OLJVEE GOLDSMITH'S LIFE AND TIMES. [BOOK n.
I7«. decently regrets it, and is glad to think it no business of
Ms; and in that year of grace and of Goldsmith's suffering,
had doubtless adorned his dining-room with the Distrest
Poet of the inimitable Mr. .Hogarth, and invited laughter
from easy guests at the garret and the milk-score. Yet
oonld they, those worthy men, have known the danger to
even their worldliest comforts then impending, perhaps
they had not laughed so heartily. For, were not these very
citizens to be indebted to Goldsmith in after years, for
cheerful hours, and happy thoughts, and fancies that would
smooth life's path to their children's children ? And now,
without a Mend, with hardly bread to eat, and uncheered
by a hearty word or a smile to help him on, he sits in his
melancholy garret, and those fancies die within him. It is
but an accident now, that the good Vicar shall be born,
that the Man in Black shall dispense his charities, that
Croaker shall grieve, Tony Lumpkin laugh, or the sweet
soft echo of the Deserted Village come for ever back upon
the heart, in charity, and kindness, and sympathy with
the poor. For, despair is in the garret; and the poet, over-
mastered by distress, seeks only the means of flight and
exile. With a day-dream to his old Irish playfellow, a sigh
for the "heavy scoundrels" who disregard him, and a wail
for the age to which genius is a mark of mockery; he turns
to that first avowed piece, which, being also his last, is to
prove that " blockheads are not men of wit, and yet that
** men of wit are actually blockheads."
A proposition which men of wit have laboured at from
early times; have proved in theory, and worked out in
practice. "How many base men," shrieked one of them
in Elizabeth's day, who felt that his wit had but made him
the greater blockhead, "how many base men, that want