CHAP. I.] WRITING THE BEE.

lady of Green Arbour Court remembered one festivity 1759.
there, which seems to have been highly characteristic. A j^t. 31.
" gentleman " called on a certain evening, and asking to'
see her lodger, went unannounced up stairs. She then
heard Goldsmith's room door pushed open, closed again
sharply from, within, and the key turned in the lock; after
this, the sound of a somewhat noisy altercation reached her;
but it soon subsided; and to her surprise, not unmingled
with alarm, the perfect silence that followed continued for
more than three hours. It was a great relief to her, she
said, when the door was again opened, and the " gentleman,"
descending more cheerfully than he had entered, sent her
out to a neighbouring tavern for some supper.* Mr. "Wilkie
or Mr. Pottinger had obtained hjs arrears, and could afford
a little comforting reward to the starving author.

Perhaps he carried off with him that mirthful paper on
the clubs of London, to which a pleasant imagination most
loved to pay festive visits on solitary and supperless days.
Perhaps that paper on public rejoicings for a victory which
described the writer's lonely wanderings a few nights before,
from Ludgate-hill to Charing-cross, through crowded and
illuminated streets, past punch-houses and coffee-houses,
and where excited shoe-makers, thinking wood to be nothing
like leather, were asking with frightful oaths what ever would
become of religion if the wooden-soled French papishes
came over! Perhaps that more affecting lonely journey
through the London streets, which the Bee soon after
published with the title of the City Night Piece,t in which
there was so much of the past struggle and the lesson it had
left, so much of the grief-taught sympathy, so much of the

* Prior, i. 328, 329.

t The greater portion of this striking paper was repeated in Letter cxvii of the
Citizen of the World..