Pretty Lady Blessington used to say of him, that “James Smith, if he had not been a _witty_ man, must have been a _great_ man.” He died in his house in Craven Street, with the calmness of a philosopher, on the 24th of December 1839, in the sixty-fifth year of his age.[248] Fond of society, witty without giving pain, a bachelor, and therefore glad to escape from a solitary home, James Smith seems to have been the model of a diner-out. Caleb Whitefoord, a wine merchant in Craven Street, and an excellent connoisseur in old pictures, was one of the legacy-hunters who infested the studio of Nollekens, the miserly sculptor of Mortimer Street. He was a foppish dresser, and was remarkable for a dashing three-cornered hat, with a sparkling black button and a loop upon a rosette. He wore a wig with five tiers of curls, of the Garrick cut, and he was one of the last to wear such a monstrosity. This crafty wine merchant used to distribute privately the most whimsical of his _Cross Readings_, _Ship News_, and _Mistakes of the Press_--things in their day very popular, though now surpassed in every number of _Punch_. Some of the best were the following:--“Yesterday Dr. Pretyman preached at St. James’s,--and performed it with ease in less than sixteen minutes.” “Several changes are talked of at Court,--consisting of 9050 triple bob-majors.” “Dr. Solander will, by Her Majesty’s command, undertake a voyage--round the head-dress of the present month.” “Sunday night.--Many noble families were alarmed--by the constable of the ward, who apprehended them at cards.” A simple-hearted age could laugh heartily at these things: would that we could! It has often been asserted that Goldsmith’s epitaph on Whitefoord was written by the wine merchant himself, and sent to the editor of the fifth edition of the Poems by a convenient common friend. It is not very pointed, and the length of the epitaph is certainly singular, considering that the poet dismissed Burke and Reynolds in less than eighteen lines. Adam built an octagon room in Whitefoord’s house in order to give his pictures an equal light; and Mr. Christie adopted the idea when he fitted up his large room in King Street, St. James’s.[249] Goldsmith is said to have been intimate with witty, punning Caleb Whitefoord, and certain it is his name is found in the postscript to the poem of _Retaliation_, written by Oliver on some of his friends at the St. James’s Coffee-house. These were the Burkes, fretful Cumberland, Reynolds, Garrick, and Canon Douglas. In this poem Goldsmith laments that Whitefoord should have confined himself to newspaper essays, and contented himself with the praise of the printer of the _Public Advertiser_; he thus sums him up:-- “Rare compound of oddity, frolic, and fun, Who relish’d a joke and rejoiced in a pun; Whose temper was generous, open, sincere; A stranger to flattery, a stranger to fear. * * * * *