OLIVER GOLDSMITH'S LIFE AND TIMES. PBOOXU.
1758. " has a regard for the public, for the literary honour of our
.ffiUJo. " country, for the figure we shall one day make among
" posterity, that would not choose to see such humbled as
" are possessed only of talents that might have made good
" cobblers, had fortune turned them to trade ? " So will truth
force its way, when out of Irish hearing. The friends, the
esteem, and the conveniences, of the poet's life, are briefly
summed up here. His misery, Ms garret, and his fame.
With part of the money received from. Hamilton he
moved into new lodgings : took " unrivalled possession " of
a fresh garret, on a first floor. The house was number
twelve, Green Arbour Court, Fleet-street, between the
Old Bailey and the site of Fleet-market: and stood in the
right hand corner of the court, as the wayfarer approached
it from Farringdon-street by an appropriate access of
" Break-neck Steps." Green Arbour Court is now gone
for ever; and of its miserable wretchedness, for a little time
replaced by the more decent comforts of a stable, not a
vestige remains. The houses, crumbling and tumbling in
Goldsmith's day, were fairly rotted down some nineteen
years since ; and it became necessary, for safety sake, to
remove what time had spared. But Mr. "Washington Irving
saw them first, and with reverence had described them,
for Goldsmith's sake. Through alleys, courts, and blind
passages; traversing Fleet-market, and thence turning
along a narrow street to the bottom of a long steep flight
of stone steps; he made good his toilsome way up into
" hardly lost." Most true. He lived long enough himself to have some foretaste
of this in his own case; we all of us now know it more completely. Let me not
quit this subject without saying that Johnson held much the same opinion as
Goldsmith about interlopers in literature. Boswell one day was full of regrets that
some learned judge had left no literary monument of himself. "Alas, sir," cried
Johnson, "what a mass of confusion should we have, if every bishop, and every
"judge, every lawyer, physician, and divine, were to write books !" Life, vi. 327.