pensioner, like his brother Henry, who a year earlier had triumphantly obtained a scholarship. This, however, was not to be. Henry Goldsmith had been engaged as tutor to the son of a gentleman named Hodson, residing near Athlone, and out of this connection had resulted a secret marriage between his pupil and his sister Catharine. From a worldly point of view the match was an excellent one, as the Hodsons were wealthy and well-to-do; but the reproaches of the young man's father stung Charles Goldsmith into taking a step which seriously crippled his resources. He entered into an engagement to pay a marriage portion of £400 with his daughter, and to this end taxed his farm and tithes until it should be defrayed. There was more of wounded pride than of strict justice in this procedure, which must have kept his family pinched until his death. The immediate result of it was a change in the prospects of his second son. It was no longer possible to send him to college as a pensioner; he must go in a more economical way as a "sizar" or poor scholar. At that time, as now, the sizars of Trinity College were educated without charge; they had free lodgings in the college garrets, and they were permitted to batten on cold bits" from the commons' table. But in return for these privileges, they wore a distinctive costume, and were required to perform certain menial offices, now abolished. Young Oliver, endowed by nature with "an exquisite sensibility of contempt "— to use his later words—fought hard against this humiliating entry into academic life. For a long time he resisted his fate; but finally, owing to the influence of a friendly uncle, the Rev, Mr. Contarine, who had already assisted

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in educating him, he yielded, and was admitted to Trinity College, Dublin, as a poor scholar, on the 11th of June, 1744, being then fifteen. In the lives of Forster and Prior, the year of admission is given as 1745; but this has been shown by Dr. J. F. Waller to be an Another Edgeworthstown pupil of the name of Beatty came with him; and the pair took up their abode in the garrets of what was then No. 35 in a range of buildings which has long since disappeared, but at that time formed the eastern side of Parliament Square.

If the circumstances of Goldsmith's initiation into college life were scarcely favourable to his idiosyncrasy, he was still more unfortunate in the tutor with whom he was placed. The Rev. Theaker Wilder, to whose care he fell, although a man of considerable ability, was apparently the last person in the world by whom his pupil's. peculiarities could be indulgently or even temperately regarded. Wilder was a man of vindictive character, morose and, at times, almost ferocious in his demeanour. Once, so the story goes,—with a sudden bound upon a passing hackney-coach, he felled to the ground its luckless driver, who had accidentally touched his face with his whip. Under such a master Goldsmith could but fare ill. His ungainly appearance, his awkwardness, and a certain mental unreadiness, which he never afterwards lost, except when he had pen in hand, left him wholly at the mercy of his persecutor, who saw in him nothing but the evidence of a dense and stubborn disposition. To make matters worse, Wilder delighted in mathematics, and Goldsmith detested them as much as Gray did. "This,"

he said later, in a passage which had more of bitter recollection than absolute accuracy-"seems a science, to which the meanest intellects are equal. I forget who it is that says 'All men might understand mathematics, if they would.'" The "dreary subtleties" of "Dutch Burgersdyck" and Polish Smeglesius, the luminaries who then presided over the study of logic, equally repelled him, as they had repelled his predecessor, Swift. Everything was thus against his advancement to honours, and the measure of his disqualification was filled up by a certain idle habit of "perpetually lounging about the college-gate," (of which, by the way, Johnson was also accused at Oxford,) and by a boyish love of pleasure and amusement. He sang with considerable taste: he played passably upon the German flute. Both of these accomplishments made him popular with many of his fellows, but they were not those from whose ranks the distinguished members of an university are usually recruited.

With these characteristics, that he should be associated with the scandals rather than with the successes of an academic career is perhaps to be anticipated. Accordingly, in May, 1747, we find him involved in a college. riot. A report had been circulated that a scholar had been arrested in Fleet Street (Dublin). This was an indignity to which no gownsman could possibly submit. Led by a wild fellow called "Gallows" Walsh, who, among the students, exercised the enviable and selfconferred office of "Controller-General of tumults in ordinary," they carried the bailiff's den by storm, stripped the unfortunate wretch who was the chief offender, and ducked him soundly in the college cistern. Intoxicated

by this triumph and reinforced by the town mob, they then proceeded to attack the tumble-down old prison. known as the "Black Dog," with a view to a general gaol delivery. But the constable of that fortress, being a resolute man, well provided with firearms, made a gallant defence, the result being that two of the townsmen were killed and others wounded. Four of the ringleaders in this disastrous affair were affair were expelled. Oliver Goldsmith was not among these; but having "aided and abetted," he was, with three others, publicly admonished, "quod seditioni favisset et tumultuantibus opem tulisset."

From the stigma of this censure, he recovered shortly afterwards by a small success. He tried for a scholarship and failed; but he gained an exhibition amounting to some thirty shillings. Unhappily this only led to a fresh mishap. His elation prompted him to celebrate his good fortune by an entertainment at his rooms, which, to add to its enormity, included persons of both sexes. No sooner was the unwonted sound of a fiddle heard in the heights of No. 35, than the exasperated Wilder burst upon the assembly, dispersing the terrified guests, and, after a torrent of abuse, knocked down the hapless host. The disgrace was overwhelming. Hastily gathering his books together, the poor lad sold them for what they would fetch, and fairly ran away, vaguely bound for America. He loitered, however, in Dublin until his means were reduced to a shilling, and then set out for Cork. After reaching perilously close to starvation-for he afterwards told Reynolds that a handful of grey peas, given to him at this time by a good-natured

girl at a wake, was the most comfortable repast he had ever made-he recovered his senses, and turned his steps homewards. His brother Henry (his father, the Rev. Charles Goldsmith, having died some three months earlier) came halfway to meet and receive him. Ultimately a kind of reconciliation was patched up with his tutor, and he was restored to the arms of his Alma Mater.

Henceforth his university life was less eventful. Wilder still, after his fashion, pursued his pupil with taunts and irony. But, beyond frequent "turnings - down," the college records contain no further evidence of unusual irregularity. His pecuniary supplies, always doubtful, had become more uncertain since his father's death, and now consisted chiefly of intermittent contributions from kind-hearted Uncle Contarine, and other friends. Often he must have been wholly dependent upon petty loans from his schoolmate Beatty, from his cousin Robert Bryanton, from his relative Edward Mills of Roscommon, all of whom were his contemporaries at Trinity. Sometimes he was reduced to pawn his books "mutare quadrata rotundis, like the silly fellow in Horace," as Wilder classically put it. Another method of making money, to which he occasionally resorted, was ballad-writing of a humble kind. There was a shop at the sign of the Rein-deer in Mountrath Court, where, at five shillings a head, he found a ready market for his productions, and it is related that he would steal out at nightfall to taste that supreme delight of the not-tooexperienced poet, the hearing them sung by the wandering minstrels of the Dublin streets. Not seldom, it is to