Vol. VIII of Nichols’ _Literary Illustrations_ (published in 1858) contains at pp. 236-240, extracts from correspondence between the Bishop and Edmund Malone from which it appears that on 16 June, 1785, Percy was urging that the Members of the Club (of which Oliver was an original Member) should show “our regard for the departed Bard by relieving his only brother, and so far as I hear, the only one of his family that wants relief.” (This was by no means the case, as Percy was afterwards to learn by bitter experience.) He wrote again to Malone on 17 October, 1786, “I must entreat you to exert all your influence among the gentlemen of The Club, and particularly urge it on Sir Joshua Reynolds, to procure subscriptions for the relief of poor Maurice Goldsmith, who is suffering great penury and distress being not only poor but very unhealthy.... A guinea a piece from the members of the Club would be a great relief to him.” Maurice’s subsequent appointment in 1787 as the Mace-bearer to the Royal Irish Academy and his place in the Licence Office appears to have eased somewhat the final years of his chequered life, but when he died in 1792, a new appeal for the Bishop’s help came from his widow, Esther Goldsmith. 11_a_. ESTHER GOLDSMITH, WIDOW OF MAURICE. All that is known about her is that she is described in a Petition to the Lord Lieutenant (the draft of which in Percy’s writing was left amongst his papers) as “the daughter of a respectable clergyman,” and as “left wholly destitute” by the death of her husband Maurice Goldsmith. She got various grants from a fund in the gift of the Lord Lieutenant known as the Concordatum, and on the last page of Prior’s _Life_ (Vol. II, 576) is a letter from her dated Rushport, Elphin, 19 June, 1793, to Mr. J. C. Walker asking his influence in favour of her appointment as housekeeper to the Royal Irish Academy. There are two unpublished later letters (1794) from Rushport to Bishop Percy, in one of which Esther wants to know about the subscription to the _Memoir_, and in the other she thanks the Bishop for £15 which she had received from the Concordatum Fund. A later letter dated 17 October, 1801, from Catherine, daughter of the Revd. Henry Goldsmith, to the Bishop seems to show that Esther had remarried. “She thinks she is as well entitled to the money arising from the publication of my Uncle’s works as I am, but there I must beg leave to differ in opinion with her.” Catherine gives some more particulars which she thinks the Bishop ought to know, but “if Mrs. Goldsmith knew the information came to your Lordship through me, ’twou’d bring her tongue upon me, which she can use well.” 12. CHARLES GOLDSMITH. (Oliver’s Brother.)