On another occasion the poet and Beauclerc were seated at the theater next to Lord Shelburne, the minister, whom political writers thought proper to nickname Malagrida. "Do you know," said Goldsmith to his lordship, in the course of conversation, "that I never could conceive why they called you Malagrida, _for_ Malagrida was a very good sort of man." This was too good a trip of the tongue for Beauclerc to let pass: he serves it up in his next letter to Lord Charlemont, as a specimen of a mode of turning a thought the wrong way, peculiar to the poet; he makes merry over it with his witty and sarcastic compeer, Horace Walpole, who pronounces it "a picture of Goldsmith's whole life." Dr. Johnson alone, when he hears it bandied about as Goldsmith's last blunder, growls forth a friendly defense: "Sir," said he, "it was a mere blunder in emphasis. He meant to say, I wonder they should use Malagrida as a term of reproach." Poor Goldsmith! On such points he was ever doomed to be misinterpreted. Rogers, the poet, meeting in times long subsequent with a survivor of those days, asked him what Goldsmith really was in conversation. The old conversational character was too deeply stamped in the memory of the veteran to be effaced. "Sir," replied the old wiseacre, "_he was a fool_. The right word never came to him. If you gave him back a bad shilling, he'd say, Why, it's as good a shilling as ever was _born_. You know he ought to have said _coined_. _Coined_, sir, never entered his head. _He was a fool, sir_." We have so many anecdotes in which Goldsmith's simplicity is played upon that it is quite a treat to meet with one in which he is represented playing upon the simplicity of others, especially when the victim of his joke is the "Great Cham" himself, whom all others are disposed to hold so much in awe. Goldsmith and Johnson were supping cozily together at a tavern in Dean Street, Soho, kept by Jack Roberts, a singer at Drury Lane, and a protege of Garrick's. Johnson delighted in these gastronomical tete-a-tetes, and was expatiating in high good-humor on rumps and kidneys, the veins of his forehead swelling with the ardor of mastication. "These," said he, "are pretty little things; but a man must eat a great many of them before he is filled." "Ay; but how many of them," asked Goldsmith, with affected simplicity, "would reach to the moon?" "To the moon! Ah, sir, that, I fear, exceeds your calculation." "Not at all, sir; I think I could tell." "Pray, then, sir, let us hear." "Why, sir, one, _if it were long enough_!" Johnson growled for a time at finding himself caught in such a trite schoolboy trap. "Well, sir," cried he at length, "I have deserved it. I should not have provoked so foolish an answer by so foolish a question."