With the exception of Garrick’s couplet, and the fragment of Whitefoord referred to at p. 234, none of the original epitaphs upon which Goldsmith was invited to ‘retaliate’ have survived. But the unexpected ability of the retort seems to have prompted a number of ex post facto performances, some of which the writers would probably have been glad to pass off as their first essays. Garrick, for example, produced three short pieces, one of which (‘Here, Hermes! says Jove, who with nectar was mellow’) hits off many of Goldsmith’s contradictions and foibles with considerable skill (v. Davies’s Garrick, 2nd ed., 1780, ii. 157). Cumberland (v. Gent. Mag., Aug. 1778, p. 384) parodied the poorest part of Retaliation, the comparison of the guests to dishes, by likening them to liquors, and Dean Barnard in return rhymed upon Cumberland. He wrote also an apology for his first attack, which is said to have been very severe, and conjured the poet to set his wit at Garrick, who, having fired his first shot, was keeping out of the way:—
On him let all thy vengeance fall;
On me you but misplace it:
Remember how he called thee Poll—
But, ah! he dares not face it.
For these, and other forgotten pieces arising out of Retaliation, Garrick had apparently prepared the above-mentioned introduction. It may be added that the statement, prefixed to the first edition, that Retaliation, as we now have it, was produced at the ‘next meeting’ of the Club, is manifestly incorrect. It was composed and circulated in detached fragments, and Goldsmith was still working at it when he was seized with his last illness.
[Of old, when Scarron, etc.] Paul Scarron (1610–60), the author inter alia of the Roman Comique, 1651–7, upon a translation of which Goldsmith was occupied during the last months of his life. It was published by Griffin in 1776.
[Each guest brought his dish.] ‘Chez Scarron,’—says his editor, M. Charles Baumet, when speaking of the poet’s entertainments,—‘venait d’ailleurs l’élite des dames, des courtisans & des hommes de lettres. On y dinait joyeusement. Chacun apportait son plat.’ (Œuvres de Scarron, 1877, i. viii.) Scarron’s company must have been as brilliant as Goldsmith’s. Villarceaux, Vivonne, the Maréchal d’Albret, figured in his list of courtiers; while for ladies he had Mesdames Deshoulières, de Scudéry, de la Sablière, and de Sévigné, to say nothing of Ninon de Lenclos and Marion Delorme. (Cf. also Guizot, Corneille et son Temps, 1862, 429–30.)
[If our landlord.] The ‘explanatory note’ to the second edition says—‘The master of the St. James’s coffee-house, where the Doctor, and the friends he has characterized in this Poem, held an occasional club.’ This, it should be stated, was not the famous ‘Literary Club,’ which met at the Turk’s Head Tavern in Gerrard Street. The St. James’s Coffee-house, as familiar to Swift and Addison at the beginning, as it was to Goldsmith and his friends at the end of the eighteenth century, was the last house but one on the south-west corner of St. James’s Street. It now no longer exists. Cradock (Memoirs, 1826, i. 228–30) speaks of dining at the bottom of St. James’s Street with Goldsmith, Percy, the two Burkes (v. infra), Johnson, Garrick, Dean Barnard, and others. ‘We sat very late;’ he adds in conclusion, ‘and the conversation that at last ensued, was the direct cause of my friend Goldsmith’s poem, called “Retaliation.”’
[Our Dean.] Dr. Thomas Barnard, an Irishman, at this time Dean of Derry. He died at Wimbledon in 1806. It was Dr. Barnard who, in reply to a rude sally of Johnson, wrote the charming verses on improvement after the age of forty-five, which end—
If I have thoughts, and can’t express them,
Gibbon shall teach me how to dress them,
In terms select and terse;
Jones teach me modesty and Greek,
Smith how to think, Burke how to speak,
And Beauclerk to converse.
Let Johnson teach me how to place
In fairest light, each borrow’d grace,
From him I’ll learn to write;
Copy his clear, familiar style,
And from the roughness of his file
Grow like himself—polite.
(Northcote’s Life of Reynolds, 2nd ed., 1819, i. 221.) According to Cumberland (Memoirs, 1807, i. 370), ‘The dean also gave him [Goldsmith] an epitaph, and Sir Joshua illuminated the dean’s verses with a sketch of his bust in pen and ink inimitably caricatured.’ What would collectors give for that sketch and epitaph! Unfortunately in Cumberland’s septuagenarian recollections the ‘truth severe’ is mingled with an unusual amount of ‘fairy fiction.’ However Sir Joshua did draw caricatures, for a number of them were exhibited at the Grosvenor Gallery (by the Duke of Devonshire) in the winter of 1883–4.
[Our Burke.] The Right Hon. Edmund Burke, 1729–97.