[12, Green Arbour Court, Old Bailey.] This was a tiny square occupying a site now absorbed by the Holborn Viaduct and Railway Station. No. 12, where Goldsmith lived, was later occupied by Messrs. Smith, Elder & Co. as a printing office. An engraving of the Court forms the frontispiece to the European Magazine for January, 1803.
[or some of his imitators.] The proximate cause of the Citizen of the World, as the present writer has suggested elsewhere, may have been Horace Walpole’s Letter from XoHo [Soho?], a Chinese Philosopher at London, to his friend Lien Chi, at Peking. This was noticed as ‘in Montesquieu’s manner’ in the May issue of the Monthly Review for 1757, to which Goldsmith was a contributor (Eighteenth Century Vignettes, first series, second edition, 1897, pp. 108–9).
[ demonstrable from internal evidence.] e.g.—The references to the musical glasses (ch. ix), which were the rage in 1761–2; and to the Auditor (ch. xix) established by Arthur Murphy in June of the latter year. The sale of the ‘Vicar’ is discussed at length in chapter vii of the editor’s Life of Oliver Goldsmith (‘Great Writers’ series), 1888, pp. 110–21.
[started with a loss.] This, which to some critics has seemed unintelliglble, rests upon the following: ‘The first three editions, . . . resulted in a loss, and the fourth, which was not issued until eight [four?] years after the first, started with a balance against it of £2 16s. 6d., and it was not until that fourth edition had been sold that the balance came out on the right side’ (A Bookseller of the Last Century [John Newbery] by Charles Welsh, 1885, p. 61). The writer based his statement upon Collins’s ‘Publishing book, account of books printed and shares therein, No. 3, 1770 to 1785.’
[James’s Powder.] This was a famous patent panacea, invented by Johnson’s Lichfield townsman, Dr. Robert James of the Medicinal Dictionary. It was sold by John Newbery, and had an extraordinary vogue. The King dosed Princess Elizabeth with it; Fielding, Gray, and Cowper all swore by it, and Horace Walpole, who wished to try it upon Mme. du Deffand in extremis, said he should use it if the house were on fire. William Hawes, the Strand apothecary who attended Goldsmith, wrote an interesting Account of the late Dr. Goldsmith’s Illness, so far as relates to the Exhibition of Dr. James’s Powders, etc., 1774, which he dedicated to Reynolds and Burke. To Hawes once belonged the poet’s worn old wooden writing-desk, now in the South Kensington Museum, where are also his favourite chair and cane. Another desk-chair, which had descended from his friend, Edmund Bott, was recently for sale at Sotheby’s (July, 1906).
GREEN ARBOUR COURT,
LITTLE OLD BAILEY
(as it appeared in 1803)
EDITIONS OF THE POEMS.
No collected edition of Goldsmith’s poetical works appeared until after his death. But, in 1775, W. Griffin, who had published the Essays of ten years earlier, issued a volume entitled The Miscellaneous Works of Oliver Goldsmith, M.B., containing all his Essays and Poems. The ‘poems’ however were confined to ‘The Traveller,’ ‘The Deserted Village,’ ‘Edwin and Angelina,’ ‘The Double Transformation,’ ‘A New Simile,’ and ‘Retaliation,’—an obviously imperfect harvesting. In the following year G. Kearsly printed an eighth edition of Retaliation, with which he included ‘The Hermit’ (‘Edwin and Angelina’), ‘The Gift,’ ‘Madam Blaize,’ and the epilogues to The Sister and She stoops to Conquer;* while to an edition of The Haunch of Venison, also put forth in 1776, he added the ‘Epitaph on Parnell’ and two songs from the oratorio of The Captivity. The next collection appeared in a volume of Poems and Plays published at Dublin in 1777, where it was preceded by a ‘Life,’ written by W. Glover, one of Goldsmith’s ‘Irish clients.’ Then, in 1780, came vol. i of T. Evans’s Poetical and Dramatic Works, etc., now first collected, also having a ‘Memoir,’ and certainly fuller than anything which had gone before. Next followed the long-deferred Miscellaneous Works, etc., of 1801, in four volumes, vol. ii of which comprised the plays and poems. Prefixed to this edition is the important biographical sketch, compiled under the direction of Bishop Percy, and usually described as the Percy Memoir, by which title it is referred to in the ensuing notes. The next memorable edition was that edited for the Aldine Series in 1831, by the Rev. John Mitford. Prior and Wright’s edition in vol. iv of the Miscellaneous Works, etc., of 1837, comes after this; then Bolton Corney’s excellent Poetical Works of 1845; and vol. i of Peter Cunningham’s Works, etc. of 1854. There are other issues of the poems, the latest of which is to be found in vol. ii (1885) of the complete Works, in five volumes, edited for Messrs. George Bell and Sons by J. W. M. Gibbs.