To Goldsmith has been imputed a vain ambition to shine in company; it is also said that he regarded with envy all literary fame but his own. Of the first charge he is certainly guilty; the second is entirely false; unless a transient feeling of bitterness at seeing preferred merit inferior to his own, may be construed into envy. A great genius seldom keeps up his character in conversation: his best thoughts, clothed in the choicest terms, he commits to paper; and with these his colloquial powers are unjustly compared. Goldsmith well knew his station in the literary world; and his desire to maintain it hi every society, often involved him in ridiculous perplexities. He would fain have been an admirable Crichton. His ambition to rival a celebrated posture-master had once very nearly cost him his shins. These eccentricities, attached to so great a man, were magnified into importance; and he amply paid the tax to which genius is subject, by being envied and abused by the dunces of his day. Yet he wanted not spirit to resent an insult; and a recreant bookseller who had published an impudent libel upon him, he chastised in his own shop. How delightful to contemplate such a character! If ever there was a heart that beat with more than ordinary affection for mankind, it was Goldsmith's. --Garrick, * Boswell, and Reynolds, “Who's for _poonch?_”---- * Garrick was born to illustrate what Shakspere wrote;--to him Nature had unlocked all her springs, and opened all her stores. His success was instantaneous, brilliant, and complete. Colley Cibber was constrained to yield him unwilling praise; and Quin, the pupil of Betterton and Booth, openly declared, “That if the young fellow was right, he, and the rest of the players, had been all wrong.” The unaffected and familiar style of Garrick presented a singular contrast to the stately air, the solemn march, the monotonous and measured declamation of his predecessors. To the lofty grandeur of tragedy, he was unequal; but its pathos, truth, and tenderness were all his own. In comedy, he might be said to act too much; he played no less to the eye than to the ear,--he indeed acted every word. Macklin blames him for his greediness of praise; for his ambition to engross all attention to himself, and disconcerting his brother actors by “pawing and pulling them about.” This censure is levelled at his later efforts, when he adopted the vice of stage-trick; but nothing could exceed the ease and gaiety of his early performances. He was the delight of every eye, the theme of every tongue, the admiration and wonder of foreign nations; and Baron, Le Kain, and Clairon, the ornaments of the French Stage, bowed to the superior genius of their illustrious friend and contemporary. In