il himself more effectually of his knowledge in
medicine, and to earn a subsistence, however scanty, by the practice of
that art.

The Bankside in Southwark, and the Temple, or its vicinity, were
successively the places where he fixed his residence. To his
professional gains he soon added the emoluments arising from his
exertions as an author. In 1758, he took a share in the conduct of the
literary journal called the Monthly Review: and for the space of seven
or eight months, while the employment lasted, lodged in the house of Mr.
Griffiths, the proprietor of it. The next year he contributed several
papers to the Lady's Magazine, and to the Bee, a collection of essays,
and published his Inquiry into the Present State of Polite Learning, in
which he speaks of the Monthly Review in terms not very respectful.
There is, I doubt, in this little essay more display than reality of
erudition. It would not be easy to say where he had discovered "that
Dante was persecuted by the critics as long as he lived." The complaints
he made of the hard fate of authors, and his censure of odes and of
blank verse, were well calculated to conciliate the good will, and to
excite the sympathy of Johnson, with whom he soon became intimate.

Poverty and indiscretion were other claims, by which the benevolent
commiseration of Johnson could scarcely fail to be awakened; and his
acquaintance with Goldsmith had not subsisted long, when an occasion
presented itself for rescuing him from the consequences of those evils.
One day, calling on our poet, at his lodgings in Wine-office Court,
Fleet-street, he found him under arrest for debt, and engaged in violent
altercation with his landlady. Taking from him the Vicar of Wakefield,
then just written, Johnson proceeded with it to Newbery the Bookseller,
from whom he obtained sixty pounds for his friend; and Goldsmith's good
humour, and the complaisance of his hostess, returning with this
accession of wealth, they spent the remainder of the day together in
harmony. In this novel, like Fielding and Smollett, he exhibits a very
natural view of familiar life. Inferior to the first in the artful
management of his story, and to the latter in the broader traits of
comic character, and not equal to either in variety and fertility, he
is, nevertheless, to be preferred to both for his power of passing from
the ludicrous to the tender, and for his regard to moral decency. It was
not printed till some years after, in