During the remainder of 1761 he continued busily to ply his pen. Besides his contributions to _The Ledger_ and _The British Magazine_, he edited _The Lady’s Magazine_, inserting in it the _Memoirs of Voltaire_, drawn up some time earlier to accompany a translation of the _Henriade_ by his crony and compatriot Edward Purdon. Towards the beginning of 1762 he was hard at work on several compilations for Newbery, for whom he wrote or edited a _History of Mecklenburgh_, and a series of monthly volumes of an abridgement of _Plutarch’s Lives_. In October of the same year was published the _Life of Richard Nash_, apparently the outcome of special holiday-visits to the then fashionable watering-place of Bath, whence its fantastic old Master of the Ceremonies had only very lately made his final exit. It is a pleasantly gossiping, and not unedifying little book, which still holds a respectable place among its author’s minor works. But a recently discovered entry in an old ledger shows that during the latter half of 1762 he must have planned, if he had not, indeed, already in part composed, a far more important effort, _The Vicar of Wakefield_. For on the 28th of October in this year he sold to one Benjamin Collins, printer, of Salisbury, for 21 pounds, a third in a work with that title, further described as ‘2 vols. 12mo.’ How this little circumstance, discovered by Mr. Charles Welsh when preparing his Life of John Newbery, is to be brought into agreement with the time-honoured story, related (with variations) by Boswell and others, to the effect that Johnson negotiated the sale of the manuscript for Goldsmith when the latter was arrested for rent by his incensed landlady—has not yet been satisfactorily suggested. Possibly the solution is a simple one, referable to some of those intricate arrangements favoured by ‘the Trade’ at a time when not one but half a score publishers’ names figured in an imprint. At present, the fact that Collins bought a third share of the book from the author for twenty guineas, and the statement that Johnson transferred the entire manuscript to a bookseller for sixty pounds, seem irreconcilable. That _The Vicar of Wakefield_ was nevertheless written, or was being written, in 1762, is demonstrable from internal evidence.