OLIVER GOLDSMITH 8 LIFE AND TIMES. [BOOK m.
1782. " most authors who frequented Mr. Davies's shop met
m?4. " merely to abuse him." Encouraged, meanwhile, by the
authors, Davies grew in amusing importance ; set up for
quite a patron of the players ;* affected the iusides as well
outsicles of books; became a critic, pronounced upon plays
and actors,! and discussed themes of scholarship ; inflicted
upon everyone his experiences of the Edinburgh univer-
sity, which he attended as a youth; and when George
Steevens called one day to buy the Oxford Homer, which
he had seen tossing about upon his shelves, was told by
the modest bookseller that he had but one, and kept it for
his own reading. I
Poor Goldsmith's pretensions, as yet, were small in the
scale of such conceit; he being but the best of the essay
writers, not the less bound on that account to unrepining
drudgery, somewhat awkward in his manners, and laughed
at for a carelesss implicity. Such was the character he was
* Beauclerc, on being told by Boswell that Davies had clapped Moody the player
on the hack to encourage him, remarked that "he could not conceive a more hurai-
" Hating situation than to be clapped on the back by Tom Davies." Life, v. 287.
f Pray, when you see Davies, the bookseller," writes Grarrick to Oolinan from
Bath (April 12, 1766), "assure him that I bear him not the least malice, which
"he is told I do, for having mentioned the vulgarisms in The Clandestine
" Manage; and, that I may convince him that all is well between us, let him
" know that I was well assured that he wrote his criticism before he had seen the
"play. Quod et* demn." Memoirs of the Oolmans, i. 181.
J Steevens to Gfarrick, Correspondence, i. 608. In another letter (i. 597-8.)
Steevens protests to Grarrick that Tom continues "tp the full as much a Icing in
"his own shop as ever he was on your stage. When he was on the point of
"leaving the theatre he most certainly stole some copper diadem from a shelf and
" put it in his pocket. He has worn it ever since." So too Johnson, in a passage
well worth quoting, when Boswell mentioned to him the fact of Davies having
protested he could not sleep for thinking of a certain sad affair : " ' As to his
" ' sleeping, sir, Tom Davies is a very great man ; Tom has been upon the stage
" ' and knows how to do those things; I have not been upon the stage, and cannot
" ' do those things.' BOSWEM : 'I have often blamed myself, sir, for not feeling
" 'for others as sensibly as many say they do.' JOHNSON : 'Sir, don't be duped by
" 'them any more. You will find these very feeling people are not very ready to
" ' do you good. They pay you by feeling,'" Ufe, iii. 95-6.