CHAP. l.j SCHOOL DATS AND HOLIDAYS.

repartee; for it is even possible that the secret might be 1738-
found in them, of much that has been too harshly condemned •*•10-
for egregious vanity in Goldsmith. It may have been so; but it
sprang from the opposite source to that in which the ordinary
forms of vanity have birth. Fielding describes a class of men
who feed upon their own hearts ; who are egotists, as he says,
the wrong way; and if Goldsmith was vain, it was the wrong
way. It arose, not from overweening self-complacency in
supposed advantages, but from what the world had forced
him since his earliest youth to feel, intense uneasy con-
sciousness of supposed defects. His resources of boyhood
went as manhood came. There was no longer the cricket-
match, the hornpipe, an active descent upon an orchard, or
a game of fives or foot-ball, to purge unhealthy humours and
" clear out the mind." There was no old dairy-maid, no
Peggy Golden, to beguile childish sorrows, or, as he mourn-
fully recalls in one of his delightful essays, to sing him into
pleasant tears with Johnny Armstrong's Last Good Night,
or the Cruelty of Barbara Allen. It was his ardent wisli, as
he grew to manhood, to be on good terms with the society
around Mm; and, finding it essential first of all to be on
good terms with himself, he would have restored by fantastic

notice. In a letter to Mr. Nichols (Illustrations, vi, 584), Percy also expressly
describes it as compiled under Ms direction. I refer to this compilation through-
out my volume, therefore, as the Percy Meniow ; and in an Appendix to the second
volume of this biography ("WHAT WAS PROPOSED ATO WHAT WAS DONE FOB raH
"BELATIVES OF GOLDSMITH"), I have entered more largelyinto the delays and disputes
connected with its composition. It should be added that many of the materials for a
life which Percy had obtained from Goldsmith himself, were lost by being intrusted to
Johnson, when the latter proposed to be his friend's biographer ; and some were
lost by Percy himself. But the failure of Johnson's design arose less from his own
dilatoriness than from a difficulty started by Francis Newbery's surviving partner
(Oarnan, the elder Newbery's son-in-law), who held the copyright of SJie Stoops to
Conquer, and who refused to join the other possessors of Q-oldsmith's writings in the
'' Edition and Memoir " which Johnson had undertaken. "I know he intended to
write Goldsmith's Life," says Malone, "for I collected some materials for it by his
"desire."ustrations, vii, 102, where he recommends it to Dr. Anderson's