into English better than any of them.’  He afterwards studied physick at Edinburgh, and upon the Continent; and I have been informed, was enabled to pursue his travels on foot, partly by demanding at Universities to enter the lists as a disputant, by which, according to the custom of many of them, he was entitled to the premium of a crown, when luckily for him his challenge was not accepted; so that, as I once observed to Dr. Johnson, he disputed his passage through Europe.  He then came to England, and was employed successively in the capacities of an usher to an academy, a corrector of the press, a reviewer, and a writer for a news-paper.  He had sagacity enough to cultivate assiduously the acquaintance of Johnson, and his faculties were gradually enlarged by the contemplation of such a model.  To me and many others it appeared that he studiously copied the manner of Johnson, though, indeed, upon a smaller scale.

At this time I think he had published nothing with his name, though it was pretty generally known that one Dr. Goldsmith was the authour of An Enquiry into the present State of polite Learning in Europe, and of The Citizen of the World, a series of letters supposed to be written from London by a Chinese.  No man had the art of displaying with more advantage as a writer, whatever literary acquisitions he made.  ’Nihil quod tetigit non ornavit.’  His mind resembled a fertile, but thin soil.  There was a quick, but not a strong vegetation, of whatever chanced to be thrown upon it.  No deep root could be struck.  The oak of the forest did not grow there; but the elegant shrubbery and the fragrant parterre appeared in gay succession.  It has been generally circulated and believed that he was a mere fool in conversation; but, in truth, this has been greatly exaggerated.  He had, no doubt, a more than common share of that hurry of ideas which we often find in his countrymen, and which sometimes produces a laughable confusion in expressing them.  He was very much what the French call un etourdi, and from vanity and an eager desire of being conspicuous wherever he was, he frequently talked carelessly without knowledge of the subject, or even without thought.  His person was short, his countenance coarse and vulgar, his deportment that of a scholar aukwardly affecting the easy gentleman.  Those who were in any way distinguished, excited envy in him to so ridiculous an excess, that the instances of it are hardly credible.  When accompanying two beautiful young ladies* with their mother on a tour in France, he was seriously angry that more attention was paid to them than to him; and once at the exhibition of the Fantoccini in London, when those who sat next him observed with what dexterity a puppet was made to toss a pike, he could not bear that it should have such praise, and exclaimed with some warmth, ‘Pshaw!  I can do it better myself.’

     * These were the Misses Horneck, known otherwise as ’Little
     Comedy’ and ’The Jessamy Bride.’—­Ed.