OLIYEB GOLDSMITH'S LIFE AND TIMES.

1759. puffery and pretence which have more depressed the modern
it. si. man-of-letters ^an ever shameless flattery and beggary
reduced his predecessors; are good evidence on that point.

But when Goldsmith wrote, there was still a certain re-
cognised work for the bookseller to do. With the aftercourse
of this narrative it will more fully appear, even in that entire
assent and adhesion of Goldsmith himself which he certainly
did not contemplate when the Enquiry was planned, yet
which, at the close of the experience of his life, he would
almost seem to have silently withdrawn, by leaving the book
revised for a posthumous edition with its protest against
booksellers unabated and unmodified. To complete that
protest now (a most essential part of this chapter in his
fortunes), I will add proof, from other parts of the Enquiry
of the manly tendency, and freedom from personal spleen,
apparent in the structure of the appeal which was built upon
it. There will be found no inconsistency between the opening
and closing lines of the sentences first given, by those who
have studied the disclosures made recently by men who take
the deepest interest in the welfare of our universities; and
who contrast them, as they now are, with the original pur-
pose for which the grand foundations of princely prelates
and nobles in advance of their age first arose in Cambridge
and Oxford.

" No nation gives greater encouragements to learning than we do ;
"yet none are so injudicious in the application. We seem to confer
" them with the same view that statesmen have been known to grant
" employments at Court, rather as bribes to silence than incentives to
" emulation. All our magnificent endowments of colleges are erro-
"neous ;* and at best, more frequently enrich the prudent than reward
" the ingenious. Among the universities abroad I have ever observed

* A kind of endowment partaking of both pension list and college lectureship,
yet free from the vice of both, has "been suggested in a generous criticism on the
first edition of this biography in the Edinburgh Review (Ixxxviii. 218-20). " The
" principle of a pension list is not one that dignifies the community of letters, nor no other employment but to cry out Dunce, and Scribbler; to