when I think of the glorious hopes which accompanied their composition, and the terrible undeceiving which attended their publication; when I reflect how many of these fair tomes were written in bitterest poverty, with the most aching hearts, in the most cheerless homes, and how many others ruined the writers who were tolerably well off before they put pen to paper; when I remember, on passing my eye along them, how many of them never were raised to their present rank and occupation till the unhappy authors were beyond the knowledge of it; when I see others which _had_ their fame during the author's lifetime, but enriched only the lucky bibliopole, and left the conscious producer of wealth only doubly poor by seeing it in the enjoyment of another; when I see those works which, while the author lived, were assailed as blasphemous and devilish, and are now the text-books of liberty and progress; and when I call to mind all the tears which have bedewed them, the sadness of soul, often leading to suicide, which has weighed down the immortal spirits which created them, I own that there is to me no such melancholy spectacle as a fine collection of books. Goldsmith had his full share of this baptism of literary wretchedness. I can not follow him minutely through the years of book-drudgery and all its attendant adventures. Suffice it that he wrote an immense mass of articles for the periodicals; hosts of histories; plays, tales, essays, and the like, anonymously; and which, therefore, brought him precarious bread, but little fame. He commenced writing in the Monthly Review in 1757, and it was not till 1764 that his name was first affixed to his first poem, The Traveler. Thus he served a seven years' apprenticeship to anonymous authorship before he began to take that rank in English literature which was his destined portion; exactly in ten years more he was in his grave, having, in the mean time, given to posterity his exquisite Deserted Village; his inimitable Vicar of Wakefield; his Good-natured Man, and She Stoops to Conquer; besides hosts of histories, written to make the pot boil. Histories of Animated Nature; of England, Greece, Rome, and what not. During the whole of his career, the pecuniary condition of Goldsmith was one of uneasiness. It is true that his generous, improvident disposition might have left the result the same had he won ten times the sum he did; but one can not help regarding the sums received by him for his writings as something most humiliating, when their real value to the booksellers of all ages is considered. We find his life abounding with his borrowing two and three guineas of his bookseller, and receiving such sums for articles. The Traveler brought him _twenty guineas_! The Vicar of Wakefield, _sixty_; and for the Deserted Village, _one hundred_; not two hundred pounds altogether, for three of the most popular works in any language. It would be a curious