'I do not mean,' wrote Goldsmith, 'so much to compliment
you as myself. It may do me some honour to inform the public, that I
have lived many years in intimacy with you. It may serve the interests
of mankind also to inform them, that the greatest wit may be found in a
character, without impairing the most unaffected piety.'
His gains from 'She Stoops to Conquer' were considerable; but by this
time his affairs had reached a stage of complication which nothing short
of a miracle could disentangle; and there is reason for supposing that
his involved circumstances preyed upon his mind. During the few months
of life that remained to him he published nothing, being doubtless
sufficiently occupied by the undertakings to which he was already
committed. The last of his poetical efforts was the poem entitled
'Retaliation', a group of epitaph-epigrams prompted by some similar
'jeux d'esprit' directed against himself by Garrick and other friends,
and left incomplete at his death. In March, 1774, the combined effects
of work and worry, added to a local disorder, brought on a nervous
fever, which he unhappily aggravated by the use of a patent medicine
called 'James's Powder.
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