delicacy. Mrs. Siddons, the celebrated actress, once paid him a visit. When she entered the room there happened to be no chair ready for her, which observing, he said with a smile: "Madam, you who so often occasion a want of seats to other people, will the more easily excuse the want of one yourself." But he also knew well how to repel by brusqueness. To a lady asking his advice about her manuscript, saying, "I have other irons in the fire, but what would you do with this article?" he replied, with more severity than politeness, "Put it with your other irons." I never heard of but one lady who had the courage to retort when thus answered. When in Scotland, eating their national dish of hodgepodge, the lady at whose table he was sitting inquired if it was good. "Good for hogs, madam." "Then, pray," said she, "let me help YOU to some more!"

One of his rough repartees has been put in rhyme by Peter Pindar:

"In Lincolnshire, a lady showed our friend

A grotto, that she wished him to commend;
Quoth she, 'How cool in summer this abode !'

'Yes, madam' (answered Johnson), 'for a toad.'"

He lived for several years in the family of Mr. Thrale, a wealthy brewer, who was also in the House of Commons, a man of uncommon kindness and good sense. His death was a terrible affliction to Johnson, who was now very solitary. Mrs. Thrale was a pretty, chatty woman, cultivated, and a good talker, whose flighty, volatile nature had been restrained and controlled by her dignified and noble husband. But after his death all was changed. She had petted and praised "the Doctor," and had been proud of him as an inmate of her house, but now she treated him so coolly that he soon left, not without a blessing on the house and her who had caused his departure. When she disgraced herself å few years after by marrying an Italian

music-teacher, Piozzi, and was preparing to leave England to escape the scorn and censure of her old friends, Johnson sent after her a letter, which shows his noble nature:

"DEAR MADAM: What you have done, however I may lament it, I have no pretence to resent, as it has not been injurious to me. I therefore breathe out one sigh more of tenderness, perhaps useless, but at least sincere.

"I wish that God may grant you every blessing, that you may be happy in this world for its short continuance, and eternally happy in a better state; and whatever I can contribute to your happiness I am very ready to repay for that kindness which soothed twenty years of a life radically wretched. Do not think slightly of the advice which I now presume to offer. Prevail upon Mr. Piozzi to settle in England; you may live here with more dignity than in Italy, and with more security; your rank will be higher, and your fortune more under your own eye. I desire not to detail all my reasons, but every argument of prudence and interest is for England, and only some phantoms of imagination seduce you to Italy. I am afraid, however, that my counsel is vain, yet I have eased my heart by doing it.

"When Queen Mary took the resolution of sheltering herself in England, the Archbishop of St. Andrews, attempting to dissuade her, attended on her journey, and, when they came to the irremeable stream that separated the two kingdoms, walked by her side into the water, in the middle of which he seized her bridle, and, with earnestness proportioned to her danger and his own affection, pressed her to return. The queen went forward. If the parallel reaches thus far, may it go no farther! The tears stand in my eyes."

A few years before his death he wrote "The Lives of the Poets," perhaps his best work, certainly the best introduction we have to the poets, from Cowley to Gray. Every

sketch is tinged with his own prejudices, yet they are invaluable to the lover of literature.

Johnson's last days were full of sadness and suffering. He longed for life, not because he enjoyed it, but because he had such a peculiar horror of death. He felt that no one could or should be sure of salvation and future happiness, and dreaded, like a little child, to go out alone into the dark. It is pleasant to know that he died very easily, in apparent peace. His last words were, "God bless you!" to a young lady who came in at the last to inquire for him. He was laid in Westminster Abbey, on a December day in 1784, among those eminent men of whom he had been the historian.

"No need of Latin or of Greek to trace

Our Johnson's memory, or inscribe his grave;
His native language claims this mournful space,
To pay the immortality he gave."

"And e'en his failings leaned to virtue's side."

WE come next to GOLDSMITH, the blundering, artless, good-natured, whimsical genius, whom every one laughs at and every one loves.

His character, an odd compound of the good and the bad, the ridiculous and the sublime, was his only inheritance from his good, simple-hearted, generous, impulsive, improvident father, who, marrying very young, with little to live on but faith and hope, struggled for a dozen years.

with poverty and real want, as curate of the hamlet of Pallas, Longford County, in Ireland.

There, in an old, half-rustic mansion, looking down on the river Inny, Oliver Goldsmith first saw the light, on the 10th of November, 1728, the fifth child in a family of eight. Both father and child should be rather pitied than blamed for their unworldliness and incompetency, for it was just like the race. They were always, according to their own account, a strange family; their hearts were in the right place, but their heads seemed to be doing any thing but what they ought—of no cleverness in the ways of the world.

Two years after Oliver's birth, better times came to the honest curate, who, by the death of his wife's uncle, succeeded to a living, and moved from the old homestead at Pallas to the rectory of Lissoy, in the county of Westmeath-a comfortable place, with seventy acres of land, just outside the pretty little village. Here the good man kept open house, "with a crowd in the kitchen and a crowd round the parlor-table; profusion, confusion, kindness, and poverty.”

We have two pictures of his father from Goldsmith's own pen. "My father, the younger son of a good family, was possessed of a small living in a church. His education was above his fortune, and his generosity greater than his education. Poor as he was he had his flatterers, poorer than himself; for every dinner he gave them they returned him an equivalent in praise; and that was all he wanted. The same ambition that actuates a monarch at the head of his army, influenced my father at the head of his table. He told the story of the ivy-tree, and that was laughed at; he repeated the jest of the two scholars. with one pair of breeches, and the company laughed at that; but the story of Taffy in the sedan-chair was sure to set the table in a roar. Thus his pleasure increased in