the
circumstances. This was Friday, the 25th. He told the doctor then his
mind was not at ease, and he died on Monday, April 4th, in his
forty-fifth year. His debts amounted to over L2,000. "Was ever poet so
trusted before?" writes Johnson to Boswell. The staircase of Brick Court
was filled with poor outcasts, to whom Goldsmith had been kind and
charitable. His coffin was opened by Miss Horneck, that a lock might be
cut from his hair. Burke and Reynolds superintended the funeral,
Reynolds' nephew (Palmer, afterwards Dean of Cashel) being chief
mourner. Hugh Kelly, who had so often lampooned the poet, was present.
At five o'clock on Saturday, the 9th of April, Goldsmith was buried in
the Temple churchyard. In 1837, a slab of white marble, to the kindly
poet's memory, was placed in the Temple Church, and afterwards
transferred to a recess of the vestry chamber. Of the poet, Mr. Forster
says, "no memorial indicates the grave to the pilgrim or the stranger,
nor is it possible any longer to identify the spot which received all
that was mortal of the delightful writer." The present site is entirely
conjectural; but it appears from the following note, communicated to us
by T.C. Noble, the well-known City antiquary, that the real site was
remembered as late as 1830. Mr. Noble says:--

"In 1842, after some consideration, the benchers of the Temple deciding
that no more burials should take place in the churchyard, resolved to
pave it over. For about fifteen years the burial-place of Dr. Goldsmith
continued in obscurity; for while some would have it that the interment
took place to the east of the choir, others clung to an opinion, handed
down by Mr. Broome, the gardener, who stated that when he commenced his
duties, about 1830, a Mr. Collett, sexton, a very old man, and a
penurious one, too, employed him to prune an elder-tree which, he
stated, he venerated, because it marked the site of Goldsmith's grave.
The stone which has been placed in the yard, 'to mark the spot' where
the poet was buried, is not the site of this tree. The tomb was erected
in 1860, but the exact position of the grave has never been discovered."
The engraving on page 169 shows the spot as it appeared in the autumn of
that year. The old houses at the back were pulled down soon after.

Mr. Forster, alluding to Goldsmith's love for the rooks, the former
denizens of the Temple Gardens, says: "He saw the rookery (in the winter
deserted, or guarded only by some f