The occasion of this quatrain, first published as Goldsmith’s* in _Poems and Plays_, 1777, p. 79, is to be found in Forster’s _Life and Times of Oliver Goldsmith_, 1871, ii. 60. Purdon died on March 27, 1767 (_Gentleman’s Magazine_, April, 1767, p. 192). ‘“Dr. Goldsmith made this epitaph,” says William Ballantyne [the author of _Mackliniana_], “in his way from his chambers in the Temple to the Wednesday evening’s club at the Globe. _I think he will never come back_, I believe he said. I was sitting by him, and he repeated it more than twice. (I think he will never come back.)”’ Purdon had been at Trinity College, Dublin, with Goldsmith; he had subsequently been a foot soldier; ultimately he became a ‘bookseller’s hack.’ He wrote an anonymous letter to Garrick in 1759, and translated the _ Henriade_ of Voltaire. This translation Goldsmith is supposed to have revised, and his own life of Voltaire was to have accompanied it, though finally the Memoir and Translation seem to have appeared separately. (Cf. prefatory note to _Memoirs of M. de Voltaire_ in Gibbs’s _Works of Oliver Goldsmith_, 1885, iv. 2.) * It had previously appeared as an extempore by a correspondent in the _Weekly Magazine_, Edin., August 12, 1773 (_Notes and Queries_, February 14, 1880). Forster says further, in a note, ‘The original . . . is the epitaph on “La Mort du Sieur Etienne”:— Il est au bout de ses travaux, Il a passé, le Sieur Etienne; En ce monde il eut tant des maux Qu’on ne croit pas qu’il revienne. With this perhaps Goldsmith was familiar, and had therefore less scruple in laying felonious hands on the epigram in the _Miscellanies_ (Swift, xiii. 372):— Well, then, poor G—— lies underground! So there’s an end of honest Jack. So little justice here he found, ’Tis ten to one he’ll ne’er come back.’ Mr. Forster’s ‘felonious hands’ recalls a passage in Goldsmith’s _Life of Parnell_, 1770, in which, although himself an habitual sinner in this way, he comments gravely upon the practice of plagiarism:—‘It was the fashion with the wits of the last age, to conceal the places from whence they took their hints or their subjects. A trifling acknowledgment would have made that lawful prize, which may now be considered as plunder’ (p. xxxii). EPILOGUE FOR LEE LEWES’S BENEFIT.