Goldsmith and Percy

Abstract

Thomas Percy’s¹ friendship for Oliver Goldsmith was of the kind that makes each meeting an event, therefore we are able to follow its course by means of his private notes. They first met on Wednesday, February 21, 1759, as the guests of Dr Grainger at the Temple Exchange Coffee House, which was used for purposes of social intercourse by many who, like Goldsmith, ‘lived in a garret writing for bread, and expecting to be dunned for a milk score’. ‘The gates of the Muses,’ like the Kingdom of Heaven, are hard but not impossible for the rich to enter into, though ‘nothing is more apt to introduce a man to them than poverty’. At the coffee house, those who, like Goldsmith, also practised the art of medicine, could be consulted by their patients, and letters might be received and written by such as were unwilling to reveal their humble dwellings. Percy met Goldsmith again at Dodsley’s² on February 26, and on Saturday, March 3, before returning to Easton Maudit, he sat all the morning with him at his rooms in Green Arbour Court, near the Old Bailey. He found him miserably lodged in a wretched, dirty room, revising the proofs of his Enquiry into Polite Learning in Europe, which was at that time being printed for Dodsley and was published on April 3. He possessed but one chair, which he offered to his visitor, and sat himself in the window.

Percy: Prelate and Poet (London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1908) pp. 140–50, 152–3, 157–60. Editor’s title.