OLIVER GOLDSMITH'S LIFE AND TIMES. [BOO* m.

59. Mr. Balph's pamphlet,* and find, amidst revivals of Fletcher's
tii. Rule a Wife and Have a Wife, and Shirley's comedy of The
Gamester, and Shakspeare's Tempest as an opera and
Taming of the Shrew as a farce, but one original production :
Lilliput, played by children. It is not immaterial to the
question, however, to recount the highest tragic claimants

* An unpublished letter is before me, written by this same Mr. Ealph to Gfarrick,
the year before his pamphlet, containing a brief summary of his private wrongs,
and furnishing so complete an illustration of Gfamck's case, as well as of that of his
opponents, that I am glad to have the opportunity of printing it. The weakness
as well as strength of both may be observed in it. The manager's mistake was to
encourage hopes up to the point when it no longer seemed unreasonable to the
expectant to claim a sort of property in their realisation. The author's mistake
was to suppose that any such encouragement could involve the right to force a play
upon a theatre irrespective not only of the manager's convenience, but of Ms final
right of judgment and rejection. Let it be observed, too, that Grarrick has evidently
obliged Mr. Ealph with money, and that the offence which causes the rupture does
not appear to have been anything more grave than the suggestion that Mr. Ealph
should wait one season more. " Sir," he writes, dating his letter the 17th Sep-
tember 1757, " So long ago as the year 1743, I had reason to be convinced that
" the stage was enchanted ground to me, which I might see, but was never to
" take hold of, and I then resolved to turn my back on the delusion for good and
" all. This resolution I adhered to invariably for ten years in succession, and you
" were the only man that could have induced me to break it, which you did
" by putting me on altering some old comedy under promise that it should be
" performed when done. In this service I employed time enough to convince me
" that to compose was as easy as to cobble. I then turned my hand from old to
"newthings, hoping to be instrumental afc least in preserving a secret which
" seemed to be on the point of being lost to the country; but on this I was again
" unlucky, for having submitted to be judged in part by producing three acts only
" out of five, my plan was condemned without mercy, and I acquiesced in the
" sentence almost without a murmur. I then became humble enough to think of
" stooping to a farce, which it is true I was promised room for, by Mr. Lacy in
" your name: but on second thoughts chose to avoid the imprudence of risking the
" little character I had in a way which could add so little to it, and again applied
'' myself to the construction of another comedy, on a plan acknowledged by your-
" self to be new and striking, which, having licked into something like shape,
'' I took care to tender before your doors were opened, believing in such case no
" danger of a disappointment could be against me in point of time. But by some
" strange fatality, I was never, it seems, to make a right judgment with regard to
" the theatre. Tour letter of the 10th gave me to understand this belief of mine
" was ill-grounded, and your other letter of Wednesday the 14th is full of
" resentment that a man of the wrong side of fifty should find out another year
" of waiting was too large a tax on a short term for any man of common sense to
" pay, which was the amount of mine to you, expressed in the most complaisantf