an audience." Did the author enjoy his success to the full ? Ask any man who has pledged the very embryo of his resources, how much pleasure he has derived from their development. A mind quick and sensitive as Goldsmith's is peculiarly at the mercy of the goading power of creditors; and the literary man who obliges himself to write deprives himself of the spirit necessary for writing well.

He now projected a Dictionary of Arts and Sciences, to which Burke, Reynolds, Johnson, Dr. Burney, and other of his distinguished friends consented to become contributors; but the grandeur of the scheme frightened the booksellers, who remembered the procrastinating and heedless habits of Goldsmith, who was to have been sole editor. This failure mortified as well as distressed him, and he was still more cast down by the ill-success of certain efforts made at this time towards a pension; the government having signified a readiness to extend the bounty of the crown to distinguished literary men in narrow circumstances. Unfortunately for Goldsmith's undoubted claim on these grounds, he had once indignantly refused to become a hack-writer for ministers, and this stamped him, once for all, as no proper recipient of ministerial favor. So there was nothing before him but hopeless toil and gradual decay, duns disturbing his thoughts and clouding his once joyous fancy, and disease increasing as difficulties thickened. Sick at heart, and unfitted for social pleasure, his temper grew irritable and capricious; and although he continued occasionally to seek the old scenes, it was only as an escape from himself. An invitation from his friends in the country casts a gleam upon the darkening stream of life; but in order to accept this, he borrows money of Garrick, and so goes down with an additional weight upon his heart, which not all the Christmas jollity and cordiality of the circle he loved could make him forget.

His friends knew not the extent of his difficulties, but they knew enough to make them sad at his last profuse dinner at his Temple chambers, an entertainment which seems to have been the dying effort at hilarity by a man who felt that all depended on rousing his failing spirits. So profuse was the first course at this entertainment, that Johnson and Reynolds, his most attached and most prudent friends, declined partaking of the second, and their example was followed by the other guests; a hint which the poet did not fail to feel. He

resolved soon after to try a country life, hoping, perhaps, to escape both the temptations and the vexations of the city, and to retrieve his desperate fortunes by unremitting toil; with what result we shall presently see.

Once more the poetic fire, the wit, the humor, which had delighted the world, were to be called up from amidst the smouldering ruin of what had been Goldsmith. The poem of Retaliation, of which everybody knows the history, shows, perhaps, as much of his peculiar power as any thing he ever did. "In fact," says Mr. Irving, "the poem for its graphic truth, its nice discrimination, its terse good sense, and its shrewd knowledge of the world, must have electrified the club almost as much as the first appearance of the Traveller, and let them still deeper into the character and talents of the man they had been accustomed to consider as their butt." But it was the last. The portrait of Reynolds was left unfinished, for death came to the relief of the weary poet, and kindly spared him longer and more mortifying suffering. A few days' pain, a few nights without sleep, some anxious and some repining thoughts, and all was over. Forty-five years of struggle were "rounded with a sleep," and then Goldsmith began to be appreciated. Reynolds mourned for him as for a brother; Johnson's life felt a new shade of gloom; Burke heard of his death with a burst of tears; and every dependant he had ever had—and they were many-sorrowed as without hope. "On the stairs of his apartment there was the lamentation of the old and infirm, and the sobbing of women; poor objects of charity to whom he had never turned a deaf ear, even when himself struggling with poverty." One mourner came, after the coffin was closed, and begged for a single look at that plain, despised face, and a lock of hair from that harassed brow "with two great wrinkles." It was the younger of the Miss Hornecks, the one whom Goldsmith had long regarded with especial fondness. One can hardly help hoping that the parted spirit does, as some think, linger awhile about its earthly tenement, conscious of surviving friendship and love and sorrow.

If in this mere jotting-down of the.points in Goldsmith's life we may seem to have chosen the dark side, we can but plead our inability to discover any other. Goldsmith's writings prove abundantly that he knew what life ought to afford; but how wide apart were his experience and his ideal! Con

scious of the possession of superior ability, and goaded by an unsleeping desire for personal consideration and love, he went through life a butt to his inferiors, feeling that his society was rather suffered than sought in the circles to which his ambition led him, and keenly alive to the fact that, in moments of happiness, he was most apt to make himself ridiculous. To be too much at one with society hampers many a genius; to be wholly at outs with it, not through choice but necessity, is misery for the man of sensibility. Convention cramps the fingers of the author, but social contempt wrings his heart. Goldsmith's fancy found its pure, love-tinted wings among associations which to a spirit of inferior birth would have been vulgar and degrading; but he was forced to learn that those wings of heavenly potency could not sustain him in the atmosphere of common, conventional life, and his spirit sank under the conviction. "He wrote like an angel, but talked like poor Poll," was the sentence of Garrick's caustic wit; and Goldsmith signed his assent to it, echoed as it seemed to him to be by the general voice, when he wrote himself "magnanimous Goldsmith, a gooseberry fool." However precious the results of his wayward life to posterity, he felt all through it the almost unmingled bitterness of failure. We may afford to philosophize about this; to him it was no abstraction. "Almost all those men who have thus lived long by chance,' he says, "and whose every day may be considered as a happy escape from famine, are known at last to die in reality. of a disorder caused by hunger, but which, in the common language, is called a broken heart." Goldsmith hungered to the last; and when his physician, hoping to minister beyond his profession, asked him in his dying hour," Is your mind at ease?" he replied, "No-it is not," and spoke no more.

