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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 December 2024
Some days into the trip with the Hornecks, this letter suggests the expedition to France was not as harmonious as anticipated. In a later letter to their mutual friend Bennet Langton, Johnson confirms that the trip had not gone well: ‘Dr Goldsmith has been at Paris with the Hornecks not very delightfully to either side.’ In addition to financial pressures, the presence of Joseph Hickey, lawyer to Burke and Reynolds and who had much more up-to-date knowledge of Paris than he, appears to have irked Goldsmith, cast somewhat into the shadows. As later correspondence shows (see Letters 35 and 64), Goldsmith and the Hornecks repaired their friendship. This letter, with its litany of complaints about the diurnal aggravations of Continental travel, provides a humorous counterpoint to the cosmopolitan Goldsmith evoked by his poem The Traveller. The overarching sense of the letter is of a man who is missing the metropolitan whirl of London and its literary homosociality.
The copy-text is the manuscript in the Free Library of Philadelphia. It was first published by Prior in 1837. It is addressed: ‘To | Sir Joshua Reynolds | Leicester Fields | London’. The postmark is incomplete at the edge of the sheet but most likely records 4 August.
Paris July 29th
My Dear Friend.
I began a long letter to you from Lisle giving a description of all that we had done and seen but finding it very dull and knowing that you would shew it again I threw it aside and it was lost. You see by the top of this letter that we are at Paris, and (as I have often heard you say) we have brought our own amusement with us for the Ladies do not seem to be very fond of what we have yet seen. With regard to myself I find that travelling at twenty and at forty are very different things, I set out with all my confirmd habits about me and can find nothing on the continent so good as when I formerly left it. One of our chief amusements here is scolding at every thing we meet with and praising every thing and every person we left at home. You may judge therefore whether your name is not frequently bandied at table among us. To tell you the truth I never thought I could regret your absence so much as our various mortifications on the road have often taught me to do.
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