his influence and creates his charm. He knew and felt his
weakness. When Johnson narrated his adventures in a close and friendly
gossip with the King, Goldsmith said:

"Well, you acquitted yourself in this conversation better than I
should have done, for I should have bowed and stammered through the
whole of it."

Goldsmith's face must have shone in moments of animation, its very
ugliness gaining a beauty all its own, more lovable for that
transformation one smile creates. He may have had an uncouth
appearance and an awkward bearing. The charm and gentleness of such a
spirit as his must have outweighed accidents of form. Now we associate
an inevitable purity and tenderness with him and with all he ever did.
If he had a poor outward mien and fashion, men must have thought
nothing of this compared to the inward grace of the heart and
love-illumined soul of the man.

Alone in London, he had come to his fierce fight: not for fame, but
for bread. Through all his squalid wanderings in the hard times, and
all his sordid trials, he sustained his cheerfulness, and in a
selfless supremacy ever strove to bestow on other lives the faith and
courage his own bright heart never wholly lost. How he lived in these
early days in London no one knows, and the tale of want, care, and
humiliation incident to gnawing peril and privation made a story too
agonising for him, open as he was, ever to fully reveal. He said one
day very quietly: "When I lived among the beggars in Axe Lane."

He may have laughed as he said the words. He must have shuddered. The
laugh was a selfless sacrifice. The shudder was real and to the very
last too true, for painful memory was vivid. We cannot tell whether,
like Shakespeare, he held the reins of horses, standing outside
taverns and theatres; or whether he carried bags for pence, ran
errands, gambled for his bread, or begged for shelter. Here was a
sweet, weak, pure, and gentle, sympathetic lad, only a boy in heart
and strength, and not even a child in that hardness life demands,
stepping he knew not whither, meeting the world in an actual and
visible solitude, and a loneliness of soul beyond the force of words
to tell. There are those who, having passed their twentieth year, are
already men of mark and power. Not such a one was poor Noll. Through
ceaseless dependence and uncertainty in both his purpose and his
position in life, he tardily gained that dignity and validity that
attends the realisation of ma