"I received one morning" (Boswell represents Johnson to have said), "a message from poor Goldsmith, that he was in great distress, and, as it was not in his power to come to me, begging that I would come to him as soon as possible. I sent him a guinea and promised to come to him directly. I accordingly went as soon as I was dressed, and found that his landlady had arrested him for his rent, at which he was in a violent passion. I perceived that he had already changed my guinea, and had got a bottle of Madeira and a glass before him. I put the cork into the bottle, desired he would be calm, and began to talk to him of the means by which he might be extricated. He then told me that he had a novel ready for the press, which he produced to me. I looked into it and saw its merits, told the landlady I should soon return, and, having gone to a bookseller, sold it for £60. I brought Goldsmith the money, and he discharged his rent, not without rating his landlady in a high tone for having used him so ill." The MS. was that of _The Vicar of Wakefield_, but the whole picture really suggests a scene from Dickens's _Pickwick_. Oliver Goldsmith acted at one time as "reader"--curious combination!--to prim old Samuel Richardson, the printer-novelist, at the latter's printing-office in the south west corner of Salisbury Square, communicating with the court, No. 76, Fleet Street. Richardson, also, had once befriended Johnson, and the worthy doctor was for ever praising his friend, and abusing his compeer in fiction, Henry Fielding, whom he called "a barren rascal." "Sir" (said Johnson), "there is more knowledge of the heart in one letter of Richardson's than in all _Tom Jones_." Some one present here remarked that Richardson was very tedious. "Why, Sir," replied Johnson, "if you were to read Richardson for the story, your impatience would be so great that you would hang yourself. But you must read him for the sentiment, and consider the story as only giving occasion to the sentiment." But if Richardson is tedious, Johnson was nothing if not prejudiced; though, after all, he has no less a person than Macaulay on his side; Macaulay, who declared that were he to be wrecked on a desert island with only one book, he would choose _Clarissa_, sentiment and all, for his sole delectation. Hogarth, the painter, it is said, once met Johnson at Richardson's printing-office; when, seeing "a person standing in the room shaking his head and rolling himself about in a ridiculous manner, he concluded he was an idiot, whom his relations had put under the care of Mr. Richardson as a very good man.... To his great surprise, however, this figure stalked forward to where he was, and all at once burst into an invective against George II.... Hogarth looked at him in astonishment, and actually imagined that this idiot had been at the moment inspired."