The occasion of this quatrain, first published as Goldsmith’s* in Poems and Plays, 1777, p. 79, is to be found in Forster’s Life and Times of Oliver Goldsmith, 1871, ii. 60. Purdon died on March 27, 1767 (Gentleman’s Magazine, April, 1767, p. 192). ‘“Dr. Goldsmith made this epitaph,” says William Ballantyne [the author of Mackliniana], “in his way from his chambers in the Temple to the Wednesday evening’s club at the Globe. I think he will never come back, I believe he said. I was sitting by him, and he repeated it more than twice. (I think he will never come back.)”’ Purdon had been at Trinity College, Dublin, with Goldsmith; he had subsequently been a foot soldier; ultimately he became a ‘bookseller’s hack.’ He wrote an anonymous letter to Garrick in 1759, and translated the Henriade of Voltaire. This translation Goldsmith is supposed to have revised, and his own life of Voltaire was to have accompanied it, though finally the Memoir and Translation seem to have appeared separately. (Cf. prefatory note to Memoirs of M. de Voltaire in Gibbs’s Works of Oliver Goldsmith, 1885, iv. 2.)
* It had previously appeared as an extempore by a correspondent in the Weekly Magazine, Edin., August 12, 1773 (Notes and Queries, February 14, 1880).
Forster says further, in a note, ‘The original . . . is the epitaph on “La Mort du Sieur Etienne”:—
Il est au bout de ses travaux,
Il a passé, le Sieur Etienne;
En ce monde il eut tant des maux
Qu’on ne croit pas qu’il revienne.
With this perhaps Goldsmith was familiar, and had therefore less scruple in laying felonious hands on the epigram in the Miscellanies (Swift, xiii. 372):—
Well, then, poor G—— lies underground!
So there’s an end of honest Jack.
So little justice here he found,
’Tis ten to one he’ll ne’er come back.’
Mr. Forster’s ‘felonious hands’ recalls a passage in Goldsmith’s Life of Parnell, 1770, in which, although himself an habitual sinner in this way, he comments gravely upon the practice of plagiarism:—‘It was the fashion with the wits of the last age, to conceal the places from whence they took their hints or their subjects. A trifling acknowledgment would have made that lawful prize, which may now be considered as plunder’ (p. xxxii).
[EPILOGUE FOR LEE LEWES’S BENEFIT.]
This benefit took place at Covent Garden on May 7, 1773, the pieces performed being Rowe’s Lady Jane Grey, and a popular pantomimic after-piece by Theobald, called Harlequin Sorcerer, Charles Lee Lewes (1740–1803) was the original ‘Young Marlow’ of She Stoops to Conquer. When that part was thrown up by ‘Gentleman’ Smith, Shuter, the ‘Mr. Hardcastle’ of the comedy, suggested Lewes, who was the harlequin of the theatre, as a substitute, and the choice proved an admirable one. Goldsmith was highly pleased with his performance, and in consequence wrote for him this epilogue. It was first printed by Evans, 1780, i. 112–4.
[in thy black aspect,] i.e. the half-mask of harlequin, in which character the Epilogue was spoken.