He became affected with literary eczema, and wrote a tragedy which he read to Richardson and a few assembled friends.  They voted it “vile, demnition vile.”  But one man thought it wasn’t so bad as it might be, and this man found a market for some of the little doctor’s book reviews, but the tragedy was fed to the fireplace.  With the money for his book reviews the doctor bought goose quills and ink, and inspiration in bottles.

Grub Street dropped in, shabby, seedy, empty of pocket but full of hope, and little suppers were given in dingy coffeehouses where success to English letters was drunk.

Then we find Goldsmith making a bold stand for reform.  He hired out to write magazine articles by the day; going to work in the morning when the bell rang, an hour off at noon, and then at it again until nightfall.  Mr. Griffiths, publisher of the “Monthly Review,” was his employer.  And in order to hold his newly captured prize, the publisher boarded the pockmarked Irishman in his own house.  Mrs. Griffiths looked after him closely, spurring him on when he lagged, correcting his copy, striking out such portions as showed too much genius and inserting a word here and there in order to make a purely neutral decoction, which it seems is what magazine readers have always desired.

Occasionally these articles were duly fathered by great men, as this gave them the required specific gravity.

It is said that even in our day there are editors who employ convict labor in this way.  But I am sure that this is not so, for we live in an age of competition, and it is just as cheap to hire the great men to supply twaddle direct as it is to employ foreign paupers to turn it out with the extra expense of elderly women to revise.

After working in the Griffith literary mill for five months, Goldsmith scaled the barricade one dark night, leaving behind, pasted on the wall, a ballad not only to Mrs. Griffiths’ eyebrow, but to her wig as well.

Soon after this, when Goldsmith was thirty years of age, his first book, “Enquiry Into the Present State of Polite Learning in Europe,” was published.  It brought him a little money and tuppence worth of fame, so he took better lodgings, in Green Arbor Court, proposing to do great things.

Half a century after the death of Goldsmith, Irving visited Green Arbor Court: 

“At length we came upon Fleet Market, and traversing it, turned up a narrow street to the bottom of a long, steep flight of stone steps called Breakneck Stairs.  These led to Green Arbor Court, and down them Goldsmith many a time risked his neck.  When we entered the Court, I could not but smile to think in what out of the way corners Genius produces her bantlings.  The Court I found to be a small square surrounded by tall, miserable houses, with old garments and frippery fluttering from every window.  It appeared to be a region of washerwomen, and lines were stretched about the square on which clothes were dangling to dry.  Poor Goldsmith!  What a time he must have had of it, with his quiet disposition and nervous habits, penned up in this den of noise and vulgarity.”