OLIYER GOLDSMITH'S LIFE AND TIMES. [BOOK m.
1759. found, in record of Lent Mr. Johnson one pound one. For,
Mt.si. in his worst distress, it was still but of literature Mr.
Johnson begged or borrowed: to her he was indebted for his
poverty, and to her only would he owe his independence.
When his mother was dying, he did not ask his friend Mr.
Eeynolds, the fashionable painter in receipt of thousands, for
the six guineas he sent to comfort her death-bed : it was the
advance of a printer.* "When, in the present year, she died,.
he paid the expenses of her funeral with the manuscript of
JRasselas.
,So schooled to regard the struggle of life and literature
as one, and in midst of all apparent disadvantage to venerate
its worth and sacredness, the author of the Enquiry into the
State of Polite Learning stepped cheerfully forward into the
market of books, and offered his wares for sale. Bookseller
"Wilkie, of the Bible in St. Paul's-churchyard, a spirited
man in his way, and one of the foremost of magazine
speculators, proposed a weekly publication of original essays,
something in the Rambler form, but once instead of twice a
week, and with greater variety of matter. Goldsmith
assented; and on Saturday the 6th of October, 1759, there
appeared, price threepence, to be continued every Saturday,
The Bee.
Floriferis ut apes saltibus omnia libant
Omnia nos itidem
was its motto; learned, yet of pleasant promise; taken from
Lucretius. It was printed " neatly," as the advertisement
in the London Chronicle of the 29th September had pro-
mised that it should be; "in crown octavo, and on good
" complacently, 'Sir, I have two very cogent reasons for not printing any list of
" ( subscribers: one, -that I have lost all the names; the other, that I have spent
" * all the money!'" BosweH, viii. 88.
* " I find in his diary a note of -the payment to Mr. Allen the printer, of six
" guineas, which he had borrowed of Mm, and sent to his dying mother."
Hawkins, 366.