NOTES.

NOTE 1. Page 103.

We do not allude chiefly to his experience in childhood, when he is reported to have been a general butt of mockery for his ugliness and his supposed stupidity; since, as regarded the latter reproach, he could not have suffered very long, having already, at a childish age, vindicated his intellectual place by the verses which opened to him an academic destination. We allude to his mature life, and the supercilious condescension with which even his reputed friends doled out their praises to him.

NOTE 2. Page 104.

We point this remark, not at Mr. Forster, who, upon the whole, shares our opinion as to the tolerable comfort of Goldsmith's life; he speaks indeed elsewhere of Goldsmith's depressions; but the question still remains-were they of frequent recurrence, and had they any constitutional settlement? We are inclined to say 7 in both cases.

NOTE 3. Page 107.

Which tub the reader may fancy to have been only an old tar barrel; if so, he is wrong. Isaac Casauborn, after severe re

searches into the nature of that tub, ascertained to the general satisfaction of Christendom that it was not of wood, or within the restorative powers of a cooper, but of earthenware, and, once shattered by a horse's kick, quite past repair. In fact, it was a large oil-jar, such as the remnant of the forty thieves lurked in, when waiting for their captain's signal from Ali Baba's house; and, in Attica, it must have cost fifteen shillings, supposing that the philosopher did not steal it. Consequently a week's loss of house-room and credit to Oliver Goldsmith, at the rate of living then prevalent in Grub street, was pretty much the same thing in money value as the loss to Diogenes of his crockery house by burglary, or in any nocturnal lark of young Attic wine-bibbers. The underwriters would have done an insurance upon either man at pretty much the same premium.

NOTE 4. Page 110.

It may be necessary to explain, for the sake of the many persons who have come amongst the reading public since the period of the incident referred to, that this was a boy called Jones, who was continually entering Buckingham Palace clandestinely, was as regularly ejected by the police, but with respectable pertinacity constantly returned, and on one occasion effected a lodgment in the royal bedchamber. Some happy wit, in just admiration of such perseverance and impudence, christened him In-I-go Jones.

NOTE 5. Page 112.

Often, but not so uniformly (the reader will think) as the dic tion, because the manners are sometimes not those of the writer's own age, being ingenious adaptations to meet the modern writer's conjectural ideas of ancient manners. These, however (even in Sir Walter Scott), are precisely the most mouldering parts in the entire architecture, being always (as, for instance, in Ivanhoe) fantastic, caricatured, and betraying the true modern ground gleaming through the artificial tarnish of antiquity. All novels, in every language, are hurrying to decay; and hurrying by internal changes, were those all; but, in the mean time, the ever

lasting life and fertility of the human mind is forever accelerating this hurry by superseding them, that is, by an external change. Old forms, fading from the interest, or even from the apprehension, have no chance at all as against new forms embodying the same passions. It is only in the grander passions of poetry, allying themselves with forms more abstract and permanent, that such a conflict of the old with the new is possible.

NOTE 6. Page 118.

It ought, by this time, to be known equally amongst governments and philosophers - - that for the state to promise with sincerity the absorption of surplus labor, as fast as it accumulates, cannot be postulated as a duty, until it can first be demonstrated as a possibility. This was forgotten, however, by Mr. C., whose vehement complaints, that the arable field, without a ploughman, should be in one county, whilst in another county was the stout ploughman without a field; and sometimes (which was worse still) that the surplus ploughmen should far outnumber the surplus fields, certainly proceeded on the secret assumption that all this was within the remedial powers of the state. The same doctrine was more openly avowed by various sections of our radicals, who (in their occasional insolent petitions to Parliament) many times asserted that one main use and function of a government was, to find work for everybody. At length (February and March, 1848) we see this doctrine solemnly adopted by a French body of rulers, self-appointed, indeed, or perhaps appointed by their wives, and so far sure, in a few weeks, to be answerable for nothing; but, on the other hand, adopting it as a practical undertaking, in the lawyer's sense, and by no means as a mere gayety of rhetoric. Meantime, they themselves will be "broken" before they will have had time for being reproached with broken promises; though neither fracture is likely to require much above the length of a quarantine.

NOTE 7. Page 119.

When writing this passage, we were not aware (as we now are) that Mr. Forster had himself noticed the case.

NOTE 8. Page 121.

His name began with A, and ended with N; there are but three more letters in the name, and if doubt arises upon our story, in the public mind, we shall publish them.

NOTE 9. Page 124.

If Addison died (as we think he did) in 1717, then, because Goldsmith commenced authorship in 1757, there would be forty years between the two periods. But, as it would be fairer to measure from the centre of Addison's literary career, that is, from 1707, the difference would be just half a century.

ALEXANDER POPE.*

EVERY great classic in our native language should .com time to time be reviewed anew; and especially if he belongs in any considerable extent to that section of the literature which connects itself with manners; and if his reputation originally, or his style of composition, is likely to have been much influenced by the transient fashions of his own age. The withdrawal, for instance, from a dramatic poet, or a satirist, of any false lustre which he has owed to his momentary connection with what we may call the personalities of a fleeting generation, or of any undue shelter to his errors which may have gathered round them from political bias, or from intellectual infirmities amongst his partisans, will sometimes seriously modify, after a century or so, the fairest original appreciation of a fine writer. A window, composed of Claude Lorraine glasses, spreads over the landscape outside a disturbing effect, which not the most practised eye can evade. The eidola theatri effect us all. No man escapes the contagion from his contemporary bystanders. And the reader may see, further

The Works of Pope, by Roscoe.