day where you and I dined: I ask your pardon.' Goldsmith
answered placidly, 'It must be much from you, sir, that I take ill.'
And so at once the difference was over, and they were on as easy terms
as ever, and Goldsmith rattled away as usual." For the rest, Johnson
was the constant and doughty champion of Goldsmith as a man of
letters. He would suffer no one to doubt the power and versatility of
that genius which he had been amongst the first to recognise and
encourage. "Whether, indeed, we take him as a poet, as a comic writer,
or as an historian," he announced to an assemblage of distinguished
persons met together at dinner at Mr. Beauclerc's, "_he stands in the
first class_." And there was no one living who dared dispute the
verdict--at least in Johnson's hearing.

CHAPTER XIV.

The Deserted Village.

But it is time to return to the literary performances that gained for
this uncouth Irishman so great an amount of consideration from the
first men of his time. The engagement with Griffin about the _History
of Animated Nature_ was made at the beginning of 1769. The work was to
occupy eight volumes; and Dr. Goldsmith was to receive eight hundred
guineas for the complete copyright. Whether the undertaking was
originally a suggestion of Griffin's, or of Goldsmith's own, does not
appear. If it was the author's, it was probably only the first means
that occurred to him of getting another advance; and that
advance--L500 on account--he did actually get. But if it was the
suggestion of the publisher, Griffin must have been a bold man. A
writer whose acquaintance with animated nature was such as to allow
him to make the "insidious tiger" a denizen of the backwoods of
Canada,[2] was not a very safe authority. But perhaps Griffin had
consulted Johnson before making this bargain; and we know that
Johnson, though continually remarking on Goldsmith's extraordinary
ignorance of facts, was of opinion that the _History of Animated
Nature_ would be "as entertaining as a Persian tale." However,
Goldsmith--no doubt after he had spent the five hundred
guineas--tackled the work in earnest. When Boswell subsequently went
out to call on him at another rural retreat he had taken on the
Edgware Road, Boswell and Mickle, the translator of the _Lusiad_,
found Goldsmith from home; "but, having a curiosity to see his
apartment, we went in and found curious scraps of descriptions of
animals scrawled upon the wall with a black-lead pencil.