FullReads

Noll Goldsmith lies here, as famous for writing
As his namesake old Noll was for praying and fighting,
In friends he was rich, tho’ not loaded with Pelf;
He spoke well of them, and thought well of himself.]

The lines–there are twenty-eight of them–speak of Whitefoord as, among other things, a

Rare compound of oddity, frolic and fun!
Who relish’d a joke, and rejoic’d in a pun;[4]
Whose temper was generous, open, sincere;
A stranger to flatt’ry, a stranger to fear;
Who scatter’d around wit and humour at will,
Whose daily bons mots half a column would fill;
A Scotchman, from pride and from prejudice free,
A scholar, yet surely no pedant was he.

What pity, alas! that so lib’ral a mind
Should so long be to news-paper-essays confin’d!
Who perhaps to the summit of science could soar,
Yet content “if the table he set on a roar”;
Whose talents to fill any station were fit,
Yet happy if Woodfall confess’d him a wit.

[Note:

4: “Mr, W.”–says a note to the fifth edition–“is so notorious a punster, that Doctor Goldsmith used to say, it was impossible to keep him company, without being infected with the itch of punning.” Yet Johnson endured him, and apparently liked him, though he had the additional disqualification of being a North Briton.]

The “servile herd” of “tame imitators”–the “news-paper witlings” and “pert scribbling folks”–were further requested to visit his tomb–

To deck it, bring with you festoons of the vine,
And copious libations bestow on his shrine;
Then strew all around it (you can do no less)
Cross-readings, Ship-news, and Mistakes of the Press.

It is not recorded that Kearsly ever saw this in Goldsmith’s “own handwriting”; the sender’s name has never been made known; and–as above observed–it has been more than suspected that Whitefoord concocted it himself, or procured its concoction. As J.T. Smith points out in Nollekens and his Times, 1828, i, 337-8, Whitefoord was scarcely important enough to deserve a far longer epitaph than those bestowed on Burke and Reynolds; and Goldsmith, it may be added–as we know In the case of Beattie and Voltaire–was not in the habit of confusing small men with great. Moreover, the lines would (as intimated by the person who sent them to Kearsly) be an extraordinarily generous return for an epitaph “unfit for publication,” by which, it is stated, Goldsmith had been greatly disturbed. Prior had his misgivings, particularly in respect to the words attributed to Goldsmith on his death-bed; and Forster allows that to him the story of the so-called “Postscript” has “a somewhat doubtful look.” To which we unhesitatingly say–ditto.

Whitefoord, it seems, was in the habit of printing his “Cross Readings” on small single sheets, and circulating them among his friends. “Rainy-Day Smith” had a specimen of these. In one of Whitefoord’s letters he professes to claim that his jeux d’esprit contained more than met the eye. “I have always,” he wrote, “endeavour’d to make such changes [of Ministry] a matter of Laughter [rather] than of serious concern to the People, by turning them into horse Races, Ship News, &c;, and these Pieces have generally succeeded beyond my most sanguine Expectations, altho’ they were not season’d with private Scandal or personal Abuse, of which our good neighbours of South Britain are realy too fond.” In Debrett’s New Foundling Hospital for Wit, new edition, 1784, there are several of his productions, including a letter to Woodfall “On the Errors of the Press,” of which the following may serve as a sample: “I have known you turn a matter of hearsay, into a matter of heresy; Damon into a daemon; a delicious girl, into a delirious girl; the comic muse, into a comic mouse; a Jewish Rabbi, into a Jewish Rabbit; and when a correspondent, lamenting the corruption of the times, exclaimed ‘O Mores!’ you made him cry, ‘O Moses!'” And here is an extract from another paper which explains the aforegoing reference to “horse Races”: “1763–Spring Meeting… Mr. Wilkes’s horse, LIBERTY, rode by himself, took the lead at starting; but being pushed hard by Mr. Bishop’s black gelding, PRIVILEGE, fell down at the Devil’s Ditch, and was no where.” The “Ship News” is on the same pattern. ” August 25 [1765] We hear that his Majesty’s Ship Newcastle will soon have a new figure-head, the old one being almost worn out.”