a married man, was anxious,
as in the old days, to treat him at an apple-stall. Then suddenly he
said:

"Sam, have you seen my picture by Sir Joshua Reynolds? Have you seen
it, Sam? Have you got an engraving?"

Sam had not yet procured the picture.

"Sam," said Goldsmith, "if your picture had been published, I should
not have waited an hour without having it."

Despite his pranks with his pupils, this time was no happy period. The
unpleasantness of the office and the severities of the scorned and
profitless labours weighed sorely on him. Every collection of
schoolboys has its share of ineffaceable snobs. These were a trial to
the teacher. Amid his practical jokes with William the footboy, and
one merry-maker and another, there is still an underlying earnestness
in all and a reverence for the pure sentiment of the heart. At this
time, when asked whom he held the best commentator on the Scriptures,
Goldsmith replied very simply, "Common Sense."

The principal of the school, Dr. Milner, was one of the most sincere
of Goldsmith's friends. At the house of this good man, Griffiths, the
publisher, meeting Goldsmith, detected his abilities at once, and
found him the first opening for his literary labours. He gave him mere
hack-work on the _Monthly Review_. This was the Whig journal of the
day, and opposed later by its Tory rival, the _Critical Review_,
edited by Smollet, also physician, novelist, and historian. Leaving
Peckham, Goldsmith now lived for a while over the shop of his employer
in Paternoster Row, gaining shelter of a sort and board and lodging.

Poor as may have been the fare, and mean as must have been the
livelihood under the roof of Mr. and Mrs. Griffiths, Oliver Goldsmith,
escaping from these conditions of life, entered others that were for a
time, at all events, far worse. One cannot tell what he did, or where
he went, or how he lived. Near Salisbury Square some squalid garret
sheltered him. He tried to shun the common gaze and hide his very
whereabouts. He turned to translating, chance criticisms, and any
drudgery that came his way, and all to little purpose. He lived in
wretchedness and obscurity, bearing the weight of an increasing
poverty, until at last the very hope of bare subsistence perished.

On one dark and misty day, as Goldsmith, in his tattered and
threadbare clothes, sat pensive and dejected in his dingy, miserable
garret, rich in fancies and very poor in food, a merry rap upon the
door