“While all the clubbists trembled at his nod.” A great deal of pedantry and paradox was mixed up with the literature of Goldsmith’s time; men’s minds were apt to be as stiff as their costumes, and authors were considered to have a certain professional dignity to support. Oliver, as we have said, was out of his element in the midst of such circumstances; he did not admire the gravity which is too often a mysterious carriage of the body to cover the defects of the mind, but was disposed in company “To rattle on exactly as he’d talk To any body in a ride or walk.” In mixed society he seemed very unequal. He very often sat silent, and the shyness of his disposition was thought to be an affectation of dignity. But when the occasion grew more festive, as at after-dinner times, and the poet’s temperament had received the stimulus of aliment and wine, he would overflow with pleasant paradoxes, jests and all sorts of unguarded hilarity, believing that those about him who were aware of the intrinsic wit and worth of his intellect, would justify him against any thought of ridicule or disparagement. In such moods, and before the most fastidious wits of the day, he would come out intrepidly with—“When I used to lodge among the beggars in Axe Lane.” The effect of this on his hearers (we believe it was spoken at one of Sir Joshua Reynold’s dinners) was something like that produced on the discomposed sovereigns sitting round the table at Tilsit, or Erfurth—we forget which—by Napoleon’s reminiscence, beginning—“When I was a lieutenant in the regiment of La Fere!” These sayings seem to show a kindred consciousness of something beyond the conventions of rank and name. Goldsmith was not to be laughed at for that sally—which Socrates or Zeno would have enjoyed very much. But the cankered and fastidious Walpole, who was present on some such occasion, and found the Irishman very blunt in his mode of argument, and very unconcerned at the rank or pretensions of Walpole himself, could not tolerate such franknesses, and with his usual affectation of point, called Oliver “an inspired idiot;” just as Chesterfield had called Johnson “a respectable Hottentot”—but indeed with greater justice; for the moralist’s manners at table, particularly his modes of eating, were rather savage.