his whole fortune; but he could not get it done for
distraction, nor dared he stir out of doors to offer it for sale. Mr.
Johnson, therefore," she continues, "sent away the bottle and went to
the bookseller, recommending the performance, and devising some
immediate relief; which, when he brought back to the writer, the latter
called the woman of the house directly to partake of punch and pass
their time in merriment. It was not," she concludes, "till ten years
after, I dare say, that something in Dr. Goldsmith's behaviour struck me
with an idea that he was the very man; and then Johnson confessed that
he was so."

"A more scrupulous and patient writer," says the admirable biographer of
the poet, Mr. John Forster, "corrects some inaccuracies of the lively
little lady, and professes to give the anecdote authentically from
Johnson's own exact narration. 'I received one morning,' Boswell
represents Johnson to have said, 'a message from poor Goldsmith, that he
was in great distress, and, as it was not in his power to come to me,
begging that I would come to him as soon as possible. I sent him a
guinea, and promised to come to him directly. I accordingly went as soon
as I was dressed, and found that his landlady 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. I put the cork into the bottle, desired he would be calm,
and 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 to me. I looked into it and saw its merits, told the landlady I
should soon return, and, having gone to a bookseller, sold it for L60. I
brought Goldsmith the money, and he discharged his rent, not without
rating his landlady in a high tone for having used him so ill.'"

[Illustration: GOUGH SQUARE (_see page 118_).]

The arrest is plainly connected with Newbery's reluctance to make
further advances, and of all Mrs. Fleming's accounts found among
Goldsmith's papers, the only one unsettled is that for the summer months
preceding the arrest. The manuscript of the novel seems by both
statements (in which the discrepancies are not so great but that Johnson
himself may be held accountable for them) to have been produced
reluctantly, as a last resource; and it is possible, as Mrs. Piozzi
intimates, that it was still regarded as unfinished. But if s