CHAPTER X.

OLIVER GOLDSMITH.

So many times, and in such variety of styles, has the life of Oliver Goldsmith been written, that in this age, of which his memoir by Forster is the production of biographical literature, there will doubtless be some ready to charge us with making vain repetitions in attempting another portrait of that remarkable man. Graver objections could however be urged against us if we were altogether to exclude him from these pages. And the story of his experiences is one which will bear frequent telling, and the moral they enforce, like the teaching of a village spire, can never be out of place.

Born in an obscure and almost unapproachable Irish village, Pallas or Pallasmore, co. Longford, on the 10th of November, 1728, Oliver entered the world as he left it- -a child of poverty. His father was a needy parson of the established church, with the famous income of £40 a year. In 1730, two years after little Oliver's birth, the worthy clergyman succeeded to the living of Kilkenny West, a parish about six miles from Pallasmore, and so obtained a revenue of almost £200 per annum, but this comparative prosperity was in truth only a just tolerable burden of penury; for the Rev. Charles Goldsmith had seven children besides the poet-three girls and four boys. Of this family two died in youth, but the others survived to experience different fortunes. Henry lived and died a humble village pastor and schoolmaster; Charles made an unfortunate emigration to Jamaica, and eventually died in extreme poverty in London at the beginning of the present century;

Maurice was a drudging cabinet maker in Charlestown, co. Roscommon; Catherine became the wife of a rich man, who seems to have cherished a prudent dislike to poor relations ; and Jane married a Mr. Johnston, whose penilessness accorded with the condition of his wife's family. Of Oliver we have now to speak.

An ugly little boy, deeply marked by the small-pox which attacked him in his seventh or eighth year, "an impenetrably stupid" little boy, who would not learn to read, and yet a droll, merry little fright, Oliver in his childhood made acquaintance with the treatment he was to experience all through life, a treatment in which contempt, severity, and caressing, jostled each other. On the 11th of June, 1745, after having scrambled through a poor preliminary education in different schools and under indifferent masters, Oliver entered the University of Dublin, covering his ragged coat and rough head with the coarse sleeveless gown of black stuff and the red cap of a sizar. The boy was just upon seventeen years of age, had a vague notion that his desire to be a scholar distinguished him from the vulgar of the human race, had a jealous and proud consciousness that he was a gentleman of a gentle family, and withal harboured in his young untaught mind an ambition for distinction, and a morbid love of approbation. His extreme ugliness was not, it would seem, a sufficient torture to his greater vanity; fate had other mortifications in store for him. As a recipient of college charity he had to wear the blood red badge of servitude, to shoulder a broom and sweep the courts of Trinity, to carry dishes from the kitchen to the hall, and to perform all the duties of a waiter at the dinner till the fellows rose from their table. His good uncle Contarine, who married the Rev. Charles Goldsmith's sister, supplied him from time to time with small sums of money, but they were not sufficient for his petty necessities; he had to pawn his books of study, to write songs at five shillings

a piece, for the ballad-mongers, and still to go about in rags, and badly shod. When he came in after life to be a celebrated man, and the rage of the town was directed to him, bishops and statesmen were fond of talking about their old college companion, Dr. Goldsmith; but little intercourse did the rich and well favoured young gentlemen, who in due course developed into rulers of the church and directors of the country, hold with the red-capped sizar. Bullies are to be found everywhere, but we are inclined to think they are more plentiful amongst the ranks of pedagogues than elsewhere, and that they exist in more gigantic proportions amongst college tutors than in any humbler class of the scholastic profession. What university man cannot point to a lecture room where a much fuller measure of professorial urbanity is bestowed on my Lord Tufto than on hearty Jack Smith, and where the needy scholar smarts under insolent reproof that never visits the shortcomings of a youthful patrician ? Goldsmith's tutor, Mr. Theaker

