pounds, to which the sale of the book, with the condemned passages restored, added another 100 pounds. Furthermore, Johnson, whose ‘Suspirius’ in _The Rambler_ was, under the name of ‘Croaker,’ one of its most prominent personages, pronounced it to be the best comedy since Cibber’s _Provok’d Husband_. During the autumn of 1767, Goldsmith had again been living at Islington. On this occasion he had a room in Canonbury Tower, Queen Elizabeth’s old hunting-lodge, and perhaps occupied the very chamber generally used by John Newbery, whose active life was, in this year, to close. When in London he had modest housing in the Temple. But the acquisition of 500 pounds for _The Good Natur’d Man_ seemed to warrant a change of residence, and he accordingly expended four-fifths of that sum for the lease of three rooms on the second floor of No. 2 Brick Court, which he straightway proceeded to decorate sumptuously with mirrors, Wilton carpets, moreen curtains, and Pembroke tables. It was an unfortunate step; and he would have done well to remember the _Nil_ _te quaesiveris extra_ with which his inflexible monitor, Johnson, had greeted his apologies for the shortcomings of some earlier lodgings. One of its natural results was to involve him in a new sequence of task-work, from which he never afterwards shook himself free. Hence, following hard upon a _Roman History_ which he had already engaged to write for Davies of Russell Street, came a more ambitious project for Griffin, _A History of Animated Nature_; and after this again, another _History of England_ for Davies. The pay was not inadequate; for the first he was to have 250 guineas, for the second 800 guineas, and for the last 500 pounds. But as employment for the author of a unique novel, an excellent comedy, and a deservedly successful poem, it was surely—in his own words—‘to cut blocks with a razor.’ And yet, apart from the anxieties of growing money troubles, his life could not have been wholly unhappy. There are records of pleasant occasional junketings—‘shoe-maker’s holidays’ he called them—in the still countrified suburbs of Hampstead and Edgware; there was the gathering at the Turk’s Head, with its literary magnates, for his severer hours; and for his more pliant moments, the genial ‘free-and-easy’ or shilling whist-club of a less pretentious kind, where the student of mixed character might shine with something of the old supremacy of George Conway’s inn at Ballymahon. And there must have been quieter and more chastened resting-places of memory, when, softening towards the home of his youth, with a sadness made more poignant by the death of his brother Henry in May, 1768, he planned and perfected his new poem of _The Deserted Village_.