ing a letter of defence
addressed to the public. "He has indeed done it very well," said
Johnson to Boswell, "but it is a foolish thing well done." And further
he remarked, "Why, sir, I believe it is the first time he has _beat_;
he may have _been beaten_ before. This, sir, is a new plume to him."

CHAPTER XVII.

INCREASING DIFFICULTIES.--THE END.

The pecuniary success of _She Stoops to Conquer_ did but little to
relieve Goldsmith from those financial embarrassments which were now
weighing heavily on his mind. And now he had less of the old high
spirits that had enabled him to laugh off the cares of debt. His
health became disordered; an old disease renewed its attacks, and was
grown more violent because of his long-continued sedentary habits.
Indeed, from this point to the day of his death--not a long interval,
either--we find little but a record of successive endeavours, some of
them wild and hopeless enough, to obtain money anyhow. Of course he
went to the Club, as usual; and gave dinner-parties; and had a laugh
or a song ready for the occasion. It is possible, also, to trace a
certain growth of confidence in himself, no doubt the result of the
repeated proofs of his genius he had put before his friends. It was
something more than mere personal intimacy that justified the rebuke
he administered to Reynolds, when the latter painted an allegorical
picture representing the triumph of Beattie and Truth over Voltaire
and Scepticism. "It very ill becomes a man of your eminence and
character," he said, "to debase so high a genius as Voltaire before so
mean a writer as Beattie. Beattie and his book will be forgotten in
ten years, while Voltaire's fame will last for ever. Take care it does
not perpetuate this picture, to the shame of such a man as you." He
was aware, too, of the position he had won for himself in English
literature. He knew that people in after-days would ask about him; and
it was with no sort of unwarrantable vainglory that he gave Percy
certain materials for a biography which he wished him to undertake.
Hence the _Percy Memoir_.

He was only forty-five when he made this request; and he had not
suffered much from illness during his life; so that there was
apparently no grounds for imagining that the end was near. But at this
time Goldsmith began to suffer severe fits of depression; and he grew
irritable and capricious of temper--no doubt another result of failing
health. He was embroiled in dis