'yet? or John Bincly left off drinking drams? or Tom 'Allen got a new wig?' To the remarkably pleasant and whimsical satire of the Scotch he at the same time wrote to Bryanton, I do not refer, because in all the editions of his works, except the Scotch, it is commonly printed but three letters to his uncle Contarine must have mention, the two less important of which, and the earliest in date, Mr. Prior discovered.

In the first, dated May, 1753, and in which he alludes to a description of himself by his uncle, as 'the philosopher 'who carries all his goods about him,' he describes Munro as the one great professor, and the rest of the doctorteachers as only less afflicting to their students than they must be to their patients. He makes humourous mention of a trip to the Highlands, for which he had hired a horse about the size of a ram, who walked away (trot he 'could not) as pensive as his master.' Other passages show to what narrow limits he had brought his wants, and with how little he was cheerfully content, and full of gratitude.

There has been some harsh judgment of Goldsmith for money wasted on abortive professional undertakings: but the sacrifices were not great. Burke had an allowance of 2007. a-year for leisure to follow studies to which he never paid the least attention; and when his father anxiously expected to hear of his call to the bar, he might have heard, instead, of a distress which forced him to sell his books: yet no one thinks, and rightly, of exacting penalties from Burke on this ground. Poor Goldsmith's supplies

were on the other hand small, irregular, uncertain, and in some two years at the furthest, exhausted altogether.

Here, in this letter to his uncle, he says that he has drawn for six pounds, and that his next draft, five months after this date, will be for but four pounds; pleading in extenuation of even these demands, that he has been obliged to buy everything since he came to Scotland, 'shirts not even excepted.' He professes himself pleased with his studies, and hopes that when he shall have heard Munro for another year, he may go 'to hear Albinus, the 'great professor at Leyden.' The whole of the letter gives evidence of a most grateful affection. In the second, written eight months later, where he describes his preparations for travel, it is not less apparent : 'Let me here ' acknowledge,' he says, 'the humility of the station in 'which you found me; let me tell how I was despised by 'most, and hateful to myself. Poverty, hopeless poverty, was my lot, and Melancholy was beginning to make me 'her own. When you.... This good man did not live to know the entire good he had done, or that his own name would probably live with the memory of it as long 'Thou best of men !'

as the English language lasted.

exclaims his nephew in the third of these letters, to which

I shall presently

Lomond and

care of Heave

larger reference, 'may Heaven

and those you love!' It is the ons worthy of itself should, in the doing, find reward: waiting not even on the thanks and prayers of such a heart as Goldsmith's. Another twenty

pounds are acknowledged on the eve of departure from Edinburgh, as the last he will ever draw for. It was the last, of which we have record. But Goldsmith had drawn his last breath before he forgot his uncle Contarine.

The old vicissitudes attended him at this new move in his game of life. Land rats and water rats were at his heels as he quitted Scotland. Bailiffs hunted him for security given to a fellow-student; and shipwreck he only escaped by a fortnight's imprisonment on a false political charge. Bound for Leyden, with characteristic carelessness or oddity he had secured his passage in a ship bound for Bourdeaux; but taken for a Jacobite in Newcastle-on-Tyne, and in Sunderland arrested by a tailor, the ship sailed on without him, and sank at the mouth of the Garonne. At last he got safe to the learned city; and wrote off to his uncle, among other sketches of character obviously meant to give him pleasure, what he thought of the three specimens of womankind he had now seen, out of Ireland. The Dutch is pale and fat,' he writes, the Scotch lean and ruddy: the one walks as if she were straddling after a go-cart, the other takes 'too masculine a stride. I shall not endeavour to deprive ' either country of its share of beauty; but I must say, 'that of all objects on this earth, an English farmer's ' daughter is most charming.'

In the same delightful letter he observingly corrects the vulgar notion of the better kind of Dutchman, and amusingly contrasts him with the downright Hollander.

"He in everything imitates a Frenchman, but in his easy disengaged air, which is the result of keeping polite company. The Dutchman is vastly ceremonious, and is exactly perhaps what a Frenchman might have been in the reign of Louis XIV. Such are the better bred; but the downright Hollander is one of the oddest figures in nature. Upon a head of lank hair he wears a half-cocked narrow hat laced with black ribbon, no coat, but seven waistcoats, and nine pair of breeches, so that his hips reach almost up to his arm-pits. This well-clothed vegetable is now fit to see company, or make love. But what a pleasing creature is the object of his appetite? Why, she wears a large fur cap, with a deal of Flanders lace; and for every pair of breeches he carries, she puts on two petticoats. A Dutch lady burns nothing about her phlegmatic admirer but his tobacco. You must know, sir, every woman carries in her hand a stove, with coals in it, which, when she sits, she snugs under her petticoats, and at this chimney, dozing Strephon lights his pipe."

At the close of the letter, Scotland and Holland are contrasted: There, hills and rocks intercept every pros'pect; here, it is all a continued plain. There, you might see a well dressed Duchess issuing from a dirty close, and here a dirty Dutchman inhabiting a palace. The Scotch may be compared to a tulip planted in dung; but I never see a Dutchman in his own house but I think of a magnificent Egyptian temple dedicated to an ox.' The playful tone of these passages, the amusing touch of satire, and the incomparably easy style, so compact and graceful, were announcements, properly first vouchsafed to the delight of good Mr. Contarine, of powers that were one day to give unfading delight to all the world.

G

Little is known of his pursuits at Leyden; but by this time he would seem to have applied himself, with little affectation of disguise, to general knowledge more than to professional. The one was available in immediate wants; the other pointed to but a distant hope which those very wants made, daily, more obscure; and the narrow necessities of self-help now crowded on him. His principal means of support were as a teacher; but the difficulties and disappointments of his own Philosophic Vagabond, when he went to Holland to teach the natives English, himself knowing nothing of Dutch, appear to have made it a sorry calling. Then, it is said, he borrowed; and again resorted to play, winning even largely but losing all he won; and it is at least certain that he encountered every form of distress. Unhappily, though he wrote many letters to Ireland, some of them described from recollection as compositions of singular ease and humour, all are lost. But Doctor Ellis, an Irish physician of eminence, and ex-student of Leyden, remembered his fellow-student when years had made him famous, and said: much, it may be confessed, in the tone of ex-post-facto prophecy that it was a common subject of remark in the place, that in all the peculiarities of Goldsmith an elevation of mind was to be noted; a philosophical tone and manner; the feeling of a gentleman; and the language and information of a scholar.' Being much in want of the philosophy, it is well that he had it; though his last known scene in Leyden was less characteristic of that, than

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