t, children
play and fight their mimic battles thereon, and when last we saw it a
group of workmen employed near by were discussing their noontide bread and
cheese and beer in various lounging attitudes upon it. The slab is sadly
chipped, yet it is not nearly so old as the years of the century. Surely
the man whose death it commemorates departed this life

Unwept, unhonored, and unsung.

Not so. Let us scrape aside the accumulated dirt, and trace with
finger-tip the fast-vanishing inscription. It says, "Here lies Oliver
Goldsmith." This, then, is the way the world reveres its great ones. Of
what avail a monument to the poet in Westminster Abbey, dignified by the
celebrated epitaph of Dr. Johnson, when his tomb is thus relegated to the
domain of neglect and oblivion? Even the site at present indicated is
"entirely conjectural:" the precise position of the poet's grave has been
long forgotten.

Goldsmith Buildings, of course, take their name from the erratic poet and
playwright. In one of them he lived and died, just above the rooms
tenanted by the learned Blackstone, who, at that time engaged in penning
the fourth volume of his "Commentaries," was often grievously annoyed by
the dancing- and drinking-parties, the games of blind-man's-buff, and the
noisy singing of "poor Noll" and his boon companions. Goldsmith took up
residence in the Temple in the spring of the year 1764, in a very shabby
set of rooms, which he shared with Jeffs, the butler of the society. Here
Dr. Johnson visited him, says Mr. Forster, "and on prying and peering
about in them after his short-sighted fashion, flattening his face against
every object be looked at, Goldsmith's uneasy sense of their deficiencies
broke out. 'I shall soon be in better chambers, sir, than these,' he said.
'Nay, sir,' answered Johnson, 'never mind that: _nil te quaesiveris
extra_.'"

In 1765, his purse having become somewhat more plethoric, he removed to
Garden Court, then, as now, one of the choice spots in the Temple Area.
Here he sported a man-servant, and ran head over ears in debt to his
trades-people. Three years later, in 1768, we find the happy-go-lucky
spendthrift squandering four hundred of the five hundred pounds which the
partial success of "The Good-Natured Man" netted him in the purchase of a
set of chambers in No. 2 Brick Court, much to the sorrow of the studious
Blackstone, whose fellow-tenant he thus became. The nocturnal revelries of
Goldy and his i