[Footnote 171: Goldsmith himself tells us: "My father, the younger son of a good family, was possessed of a small living in the Church. His education was above his fortune, and his generosity greater than his education. Poor as he was, he had his flatterers; for every dinner he gave them they returned him an equivalent in praise, and this was all he wanted."] [Footnote 172: It happened that a certain lady became charmed with Mirabeau by reading his writings, and wrote him rather a tender letter, asking him to describe himself to her. He did so by return of post as follows: "Figure to yourself a tiger that has had the small-pox." History has not handed down the sequel.] [Footnote 173: Mirabeau and the Marchioness had agreed on mutual destruction, by exchanging poisoned locks of hair, if he failed to be acquitted.] [Footnote 174: To make the appropriateness of this retort clear, it should be known that Judge Robinson was the author of many stupid, slavish, and scurrilous political pamphlets; and by his servility to the ruling powers he had been raised to the eminence which he thus shamefully disgraced.] [Footnote 175: The effect the poem had upon the Earl of Southampton when he first read it will be remembered. Spenser took it to this noble patron of poets as soon as it was finished, and sent it up to him. The earl read a few pages and said to a servant, "Take the writer twenty pounds." Reading on, he presently cried in rapture, "Carry that man twenty pounds more." Still he read on; but at length he shouted, "Go turn that fellow out of the house, for if I read further I shall be ruined!"] [Footnote 176: When a boy, West secretly pursued his first attempts at art, absenting himself from school to do so. Being one day surprised at his work in the garret of the house by his mother, he expected to be seriously reproved; but Mrs. West saw incipient genius in her son's work at the age of ten; so she kissed and congratulated him, promising to intercede with his father in his behalf that he would forgive him for his truancy.] [Footnote 177: It was not without difficulty that Gibbon could obtain a publisher for his famous History. After it had been declined by several houses, it was finally undertaken by Thomas Cadell, "on easy terms," as the author expresses it. It was thought best to publish only five hundred copies at first; this edition being soon exhausted, edition after edition followed in rapid succession, until, as Gibbon says, "my book was on every table and on almost every toilet."]