CHAP. S.J THE TRAVELLER AND WHAT FOLLOWED IT.
" despising fame and fortune, has retired early to happiness 1764.
" and ohscurity -with an income of forty pounds a year. .at 36.
" I now perceive, rny dear brother," continued Goldsmith,
with affecting significance, " the wisdom of your humhle
" choice. You have entered upon a sacred office, where the
" harvest is great, and the labourers are but few; while you
" have left the field of ambition, where the labourers are
" many, and the harvest not worth carrying away." Such as
the harvest was, however, he was at last himself about to
gather it in. He proceeded to describe to his brother the
object of his poem, as an attempt to show that there may be
equal happiness in states that are differently governed from
our own, that every state has a particular principle of
happiness, and that this principle in each may be carried to
a mischievous excess: but he expressed a strong doubt, since
he had not taken a political " side," whether its freedom
from individual and party abuse would not wholly bar its
success.
While he wrote, he might have quieted that fear. As the
poem was passing through the press, Churchill died. It was
he who had pressed poetry into the service of party, and for
the last three years, to apparent exclusion of every nobler
theme, made harsh political satire the favoured utterance of
the Muse. But his rude strong spirit had suddenly given
way. Those unsubdued passions; those principles, unfettered
rather than depraved; that real manliness of soul, scorn of
convention, and unquestioned courage; that open heart and
liberal hand; that eager readiness to love or to hate, to strike
or to embrace, had passed away for ever. Nine clays earlier,
his antagonist Hogarth had gone the same dark journey;
and the reconciliation that would surely, even here, have
sooner or later vindicated their common genius, the hearty