examination, as mate to a naval hospital. Even to so humble
a post he was found unequal. By this time the schoolmaster whom he had
served for a morsel of food and the third part of a bed was no more.
Nothing remained but to return to the lowest drudgery of literature.
Goldsmith took a garret in a miserable court, to which he had to climb
from the brink of Fleet Ditch by a dizzy ladder of flagstones called
Breakneck Steps. The court and the ascent have long disappeared; but old
Londoners will remember both. (A gentleman, who states that he has known
the neighbourhood for thirty years, corrects this account, and informs
the present publisher that the Breakneck Steps, thirty-two in number,
divided into two flights, are still in existence, and that, according
to tradition, Goldsmith's house was not on the steps, but was the first
house at the head of the court, on the left hand, going from the Old
Bailey. See "Notes and Queries" (2d. S. ix. 280).) Here, at thirty, the
unlucky adventurer sat down to toil like a galley slave.

In the succeeding six years he sent to the press some things which have
survived and many which have perished. He produced articles for reviews,
magazines, and newspapers; children's books which, bound in gilt paper
and adorned with hideous woodcuts, appeared in the window of the once
far-famed shop at the corner of Saint Paul's Churchyard; "An Inquiry
into the State of Polite Learning in Europe," which, though of little
or no value, is still reprinted among his works; a "Life of Beau Nash,"
which is not reprinted, though it well deserves to be so (Mr Black has
pointed out that this is inaccurate: the life of Nash has been twice
reprinted; once in Mr Prior's edition (vol. iii. p. 249), and once in
Mr Cunningham's edition (vol. iv. p. 35).); a superficial and incorrect,
but very readable, "History of England," in a series of letters
purporting to be addressed by a nobleman to his son; and some very
lively and amusing "Sketches of London Society," in a series of letters
purporting to be addressed by a Chinese traveller to his friends. All
these works were anonymous; but some of them were well-known to be
Goldsmith's; and he gradually rose in the estimation of the booksellers
for whom he drudged. He was, indeed, emphatically a popular writer. For
accurate research or grave disquisition he was not well qualified by
nature or by education. He knew nothing accurately: his reading had been
desultory; nor had h