OLIVER GOLDSMITH S LIFE AND TIMES. [BOOK in.
1761. bookseller made, then, lie was there to answer it. He had
jiusk the comfort of remembering that the patron had himself
patrons; that something of their higher influence had been
attracted to his Chinese Letters; and that he was not
slaving altogether without hope.
1762. His first undertaking in 1762 was a pamphlet on the Cock
Mi.34. Lane Ghost, for which Newbery paid him three guineas:
but whether, with Johnson, he thought the impudent im-
posture worth grave enquiry; or, with Hogarth, turned it to
wise purposes of satire; or only laughed at it, as Churchill
did; the pamphlet has not with certainty survived to inform
us. * His next labour, which has been attributed to him on
the authority of " several personal acquaintances," t was the
revision of a History of Mechlenburgh from the first settlement
of the Vandals in that country, which the settlement of the
young Queen Charlotte in this country was expected to
make popular; and for which, according to his ordinary
rates of payment, he would have received £,20. This may
have been that first great advance "in a lump" which
seemed to his monied inexperience a sum so enormous as
to require the grandest schemes for disposing of it. J For
a subsequent payment of £10, he assisted Newbery with an
Art of Poetry on a New Plan, or in other words, a com-
pilation of poetical extracts; and concurrently with this,
Mr. Newbery begged leave to offer to the young gentlemen
* A pamphlet on the subject published by Bristow, who was a neighbour of
Newber/s and with whom he had occasional connexion, has been assumed to be
that for which Goldsmith was paid; and Mr. Crossley, who possesses a copy of that
pamphlet, says (Notes and Queries, v. 77) that he thinks the beginning and
conclusion, "though evidently written in haste, are not without marks of
" Goldsmith's serious and playful manner." Of course all this can only be con-
jecture, but it is at the least very unlikely that Newbery should have declined
to issue what he had consented to pay Goldsmith for writing j and that Bristow
published for him is certain, for at his shop the Public Ledger was first sold,
t Prior i, 388. J Europ. May. xxiv. 92,