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a blunder; and the blunder is so broad and palpable that it implies instant forgetfulness both in the writer and the reader. The idea which furnishes the basis of the passage is this: that the conduct ascribed to Addison is in its own nature so despicable as to extort laughter by its primary impulse, but that this laughter changes into weeping when we come to understand that the person concerned in this delinquency is Addison. The change, the transfiguration, in our mood of contemplating the offence is charged upon the discovery which we are supposed to make as to the person of the offender; that which by its baseness had been simply comic when imputed to some corresponding author passes into a tragic coup-de-théatre when it is suddenly traced back to a man of original genius. The whole, therefore, of this effect is made to depend upon the sudden scenical transition from a supposed petty criminal to one of high distinction. And, meantime, no such stage effect had been possible, since the knowledge that a man of genius was the offender had been what we started with from the beginning. "Our laughter is changed to tears," says Pope, as soon as we discover that the base act had a noble author." And, behold! the initial feature in the whole description of the case is, that the libeller was one whom "true genius fired":

"Peace to all such! But, were there one whose mind
True genius fires," etc.

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Before the offence is described, the perpetrator is already characterised as a man of genius: and, in spite of that knowledge, we laugh. But suddenly our mood changes, and we weep. But why? I beseech you. Simply because we have ascertained the author to be a man of genius.

"Who would not laugh, if such a man there be?
Who would not weep, if Atticus were he?"

The sole reason for weeping is something that we knew already before we began to laugh.

OLIVER GOLDSMITH1

THIS book accomplishes a retribution which the world has waited for through more than seventy years. Welcome at any rate by its purpose, it is trebly welcome by its execution, to all hearts that linger indulgently over the frailties of a national favourite, long systematically exaggerated,—to all hearts that brood indignantly over the genial powers of that favourite, too often maliciously undervalued.

A man of original genius, shown to us as revolving through the leisurely stages of a biographical memoir, lays open, to readers prepared for such revelations, two separate theatres of interest: one in his personal career; the other in his works and his intellectual development. Both unfold concurrently: and each borrows a secondary interest from the other: the life from the recollection of the works-the

works from the joy and sorrow of the life. There have, indeed, been authors whose great creations, severely preconceived in a region of thought transcendent to all impulses of earth, would have been pretty nearly what they are under any possible changes in the dramatic arrangement of their lives. Happy or not happy, gay or sad,- these authors would equally have fulfilled a mission too solemn

1 First published in the North British Review for May 1848, and revised by De Quincey in 1857 for the collective edition of his works, with some verbal changes (e.g. "we" into "I," "our" into "my"). The book reviewed was "The Life and Adventures of Goldsmith: a Biography. In four books. By John Forster. London, 1848."

and too stern in its obligations to suffer any warping from chance, or to bend before the accidents of life, whether dressed in sunshine or in wintry gloom. But generally this is otherwise. Children of Paradise, like the Miltons of our planet, have the privilege of stars to "dwell apart.” But the children of flesh, whose pulses beat too sympathetically with the agitations of mother - earth, cannot sequester themselves in that way. They walk in no such altitudes, but at elevations easily reached by ground-winds of humble calamity. And from that cup of sorrow which upon all lips is pressed in some proportion they must submit, by the very tenure on which they hold their gifts, to drink, if not more profoundly than others, yet more perilously as regards the fulfilment of their intellectual mission.

Amongst this household of children, too sympathetically linked to the trembling impulses of earth, stands forward conspicuously Oliver Goldsmith. And there is a belief current that he was conspicuous, not only in the sense of being constitutionally more flexible than others to the impressions of calamity, in case they had happened to occur, but also that he really met with more than his share of those afflictions. I am disposed to think that this was not so. My trust is that Goldsmith lived upon the whole a life which, though troubled, was one of average enjoyment. Unquestionably, when reading at midnight, in the middle watch of a century which he never reached by one whole generation, this record of one so guileless, so upright, or seeming to be otherwise only in the eyes of those who did not know his difficulties, nor could have understood them,—when recurring also to his admirable genius, to the sweet natural gaiety of his oftentimes pathetic humour, and to the varied accomplishments, from talent or erudition, by which he gave effect to endowments so fascinating,—one cannot but sorrow over the strife which he sustained, and over the wrong by which he suffered. A few natural tears fall from every eye at the rehearsal of so much contumely from fools, which he faced unresistingly as one bareheaded under a hailstorm 1; and

