had
arrested him for his rent, at which he was in a violent passion. I
perceived that he had already changed my guinea and had got a bottle
of Madeira and a glass before him."

The coming passage is beautifully characteristic:

"I put the cork into the bottle," said Johnson, and then goes on with
the narrative.

"I desired he would be calm," he proceeded, "and I began to talk to
him of the means by which he might be extricated. He then told me that
he had a novel ready for the press, which he produced. I looked into
it and saw its merits, told the landlady I should soon return, and
having gone to a bookseller, sold it for sixty pounds. I brought
Goldsmith the money, and he discharged his rent, not without rating
his landlady in high tone for having used him so ill."

Amid all his distresses, Goldsmith had been quietly and diligently
perfecting his beautiful novel, _The Vicar of Wakefield_.
Simultaneously he had been engaged upon _The Traveller_. At that very
instant it lay completed in his desk.

The pure delights of life he knew faithfully, and lovingly bestowed.
This man possessed not merely in an unusual, but in an absolutely
unique, degree the grace of sympathetic affectionateness. He fulfilled
the Pauline mandate, "Be kindly affectionate one to another." In
Goldsmith this was nothing less than very genius. His graceful letters
to his Irish friends, and, indeed, to all to whom he ever wrote,
evince the kindest and most caressing feelings imaginable. They are
about the home, the children, the pet animals, and trivial ties, and
pleasing, pleading memories and hopes. As you read, Divinity hedges
about the lowly hearths that he pictured so lovingly. It is a curious
power. When Goldsmith was at Bath, from the way that Johnson mentions
him in his letters to Langton we note how much the little doctor was
missed by his friend when he left town. It was a bright moment when
Goldsmith moved into his chambers in the Temple. Here he lived his
last years, and his literary life will always be associated more with
this place than with any other. In these rooms, amongst his friends
might have been seen old General Oglethorpe, that courageous veteran
Paoli, and the young and dauntless Grattan. Here the _Roman History_
was written. This work was greatly applauded by the critics. Its
production made Johnson burst forth into that splendour of laudation
in which he said that whatever Goldsmith did, he did better than all
others, a