[And footmen, lords and dukes can act.] Cf. Gil Blas, 1715–35, liv. iii, chap. iv:—‘Il falloit voir comme nous nous portions des santés à tous moments, en nous donnant les uns aux autres les surnoms de nos maîtres. Le valet de don Antonio appeloit Gamb celuiet nous nous enivrions peu à peu sous ces noms empruntés, tout aussi bien que les seigneurs qui les portoient véritablement.’ But Steele had already touched this subject in Spectator, No. 88, for June 11, 1711, ‘On the Misbehaviour of Servants,’ a paper supposed to have afforded the hint for Townley’s farce of High Life below Stairs, which, about a fortnight after The Logicians Refuted appeared, was played for the first time at Drury Lane, not much to the gratification of the gentlemen’s gentlemen in the upper gallery. Goldsmith himself wrote ‘A Word or two on the late Farce, called High Life below Stairs,’ in The Bee for November 3, 1759, pp. 154–7.
[A SONNET.]
This little piece first appears in The Bee for October 20, 1759 (No. iii). It is there called ‘A Sonnet,’ a title which is only accurate in so far as it is ‘a little song.’ Bolton Corney affirms that it is imitated from the French of Saint-Pavin (i.e. Denis Sanguin de Saint-Pavin, d. 1670), whose works were edited in 1759, the year in which Goldsmith published the collection of essays and verses in which it is to be found. The text here followed is that of the ‘new edition’ of The Bee, published by W. Lane, Leadenhall Street, no date, p. 94. Neither by its motive nor its literary merits—it should be added—did the original call urgently for translation; and the poem is here included solely because, being Goldsmith’s, it cannot be omitted from his complete works.
[This and the following line] in the first version run:—
Yet, why this killing soft dejection?
Why dim thy beauty with a tear?
[STANZAS ON THE TAKING OF QUEBEC.]
Quebec was taken on the 13th September, 1759. Wolfe was wounded pretty early in the action, while leading the advance of the Louisbourg grenadiers. ‘A shot shattered his wrist. He wrapped his handkerchief about it and kept on. Another shot struck him, and he still advanced, when a third lodged in his breast. He staggered, and sat on the ground. Lieutenant Brown, of the grenadiers, one Henderson, a volunteer in the same company, and a private soldier, aided by an officer of artillery who ran to join them, carried him in their arms to the rear. He begged them to lay him down. They did so, and asked if he would have a surgeon. “There’s no need,” he answered; “it’s all over with me.” A moment after, one of them cried out, “They run; see how they run!” “Who run?” Wolfe demanded, like a man roused from sleep. “The enemy, sir. They give way everywhere!” “Go, one of you, to Colonel Burton,” returned the dying man; “tell him to march Webb’s regiment down to Charles River, to cut off their retreat from the bridge.” Then, turning on his side, he murmured, “Now, God be praised, I will die in peace!” and in a few moments his gallant soul had fled.’ (Parkman’s Montcalm and Wolfe, 1885, ii. 296–7.) In his History of England in a Series of Letters, 1764, ii. 241, Goldsmith says of this event:—‘Perhaps the loss of such a man was greater to the nation than the conquering of all Canada was advantageous; but it is the misfortune of humanity, that we can never know true greatness till the moment when we are going to lose it.’* The present stanzas were first published in The Busy Body (No. vii) for Tuesday, the 22nd October, 1759, a week after the news of Wolfe’s death had reached this country (Tuesday the 16th). According to Prior (Life, 1837, i. 6), Goldsmith claimed to be related to Wolfe by the father’s side, the maiden name of the General’s mother being Henrietta Goldsmith. It may be noted that Benjamin West’s popular rendering of Wolfe’s death (1771)—a rendering which Nelson never passed in a print shop without being stopped by it—was said to be based upon the descriptions of an eye-witness. It was engraved by Woollett and Ryland in 1776. A key to the names of those appearing in the picture was published in the Army and Navy Gazette of January 20, 1893.
* He repeats this sentiment, in different words, in the later History of England of 1771, iv. 400.
[AN ELEGY ON MRS. MARY BLAIZE.]
The publication in February, 1751, of Gray’s Elegy Wrote in a Country Church Yard had set a fashion in poetry which long continued. Goldsmith, who considered that work ‘a very fine poem, but overloaded with epithet’ (Beauties of English Poesy, 1767, i. 53), and once proposed to amend it ‘by leaving out an idle word in every line’ [!] (Cradock’s Memoirs, 1826, i. 230), resented these endless imitations, and his antipathy to them frequently reveals itself. Only a few months before the appearance of Mrs. Blaize in The Bee for October 27, 1759, he had written in the Critical Review, vii. 263, when noticing Langhorne’s Death of Adonis, as follows:—‘It is not thus that many of our moderns have composed what they call elegies; they seem scarcely to have known its real character. If an hero or a poet happens to die with us, the whole band of elegiac poets raise the dismal chorus, adorn his herse with all the paltry escutcheons of flattery, rise into bombast, paint him at the head of his thundering legions, or reining Pegasus in his most rapid career; they are sure to strew cypress enough upon the bier, dress up all the muses in mourning, and look themselves every whit as dismal and sorrowful as an undertaker’s shop.’ He returned to the subject in a Chinese Letter of March 4, 1761, in the Public Ledger (afterwards Letter ciii of The Citizen of the World, 1762, ii. 162–5), which contains the lines On the Death of the Right Honourable ***; and again, in The Vicar of Wakefield, 1766, i. 174, à propos of the Elegy on the Death of a Mad Dog, he makes Dr. Primrose say, ‘I have wept so much at all sorts of elegies of late, that without an enlivening glass I am sure this will overcome me.’