face and figure were ill suited to the boards even of the
humblest theatre. He pounded drugs and ran about London with
phials for charitable chemists. He joined a swarm of beggars,
which made its nest in Axe Yard. He was for a time usher of a
school, and felt the miseries and humiliations of this situation
so keenly that he thought it a promotion to be permitted to earn
his bread as a bookseller's hack; but he soon found the new yoke
more galling than the old one, and was glad to become an usher
again. He obtained a medical appointment in the service of the
East India Company; but the appointment was speedily revoked.
Why it was revoked we are not told. The subject was one on which
he never liked to talk. It is probable that he was incompetent
to perform the duties of the place. Then he presented himself at
Surgeon's Hall for examination, as mate to a naval hospital.
Even to so humble a post he was found unequal. By this time the
schoolmaster whom he had served for a morsel of food and the
third part of a bed was no more. Nothing remained but to return
to the lowest drudgery of literature. Goldsmith took a garret in
a miserable court, to which he had to climb from the brink of
Fleet Ditch by a dizzy ladder of flagstones called Breakneck
Steps. The court and the ascent have long disappeared; but old
Londoners will remember both. (A gentleman, who states that he
has known the neighbourhood for thirty years, corrects this
account, and informs the present publisher that the Breakneck
Steps, thirty-two in number, divided into two flights, are still
in existence, and that, according to tradition, Goldsmith's house
was not on the steps, but was the first house at the head of the
court, on the left hand, going from the Old Bailey. See "Notes
and Queries" (2d. S. ix. 280).) Here, at thirty, the unlucky
adventurer sat down to toil like a galley slave.