¹ The Works of Oliver Goldsmith (London, 1884–86), iv, 50, 55, 132 (hereafter cited as Works). The advertisement and the reference on p. 55 appeared only in the second edition; that on p. 132 only in the first.

² All quotations in this article from Scott's letters are by courtesy of the Trustees of the British Museum. There are thirty-four volumes in Eg. MSS. 3725–58, but the last three are not letter-books: 3756 is a fragmentary diary, with very brief references to events from the 1730's to the 1760's; 3757 is a manuscript catalogue of Scott's library, extending only to 1757; 3758 is not properly a part of the Scott papers: it is the account book, for 1825–41, of William John Home Mylne.

Before the collection was acquired by the B. M., it had been rescued from a bonfire which destroyed several of the volumes. I should like to thank Miss Jean M. H. Mylne, from whom the B. M. acquired the manuscripts, for her kindness in giving me this information about them. I should also like to acknowledge my indebtedness to the Bath Hospital Management Committee for allowing me to examine the minutes of the Hospital Committee. I am especially grateful, for their courtesy and help, to Mr. Peter Pagan, Director of the Victoria Art Gallery and Municipal Libraries, Bath; and to Miss Carrol Jenkins, of his staff.

³ Joseph Foster, Alumni Oxonienses, 1715–1886 (Oxford & London, 1888). For Scott's marriage, see Eg. 3756, f. 19. A brief account of Scott's birth, education, and marriage is given by Philip Morant, in The History and Antiquities of Essex (1768), i, 169. The B. M. catalogue lists A Catalogue of a … Collection of Paintings belonging to Scott, but the item is missing, presumably destroyed.

⁴ The Record of the Royal Society of London (London, 1901). Scott referred to his portrait in Eg. 3731, f. 101. I wish to thank Dr. John David Mabbott, President of St. John's College, Oxford, for allowing me to examine the portrait.

⁵ Scott's name appears on the title page of Select Remains (as the work's “publisher”), but he has not been recognized as the editor of the Britannia, his role in the publication of which is made clear in Eg. 3744, ff. 146, 160; 3745, f. 89; 3746, f. 18. In a genealogical account of his family, Scott named Derham as his cousin (Eg. 3756, f. 27). A List of the Society of Antiquaries of London for 1775 (the earliest I have been able to see) records Scott as a Fellow; for the date of his election, see Eg. 3756, f. 44.

⁶ Eg. 3746, ff. 16–17. This letter is not in Thomas W. Copeland's edition of Burke's correspondence. Scott's commission was sent him on 2 June 1770 by the Earl of Rochford, Lord Lieutenant of the County (Eg. 3746, ff. 35–36).

⁷ Eg. 3756, ff. 24–25; Bath General Hospital Committee-Book No. 4, pp. 76, 136.

⁸ In 1758, for example, Scott, Nash, and another governor, James Roffey, were delegated to arrange a performance of sacred music in the Abbey Church, for the benefit of the Hospital (Committee-Book No. 4, pp. 181, 187, 194, 196).

⁹ Bath under Beau Nash (London, 1907), p. 232.

¹⁰ Council Book No. 7.

¹¹ Quoted in “MS. Collections at Castle Horneck, 1720–1772,” The Quarterly Review, cxxxix (1875), 388.

¹² Committee-Book No. 5, pp. 38, 90, 137, 140. The Board also received only a partial payment for another of Nash's notes, this one for £39/10, donated to the Hospital by Gilbert Fleming (ibid., pp. 54, 90, 140).

¹³ Eg. 3739, f. 96. Young was appointed administrator of Nash's estate on 8 May 1761 (Somerset House, P. C. C., Administrations, May 1761).

¹⁴ Willard Connely, Beau Nash (London, 1955), p. 146.

¹⁵ Eg. 3739, f. 96; 3736, ff. 75, 65. For Goldsmith's brief account of Nash's effects and their disposal, see Works, iv, 135.

¹⁶ Bath Journal, 23 March 1761.

¹⁷ Bath Journal, 25 May 1761.

