Poverty and indiscretion were other claims, by which the benevolent commiseration of Johnson could scarcely fail to be awakened; and his acquaintance with Goldsmith had not subsisted long, when an occasion presented itself for rescuing him from the consequences of those evils. One day, calling on our poet, at his lodgings in Wine-office Court, Fleet-street, he found him under arrest for debt, and engaged in violent altercation with his landlady. Taking from him the Vicar of Wakefield, then just written, Johnson proceeded with it to Newbery the Bookseller, from whom he obtained sixty pounds for his friend; and Goldsmith's good humour, and the complaisance of his hostess, returning with this accession of wealth, they spent the remainder of the day together in harmony. In this novel, like Fielding and Smollett, he exhibits a very natural view of familiar life. Inferior to the first in the artful management of his story, and to the latter in the broader traits of comic character, and not equal to either in variety and fertility, he is, nevertheless, to be preferred to both for his power of passing from the ludicrous to the tender, and for his regard to moral decency. It was not printed till some years after, in 1766, when his reputation had been in some degree established by The Traveller. Meanwhile he published, in a periodical work called the Ledger, his Letters from a Citizen of the World to his Friend in the East, in which, under the character of a Chinese philosopher, he describes the customs and manners of Europeans. But this assumed personage is an awkward concealment for the good-humoured Irishman, with his never-failing succession of droll stories. Of these there are too many; and the want of any thing like a continued interest is sensibly felt. I do not know of any book, on the same plan, that is to be compared with the Persian Letters of Montesquieu. In the spring of 1763 he had lodgings in Islington, and continuing there till the following year, he revised several petty publications for Newbery, and wrote the Letters on English History, which, from their being published as the letters of a nobleman to his son, have been attributed by turns to the Earl of Orrery and Lord Lyttelton.