FullReads

[Note:

2: Master of the Ceremonies.]

And so forth, fully justifying the writer’s motto from Cicero, De Finibus : ” Fortuitu Concursu hoc fieri, mirum est. ” It may seem that the mirthful element is not overpowering. But “gentle Dulness ever loves a joke”; and in 1766 this one, in modern parlance, “caught on.” “Cross readings” had, moreover, one popular advantage: like the Limericks of Edward Lear, they were easily imitated. What is not so intelligible is, that they seem to have fascinated many people who were assuredly not dull. Even Johnson condescended to commend the aptness of the pseudonym, and to speak of the performance as “ingenious and diverting.” Horace Walpole, writing to Montagu in December 1766, professes to have laughed over them till he cried. It was “the newest piece of humour,” he declared, “except the Bath Guide [Anstey’s], that he had seen of many years”; and Goldsmith–Goldsmith, who has been charged with want of sympathy for rival humourists–is reported by Northcote to have even gone so far as to say, in a transport of enthusiasm, that “it would have given him more pleasure to have been the author of them than of all the works he had ever published of his own,”–which, of course, must be classed with “Dr. Minor’s” unconsidered speeches.

” Bien heureux “–to use Voltaire’s phrase–is he who can laugh much at these things now. As Goldsmith himself would have agreed, the jests of one age are not the jests of another. But it is a little curious that, by one of those freaks of circumstance, or “fortuitous concourses,” there is to-day generally included among the very works of Goldsmith above referred to something which, in the opinion of many, is conjectured to have been really the production of the ingenious compiler of the “Cross Readings.” That compiler was one Caleb Whitefoord, a well-educated Scotch wine-merchant and picture-buyer, whose portrait figures in Wilkie’s “Letter of Introduction.” The friend of Benjamin Franklin, who had been his next-door neighbour at Craven Street, he became, in later years, something of a diplomatist, since in 1782-83 he was employed by the Shelburne administration in the Paris negotiation for the Treaty of Versailles. But at the date of the “Cross Readings” he was mainly what Burke, speaking contemptuously of his status as a plenipotentiary, styled a ” diseur de bons mots “; and he was for this reason included among those “most distinguished Wits of the Metropolis,” who, following Garrick’s lead in 1774, diverted themselves at the St. James’s Coffee-house by composing the epitaphs on Goldsmith which gave rise to the incomparable gallery entitled Retaliation. In the first four editions of that posthumous poem there is no mention of Whitefoord, who, either at, or soon after the first meeting above referred to, had written an epitaph on Goldsmith, two-thirds of which are declared to be “unfit for publication.”[3] But when the fourth edition of Retaliation had been printed, an epitaph on Whitefoord was forwarded to the publisher, George Kearsly, by “a friend of the late Doctor Goldsmith,” with an intimation that it was a transcript of an original in “the Doctor’s own handwriting.” “It is a striking proof of Doctor Goldsmith’s good-nature,” said the sender, glancing, we may suppose, at Whitefoord’s performance. “I saw this sheet of paper in the Doctor’s room, five or six days before he died; and, as I had got all the other Epitaphs, I asked him if I might take it. ” In truth you may, my Boy (replied he), for it will be of no use to me where I am going.”

[Note:

3: Hewins’s Whitefoord Papers, 1898, p. xxvii. ff., where the first
four lines of twelve are given. They run–