The sun, after so sad an accident, might shine next morning as
bright as usual; men might laugh and sing the next day, and transact
business as before; and not a single creature feel any regret but myself.
Instead of having Apollo in mourning or the Muses in a fit of the spleen;
instead of having the learned world apostrophizing at my untimely decease;
perhaps all Grub Street might laugh at my fate, and self-approving dignity
be unable to shield me from ridicule."
Circumstances occurred about this time to give a new direction to
Goldsmith's hopes and schemes. Having resumed for a brief period the
superintendence of the Peckham school during a fit of illness of Dr.
Milner, that gentleman, in requital for his timely services, promised to
use his influence with a friend, an East India director, to procure him a
medical appointment in India.
There was every reason to believe that the influence of Dr. Milner would be
effectual; but how was Goldsmith to find the ways and means of fitting
himself out for a voyage to the Indies? In this emergency he was driven to
a more extended exercise of the pen than he had yet attempted. His
skirmishing among books as a reviewer, and his disputatious ramble among
the schools and universities and literati of the Continent, had filled his
mind with facts and observations which he now set about digesting into a
treatise of some magnitude, to be entitled "An Inquiry into the Present
State of Polite Learning in Europe.
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