CHAPTER IV.

THE CITIZEN OF THE WORLD.

1760.

WITH the second week of Ms engagement on the Public 1760.
Ledger, Goldsmith had taken greater courage. The letter Mt. 32.
which appeared on the 24th of January, though without
title or numbering to imply intention of continuance, threw
out the hint of a series of letters, and of a kind of narrative
as in the Lettres Persanes. The character assumed was that
of a Chinese visitor to London: the writer's old interest in
the flowery people having received new strength, of late, from
the Chinese novel on which his dignified acquaintance
Mr, Percy had been recently engaged.* The second letter,
still without title, appeared five days after the first; some
inquiry seems to have been made for their continuance;
and thence uninterruptedly the series went on. Not until

* "I will endeavour," writes Shenstone in the following year (Nichols's lUus-
trcctions, vii. 222), "to procure and send you a copy of Percy's translation of a
'' genuine Chinese novel in four small volumes, printed months ago, but not to be
" published before winter." Percy was the editor, and wrote the preface and
notes; but the actual translation of Hau Kion Choaan from the Chinese was
executed by Mr. Wilkinson, and all that Percy did in that respect was to translate
the translator "into good reading English." It may be worth remarking, that,
three years before, some noise had been made by a smart political squib of Horace
Walpole's, which he protested he had writ in an hour-and-a-half, and which passed
through five editions in a fortnight, the Letter from Xo Ho, a Chinese Philosopher
at London, to his friend Lien Old at Pekin. See Cott. Lett. iv. 28£>, 290. he more than once confessed; and if he had