oswell,
with regard to the sixty pounds, "a sufficient price too, when it was
sold; for then the fame of Goldsmith had not been elevated, as it
afterwards was, by his _Traveller_; and the bookseller had such faint
hopes of profit by his bargain, that he kept the manuscript by him a
long time, and did not publish it till after the _Traveller_ had
appeared. Then, to be sure, it was accidentally worth more money."

CHAPTER IX.

THE TRAVELLER.

This poem of the _Traveller_, the fruit of much secret labour and the
consummation of the hopes of many years, was lying completed in
Goldsmith's desk when the incident of the arrest occurred; and the
elder Newbery had undertaken to publish it. Then, as at other times,
Johnson lent this wayward child of genius a friendly hand. He read
over the proof-sheets for Goldsmith; was so kind as to put in a line
here or there where he thought fit; and prepared a notice of the poem
for the _Critical Review_. The time for the appearance of this new
claimant for poetical honours was propitious. "There was perhaps no
point in the century," says Professor Masson, "when the British Muse,
such as she had come to be, was doing less, or had so nearly ceased to
do anything, or to have any good opinion of herself, as precisely
about the year 1764. Young was dying; Gray was recluse and indolent;
Johnson had long given over his metrical experimentations on any
except the most inconsiderable scale; Akenside, Armstrong, Smollett,
and others less known, had pretty well revealed the amount of their
worth in poetry; and Churchill, after his ferocious blaze of what was
really rage and declamation in metre, though conventionally it was
called poetry, was prematurely defunct. Into this lull came
Goldsmith's short but carefully finished poem." "There has not been so
fine a poem since Pope's time," remarked Johnson to Boswell, on the
very first evening after the return of young Auchinleck to London. It
would have been no matter for surprise had Goldsmith dedicated this
first work that he published under his own name to Johnson, who had
for so long been his constant friend and adviser; and such a
dedication would have carried weight in certain quarters. But there
was a finer touch in Goldsmith's thought of inscribing the book to his
brother Henry; and no doubt the public were surprised and pleased to
find a poor devil of an author dedicating a work to an Irish parson
with L40 a year, from whom he could no