jealousies, which are but too common among men of letters, but
which a man of letters who is also a man of the world does his
best to conceal, Goldsmith avowed with the simplicity of a child.
When he was envious, instead of affecting indifference, instead
of damning with faint praise, instead of doing injuries slily and
in the dark, he told everybody that he was envious. "Do not,
pray, do not talk of Johnson in such terms," he said to Boswell;
"you harrow up my very soul." George Steevens and Cumberland
were men far too cunning to say such a thing. They would have
echoed the praises of the man whom they envied, and then have
sent to the newspapers anonymous libels upon him. Both what was
good and what was bad in Goldsmith's character was to his
associates a perfect security that he would never commit such
villany. He was neither ill natured enough, nor long headed
enough, to be guilty of any malicious act which required
contrivance and disguise.

Goldsmith has sometimes been represented as a man of genius,
cruelly treated by the world, and doomed to struggle with
difficulties which at last broke his heart. But no
representation can be more remote from the truth. He did,
indeed, go through much sharp misery before he had done anything
considerable in literature. But, after his name had appeared on
the title-page of the "Traveller," he had none but himself to
blame for his distresses. His average income, during the last
seven years of his life, certainly exceeded 400 pounds a year;
and 400 pounds a year ranked, among the incomes of that day, at
least as high as 800 pounds a year would rank at present. A
single man living in the Temple with 400 pounds a year might then
be called opulent. Not one in ten of the young gentlemen of good