1 I do not allude chiefly to his experience in childhood, when he is reported to have been a general butt of ridicule for his ugliness and

VOL. IV

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worse to bear than the scorn of fools was the imperfect sympathy and jealous self-distrusting esteem which he received to the last from friends. Doubtless he suffered much wrong; but so, in one way or other, do most men: he suffered also this special wrong, that in his lifetime he never was fully appreciated by any one friend: something of a counter-movement ever mingled with praise for him; he never saw himself enthroned in the heart of any young and fervent admirer; and he was always overshadowed by men less deeply genial, though more showy than himself: but these things happen, and will happen for ever, to myriads amongst the benefactors of earth. Their names ascend in songs of thankful commemoration, yet seldom until the ears are deaf that would have thrilled to the music. And these were the heaviest of Goldsmith's afflictions: what are likely to be thought such-viz. the battles which he fought for his daily bread-I do not number amongst them. To struggle is not to suffer. Heaven grants to few of us a life of untroubled prosperity, and grants it least of all to its favourites. Charles I. carried, as it was thought by a keen Italian judge of physiognomy, a predestination to misery written in his features. And it is probable that, if any Cornelius Agrippa had then been living, to show him in early life the strife, the bloodshed, the triumphs of enemies, the treacheries of friends, the separation for ever from the familiar faces of his hearth, which darkened the years from 1642 to 1649, Charles would have said, “Prophet of woe! if I bear to live through this vista of seven years, it is because at the further end of it thou showest me the consolation of a scaffold." And yet my own belief is that, in the midst of its deadly agitations and its torments of suspense, probably enough by the energies of hope, or even of anxiety which exalted it, that period of bitter conflict was found by the king a more ennobling life than he would have found in the torpor of a prosperity too profound. To be cloyed perpetuhis 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. I allude to his mature life, and the supercilious condescension with which even his reputed friends doled out their praises to him.

ally is a worse fate than sometimes to stand within the vestibule of starvation; and we need go no further than the confidential letters of the court ladies in this and other countries to satisfy ourselves how much worse in its effects upon happiness than any condition of alarm and peril is the lethargic repose of luxury too monotonous, and of security too absolute. If, therefore, Goldsmith's life had been one of continual struggle, it would not follow that it had therefore sunk below the standard of ordinary happiness. But the life-struggle of Goldsmith, though severe enough (after all allowances) to challenge a feeling of tender compassion, was not in such a degree severe as has been represented.1 He enjoyed two great immunities from suffering that have been much overlooked; and such immunities that, in our opinion, four in five of all the people ever connected with Goldsmith's works, as publishers, printers, compositors (that is, men taken at random), have very probably suffered more, upon the whole, than he. The immunities were these :—1st, from any bodily taint of low spirits. He had a constitutional gaiety of heart, an elastic hilarity, and, as he himself expresses it, "a knack of hoping"—which knack could not be bought with Ormus and with Ind, nor hired for a day with the peacock-throne of Delhi. How easy was it to bear the brutal affront of being to his face described as "Doctor minor," when one hour or less would dismiss the Doctor major, so invidiously contradistinguished from himself, to a struggle with scrofulous melancholy; whilst he, if returning to solitude and a garret, was returning also to habitual cheerfulness. There lay one immunity, beyond all price, from a mode of strife to which others, by a large majority, are doomed, strife with bodily wretchedness. Another immunity he had of almost equal value, and yet almost equally forgotten by its biographers-viz. from the responsibilities of a family. Wife and children he had not. They it is that, being a man's chief blessings, create also for him

1 I point this remark not at Mr. Forster; who, upon the whole, shares my 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 root or lodgment? I am inclined to say no in both

cases.

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