¹⁸ Eg. 3736, ff. 143–144; 3737, ff. 78, 82. The Chesterfield portrait went to an unnamed buyer, for two and one-half guineas, in January 1762; shortly thereafter a friend of Scott's, Charles Moore, bought the other two portraits (3737, f. 91).

¹⁹ Scott referred to this notice in a letter to Charles Young (Eg. 3736, f. 102).

²⁰ Memoirs of the Celebrated Miss Fanny M—(1759), p. 12. This is the second edition of the work. I have not located the first edition. In the Memoir, Nash is called “Mr. Easy.”

²¹ Melville, pp. 266–271. For Fanny Murray, see also DNB. Juliana Papjoy was incredible not only in name but also in her choice of life after she left Nash. “Her principal residence,” according to the Bath Journal for 10 April 1777, “she took up in a large hollow tree, now standing within a mile of Warminster … [which] she made her habitation for between thirty and forty years.” Obituary notices in The Gentleman's Magazine and The Annual Register for 1777 also record this remarkable story. There is no authority for R. E. M. Peach's assertion that she returned to Nash and attended him in his declining days (The Life and Times of Ralph Allen, London, 1895, p. 225); nor is she mentioned anywhere in Scott's letters.

²² Newbery had two children who survived him: Mary, born in 1740, and Francis (who took over the business after his father's death), born in 1743 (Arthur LeBlanc Newbery, Records of the House of Newbery, Derby & London, 1911, pp. 5–6).

²³ The letter-books show that Scott left Bath at the end of June (Eg. 3736, ff. 152–153) and did not return until October (3737, ff. 29–31).

²⁴ Eg. 3739, ff. 95–98. Scott occasionally made marginal notes in his letter-books. One such to this letter states that Scott met Yescombe in London on 1 November and showed him Young's letter and his answer. The details of his letter to Young must, therefore, be accurate. A letter to Ralph Allen, dated 1 November, mentioned this occurrence and, incidentally, located the Young family in “Brideford” (ibid., f. 99).

²⁵ Scott was a faithful and vocal admirer of Dr. Robert James, a fellow alumnus of St. John's College. In 1777 he wrote a testimonial to Francis Newbery, celebrating the cure from rheumatism that James's Analeptic Pills had wrought for him (Eg. 3753, ff. 32, 80–81). The letter appeared in newspapers at the time (e.g., the Public Advertiser, 9 April 1777). For an account of the controversy over whether Dr. James's Powder aggravated Goldsmith's condition during his last illness, see Ralph M. Wardle, Oliver Goldsmith (Lawrence, Kansas, 1957), pp. 274–275, 280.

²⁶ Although Scott did not give the title of the book, his reference to and paraphrase of the Dedication to the Art of Poetry make it clear that this is the book which Newbery sent him. It had appeared on 9 March 1762 (Wardle, p. 131).

²⁷ “The connections … [Nash] had with the people of the Assembly-rooms would not have been known, had it not transpired from a man who kept one of the Rooms at Tunbridge Wells, whose name was [Thomas] Joye … [who] discovered to Mr. Nash that he was wrong'd out of some hundreds of pounds” ([Francis Fleming], The Life and Extraordinary Adventures of Ginnadrake, 1771, iii, 68).

²⁸ The Life of Oliver Goldsmith (London, 1837), i, 402, 407.

²⁹ The apologia ending on O4^v is on pp. 141–142 in Works, iv; the material on O5^r-Q5^v is on pp. 142–154.

³⁰ The additional material may have been more extensive originally. In the first edition of the Life the catchword on P8^v (the last page of the P signature) is The. However, Q1^r opens with the word Among, introducing, “Among other Papers in the custody of Mr. Nash,” the letter attacking Nash for sanctioning gaming at Bath. This discrepancy might indicate that after the P signature was composed it was decided to shorten the Life so that it could be completed in the Q gathering, and consequently a block of supplementary material (beginning with the word The) was omitted. I am grateful to Professor Arthur Friedman for this suggestion.

³¹ This error misled the DNB and several of Nash's biographers, who give the date of death as 3 February. Some eighteenth-century sources reported the date as 13 February (see Works, iv, 133, 154), but Scott seemed quite positive in saying that it was 12 February.

