Minor's" unconsidered speeches.
"_Bien heureux_"--to use Voltaire's phrase--is he who can laugh much at
these things now. As Goldsmith himself would have agreed, the jests of
one age are not the jests of another. But it is a little curious that,
by one of those freaks of circumstance, or "fortuitous concourses,"
there is to-day generally included among the very works of Goldsmith
above referred to something which, in the opinion of many, is
conjectured to have been really the production of the ingenious compiler
of the "Cross Readings." That compiler was one Caleb Whitefoord, a
well-educated Scotch wine-merchant and picture-buyer, whose portrait
figures in Wilkie's "Letter of Introduction." The friend of Benjamin
Franklin, who had been his next-door neighbour at Craven Street, he
became, in later years, something of a diplomatist, since in 1782-83 he
was employed by the Shelburne administration in the Paris negotiation
for the Treaty of Versailles. But at the date of the "Cross Readings" he
was mainly what Burke, speaking contemptuously of his status as a
plenipotentiary, styled a "_diseur de bons mots_"; and he was for this
reason included among those "most distinguished Wits of the Metropolis,"
who, following Garrick's lead in 1774, diverted themselves at the St.
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