“Yours, most affectionately,
“OLIVER GOLDSMITH.”
By this letter we find the Goldsmiths the same shifting, shiftless race as formerly; a “shattered family,” scrambling on each other’s back as soon as any rise above the surface. Maurice is “every way unprovided for”; living upon Cousin Jane and her husband, and, perhaps, amusing himself by hunting otter in the river Inny. Sister Johnson and her husband are as poorly off as Maurice, with, perhaps, no one at hand to quarter themselves upon; as to the rest, “what is become of them; where do they live; how do they do; what is become of Charles?” What forlorn, haphazard life is implied by these questions! Can we wonder that, with all the love for his native place, which is shown throughout Goldsmith’s writings, he had not the heart to return there? Yet his affections are still there. He wishes to know whether the Lawders (which means his cousin Jane, his early Valentine) ever make mention of him; he sends Jane his miniature; he believes “it is the most acceptable present he can offer”; he evidently, therefore, does not believe she has almost forgotten him, although he intimates that he does: in his memory she is still Jane Contarine, as he last saw her, when he accompanied her harpsichord with his flute. Absence, like death, sets a seal on the image of those we have loved; we cannot realize the intervening changes which time may have effected.
As to the rest of Goldsmith’s relatives, he abandons his legacy of fifteen pounds, to be shared among them. It is all he has to give. His heedless improvidence is eating up the pay of the booksellers in advance. With all his literary success, he has neither money nor influence; but he has empty fame, and he is ready to participate with them; he is honorary professor, without pay; his portrait is to be engraved in mezzotint, in company with those of his friends, Burke, Reynolds, Johnson, Colman, and others, and he will send prints of them to his friends over the Shannon, though they may not have a house to hang them up in. What a motley letter! How indicative of the motley character of the writer! By the bye, the publication of a splendid mezzotinto engraving of his likeness by Reynolds, was a great matter of glorification to Goldsmith, especially as it appeared in such illustrious company. As he was one day walking the streets in a state of high elation, from having just seen it figuring in the print-shop windows, he met a young gentleman with a newly married wife hanging on his arm, whom he immediately recognized for Master Bishop, one of the boys he had petted and treated with sweetmeats when a humble usher at Milner’s school. The kindly feelings of old times revived, and he accosted him with cordial familiarity, though the youth may have found some difficulty in recognizing in the personage, arrayed, perhaps, in garments of Tyrian dye, the dingy pedagogue of the Milners. “Come, my boy,” cried Goldsmith, as if still speaking to a schoolboy, “Come, Sam, I am delighted to see you. I must treat you to something—what shall it be? Will you have some apples?” glancing at an old woman’s stall; then, recollecting the print-shop window: “Sam,” said he, “have you seen my picture by Sir Joshua Reynolds? Have you seen it, Sam? Have you got an engraving?” Bishop was caught; he equivocated; he had not yet bought it; but he was furnishing his house, and had fixed upon the place where it was to be hung. “Ah, Sam!” rejoined Goldsmith reproachfully, “if your picture had been published, I should not have waited an hour without having it.”
After all, it was honest pride, not vanity, in Goldsmith, that was gratified at seeing his portrait deemed worthy of being perpetuated by the classic pencil of Reynolds, and “hung up in history,” beside that of his revered friend, Johnson. Even the great moralist himself was not insensible to a feeling of this kind. Walking one day with Goldsmith, in Westminster Abbey, among the tombs of monarchs, warriors, and statesmen, they came to the sculptured mementos of literary worthies in Poets’ Corner. Casting his eye round upon these memorials of genius, Johnson muttered in a low tone to his companion,
“Forsitan et nostrum nomen miscebitur istis.”
Goldsmith treasured up the intimated hope, and shortly afterward, as they were passing by Temple bar, where the heads of Jacobite rebels, executed for treason, were mouldering aloft on spikes, pointed up to the grizzly mementos, and echoed the intimation,
“Forsitan et nostrum nomen miscebitur istis.”