait on you down,’—
‘You shan’t stir a foot.’ ‘You’ll think me a clown.’
[‘And nobody with me at sea but myself.’] This is almost a textual quotation from one of the letters of Henry Frederick, Duke of Cumberland, to Lady Grosvenor, a correspondence which in 1770 gave great delight to contemporary caricaturists and scandal-mongers. Other poets besides Goldsmith seem to have been attracted by this particular lapse of his illiterate Royal Highness, since it is woven into a ballad printed in The Public Advertiser for August 2 in the above year:—
The Miser who wakes in a Fright for his Pelf,
And finds no one by him except his own Self, etc.
[When come to the place, etc.] Cf. Boileau, ut supra, ll. 31–4:—