If it be objected, that our view of Goldsmith's career is calculated utterly to chill the ardor of genius, we reply that kindred genius, at least, will regard his whole life as the preparation for an immortality which would repay any amount of trial and suffering. If the choice had been offered to the poet himself, we can imagine few moments of his heart-wrung life, during which he would have been tempted to prefer an obscure though happy present to the affection and respect of future ages. Let this be our consolation under the somewhat oppressive weight of sympathy which the study of such a life leaves upon the heart.

He could joke about his disappointments sometimes, though the joke has always a melancholy minor tone running through it. In a letter to an Irish friend, he says, "There will come a day—no doubt there will I beg you will live a couple of hundred years longer to see it when the Scaligers and the Daciers will vindicate my character, give learned editions of my labors, and bless the times with copious comments on the text. You shall see how they will fish up the heavy scoundrels that disregard me now, or will then venture to cavil at my productions. How will they then bewail the times that suffered so much genius to be neglected!" This passage gives the key-note of his entire personal history. "No one who examines the whole case," says Mr. Forster, doubt, I think, that Goldsmith had never cause to be really content with his position among the men of his time, or with the portion of celebrity at any period during his life assigned to him."

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Considering this, which is too obvious to be argued, is not the sustained sweetness of Goldsmith's disposition almost miraculous? With a pride which prompted him to quarrel with anybody on whom his interest in any way depended, though it instantly disappeared when the aggressor was his inferior, how did love make a child of him; as in the case when Johnson, having said to him in company,-"Sir, you are impertinent," apologized, as he ought, before a numerous assemblage. "Dr. Goldsmith! I was rude to you yesterday I beg your pardon." “It must be much from you, sir, that I take ill," said the tender heart of the poet, melted out of its seething indignation in an instant. Even what the haughty world laughs at as gullibility, loses all its meanness when we recognize its source-boundless love and confidence, unshaken by insult, poverty, and disappointment unceasing. The contrasted effect of fiery passions and inexhaustible tenderness equally exemplified in a single character was never more strikingly shown; but happily the evil was evanescent as the dew, while the benign remained ever to bless his contemporaries and the world. It is to this wealth of sympathy that Goldsmith's writings will owe their immortality. "To think like a wise man, but to speak like the common people," is, in some sense, the secret of intellectual efficacy; genius enabled Goldsmith to fulfil the first part of this direction of

sage old Ascham, love taught him the second. This was the inexpressible charm of his writings-this simplicity which was not poverty, this luminous plainness, sweetened wisdom, sympathetic satire, unvenomed humor. His readers learn such trust in him that even his praise passes uncensured; a real dogmatism in him seems wholly modest, and wins our judgment unawares. All his goodness is so evidently spontaneous, that we insensibly come to think all is good, in the face of occasional false philosophy and not quite orthodox sentiment.

Mr. Irving makes graceful acknowledgment of his obligations to this great master to whom it has been his highest honor to be compared-in a quotation from Dante :

Tu se' lo mio maestro, e 'l mio autore:

Tu sei solo colui, da cu' io tolsi
Lo bello stile, che m'ha fatto onore.

We are proud that our country furnishes one who is in any degree worthy of wearing such a mantle; thus helping to prove our claim to direct descent from the great fathers of the language, and the folly of any attempt to sever the chain. Without being in any sense an imitator of Goldsmith, Mr. Irving partakes largely of his spirit; and the Life we have been considering, though not without occasional traces of carelessness, is a good specimen of that fascinating style to which both writers owe their great celebrity.

ART. II.-Kisfaludi Kisfaludy Károly' Minden Munkái. Pesten. 1843-4. (The complete works of Charles Kisfaludy, of Kisfalud. Pest.)

THE language and literature of the Magyars offer a most interesting field of study. The language, viewed in its relation to the advancement of philological science alone, is well worthy the attention of the foreign student.

It has been too much the custom to take it for granted, that the languages of those nations which have attained to the greatest eminence in literature are those which are intrinsically the most beautiful and complete. We are apt to attri