“OLIVER GOLDSMITH.”
The Life of Voltaire, alluded to in the latter part of the preceding letter, was the literary job undertaken to satisfy the demands of Griffiths. It was to hare preceded a translation of the Henriade, by Ned Purdon, Goldsmith’s old schoolmate, now a Grub Street writer, who starved rather than lived by the exercise of his pen, and often tasked Goldsmith’s scanty means to relieve his hunger. His miserable career was summed up by our poet in the following lines written some years after the tune we are treating of, on hearing that he had suddenly dropped dead in Smithfield:
“Here lies poor Ned Purdon, from misery freed,
Who long was a bookseller’s hack;
He led such a damnable life in this world,
I don’t think he’ll wish to come back.”
The memoir and translation, though advertised to form a volume, were not published together; but appeared separately in a magazine.
As to the heroi-comical poem, also, cited in the foregoing letter, it appears to have perished in embryo. Had it been brought to maturity we should have had further traits of autobiography, the room already described was probably his own squalid quarters in Green Arbor Court; and in a subsequent morsel of the poem we have the poet himself, under the euphonious name of Scroggin:
“Where the Red Lion peering o’er the way,
Invites each passing stranger that can pay;
Where Calvert’s butt and Parson’s black champagne
Regale the drabs and bloods of Drury Lane:
There, in a lonely room, from bailiffs snug,
The muse found Scroggin stretch’d beneath a rug;
A nightcap deck’d his brows instead of bay,
A cap by night, a stocking all the day!”
It is to be regretted that this poetical conception was not carried out; like the author’s other writings, it might have abounded with pictures of life and touches of nature drawn from his own observation and experience, and mellowed by his own humane and tolerant spirit; and might have been a worthy companion or rather contrast to his Traveler and Deserted Village, and have remained in the language a first-rate specimen of the mock-heroic.