8 - To Edward Mills, London, 7 August [1758]

Summary

Edward Mills was Goldsmith's cousin, the son of Charles Goldsmith's sister. Mills did not respond in any way to Goldsmith's request, as the later letter to Henry Goldsmith shows. This letter is introduced with thoughts upon what would become a quintessentially Goldsmithian opposition of ambition and domestic contentment. Mills, it seems, had forsaken a career at the bar in Dublin – or, more probably and profitably, London – and there is a little needling, possibly, in Goldsmith’s imagining his cousin's lost glories as enhancing his own. Mills has chosen instead his own smaller circle of acquaintance, the ‘cultivation of his paternal acres’. There is an awkwardness of tone in this letter as Goldsmith tries to establish, or re-establish, a connection with Mills only to set up his own request that Mills help to collect Irish subscriptions for Goldsmith's forthcoming Enquiry into the Present state of Polite Learning in Europe, which would be published anonymously in April 1759. Dated 7 August, this is the first letter of a series which Goldsmith wrote to relatives and friends in Ireland seeking such subscriptions in order to preempt Irish piracy.

The copy-text is the manuscript in the British Library. It was first published by Percy in 1801. It is addressed ‘To Edward Mills Esq^r. | near | Roscommon | Ireland’ and postmarked 17 August. The bracketed portions, worn away in the manuscript, are supplied by Percy, except where otherwise noted.

D^r S^r.

You have quitted, I find, that plan of life which you once Intended to pursue, and given up ambition for domestic tranquillity: Were I to consult your satisfaction alone in this change I have the utmost reason to congratulate your choice, but when I consider my own I cant avoid feeling some regret, that one of my few friends has declin’d a pursuit in which he had every reason to expect success. The truth is, like the rest of the world I am self-interested in my concern and do not so much consider the happiness you have acquir’d as the honour I have probably lost in the change. I have often let my fancy loose when you were the subject, and have imagined you gracing the bench or thundering at the bar, while I have taken no small pride to myself and whispered all that I could come near, that that was my cousin.