³² Aside from an obvious misprint, the other errata in the list were presumably noted by Scott. One changes “pump-room” to “Wiltshire's ball-room” (Works, iv, 111); one emends the phrase “… the contempt of the great, who …” to “ … the contempt of the great, many of whom” (ibid., p. 131). Newbery apparently did not consider the other information which Scott added in his postscript important enough to trouble with; for none of these details is included in the second edition of the Life. The description of the Life of Nash in The Rothschild Library ([Cambridge, 1954], Vol. i, Item 1022) notes that C6 in one of the B. M. copies is a cancel. This change was made to emend the sentence, “The nobility regarded him as an inoffensive … companion” to “Some of the nobility regarded him as an inoffensive … companion” (Works, iv, 66). This emendation, which is similar to the change of “the great, who” to “the great, many of whom,” may have been the result of one of Scott's marginalia in the manuscript copy of the Life which Newbery sent him.

³³ The book is Viaggiana (1776?), by Stephen Weston. Weston cited ll. 205–206 of The Traveller, along with passages from Aeschylus, Virgil, Apollonius, and Ariosto, as an example of a “beautiful image, of which poets of all ages … have availed themselves” (pp. 121–122). This reference, Scott wrote to Weston, did “great Honour … [to] Dr. Goldsmith's Memory” (Eg. 3753, f. 36).

³⁴ Wardle, pp. 160–161.

³⁵ Arthur Sherbo, “A Manufactured Anecdote in Goldsmith's Life of Richard Nash,” MLN, lxx (1955), 20–22; Morris Golden, “Another Manufactured Anecdote in the ‘Life of Richard Nash‘?” N&Q, xxii (1957), 120–121.

³⁶ Works, iv, 121–122. The story of the cobbler and the bailie begins, “There lived a cobbler—some people do laugh at this story and some do not; however, the story is this—there lived a cobbler in a stall. This stall was opposite our house, so I knew him very well. This cobbler a bailie came after, for I must tell you he was a very low fellow.” Portraits by Sir Joshua Reynolds, ed. Frederick W. Hilles (New Haven, 1952), pp. 51–52.

³⁷ TLS (2 November 1956), p. 649.

³⁸ Gibbs suggested that Goldsmith may have modeled Honeywood partly on the character of “S—” (Works, iv, 92, n. 1).

³⁹ Wood does include the piquant detail that Fanny Brad-dock called her faithful serving-woman “Nash”—because of “her genteel Appearance … after the proper Name of the Beau, and titular King of the City” (ii, 449).

⁴⁰ Wood's account of the gaming acts is in ii, 388–391. For the act of 1745, see The Statutes at Large (Cambridge, 1765), 18 George II, c. 34. The act lists the specific games to be proscribed; E. O. is not among them. Numerous contemporary references show that E. O. was played at Bath after 1745. Connely quotes Mrs. Montagu's account of the game in 1749 and supposes that it was clandestine (p. 147). However, the author of A Brief Description of Bath (1747) makes it clear that the game (which he calls “O. E.”) was openly played in Bath at that time (p. 6). In a letter of 1782, Walpole mentioned an E. O. table that was currently popular in London (The Letters of Horace Walpole, ed. Paget Toynbee, Oxford, 1903, xii, 267).

⁴¹ This account of Nash's suit—and of the depositions which follow—is based on Chancery Proceedings (P.R.O.), Six Clerks Series, C 12/492/19, 20, 21; C 12/742/2; C 12/1486/13.

⁴² The Life of Mr. James Quin (1766), p. 98.

⁴³ Ronald S. Crane, New Essays by Oliver Goldsmith (Chicago, 1927), pp. xxxiii, xxxiv, xxxvii, 98–124.

⁴⁴ Cf. Works, iv, 127, n. 1. R.E.M. Peach offered the theory (for which he gave no evidence) that the “Quin” letter was written by Samuel Derrick, who “sought to oust Nash by any means” in hopes that he could become Master of the Ceremonies, and who sent the letter to Chesterfield, whose secretary passed it on to Nash. This argument was presented in the Bath Herald: the article is one of a scrapbook of news-cuttings, in the Municipal Library, Bath, entitled The Old Bath Booksellers, Publishers, and Printers.

