fact to ascertain, were it possible, what these three works alone have made for the booksellers. But if Goldsmith was not well remunerated for the works with which he enriched the English language, he was rich in friends. Johnson, Burke, Sir Joshua Reynolds, all the great men of the age, were his intimate associates, and knew how to value both his genius and his unselfish nature. The friendship of Johnson for him was beautiful. All the world knows the story of Johnson selling "the manuscript of the Vicar of Wakefield" to save the author from an arrest of his landlady for arrears of rent. It has been made the subject of more than one excellent painting; but it is not so generally known, that so uncertain were both Johnson and the publisher of its merits, that it remained nearly two years in the publisher's desk before he ventured to publish it. It was the fame of The Traveler which emboldened the bibliopole to bring it out, and the public at once received it with one instant and general cheer. We must now confine ourselves to a brief indication of the successive residences and haunts of Goldsmith during his literary life in London, first observing only, that so unpromising for a long time was the field of authorship, that he sought several times to quit it. In 1758, he procured the post of physician and surgeon to one of the factories on the coast of Coromandel, but was refused his certificate at Surgeon's Hall as not duly qualified. He tried, in 1760, to procure the situation of secretary to the Society of Arts, as a means of permanent support; and failing, he recurred to a wild project, which he had entertained years before, of going out to the East to decipher the inscriptions on the Written Mountains, though he was totally ignorant of Arabic, or the language in which the inscriptions might be supposed to be written. His inducement was the salary of £300 a year, which had been left for that purpose. He proposed, in this expedition, also, to acquire a knowledge of the arts peculiar to the East, and introduce them into Britain. When Johnson heard of this, he said, "Why, sir, he would bring home a grinding-barrow, which you see in every street of London, and think he had furnished a wonderful improvement." The scheme appeared as visionary in other quarters, and so fell through. These various plans, however, all show what a thorny path was that of authorship to him.