1. 53. What say you-a pasty? it shall, and it must. The first version reads

I'll take no denial-you shall, and you must.

Mr. J. M. Lobban, Goldsmith, Select Poems, 1900, notes a hitherto undetected similarity between this and the 'It must, and it shall be a barrack, my life' of Swift's Grand Question Debated. See also 11. 56 and 91.

1. 56. No stirring, I beg-my dear friend-my dear friend. In the first edition

No words, my dear GOLDSMITH! my very good Friend! Mr. Lobban compares :

'Good morrow, good captain.' 'I'll wait on you down,''You shan't stir a foot.' 'You'll think me a clown.'

1. 60. And nobody with me at sea but myself.' This is almost a textual quotation from one of the letters of Henry Frederick, Duke of Cumberland, to Lady Grosvenor, a correspondence which in 1770 gave great delight to contemporary caricaturists and scandal-mongers. Other poets besides Goldsmith seem to have been attracted by this particular lapse of his illiterate Royal Highness, since it is woven into a ballad printed in The Public Advertiser for August 2 in the above year :

The Miser who wakes in a Fright for his Pelf,

And finds no one by him except his own Self, &c.

1. 67. When come to the place, &c. Cf. Boileau, ut supra, 11. 31-4:

A peine étais-je entré, que, ravi de me voir,

Mon homme, en m'embrassant, m'est venu recevoir; Et montrant à mes yeux une allégresse entière, Nous n'avons, m'a-t-il dit, ni Lambert ni Molière. Lambert the musician, it may be added, had the special reputation of accepting engagements which he never kept.

1. 72. and t'other with Thrale. Henry Thrale, the Southwark brewer, and the husband of Mrs. Thrale, afterwards Mrs. Piozzi. Johnson first made his acquaintance in 1765. Strahan complained to Boswell that, by this connexion, Johnson' was in a great measure absorbed from the society of his old friends.'

(Birkbeck Hill's Boswell, 1887, iii. 225.) Line 72 in the first edition reads

'They'

The one at the House, and the other with THRALE. 1. 76. They both of them merry and authors like you. should apparently be 'they're.' The first version readsWho dabble and write in the Papers-like you.

6

'Pan

1. 78. Some think he writes Cinna-he owns to Panurge. urge' and 'Cinna' arè signatures which were frequently to be found at the foot of letters addressed to the Public Advertiser in 1770-1 in support of Lord Sandwich and the Government. They are said to have been written by Dr. W. Scott, Vicar of Simonburn, Northumberland, and chaplain of Greenwich Hospital, both of which preferments had been given him by Sandwich. In 1765 he had attacked Lord Bute and his policy over the signature of Anti-Sejanus.' Sandwich and his parson Anti-Sejanus [are] hooted off the stage '-writes Walpole to Mann, March 21, 1766. According to Prior, it was Scott who visited Goldsmith in his Temple chambers, and invited him to 'draw a venal quill' for Lord North's administration. Goldsmith's noble answer, as reported by his reverend friend, was-'I can earn as much as will supply my wants without writing for any party; the assistance therefore you offer is unnecessary to me.' (Life, 1837, ii. 278.) There is a caricature portrait of Scott at p. 141 of The London Museum for February, 1771, entitled "Twitcher's Advocate,' 'Jemmy Twitcher' being the nickname of Lord Sandwich.

1. 82. Swinging, great, huge. Bishop Lowth has just finished the Dramas, and sent me word, that although I have paid him the most swinging compliment he ever received, he likes the whole book more than he can say.' (Memoirs of Hannah More, 1834, i. 236.)

1. 84. pasty. The first version has Ven'son.'

1. 87. So there I sat, &c. This couplet is not in the first version.

1. 91. And, ‘Madam,' quoth he. Mr. Lobban again quotes Swift's Grand Question Debated:

And 'Madam,' says he, 'if such dinners you give
You'll ne'er want for parsons as long as you live.'

These slight resemblances, coupled with the more obvious likeness of the Raphaels, Correggios, and stuff' of Retaliation (11. 145-6) to the 'Noueds and Bluturks and Omurs and stuff' (also pointed out by Mr. Lobban) are interesting, because they show plainly that Goldsmith remembered the works of Swift far better than The New Bath Guide, which has sometimes been supposed to have set the tune to the Haunch and Retaliation.

1. 91. may this bit be my poison.' The gentleman in She Stoops to Conquer, Act i, who is 'obligated to dance a bear,' uses the same asseveration (v. p. 219 of this volume). Cf. also Squire Thornhill's somewhat similar formula in chap. vii of The Vicar of Wakefield, 1766, i. 59.

1. 95. The tripe,' quoth the Jew, &c. The first version reads— 'Your Tripe!' quoth the Jew, 'if the truth I may speak, I could eat of this Tripe seven days in the week.'

1. 103. Re-echoed, i.e. ́ returned' in first edition.

1. 104. thot. This, probably by a printer's error, is altered to 'that' in the second version. But the first reading is the more in keeping, besides being a better rhyme.

