CHAP, ix.] THE ABBEST AND WHAT PRECEDED IT.
" without rating his landlady in a high tone for having used
"him so ill."* '
Nor does the rating seem altogether undeserved, since
there can hardly be a doubt, I think, that Mrs. Fleming was
the landlady. The attempt to clear her appears to me to fail
in many essential points. Tracing the previous incidents
minutely, it is almost impossible to disconnect her from this
consummation of them, with which, at the same time, every
trace of Goldsmith's residence in her house is brought to a
close. As for the incident itself, it has nothing startling for
the reader who is familiar with what has gone before it. It
is the old story of distress, with the addition of a right to
resent it which poor Goldsmith had not felt till now; and in
the violent passion, the tone of indignant reproach, and the
bottle of madeira, one may see that recent gleams of success
and of worldly consideration have not strengthened the old
habits of endurance. The arrest is plainly connected with
Newbery's reluctance to make further advances ; of all Mrs.
Fleming's accounts found among his papers, the only one un-
settled is that for the summer months preceding the arrest ;f
* Boswdl, ii. 193. For a third and ridiculously inventive account of the incident,
in -which Goldsmith figures as at his wit's end how to wipe off his landlady's score
and keep a roof over his head, "except hy closing with a very staggering proposal
"on her part, and taking his creditor for wife, whose charms were very far from
'' alluring, whilst her demands were extremely urgent;" and which contains a
mass of other preposterous statements; see Cumberland's Memoirs, i. 372-3.
f A fourth version, that of Sir John Hawkins (quoted by Mr. Mitford in his
Life, p. clsxviii), and strongly smacking of the knight's usual vein, appears to
me to point to Islington as the locality of the arrest, though it does not directly
confirm that suggestion. "Of the booksellers whom he styled his friends,
" Mr. Newbery was one. This person had apartments in Canonbury-house, where
" Goldsmith often lay concealed from his creditors. Under a pressing necessity,
"he there wrote his Vicar of Wakefield, and for it received of Newbery forty
"pounds." It does not detract from the value of this evidence, such as it is, that
Sir John gives afterwards (Life, 420-1) his own blundering account of the
attempted arrest, and Johnson's relief, in apparent ignorance that the piece of
writing was the Vicar of Wakefield. See the story as discussed in Croker's
JBosweU, 141.