' He had often relied upon this before, but in
the present instance it was unsuited to his complaint. On Monday, the
4th of April, 1774, he died, in his forty-sixth year, and was buried on
the 9th in the burying-ground of the Temple Church. Two years later a
monument, with a medallion portrait by Nollekens, and a Latin
inscription by Johnson, was erected to him in Westminster Abbey, at the
expense of the Literary Club. But although the inscription contains more
than one phrase of felicitous discrimination, notably the oft-quoted
'affectuum potens, at lenis dominator', it may be doubted whether the
simpler words used by his rugged old friend in a letter to Langton are
not a fitter farewell to Oliver Goldsmith,--'Let not his frailties be
remembered; he was a very great man.'
In person Goldsmith was short and strongly built. His complexion was
rather fair, but he was deeply scarred with small-pox; and--if we may
believe his own account--the vicissitudes and privations of his early
life had not tended to diminish his initial disadvantages.
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