For these, and other forgotten pieces arising out of _Retaliation_, Garrick had apparently prepared the above-mentioned introduction. It may be added that the statement, prefixed to the first edition, that _Retaliation_, as we now have it, was produced at the ‘next meeting’ of the Club, is manifestly incorrect. It was composed and circulated in detached fragments, and Goldsmith was still working at it when he was seized with his last illness. Of old, when Scarron, etc. Paul Scarron (1610–60), the author _inter alia_ of the _Roman Comique_, 1651–7, upon a translation of which Goldsmith was occupied during the last months of his life. It was published by Griffin in 1776. Each guest brought his dish. ‘Chez Scarron,’—says his editor, M. Charles Baumet, when speaking of the poet’s entertainments,—‘venait d’ailleurs l’élite des dames, des courtisans & des hommes de lettres. On y dinait joyeusement. _Chacun apportait son plat_.’ (_Œuvres de Scarron_, 1877, i. viii.) Scarron’s company must have been as brilliant as Goldsmith’s. Villarceaux, Vivonne, the Maréchal d’Albret, figured in his list of courtiers; while for ladies he had Mesdames Deshoulières, de Scudéry, de la Sablière, and de Sévigné, to say nothing of Ninon de Lenclos and Marion Delorme. (Cf. also Guizot, _ Corneille et son Temps_, 1862, 429–30.) If our landlord. The ‘explanatory note’ to the second edition says—‘The master of the St. James’s coffee-house, where the Doctor, and the friends he has characterized in this Poem, held an occasional club.’ This, it should be stated, was not the famous ‘Literary Club,’ which met at the Turk’s Head Tavern in Gerrard Street. The St. James’s Coffee-house, as familiar to Swift and Addison at the beginning, as it was to Goldsmith and his friends at the end of the eighteenth century, was the last house but one on the south-west corner of St. James’s Street. It now no longer exists. Cradock (_Memoirs_, 1826, i. 228–30) speaks of dining _at the bottom of St. James’s Street_ with Goldsmith, Percy, the two Burkes (_v. infra_), Johnson, Garrick, Dean Barnard, and others. ‘We sat very late;’ he adds in conclusion, ‘and the conversation that at last ensued, was the direct cause of my friend Goldsmith’s poem, called “_Retaliation._”’ Our Dean. Dr. Thomas Barnard, an Irishman, at this time Dean of Derry. He died at Wimbledon in 1806. It was Dr. Barnard who, in reply to a rude sally of Johnson, wrote the charming verses on improvement after the age of forty-five, which end— If I have thoughts, and can’t express them, Gibbon shall teach me how to dress them, In terms select and terse; Jones teach me modesty and Greek, Smith how to think, Burke how to speak, And Beauclerk to converse.