The literary character is sure to suffer, more or less, in contact with society. Men of letters who spend half their time with the dead are not exactly the people to be _au fait_ of all the ways of the living; and have not always the good sense of Thomas Baker, who, for that very reason, refused, long ago, to be introduced to the Earl of Oxford and the polished people of his acquaintance. They generally offend against the conventions and are not pardoned in their biographies, which are sometimes writ by men of the world, and which, when even written by authors, who may be supposed capable of sympathizing more with the literary character, still show how the jealousies and prejudices of the craft will stand in the way of honest criticism. A man’s character depends very much on his historians—and Goldsmith, a literary adventurer, a bookseller’s hack, and an Irishman, was particularly—perhaps, necessarily—unfortunate in his. There have been crowds of distinguished literary men whose peculiarities were almost as much ridiculed as those of Goldsmith, but who have found a more dignified appreciation, by virtue of fairer biographers. Socrates was laughed at more than any man in Athens. But his immortal pupil has rescued his fame from those wits and satirists who used to loiter about the porches, and go, of a morning, to applaud the Clouds of Aristophanes. Socrates was an ugly little man—in the midst of the fine-faced men of Attica—generally threadbare and slovenly; and even Plato has been obliged to allow that his honored master was like an apothecary’s gallipot, painted outside with grotesque figures, but containing balm within. He was as much laughed at as Goldsmith; but nobody can think Socrates a laughable old fellow. There was the Emperor Julian. When he sojourned at Antioch, he was ridiculed and lampooned by the citizens for his careless dress and beard, and his simple manners. Whereupon, instead of treating them as Sulla did those facetious Greeks who said “his face was a mulberry sprinkled with meal,” the philosophic apostate wrote a book against them, called “Misopogon,” in which he pleasantly satirized himself for his literary peculiarities, justified his critics, and happily admitted that he did not, indeed, resemble in any thing those witty and fashionable people who made merry at his expense. If these Antiochans were Julian’s biographers, he should cut but a silly figure in the eyes of posterity. As it is, he has hardly fared much better in another point of view. La Fontaine was voted intolerably stupid in society. The gay Parisians said he merely vegetated—and he was called the Fable Tree—bringing forth fables! Poor Burns complained that though, when he wished, he could make himself “beloved,” he could not make himself “respected.” He confessed that he wanted discretion—was prone to a _lapsus linguæ_, and very apt to offend the sense of the society he was in—in this, somewhat like Goldsmith.