escribed
for himself. The remedy aggravated the malady. The sick man was induced
to call in real physicians; and they at one time imagined that they had
cured the disease. Still his weakness and restlessness continued. He
could get no sleep. He could take no food. "You are worse," said one
of his medical attendants, "than you should be from the degree of fever
which you have. Is your mind at ease?" "No, it is not," were the last
recorded words of Oliver Goldsmith. He died on the third of April 1774,
in his forty-sixth year. He was laid in the churchyard of the Temple;
but the spot was not marked by any inscription, and is now forgotten.
The coffin was followed by Burke and Reynolds. Both these great men were
sincere mourners. Burke, when he heard of Goldsmith's death, had burst
into a flood of tears. Reynolds had been so much moved by the news that
he had flung aside his brush and palette for the day.

A short time after Goldsmith's death, a little poem appeared, which
will, as long as our language lasts, associate the names of his two
illustrious friends with his own. It has already been mentioned that he
sometimes felt keenly the sarcasm which his wild blundering talk brought
upon him. He was, not long before his last illness, provoked into
retaliating. He wisely betook himself to his pen; and at that weapon he
proved himself a match for all his assailants together. Within a
small compass he drew with a singularly easy and vigorous pencil the
characters of nine or ten of his intimate associates. Though this little
work did not receive his last touches, it must always be regarded as a
masterpiece. It is impossible, however, not to wish that four or five
likenesses which have no interest for posterity were wanting to that
noble gallery; and that their places were supplied by sketches of
Johnson and Gibbon, as happy and vivid as the sketches of Burke and
Garrick.

Some of Goldsmith's friends and admirers honoured him with a cenotaph
in Westminster Abbey. Nollekens was the sculptor; and Johnson wrote the
inscription. It is much to be lamented that Johnson did not leave to
posterity a more durable and a more valuable memorial of his friend. A
life of Goldsmith would have been an inestimable addition to the Lives
of the Poets. No man appreciated Goldsmith's writings more justly than
Johnson; no man was better acquainted with Goldsmith's character and
habits; and no man was more competent to delineate with truth and spirit