ares, the
genius of the poet flashed forth once more in his personal poem,
"Retaliation." At a club dinner at St. James's coffee-house, the
proposition was made that each member present should write an epitaph on
Goldsmith, and Garrick started with:

Here is Nolly Goldsmith, for shortness called Noll,
Who wrote like an angel, and talked like poor Poll.

Later, Goldsmith retaliated with epitaphs on his circle of club friends.
His list of discriminating pictures was not complete when he died.
Indeed, the picture of Reynolds breaks off with a half line.

On March 25, 1774, the poet was too ill to attend the club
gathering--how ill, his friends failed to realise. On the morning of
April 4, he died from weakness following fever. "Is your mind at ease?"
asked his doctor. "No, it is not," was the melancholy answer, and his
last recorded words. His debts amounted to not less than two thousand
pounds. "Was ever poet so trusted!" exclaimed Johnson.

His remains were committed to their final resting-place in the burial
ground of the Temple Church, and the staircase of his chambers is said
to have been filled with mourners the reverse of domestic--women without
a home, without domesticity of any kind, with no friend but him they had
come to weep for, outcasts of that great, solitary, wicked city, to whom
he had never forgotten to be kind and charitable.

Johnson spoke his epitaph in an emphatic sentence: "He had raised money,
and squandered it, by every artifice of acquisition and folly of
expense; but let not his frailties be remembered--he was a very great
man."

* * * * *

GEORGE FOX

Journal

George Fox, the founder of the Society of Friends, or "Friends
of the Truth," was born at Drayton, Leicestershire, in July,
1624, and died in London on January 13, 1691. His "Journal,"
here epitomised, was published in 1694, after being revised by
a committee under the superintendence of William Penn, and
prefaced for the press by Thomas Ellwood, the Quaker. Fox
rejected all outward shows of religion, and believed in an
inward light and leading. He claimed to be divinely directed
as he wandered, Bible in hand, through the country, denouncing
church-worship, a paid ministry, religious "profession," and
advocating a spiritual affiliation with Christ as the only
true religion. He was imprisoned often and long for "brawling"