hence, Boswell says, "poorest of talkers;" but around in his chambers, with one or two sympathetic listeners only, and perhaps a bottle of Canary flanking him, and with a topic started that chimed with the emotional nature of the man, and I am sure he would have talked out a whole chapter of a new _Vicar of Wakefield_. But whatever the tongue might do, there was no doubt about the pen; we find him even undertaking discourses upon _Animated Nature_, and history--of Greece or of Rome. Has he then the plodding faculty, and is he a man of research? No; but he has the aptitude to seize upon the plums in the researches of others, and embody them in the amber of his language. He poaches all over the fields of history and science, and bags the bright-winged birds which the compilers have never seen, or which, if seen, they have classed with the gray and the dun of the {133} sparrows. His poetry, when he makes it, may not have so much of polished clang and witty jingle as the verse of Pope; it may lack the great ground-swell of rhythmic cadence which belongs to Johnson; but--somewhere between the lines, and subtly pervading every pause and flow--there is a tenderness, a suave, poetic perfume, a caressing touch of both mind and heart which we cannot describe--nor forget. Of the original club-men, Goldsmith[16] died first, in 1774, at Brick-court in the Temple; he was forty-five years old, and yielded to a quick, sharp illness at the last, into which all the worries of a much worried life seemed to crowd him. He had been plotting new works, and a new life too; a getting away (if it might be) from the smirch that hung about him in the Temple corridors, out to the Edgware farmery, where primroses and hedges grew, and where there was a scent upon the air, of that old country home of Lissoy: "I still had hopes my latest hours to crown, Amidst those humble bowers to lay me down; {134} To husband out life's taper at the close, And keep the flame from wasting by repose. I still had hopes, for pride attends me still, Amidst the swains to show my book-learned skill; Around my fire an evening group to draw And tell of all I felt and all I saw. And, as a hare, whom hounds and horns pursue, Pants to the place from which at first he flew, I still had hopes, my long vexations past, Here to return, and die at home at last." A stolid physician, called in consultation in those last days, and seeing his disordered state, asked, "If his mind was at ease?" Mind at ease! Surely a rasping question to put to a man whose pulse is thumping toward the hundreds, whose purse is empty, plans broken up, credit gone, debts crowding him at every point, pains racking him, and the grimy Fleet Prison close by, throwing its shadow straight across his path. No, his mind is _not_ at ease; and the pulse does gallop faster and faster, and harder and harder to the end; when, let us hope--ease did come, and--God willing--"Rest for the weary." {135}