“Is there anything I can do for you at Paris? I wish you would tell me. The whole of my own purchases here is one silk coat, which I have put on, and which makes me look like a fool. But no more of that. I find that Colman has gained his lawsuit. I am glad of it. I suppose you often meet. I will soon be among you, better pleased with my situation at home than I ever was before. And yet I must say that, if anything could make France pleasant, the very good women with whom I am at present would certainly do it. I could say more about that, but I intend showing them the letter before I send it away. What signifies teasing you longer with moral observations, when the business of my writing is over? I have one thing only more to say, and of that I think every hour in the day; namely, that I am your most sincere and most affectionate friend,
“OLIVER GOLDSMITH.
“Direct to me at the Hotel de Danemarc,
Rue Jacob, Fauxbourg St. Germains.”
A word of comment on this letter:
Traveling is, indeed, a very different thing with Goldsmith the poor student at twenty, and Goldsmith the poet and professor at forty. At twenty, though obliged to trudge on foot from town to town, and country to country, paying for a supper and a bed by a tune on the flute, everything pleased, everything was good; a truckle bed in a garret was a conch of down, and the homely fare of the peasant a feast fit for an epicure. Now, at forty, when he posts through the country in a carriage, with fair ladies by his side, everything goes wrong: he has to quarrel with postilions, he is cheated by landladies, the hotels are barns, the meat is too tough to be eaten, and he is half poisoned by green peas! A line hi his letter explains the secret: “The ladies do not seem to be very fond of what we have yet seen.” “One of our chief amusements is scolding at everything we meet with, and praising everything and every person we have left at home!” the true English traveling amusement. Poor Goldsmith! he has “all his confirmed habits about him”; that is to say, he has recently risen into high life, and acquired highbred notions; he must be fastidious like his fellow-travelers; he dare not be pleased with what pleased the vulgar tastes of his youth. He is unconsciously illustrating the trait so humorously satirized by him in Bill Tibbs, the shabby beau, who can find “no such dressing as he had at Lord Crump’s or Lady Crimp’s”; whose very senses have grown genteel, and who no longer “smacks at wretched wine or praises detestable custard.” A lurking thorn, too, is worrying him throughout this tour; he has “outrun the constable”; that is to say, his expenses have outrun his means, and he will have to make up for this butterfly flight by toiling like a grub on his return.
Another circumstance contributes to mar the pleasure he had promised himself in this excursion. At Paris the party is unexpectedly joined by a Mr. Hickey, a bustling attorney, who is well acquainted with that metropolis and its environs, and insists on playing the cicerone on all occasions. He and Goldsmith do not relish each other, and they have several petty altercations. The lawyer is too much a man of business and method for the careless poet, and is disposed to manage everything. He has perceived Goldsmith’s whimsical peculiarities without properly appreciating his merits, and is prone to indulge in broad bantering and raillery at his expense, particularly irksome if indulged in presence of the ladies. He makes himself merry on his return to England, by giving the following anecdote as illustrative of Goldsmith’s vanity:
“Being with a party at Versailles, viewing the waterworks, a question arose among the gentlemen present, whether the distance from whence they stood to one of the little islands was within the compass of a leap. Goldsmith maintained the affirmative; but, being bantered on the subject, and remembering his former prowess as a youth, attempted the leap, but, falling short, descended into the water, to the great amusement of the company.”
Was the Jessamy Bride a witness of this unlucky exploit?
This same Hickey is the one of whom Goldsmith, some time subsequently, gave a good-humored sketch in his poem of The Retaliation.
“Here Hickey reclines, a most blunt, pleasant creature,
And slander itself must allow him good nature;
He cherish’d his friend, and he relish’d a bumper,
Yet one fault he had, and that one was a thumper.
Perhaps you may ask if the man was a miser;
I answer No, no, for he always was wiser;
Too courteous, perhaps, or obligingly flat,
His very worst foe can’t accuse him of that;
Perhaps he confided in men as they go,
And so was too foolishly honest? Ah, not
Then what was his failing? Come, tell it, and burn ye—
He was, could he help it? a special attorney.”