stroke of luck, which was to make his fortune.  He was perpetually haunted by duns and bailiffs; yet he did not stint himself of luxuries so long as he obtained credit.  When appointed to the office of Commissioner of Stamps, with a moderate income, he set up a carriage with two and sometimes four horses; and he maintained two houses, one in London, the other at Hampton.  His means being altogether inadequate to this style of living, he soon became drowned in greater debt than before.  He was repeatedly impounded by lawyers, and locked up in sponging-houses.  Executions were put into his houses; his furniture was sold off; his wife wanted the commonest necessaries of life; and still the pleasure-loving Steele maintained his equanimity and good temper.  Something great was always on the point of turning up in his favour.  One of his grandest schemes was that for bringing fish alive to the London market; “and then,” said he to his wife, “you will be better provided for than any lady in England.”  But the good turn never came to Sir Richard; and he died out at elbows on his wife’s little property in Wales.

Goldsmith was another of the happy-go-lucky debtors.  He swam in debt.  He was no sooner out of it, than he was plunged into it again, deeper than before.  The first money he earned as a tutor—­it was all the money he had—­was spent in buying a horse.  His relations raised L50, and sent him to the Temple to study law, but he got no farther than Dublin, where he spent or gambled away all the money.  Then he went to Edinburgh to study medicine, and was forced to fly from it, having become surety for a friend.  He started on the tour of Europe without any money in his pocket—­with nothing but his flute; and he begged and played, until he came back to England, as poor as he went.  He himself used afterwards to say that there was hardly a kingdom in Europe in which he was not a debtor.[1]

[Footnote 1:  FORSTER—­Life of Goldsmith, ed. 1863, p. 41.]

Even when Goldsmith began to earn money freely, he was still in debt.  He gave away with one hand what he earned with the other.  He was dunned for his milk-score, arrested for rent, threatened by lawyers, but never learnt the wisdom of economy.  In the same month in which the second edition of his “Vicar of Wakefield” was published, his bill of fifteen guineas, drawn on Newbery, was returned dishonoured.  When he was figuring at Boswell’s dinner in Old Bond Street in the “ratteen suit lined with satin, and bloom-coloured silk breeches,” the clothes belonged to his tailor, and remained unpaid till his death.

Prosperity increased his difficulties rather than diminished them; the more money he had, the more thoughtless and lavish was his expenditure.  He could refuse no indulgence, either to himself or others.  He would borrow a guinea and give it to a beggar.  He would give the clothes off his back, and the blankets off his bed.  He could refuse nobody.  To meet his thoughtless expenditure, he raised money by promising to write books which he never began.  He was perpetually discounting to-morrow, and mortgaging an estate already overburthened.  Thus he died, as he had begun, poor, embarrassed, and in debt.  At his death he owed over two thousand pounds:  “Was ever poet,” says Johnson, “so trusted before?”