sold; for then the fame of Goldsmith had not been elevated, as it afterwards was, by his 'Traveller;' and the bookseller had faint hopes of profit by his bargain. After the 'Traveller,' to be sure, it was accidentally worth more money." The "Traveller" was now completed, and was published very shortly after the bailiff episode. It took the circle who surrounded Goldsmith completely by surprise; some of the members of the Literary Club even affected to doubt that he could have written it, and declared that the most striking passages were the work of Johnson. But Johnson himself laughed at all this, and openly and honestly proclaimed his belief in the great merits of the poem, and declared that since the death of Pope nothing equal to it had been written. The touches which describe the various shades of character in the different nations are exquisite, and can only be the result of personal observation aided by mature thought. And now our poet resolved to try his powers in a new field—to write a comedy, the remuneration for which should pay off the debts that were fast accumulating round him. But here fresh vexation and new care awaited him. Garrick, the great actor and prosperous manager, to whom he offered the play, took upon himself the office of critic and emendator, authoritatively suggested the entire omission of _Lofty_, one of the best characters, and, to use an expressive vulgarism, seemed inclined to "burke" the comedy altogether. Goldsmith, smarting under the actor's patronizing criticism, became angry, refused to alter or amend the play, and finally took the manuscript out of Garrick's hands, and transferred it to the rival management of Colman at Covent Garden. But Colman, though he accepted the piece, had little or no hope that it would be a success; and he contrived to impart his own doubts and misgivings to the whole company. The fact was, that, at this period, sentimental comedy, showing men and women as they appear in the pages of novelists of a certain school, but not as they walk and talk in real life, was in the ascendant; and Hugh Kelly—a man with some ingenuity, but without a spark of genius—was the great representative of this school of writing. Now Goldsmith held that a comedy should be comic—that it should, above all things, amuse the spectators by humourous dialogue and startling action; and, in his dramatic creed, the enunciation of moral platitudes had no place. In fact, the lines Goldsmith afterwards wrote concerning Cumberland, Kelly's successor in the Sentimental School of Comedy, might well have been applied to Kelly himself: [Illustration: _Goldsmith and his Landlady._] "A flattering painter, who made it his care, To draw men as they ought to be, not as they are, His gallànts are all faultless, his women divine; And Comedy wonders at being so fine! Like a tragedy queen he has dizened her out, Or rather like Tragedy giving a rout."