"'Dr Goldsmith,' said Johnson, 'something passed to-day where you and I dined; I ask your pardon.' Goldsmith answered placidly, 'It must be much from you, Sir, that I take ill.' And so at once the difference was over, and they were on as easy terms as ever, and Goldsmith rattled away as usual." Sometimes Goldsmith had the last word, as when they were discussing the writing of a good fable, like that of the little fishes: "'The skill,' said Goldsmith, 'consists in making them talk like little fishes.' While he indulged himself in this fanciful reverie, he observed Johnson shaking his sides, and laughing. Upon which he smartly proceeded, 'Why, Dr Johnson, this is not so easy as you seem to think; for if you were to make little fishes talk, they would talk like WHALES.'" But these victories and defeats in conversation were only incidents in the history of a well-tried friendship. When Goldsmith died in 1774 at the age of 46, Johnson wrote to his friend, Bennet Langton: "Poor Goldsmith is gone.... He died of a fever, exasperated, as I believe, by the fear of distress. He had raised money and squandered it, by every artifice of acquisition and folly of expence. But let not his frailties be remembered; he was a very great man." "Goldsmith" he said many years later, "was a man who, whatever he wrote, did it better than any other man could do. He deserved a place in Westminster-Abbey, and every year he lived, would have deserved it better." Westminster Abbey holds a memorial, but not the mortal remains, of Oliver Goldsmith. For the monument which, at the suggestion of Sir Joshua Reynolds, was set up in the Abbey two years after Goldsmith's death Johnson wrote the inscription. "I ... send you," he wrote to Sir Joshua, "the poor dear Doctor's epitaph. Read it first yourself; and if you then think it right, shew it to the Club. I am, you know, willing to be corrected." The Club suggested several alterations, the chief of them being that the epitaph should be in English rather than in Latin. "But the question was, who should have the courage to propose them to him [Johnson]. At last it was hinted, that there could be no way so good as that of a _Round Robin_, as the sailors call it, which they make use of when they enter into a conspiracy, so as not to let it be known who puts his name first or last to the paper.... Sir Joshua agreed to carry it to Dr Johnson, who received it with much good humour, and desired Sir Joshua to tell the gentlemen, that he would alter the Epitaph in any manner they pleased, as to the sense of it; but _he would never consent to disgrace the walls of Westminster Abbey with an English inscription_." Here we will risk the posthumous wrath of Johnson and give the first sentence of the epitaph in English: OLIVER GOLDSMITH Poet, Naturalist, Historian, Who scarce left a single kind of writing Untouched And touched none that he did not adorn. FOOTNOTES: [25] See p. 46.