When nearly a quarter of a century later, Percy put his hand to the preparation of the Memoir of his friend, he may have thought that the discreditable incidents obscuring the memory of a great public success were best buried in oblivion; and he therefore confined himself in the published work to the statement that “She Stoops to Conquer” “added very much to the author’s reputation, and brought down upon him a torrent of congratulatory addresses and petitions from less fortunate bards whose indigence compelled them to solicit his bounty, and of scurrilous abuse from such of them, as being less reduced, only envied his success.” (_Memoir_, p. 101.) Percy could not, it is true, resist the temptation of placing on record in the Memoir “Tom Tickle’s” attack on Goldsmith in the _London Packet_: but, says he, “we would not defile our page with this scurrilous production, so shall insert it in the margin.” (pp. 103-5, notes.) It seems to me not unlikely that Percy’s opinion was sought as to the wording of the defence or disclaimer by Goldsmith “To the Public” which appeared in the _Daily Advertiser_ of 31 March, 1773, as this also is printed _in extenso_ in the Memoir of 1801 (pp. 107-8). Dr. Johnson had certainly no hand in its preparation, for on Saturday, 3 April, in response to an enquiry by the obsequious Boswell, he said: “Sir, Dr. Goldsmith would no more have asked me to have wrote such a thing as that for him, than he would have asked me to feed him with a spoon, or to do anything else that denoted imbecility.... He has indeed done it very well, but it is a foolish thing well done.” Percy says in the Memoir (p. 107): “The subject of this dispute was long discussed in the public papers, which discanted on the impropriety of attacking a man in his own house: and an action was threatened for the assault: which was at length compromised”: and here he leaves it, as we may well do. One other matter connected with “She Stoops to Conquer” I must ask your permission to touch upon before I conclude. Four attempts were made at an Epilogue for the play, and the Percy documents enable us for the first time to understand the sequence of these. Two of them were printed (not quite textually) in Vol. II of the Memoir of 1801, and Percy, who set great store by them, complains to his correspondents that enough credit was not given to him by the publishers for them. He told Dr. Robert Anderson: “The Dr. had likewise given him two original Poems that had never been printed. These are the two Epilogues printed in the second Volume, viz: that spoken by Mrs. Bulkley and Miss Catley, and that intended for Mrs. Bulkley. The latter [it] is said in a Note, was given in Manuscript to Dr. Percy by the Author, but no such mention is made of the former, tho’ it was also so given by him and delivered to the Publishers in his own writing.”