CHAP. Vll.] - HOGARTH AND KBYKOLDS.

through many editions; and was afterwards translated into 1763.
French by the wife of Brissot, with notes by the revolutionary jEtTis
leader himself. The nobleman was supposed to be Lord
Chesterfield, so refined was the style; Lord Orrery had also
the credit of it; but the persuasion at last became general
that the author was Lord Lyttelton,* and the name of that
grave good lordf is occasionally still seen affixed to it on the
bookstalls. The mistake was never formally corrected: it being
the bookseller's interest to continue it, and not less the author's
as well, when in his own name he subsequently went over the
same ground. But it was not concealed from his Mends;
copies of the second edition of the book were sent with his
autograph to both Percy and Johnson; and his Mend Cooke
tells us, not only that he had really written it in his lodgings
at Islington, but how and in what way he did so. In the
morning, says this authority, he would study, in Bapin, Carte,
Kenneth's Complete History, and the recent volumes of Hume,
as much of what related to the period on which he was engaged

* As late as 1793, it became matter of discussion in the Gentleman's Magazine
(Ixiii. 799, &c) which of these three noblemen had written the letters ; whereupon
a better informed correspondent told Mr. Urban the real name of the writer, and
added : "Goldsmith was much gratified to find the assumed character so well
" sustained, as to pass upon the world for real; and was often diverted with the
'{ contending opinions of such as ascribed it to one or other of the above noblemen.
" This information comes from one who had a copy given him by the real author
" when it first came from the press, and who had often laughed with him at the
" success of his fiction." Gent. Mag, Ixiii. 1189.

f It may have been in consequence of its success in this instance, that the reck-
less author of Dr. Syntax, Combe, placed the name of the second or "wicked"
lord to his wonderfully clever collection of letters. In the course of a recent
attempt in the Quarterly Review (xc. 91-163) to identify this second lord with
Junius, which I cannot but regard as altogether unsound, though in parts
ingenious, a wholly unwarranted assumption is made of the genuineness of
these letters in the main. There cannot be a doubt that they are spurious, and all
written by Combe. One of them, I may take this opportunity of saying, is a sort
of homily on the moral of Goldsmith's life and death, on which the writer is as
severely critical, in regard to the vices of improvidence and extravagance, as it
behoved a man to be who ran through more than one fortune, and closed a career
of riotous vicissitude by extremely assiduous literary labours in the king's bench
prison. he rose in that society to deliver a speech which he had