92 OLIVER GOLDSMITHS LIFE AND TIMES. |n,,OK I.
1W. " of Grub Street with reverence. I thought it my glory
JGt. 29. ." to puraie a track which Pryden and Otway trod before me."
The difference of fact and fiction hero will bo, that glory had
nothing to do with this matter. Griffiths and glory were not
to be thought of together. The sorrowful road seemed the
last that was left to him: and he entered it.
On this track, then—-taken by few successfully, taken
happily by few, though not on that account the less in
every age the choice of men of genius-—we BOG Goldsmith,
in his twenty-ninth year, without the liberty of choice, in
sheer and bare necessity, calling after calling having slipped
from him, launched for the first time. The prospect of
unusual gloom might have dumped the ardour of a more
cheerful adventurer.
Fielding had died in shattered hope and fortune, at
what should have been his prime of life, throe yearn before;
within the next two years, poor and mad, Collins was
fated to descend to his early grave; Smollett wan toughly
fighting for his every-day's existence ; and Johnson, within
some half-doKon months, had been tenant of a Bpunging-
house. No man throve that was connected with letters,
unless ho were also connected with their trade and
merchandise, and, like ItichardMon, could print aa well as
write books.
" Had some of those," cried Smollett, in his bitterness,
(< who were pleased to call themselves my friends, boon at
" any pains to deserve the character, and told mo ingcira-
" ously what 1 had to expect in the capacity of an author,
" when I first professed myself of that venerable fraternity,
" 1 should in all probability have spared myself the inert;-
" dible labour and chagrin I have since undergone,"* "I
tu UKI tteyuside.