OLIVER GOLDSMITH'S LIFE AND TIMES. [BOOK n,
Scandinavian poetry and mythology: and Goldsmith's first
effort in the Monthly Review was to describe the fruits of
these researches, to point out resemblances to the inspiration
of the East, and to note the picturesqueness and sublimity
of the fierce old Norse imagination. " The learned on this
"side the Alps," he began, "have long laboured at the
" antiquities of Greece and Borne, but almost totally
" neglected their own; like conquerors, who, while they
" have made inroads into the territories of their neighbours,
"have left their own natural dominions to desolation."*
This was a lively interruption to the ordinary Monthly
dulness, and perhaps the Percys, and intelligent subscribers
of that sort, opened eyes a little wider at it. It was not
long after, indeed, that Percy first began to dabble in Runic
Verses from the Icelandic; before eight years were passed
he had published his famous Reliques; and in five years
more, during intimacy with the writer of this notice of
Mallet, he produced his translation of Mallet's Northern
Antiquities. In all this there was probably no connection:
yet it is wonderful what a word in season from a man of
genius may do; even when the genius is hireling and
obscure, and labouring only for the bread it eats.
More common-place was the respectable-looking thin
duodecimo with which Mr. Griffiths's workman began his
next month's labour, but a duodecimo which at the time was
making noise enough for every octavo, quarto, and folio in
the shop. This was Douglas, a Tragedy, as it is acted at
the Theatre Royal in Covent Garden. It was not acted at
the Theatre Royal in Drury Lane, because Garrick, who
shortly afterwards so complacently exhibited himself in Agis,
in the Siege of Aquileia, and other ineffable dulness from
* Monthly Xwiew, xvi. 377, April 1757. See ante, 91.