His chief publications in the next two years were the above-mentioned _History of England_, 1771; _Threnodia Augustalis_, a poetical lament-to-order on the death of the Princess Dowager of Wales, 1772; and the abridgement of the _Roman History_, 1772. But in the former year he had completed a new comedy, _She Stoops to Conquer; or, The Mistakes of a Night_, which, after the usual vexatious negotiations, was brought out by Colman at Covent Garden on Monday, the 15th of March, 1773. The manager seems to have acted Goldsmith’s own creation of ‘Croaker’ with regard to this piece, and even to the last moment predicted its failure. But it was a brilliant success. More skilful in construction than _The Good Natur’d Man_, more various in its contrasts of character, richer and stronger in humour and _vis comica_, _She Stoops to Conquer_ has continued to provide an inexhaustible fund of laughter to more than three generations of playgoers, and still bids fair to retain the character generally given to it, of being one of the three most popular comedies upon the English stage. When published, it was gratefully inscribed, in one of those admirable dedications of which its author above all men possessed the secret, to Johnson, who had befriended it from the first. ‘I do not mean,’ wrote Goldsmith, ‘so much to compliment you as myself. It may do me some honour to inform the public, that I have lived many years in intimacy with you. It may serve the interests of mankind also to inform them, that the greatest wit may be found in a character, without impairing the most unaffected piety.’ His gains from _She Stoops to Conquer_ were considerable; but by this time his affairs had reached a stage of complication which nothing short of a miracle could disentangle; and there is reason for supposing that his involved circumstances preyed upon his mind. During the few months of life that remained to him he published nothing, being doubtless sufficiently occupied by the undertakings to which he was already committed. The last of his poetical efforts was the poem entitled