[DESCRIPTION OF AN AUTHOR’S BEDCHAMBER.]
In a letter written to the Rev. Henry Goldsmith in 1759 (Percy Memoir, 1801, pp. 53–9), Goldsmith thus refers to the first form of these verses:—‘Your last letter, I repeat it, was too short; you should have given me your opinion of the design of the heroicomical poem which I sent you: you remember I intended to introduce the hero of the poem, as lying in a paltry alehouse. You may take the following specimen of the manner, which I flatter myself is quite original. The room in which he lies, may be described somewhat this way:—
The window, patch’d with paper, lent a ray,
That feebly shew’d the state in which he lay.
The sanded floor, that grits beneath the tread:
The humid wall with paltry pictures spread;
The game of goose was there expos’d to view
And the twelve rules the royal martyr drew:
The seasons, fram’d with listing, found a place,
And Prussia’s monarch shew’d his lamp-black face
The morn was cold; he views with keen desire,
A rusty grate unconscious of a fire.
An unpaid reck’ning on the frieze was scor’d,
And five crack’d tea-cups dress’d the chimney board.
And now imagine after his soliloquy, the landlord to make his appearance, in order to dun him for the reckoning:—
Not with that face, so servile and so gay,
That welcomes every stranger that can pay,
With sulky eye he smoak’d the patient man,
Then pull’d his breeches tight, and thus began, etc.
All this is taken, you see, from nature. It is a good remark of Montaign[e]’s, that the wisest men often have friends, with whom they do not care how much they play the fool. Take my present follies as instances of regard. Poetry is a much easier, and more agreeable species of composition than prose, and could a man live by it, it were no unpleasant employment to be a poet.’
In Letter xxix of The Citizen of the World, 1762, i. 119–22, which first appeared in The Public Ledger for May 2, 1760, they have a different setting. They are read at a club of authors by a ‘poet, in shabby finery,’ who asserts that he has composed them the day before. After some preliminary difficulties, arising from the fact that the laws of the club do not permit any author to inflict his own works upon the assembly without a money payment, he introduces them as follows:—‘Gentlemen, says he, the present piece is not one of your common epic poems, which come from the press like paper kites in summer; there are none of your Turnuses or Dido’s in it; it is an heroical description of nature. I only beg you’ll endeavour to make your souls unison* with mine, and hear with the same enthusiasm with which I have written. The poem begins with the description of an author’s bedchamber: the picture was sketched in my own apartment; for you must know, gentlemen, that I am myself the heroe. Then putting himself into the attitude of an orator, with all the emphasis of voice and action, he proceeded.
Where the Red Lion, etc.’
* i.e. accord, conform.
The verses then follow as they are printed in this volume; but he is unable to induce his audience to submit to a further sample. In a slightly different form, some of them were afterwards worked into The Deserted Village, 1770. (See ll. 227–36.)