angry landlady is
unpleasant, and an arrest is awkward; but in comes an opportune
guinea, and the bottle of Madeira is opened forthwith.

In these rooms in Wine Office Court, and at the suggestion or
entreaty of Newbery, Goldsmith produced a good deal of miscellaneous
writing--pamphlets, tracts, compilations, and what not--of a more or
less marketable kind. It can only be surmised that by this time he may
have formed some idea of producing a book not solely meant for the
market, and that the characters in the _Vicar of Wakefield_ were
already engaging his attention; but the surmise becomes probable
enough when we remember that his project of writing the _Traveller_,
which was not published till 1764, had been formed as far back as
1755, while he was wandering aimlessly about Europe, and that a sketch
of the poem was actually forwarded by him then to his brother Henry in
Ireland. But in the meantime this hack-work, and the habits of life
connected with it, began to tell on Goldsmith's health; and so, for a
time, he left London (1762), and went to Tunbridge and then to Bath.
It is scarcely possible that his modest fame had preceded him to the
latter place of fashion; but it may be that the distinguished folk of
the town received this friend of the great Dr. Johnson with some small
measure of distinction; for we find that his next published work, _The
Life of Richard Nash, Esq._, is respectfully dedicated to the Right
Worshipful the Mayor, Recorder, Aldermen, and Common Council of the
City of Bath. The Life of the recently deceased Master of Ceremonies
was published anonymously (1762); but it was generally understood to
be Goldsmith's; and indeed the secret of the authorship is revealed in
every successive line. Among the minor writings of Goldsmith there is
none more delightful than this: the mock-heroic gravity, the
half-familiar contemptuous good-nature with which he composes this
Funeral March of a Marionette, are extremely whimsical and amusing.
And then what an admirable picture we get of fashionable English
society in the beginning of the eighteenth century, when Bath and Nash
were alike in the heyday of their glory--the fine ladies with their
snuff-boxes, and their passion for play, and their extremely effective
language when they got angry; young bucks come to flourish away their
money, and gain by their losses the sympathy of the fair; sharpers on
the look-out for guineas, and adventurers on the look-out for
we