“You scarce can conceive how much eight years of disappointment anguish and study have worn me down. Imagine to yourself a pale melancholly visage with two great wrinkles between the eye-brows, with an eye disgustingly severe and a big wig, and you may have a perfect picture of my present appearance.” He then discusses and approves as judicious and convincing his brother’s proposals for “breeding up your son as a scholar.” “Preach then my dear Sir, to your son not the excellence of human nature nor the disrespect of riches, but endeavour to teach him thrift and economy. Let his poor wandering uncle’s example be placed in his eyes. I had learned from books to love virtue before I was taught from experience the necessity of being selfish.” (The Percy Memoir of 1801 prunes and waters down this passage.) After references to his mother and other members of the family, Oliver mentions the imminent publication of his “catchpenny” life of Voltaire, which has brought him in £20, and quotes some phrases of the “heroicomical poem” on the design of which he had asked his brother’s opinion in a previous letter (now lost). These are the well-known lines commencing The window, patch’d with paper lent a ray, That feebly show’d the state in which he lay with the subsequent references to the “sanded floor” the “humid wall” the game of goose, “the twelve rules the royal martyr drew,” etc. These lines with a different setting reappeared in Letter XXX of the Citizen of the World, which first appeared in the _Public Ledger_ for 2 May, 1760, and some of them were worked afterwards into lines 227-36 of the Deserted Village, 1770, where they are improved by the addition of: “The Chest contriv’d a double debt to pay A bed by night, a chest of drawers by day.” Following his usual practice when he does set to work on a letter, Oliver writes on to the extreme bottom of the page, and finishes thus: “I am resolved to leave no space, tho I should fill it up only by telling you what you very well know already, I mean that I am your most affectionate friend and brother, Oliver Goldsmith.” LATER LETTERS. There is now a long gap in the letters to his family, only in fact broken by two communications, one to his nephew Henry dated 7 June, 1768, condoling with him on the death of his father the Revd. Henry, and the other to his own brother Maurice despatched about January, 1770, in response to the latter’s request for financial assistance. The first of these two letters has only just come to light, having been recently purchased through a dealer who got it from Nova Scotia by Mr. William Harris Arnold of Nutley, New Jersey, U.S.A., to whose kindness I owe a transcript of it. It is a letter of deep feeling at the death of his brother, and contains a promise to help the nephew if possible.