⁴⁵ The Miscellaneous Works of Oliver Goldsmith (London, 1837), iii, 344, n. 1.

⁴⁶ The Letters of Horace Walpole, iii, 344, 362. For another reference to Bland's suicide, which occurred in Paris in September 1755, see Mrs. Anne East's letter to George Doddington, in Historical Manuscripts Commission, Various, vi, 30.

⁴⁷ John Carlisle D. Spedding, The Spedding Family (Dublin, 1909), pp. 28–29. (John Spedding quoted the epitaph from The Grand Magazine, May 1759, and cited the London Magazine, April 1753, for an account of “The Pothereen Mare”; both references, however, are erroneous, and I have not been able to find the sources for Spedding's information.) For Goldsmith's references to the “Paddereen” or “Podareen” Mare, see Works, iii, 28, and The Collected Letters of Oliver Goldsmith, ed. K. C. Balderston (Cambridge, 1928), p. 29. More than one eighteenth-century race horse may have been so named, but Spedding's horse seems a likelier candidate for the one referred to by Goldsmith than does the horse suggested by Michael Cox in N&Q (Ser. 8), ix, 461.

⁴⁸ Prior, The Life of Oliver Goldsmith, ii, 583. Collier's miscellaneous essays were collected in 1720 and issued as Essays upon Several Moral Subjects (3rd edition; four parts in three volumes). An Essay upon Gaming was not reprinted, but the publisher of Essays upon Several Moral Subjects had copies of the 1713 printing on hand and bound them in copies of Part iii of this edition, apparently as long as the supply lasted. The B. M. has three copies of Part iii of the 1720 edition. In one of these, An Essay upon Gaming is bound after CC8^v, which has the catchword An; since the Essay is that printed in 1713, pagination and signatures do not conform with those of the preceding essays in the volume. The Essay is not in the other two B. M. copies of Part iii, but the last page of one of them has the catchword An; there is no catchword on the last page of the other copy.

⁴⁹ Percy Fitzgerald's theory that the letter was sent to Dodd by Elizabeth Smithson, Countess of Northumberland, may be correct, although he offered no evidence. He implied, however, that she was also the author of the letter, which is extremely unlikely (A Famous Forgery, London, 1865, pp. 33, 23–24).

⁵⁰ I have quoted from the second edition of Reflections on Death (1765); Dodd's remarks on the Life of Nash are on pp. 111–113. I have not seen a copy of the first edition, in which the passage occurs on p. 136 (see Charles Welsh, A Bookseller of the Last Century, London, 1885, p. 206). The first edition was not published until March 1763, but it had already been set up in type when the offending passage was removed from the second edition of the Life of Nash. Consequently, Dodd was forced to add the following “Advertisement” to his book: “[the author] is bound in justice to the ingenuous [sic] Writer of Mr. Nash's Life, to declare, that the Passage objected to, p. 136, is corrected in the second Edition of that Work.” Despite these amends, both Dodd's stricture on the Life and his “Advertisement” were retained in the second edition of Reflections on Death.

⁵¹ Eg. 3738, f. 30. Scott alluded to the dispute in two letters (3737, f. 52; 3738, f. 68) but did not explain it. The Hospital minutes do not tell the whole story, but the trouble seems to have arisen over Scott's negotiations, on behalf of the Hospital, with Benjamin Bathurst concerning a lease of lands owned by the Hospital (see Committee-Book No. 5, pp. 75–76, 79).

⁵² Although Caulet's name has been anglicized to “Collett” in contemporary biographies of Nash, the signature in the Hospital Committee-Book is “James Caulet”; Scott spelled the name thus. Caulet was elected to the Board, in Nash's place, on 1 May 1761 (Committee-Book No. 5, p. 45). He resigned as Master of the Ceremonies in January 1763, and Derrick's succession was announced in the Bath Chronicle on 27 January. Scott referred several times to Caulet in his letters (Eg. 3736, ff. 90, 103, 112, 114, 126; 3737, ff. 72, 96; 3738, ff. 74–75, 119–120, 142). For references to Derrick, see 3738, ff. 120, 141–142, 156–157.