Wilder, was one of a class. This gentleman after rating and storming at the luckless sizar on every imaginable ground, and with every figure of rhetoric, after sneering at his want of money, and swearing at him for his stupidity and nervousness, concluded by knocking him down with. his fist. But even while under the oppression of this brute, Goldsmith had his minutes of happiness. At night he prowled about the city, and at the corners of gin and whisky palaces heard his ballads sung to admiring audiences of beggars. Poor too as he was, he was continually giving to those who were poorer; and on one occasion he gave the blankets off his bed to the homeless mother of five starving children. The weather was bitterly cold, and the generous young man to obtain the requisite warmth for himself, cut open his mattress at the top and slipped down into the stuffing.

No wonder that Oliver's university career was not

VOL. I.

crowned with honour. The only academical prize he gained, was a paltry exhibition, worth about thirty shillings; and this success so elated him, that he gave a noisy party which brought Mr. Wilder to his room, and induced that polished gentleman to strike the jubilant exhibitioner to the ground. It is interesting to know that Mr. Theaker Wilder was killed in a drunken riot, just at the time when Goldsmith's social success was at its height.

Unlike Johnson, Goldsmith left his university with a degree. On February 27, 1749, he was made a bachelor of arts, and took his leave of Alma Mater. His father had been dead two years; his mother lived in straitened circumstances they always had been strait enough at Ballymahon; his brother Henry had fixed himself in the old parsonage at Pallas, and, as his father had done, was working hard for £40 per annum. Oliver consented to enter the church, and after spending the two years that followed his leaving Dublin at Ballymahon, he applied to the Bishop of Elphin to ordain him. His lordship after having had interview with him, declined to grant his request, in fact, plucked him. The cause of this rejection is uncertain. Oliver's sister, like a sister, and God bless her! for it, affirmed that the bishop only objected to her brother's youth; there were some who said that Mr. Theaker Wilder's malice had influenced the episcopal judgment; and others declare that the offence which effected Goldsmith's rejection, was his presenting himself for ordination in scarlet breeches. It is, however, more than probable that he was examined, and found to want that slight acquaintance with the scriptures and the thirty-nine articles magnificently called "Divinity," which is expected in candidates for orders. Certainly Oliver was not an industrious student when at Dublin, and the two years passed at Ballymahon had been consumed in fishing, gossiping, writing verses for and wheedling money out of Uncle Cop

tarine, gambling and carousing at the village whisky shop, playing the flute, and running errands for his mother. At this period of his life, there were few signs of what he was to be. To the most charitable and discerning observer, he appeared little more than an ungainly, dissolute, affectionate Irish blackguard, who had abused what few advantages had come in his humble path. One good friend he had at this critical time, his Uncle Contarine. As long as his reason remained to him, this good man was an ever present help to his nephew; and now he obtained for him the post of tutor in the family of Mr. Flinn, a wealthy grandee of the county. At the end of a year, Oliver lost his place, in consequence of accusing one of Mr. Flinn's family of cheating at cards, and the money saved from his salary was soon lost. Having failed in his attempt to get himself made a priest, and having met with no better success in the vocation of a tutor, Oliver now wished to be a lawyer. The idea of being "a Templar" tickled the vanity of the honest fellow, and uncle Contarine firmly believing that the boy would turn out splendidly, sooner or later, gave him £50. Oliver started for London, but he got no further on his way than Dublin, where he lost his £50 by gambling. On his return to Ballymahon, his poor mother's cottage was closed against him; for a short time he lived with his brother Henry at Pallas, but was soon excluded from that house also. The ne'er-do-weel was then received by the long-suffering uncle Contarine, whom he exerted himself to please, and with whose daughter he fell in love.

It was the autumn of 1752, that Oliver made another start in life, by going to Edinburgh to study medicine with a view to becoming a physician. Uncle Contarine supplied him with another purse, and Goldsmith arrived at his destination without being plundered by sharpers. His residence at Edinburgh was much more pleasant than his sojourn at the university of Dublin; he was poor, but his