Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: Life of Oliver Goldsmith / By Austin Dobson. Source: Wellcome Collection.
Provider: This material has been provided by the Augustus C. Long Health Sciences Library at Columbia University and Columbia University Libraries/Information Services, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the the Augustus C. Long Health Sciences Library at Columbia University and Columbia University.
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![the ^Esop couplet, is an epigram called The Clown's Reply, dated Edinburgh, 1753; and one or two of his letters to his friends have survived. He was not a willing letter-writer. An hereditary indolence (I have it from the mother's side) has hitherto prevented my writing to you, he says to Bob Bryanton, and still prevents my writing at least twenty-five letters more, due to my friends in Ireland. No turnspit-dog gets up into his wheel with more reluctance than I sit down to write; yet no dog ever loved the roast meat he turns better than I do him I now address. But already he exhibits that delightful narrative ease which distinguishes The Citizen of the World, from which the following, with its glimpse of the fair and hapless Duchess of Hamilton, once Miss Elizabeth Gunning, might be an extract:— We have no such character here as a coquet, but alas ! how many envious prudes ! Some days ago, I walked into my Lord Kilcoubry's [Kirkcudbright's] (don't be surprised, my lord is but a glover x) when the Duchess of Hamilton (that fair who sacrificed her beauty to her ambition, and her inward peace to a title and gilt equipage) passed by in her chariot; her battered hus- band, or more properly, the guardian of her charms, sat by her side. Straight envy began, in the shape of no less than three ladies who sat with me, to find faults in her faultless form. ' For my part,' says the first, ' I think, what I always thought, that the duchess has too 1 William Maclcllan, says Prior, who claimed the title, and uhose son succeeded in establishing the claim in 1773.](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b21224201_0036.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
