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[After the Fourth Edition of Doctor Goldsmith's Retaliation was printed, the Publisher received a supplementary Epitaph on the Wit and Punster Caleb Whitefoord. Though it is found appended to the later issues of the Poem, it has been suspected that Whitefoord wrote it himself. It may be that the following, which has recently come to light, is another forgery.]

Here Johnson is laid. Have a care how you walk;
If he stir in his sleep, in his sleep he will talk.
Ye gods! how he talk'd! What a torrent of sound,
His hearers invaded, encompass'd and—drown'd!
What a banquet of memory, fact, illustration,
In that innings-for-one that he call'd conversation!
Can't you hear his sonorous “Why no, Sir!” and “Stay, Sir!
Your premiss is wrong,” or “You don't see your way, Sir!”
How he silenc'd a prig, or a slip-shod romancer!
How he pounc'd on a fool with a knock-me-down answer!

But peace to his slumbers! Tho' rough in the rind,
The heart of the giant was gentle and kind:

314

What signifies now, if in bouts with a friend,
When his pistol miss'd fire, he would use the butt-end?

“He [Johnson] had recourse to the device which Goldsmith imputed to him in the witty words of one of Cibber's comedies: ‘There is no arguing with Johnson; for when his pistol misses fire, he knocks you down with the butt end of it.’” (Hill's Boswell, 1887, ii. 100.)

If he trampled your flow'rs, like a bull in a garden,
What matter for that? he was sure to ask pardon;
And you felt on the whole, tho' he'd toss'd you and gor'd you,
It was something, at least, that he had not ignor'd you.
Yes! the outside was rugged. But test him within,
You found he had nought of the bear but the skin;

“Let me impress upon my readers a just and happy saying of my friend Goldsmith, who knew him [Johnson] well: ‘Johnson, to be sure, has a roughness in his manner; but no man alive has a more tender heart. He has nothing of the bear but his skin.’” (Hill's Boswell, 1887, ii. 66.)

And for bottom and base to his anfractuosity,
A fund of fine feeling, good taste, generosity.
He was true to his conscience, his King, and his duty;
And he hated the Whigs, and he soften'd to Beauty.

Turn now to his Writings. I grant, in his tales,
That he made little fishes talk vastly like whales;

“If you were to make little fishes talk, they would talk like Whales.” (Goldsmith to Johnson, Hill's Boswell, 1887, ii. 231.)

I grant that his language was rather emphatic,
Nay, even—to put the thing plainly—dogmatic;
But read him for Style,—and dismiss from your thoughts,
The crowd of compilers who copied his faults,—

These, or like rhymes, are to be found in Edwin and Angelina, and—for the matter of that—in Retaliation itself:—

“Say, where has our poet this malady caught?
Or, wherefore his characters thus without fault?”

But the practice is not confined to Goldsmith: it is also followed by Pope and Prior.

Say, where is there English so full and so clear,
So weighty, so dignified, manly, sincere?
So strong in expression, conviction, persuasion?
So prompt to take colour from place and occasion?
So widely remov'd from the doubtful, the tentative;
So truly—and in the best sense—argumentative?

315

You may talk of your Burkes and your Gibbons so clever,
But I hark back to him with a “Johnson for ever!”
And I feel as I muse on his ponderous figure,
Tho' he's great in this age, in the next he'll grow bigger;
And still while[OMITTED]

[Cætera Desunt.]