x LIFE OF GOLDSMITH. 



The profits arising from his two comedies were estimated at 1300, rating the Good-natured 

 Man at 500, and She Stoops to Conquer at 800, which, with the product of other works, 

 amounted, as is asserted upon a good authority, to 1800; but, through a profuse liberality to 

 indigent authors, and particularly those of his own country, who played on his credulity, to- 

 gether with the effects of a habit he had contracted for gaming, he found himself, at the close 

 of that very year, not in a state of enjoyment of a pleasing prospect before him, but enveloped 

 in the gloom of despondency, and all the perplexities of deht, accumulated by his own 

 indiscretion. 



It is remarkable, that, about this time, our Author altered his mode of address; he rejected 

 the title of Doctor, and assumed that of plain Mr. Goldsmith. This innovation has been at- 

 tributed to various causes. Some supposed he then formed a resolution never to engage as 

 a practical professor in the healing art; others imagined that he conceived the important ap- 

 pellation of Doctor, and the grave deportment attached to the character, incompatible with 

 the man of fashion, to which he had the vanity to aspire ; but, whatever might be his motive, 

 he could not throw off the title, which the world imposed on him to the day of his death, and 

 which is annexed to his memory at the present day; though he never obtained a degree su- 

 perior to that of Bachelor of Physic. 



Though Goldsmith was indiscreet, he was, at the same time, industrious ; and, though his 

 genius was lively and fertile, he frequently submitted to the dull task of compilation. He had 

 previously written Histories of England, Greece, and Rome; and afterwards undertook, and 

 finished, a work, entitled, An History of the Earth and Animated Nature, 



His last production, Retaliation, though not intended for public view, but merely his own 

 private amusement, and that of a few particular friends, exhibits strong marks of 

 genuine humour. It originated from some jokes of festive merriment on the Author's 

 person and dialect, in a club of literary friends, where good nature was sometimes sacrificed 

 at the shrine of wit and sarcasm; and as Goldsmith could not disguise h^s feelings upon 

 the occasion he, was called upon for retaliation, which he produced the very next club 

 meeting. 



It may not be so accurate as his other poetical productions, as he did not revise it, or live 

 to finish it in the manner he intended; yet high eulogiums have been passed on it by some of 

 the first characters in the learned world, and it has obtained a place in most o.f the editions 

 of the English Poets. 



Our Author no\v approached the period of his dissolution. He had been frequently attack- 

 ed for some years with a strangury, and the embarrassed state of his affairs aggravated the 

 violence of the disorder, which, with the agitation of his mind, brought on a nervous fever, 



