No. 27, page 181. - Dick Minim the Critic. Phædra and Hippolitus (p. 184), an adaptation by Edmund Smith of Racine's Phédre, was produced at the Haymarket, 21st April, 1707, and acted four times. Addison wrote the Prologue, Prior the Epilogue. The former (Spectator, No. 18) calls it "an admirable tragedy"; but it pleased the critics better than the pit. It was revived at Covent Garden in November, 1754, which is perhaps an additional reason why Johnson remembered it here. Babarossa (p. 185), produced at Drury Lane in the same year, was a tragedy by the Rev. Dr. Brown. In this play the bells for the midnight and the second watch are used as signals by the assassins of the chief character. Cleone (p. 186), also a tragedy, was by Robert Dodsley, the bookseller, who published London and the Vanity of Human Wishes. It first came out at Covent Garden on December 2, 1758. Johnson regarded it as superior to Otway, and thus speaks of it in a letter to Bennet Langton, dated January 9, 1759: "Cleone was well acted by all the characters, but Bellamy [i. e., the blue-eyed and beautiful George Ann Bellamy, who, as the heroine, made the fortune of the piece] left nothing to be desired. I went the first night, and supported it as well as I might; for Doddy, you know, is my patron, and I would not desert him. The play was very well received. Doddy, after the danger was over, went every night to the stage-side, and cried at the distress of poor Cleone." (Boswell's Life, by Croker, Chap. XIII.)

Dick Minim would have rejoiced over the opening verse of Enoch Arden : —

"Long lines of cliff breaking have left a chasm."

No. 28, page 188. - Dick Minim the Critic (continued). In a forcible passage respecting translations, which is to be found in the "Preface" to the Dictionary, Johnson had already declared his aversion to tribunals of taste (p. 188): "If an academy should be established for the cultivation of our style, which I, who can never wish to see depend

ence multiplied, hope the spirit of English liberty will hinder or destroy, let them, instead of compiling grammars and dictionaries, endeavor, with all their influence, to stop the license of translators, whose idleness and ignorance, if it be suffered to proceed, will reduce us to babble a dialect of France." The writer who, as Garrick expressed it with more patriotism than elegance,

"" . . arm'd like a hero of yore,

Had beat forty French, and would beat forty more,"

might perhaps be pardoned for a little self-satisfaction, M. Littré not having yet arisen as a formidable rival. But those who care to ascertain what the foremost English critic of our day has to say upon the same theme should turn to Mr. Matthew Arnold's paper on The Literary Influence of Academies. (Cornhill Magazine, x., pp. 154-172.)

In Oldisworth's panegyric on Edmund Smith (see Note to No. 27) quoted by Johnson in his life of that author, there is a passage of which he may have been thinking when he wrote Minim's advice to aspiring youth (p. 191): "When he was writing upon a subject, he would seriously consider what Demosthenes, Homer, Virgil, or Horace, if alive, would say upon that occasion, which whetted him to exceed himself as well as others."- (Lives of the Poets, Cunningham's edn., ii., 46.)

This

No. 29, page 193. Art-Connoisseurs. Essay, and those on the Grand Style of Painting, and the True Idea of Beauty (Idlers, Nos. 79 and 82), were said by Northcote to be "a kind of syllabus" of Sir Joshua's famous Discourses. The references in this paper to "the flowing line, which constitutes grace and beauty," and the "pyramidal principle (p. 195), would seem to be sidelong strokes at Hogarth's Analysis, 1753, which had its origin in the precept attributed to Michael Angelo that a figure should alway be " Pyramidall, Serpentlike, and multiplied by one two and three."— (Preface, p. v.)

No. 30, page 198. The Man in Black.-The paper which immediately follows this one in the Citizen of the World, while professing to give the personal history of the "Man in Black," contains several particulars which belong to Goldsmith's own biography. "Who can possibly doubt," says Mr. Forster, "the original from whom the man in black's experiences were taken?" (Citizen of the World, xxvii.) "The first opportunity he [my father] had of finding his expectations disappointed was in the middling figure I made at the university: he had flattered himself that he should soon see me rising into the foremost rank in literary reputation, but was mortified to find me utterly unnoticed and unknown. His disappointment might have been partly ascribed to his having overrated my talents, and partly to my dislike of mathematical reasonings at a time when my imagination and memory, yet unsatisfied, were more eager after new objects than desirous of reasoning upon those I knew. This, however, did not please my tutor, who observed indeed that I was a little dull; but at the same time allowed that I seemed to be very good-natured, and had no harm in me.”— (Life, Bk. I., Chap. ii.)

No. 31, page 203.Beau Tibbs. This paper and the next, although included in the Citizen of the World, are here printed as revised in the Essays by Mr. Goldsmith, published by W. Griffin in 1765. "It is supposed that this exquisite sketch had a living original in one of Goldsmith's casual acquaintance; a person named Thornton, once in the army." (Forster's Life, Bk. III., Chap. iv.)

No. 32, page 208. ·Beau Tibbs (continued). — As indicative of Goldsmith's fondness of the Christian name of little Miss Tibbs, Cunningham points out that he transfers them to a character of later date: "Lady Blarney was particularly attached to Olivia; Miss Carolina Wilhelmina Amelia Skeggs (I love to give the whole name) took a greater fancy

to her sister." (Vicar of Wakefield, Chap. xi.) The italics are ours.

No. 33, page 214. Beau Tibbs at Vauxhall. Vauxhall, much fallen and degraded, saw its "positively last" day in 1859. The fifteen hundred lamps, the waterworks, and the French horns so dear to Mrs. Tibbs's Countess, had then long been things of the past; and those who wish to realize the splendors of the Rotunda, the "magnificent orchestra of Gothic construction," the mechanical landscape, the Grove, and the "Lover's Walk," must reconstruct them from the pages of Walpole and Miss Burney, or the design of Wale and Canaletto. It is possible that those decorations of the pavilions which the much-suffering pawnbroker's widow admired were the very paintings which Hogarth and Hayman had executed for Jonathan Tyers as far back as 1732. They existed for many years subsequent to the date when Goldsmith wrote, being sold with other property in 1841. At that time they were said to be greatly" obscured by dirt." When it is added that they had long been exposed to the air, varnished every year, and freely assaulted by sandwich knives, it will be seen that their condition was indeed deplorable. But the little beau would not have approved them at any stage; he would have shrugged his shoulders, rapped his box, and talked of the grand contorno of Alesso Baldovinetti.

Neither this admirable study in genre nor the Man in Black is included in Goldsmith's selected Essays of 1765. It is difficult to account for their absence, except by that strange paternal blindness which also led Prior to omit from his collected poems the "Secretary" and the lines to a "Child of Quality," two of the pieces by which he is perhaps best known to readers of to-day.

This

No. 34, page 221. ·A Country Dowager. paper is printed from the edition of Mackenzie's works published at Edinburgh in 1808, and revised by the author.