He chanced in this way to meet Samuel Richardson, who, because
he wrote the first English romance, has earned the title of Father of
Lies. In order to get a very necessary loaf of bread, Doctor Goldsmith
asked Richardson to let him read proof. So Richardson gave him
employment, and in correcting proof the discovery was made that the Irish
doctor could turn a sentence, too.

He became affected with literary eczema, and wrote a tragedy which he
read to Richardson and a few assembled friends. They voted it "vile,
demnition vile." But one man thought it wasn't so bad as it might be, and
this man found a market for some of the little doctor's book reviews, but
the tragedy was fed to the fireplace. With the money for his book reviews
the doctor bought goose quills and ink, and inspiration in bottles.

Grub Street dropped in, shabby, seedy, empty of pocket but full of hope,
and little suppers were given in dingy coffeehouses where success to
English letters was drunk.

Then we find Goldsmith making a bold stand for reform. He hired out to
write magazine articles by the day; going to work in the morning when the
bell rang, an hour off at noon, and then at it again until nightfall. Mr.
Griffiths, publisher of the "Monthly Review," was his employer. And in
order to hold his newly captured prize, the publisher boarded the
pockmarked Irishman in his own house. Mrs. Griffiths looked after him
closely, spurring him on when he lagged, correcting his copy, striking
out such portions as showed too much genius and inserting a word here and
there in order to make a purely neutral decoction, which it seems is what
magazine readers have always desired.

Occasionally these articles were duly fathered by great men, as this gave
them the required specific gravity.

It is said that even in our day there are editors who employ convict
labor in this way. But I am sure that this is not so, for we live in an
age of competition, and it is just as cheap to hire the great men to
supply twaddle direct as it is to employ foreign paupers to turn it out
with the extra expense of elderly women to revise.

After working in the Griffith literary mill for five months, Goldsmith
scaled the barricade one dark night, leaving behind, pasted on the wall,
a ballad not only to Mrs. Griffiths' eyebrow, but to her wig as well.

Soon after this, when Goldsmith was thirty years of age, his first book,
"Enquiry Into the Present State of Polite Learning in Europe,"