OLIVER GOLDSMITH'S LIFE AND TIMES. [BOOK m.
1759, of one to whom the practice of poverty was not still familiar.
JEt, 31. Here lay the singular worth of Johnson's example : that the
world of enemies as well as friends were beginning, in a poor
man, to recognise an intellectual chief and potentate of litera-
ture, a man who had the right to rule them. " He and I were
" never cater-cousins," wrote Smollett to "Wilkes a month or
two before the date to which I have brought this narrative, and
in the same letter Smollett calls him the " Great Chain of
"literature." Yet the great chain's poverty was obliged in
this very year to surrender Gough-square for a humbler
lodging in Gray's Inn: that same Gough-square in Fleet-
street, where Doctor Burney had found him amid a chaos of
Greek folios, and with the moderate accommodation of one
deal writing-desk and a chair and a half; the entire seat
offered to his visiter, and himself tottering on its three-
legged and one-armed fellow. Nay, some few brief years
before, he had been placed under arrest for .five pounds
eighteen shillings; though already he had written London,
the Vanity of Human Wishes, and the Rambler, and was
author of The English Dictionary.
Now, week by week, in a paper of Mr. John Newbery's, he
sent forth the Idler* What he was, and what with a serious
earnestness, be it wrong or right, he had come into the world
to say and do, were at last becoming evident to all. Colleges
were glad to have him visit them, and a small enthusiastic
circle was gradually forming around him. The Eeynoldses,
Bennet Langtons, andTophamBeauclercs, had thus early given
" better than the rest, for they gave the waiter nothing." Boswell, i.113.) But then no
fasting disappear in Ofellus's bill of fare, and at that period of his life, as he surprised
the party in the Hebrides by telling them several years later, '' he had fasted for two
" days at a time, during which he had gone about visiting, though not at the hours of
'' dinner or supper; that he had drank tea, but eaten no bread; that this was no inten-
tional fasting, but happened just in the course of a literary life." SosioeU, v. 8, 9.
* Among the papers of Newbery is the account rendered on the collection of the