CHAP, x.] THE TRAVELLER ASTD WHAT FOLLOWED IT.
allowed; but seldom without something of a sting. " Well, 1754.
" I never more shall think Doctor Goldsmith ugly," was JEt?6
the frank tribute of the sister of Eeynolds, after hearing
Johnson read the Traveller aloud " from the beginning to
" the end of it," a few days after it was published.* Here
was another point of friendliest and most general agreement.
" Eenny dear," now a mature and very fidgety little dame
of seven-and-thirty, had never been noted for her beauty;
and few would associate such a thing with the seamed,
scarred face of Johnson; but the preponderating ugliness of
Goldsmith was a thing admitted and allowed for all to fling a
stone at, however brittle their own habitations. Miss Eeynolds
had founded her admiring tribute on what she had herself said
at a party in her brother's house some days before. It had
been suddenly proposed, as a social game after supper, to
toast ordinary women, and have them matched by ordinary
men; whereupon one of the gentlemen having given
Miss Williams, Johnson's blind old pensioner, Miss Eeynolds
instantly matched her with Goldsmith; and this whimsical
union so enchanted Mrs. Cholmondeley, that, though she had
at the time some pique with Eenny dear, she ran round the
table, kissed her, and said she forgave her everything for her
last toast. " Thus," exclaimed Johnson, who was present,
and whose wit at his friend's expense was rewarded with a
roar, " thus the ancients, on the making-up of their quarrels,
" used to sacrifice a beast betwixt them."t Poor Goldsmith!
* See Miss Beynolds's recollections printed in the appendix to Groker's Bomett.
Of these I ought to remark, however, that several of them (as Mr. Croker himself
admits of one) are manifestly fabricated out of imperfect or confused recollections
of anecdotes elsewhere existing, an example of which I give in my next note.
f My authority for this anecdote, the point of which is missed in Miss Eeyaolds's
recollections (Groker's BosweU, 831) hitherto supposed to be the only authority
for it, is a writer in the Gentleman's Magazine for July 1797. No sacrifice was
called for at the commencement of a friendship : it was the cessation or reconciliation