1. 110. Wak'd Priam. Cf. 2 Henry IV, Act i, Sc. 1:

Even such a man, so faint, so spiritless,

So dull, so dead in look, so woe-begone,
Drew Priam's curtain in the dead of night.

And would have told him half his Troy was burnt.

1. 120. sicken'd over by learning. Cf. Hamlet, Act iii, Sc. 1: And thus the native hue of resolution

Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought. Notwithstanding the condemnation of Shakespeare in the Present State of Polite Learning, and elsewhere, Goldsmith frequently weaves Shakespearean recollections into his work. Cf. She Stoops to Conquer, 1773, Act i, p. 13, 'We wanted no ghost to tell us that' (Hamlet, Act i, Sc. 5); and Act i, p. 9, where he uses Falstaff's words (1 Henry IV, Act v, Sc. 1)::

Would it were bed-time and all were well.

1. 121. as very well known. The first version has, ''tis very well known.'

EPITAPH ON THOMAS PARNELL.

This epitaph, apparently never used, was published with The Haunch of Venison, 1776; and is supposed to have been written about 1770. In that year Goldsmith wrote a Life of Thomas Parnell, D.D., to accompany an edition of his poems, printed for Davies of Russell Street. Parnell was born in 1679, and died at Chester in 1718, on his way to Ireland. He was buried at Trinity Church in that town, on the 24th of October. Goldsmith says that his father and uncle both knew Parnell (Life of Parnell, 1770, p. v), and that he received assistance from the poet's nephew, Sir John Parnell, the singing gentleman who figures in Hogarth's Election Entertainment. Why Goldsmith should write an epitaph upon a man who died ten years before his own birth, is not easy to explain. But Johnson also wrote a Latin one, which he gave to Boswell. (Birkbeck Hill's Life, 1887, iv. 54.)

1. 1. gentle Parnell's name. [Epistle to Harley, 1. iv]:

Mitford compares Pope on Parnell

With softest manners, gentlest Arts adorn'd.

Pope published Parnell's Poems in 1722, and his sending them to Harley, Earl of Oxford, after the latter's disgrace and retirement, was the occasion of the foregoing epistle, from which the following lines respecting Parnell may also be cited :

For him, thou oft hast bid the World attend,
Fond to forget the statesman in the friend;
For SWIFT and him despis'd the farce of state,
The sober follies of the wise and great;
Dext'rous the craving, fawning crowd to quit,
And pleas'd to 'scape from Flattery to Wit.

1. 3. his sweetly-moral lay. Cf. The Hermit, the Hymn to Contentment, the Night Piece on Death—which Goldsmith certainly recalled in his own City Night-Piece. Of the last-named Goldsmith says (Life of Parnell, 1770, p. xxxii), not without an obvious side-stroke at Gray's too-popular Elegy, that it deserves every praise, and I should suppose with very little amendment, might be made to surpass all those night pieces and church yard scenes that have since appeared.' This is certainly (as Longfellow sings) to rustling hear in every breeze

The laurels of Miltiades.

6

Of Parnell, Hume wrote (Essays, 1770, i. 244) that ' after the fiftieth reading; [he] is as fresh as at the first.' But Gray (speaking-it should be explained-of a dubious volume of his posthumous works) said: 'Parnell is the dung-hill of Irish Grub Street' (Gosse's Gray's Works, 1884, ii. 372). Meanwhile, it is his fate to-day to be mainly remembered by three words (not always attributed to him) in a couplet from what Johnson styled 'perhaps the meanest' of his performances, the Elegy-to an Old Beauty :

And all that's madly wild, or oddly gay,

We call it only pretty Fanny's way.

THE CLOWN'S REPLY.

This, though dated 'Edinburgh, 1753,' was first printed in Poems and Plays, 1777, p. 79.

1. 1. John Trott is a name for a clown or commonplace character. Miss Burney (Diary, 1904, i. 222) says of Dr. Delap :-'As to his person and appearance, they are much in the John-trot style.' Foote, Chesterfield, and Walpole use the phrase; Fielding Scotticizes it into John Trott-Plaid, Esq.'; and Bolingbroke employs it as a pseudonym.

1. 6. I shall ne'er see your graces. 'I shall never see a Goose again without thinking on Mr. Neverout,'-says the 'brilliant Miss Notable' in Swift's Polite Conversation, 1738, p. 156.

EPITAPH ON EDWARD PURDON.

The occasion of this quatrain, first published as Goldsmith's 1 in Poems and Plays, 1777, p. 79, is to be found in Forster's Life and Times of Oliver Goldsmith, 1871, ii. 60. Purdon died on March 27, 1767 (Gentleman's Magazine, April, 1767, p. 192). "Dr. Goldsmith made this epitaph," says William Ballantyne [the author of Mackliniana], 66 in his way from his chambers in the Temple to the Wednesday evening's club at the Globe. I think he will never come back, I believe he said.

I was

1 It had previously appeared as an extempore by a correspondent in the Weekly Magazine, Edin., August 12, Ì773 (Notes and Queries, February 14, 1880).