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OLIVER GOLDSMITH.

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH.

OLIVER GOLDSMITH, a son of a humble village preacher, was born at the parsonage in Pallas, the property of the Edgeworths of Edgeworthstown, in the county of Longford, Ireland, November 10, 1728. He died in London, wept over by Johnson, Burke, Reynolds, and Garrick, April 4, 1774, five months over his forty-fifth year. Between the obscure Irish village birthplace and the monument in Westminster Abbey stretched a career which was half in clouds and half in sunshine, a rainbow of tears and smiles. He had no advantages of birth other than the priceless one of a simple-hearted father, "passing rich with forty pounds a year," who lives again in the preacher of the Deserted Village, and more minutely in the hero of the Vicar of Wakfield. His life, to outward seem

ing, was a series of blunders. He was tossed about from one school to another, learning many things which somehow seem more in his life than Latin or Greek. He learned to play the flute, and he fell in love with vagrancy, or rather the vagrant in him was carefully nourished by an unworldly, unsophisticated father, a merry-andrew of a teacher, and by fickle Fortune herself. An uncle, the Rev. Mr. Contarine, was the prudent man of the family, always appearing as the necessary counterpoise to prevent Oliver from flying off into irrecoverable wandering. By his advice and help the lad passed from his schools to Trinity College, Dublin, perhaps a needful discipline, but

certainly a harsh one; for there, where one might look for genial surroundings to one afterward to become a master in literature, the luckless youth was to find new trials to his sensitive spirit, and to have his compensation in pleasures quite unprovided in the college scheme. His poverty compelled him to take a menial position, he had a brutal tutor, and after he had been a year and a half at college his father died, leaving him in still more abject poverty than before. He wrote street ballads to save himself from actual starvation, and sold them for five shillings apiece. In all this murky gloom the lights that twinkle are the secret joy with which the poor poet would steal out at night to hear his ballads sung, and the quick rush of feeling in which he would use his five shillings upon some forlorn beggar, whose misery made him forget his own. Once he ran away from college, stung by some too sharp insult from his tutcr, but he returned to take his degree, and at the end of three years, carrying away some scraps of learning, he returned to his mother's house.

There for two years he led an aimless, happy life, waiting for the necessary age at which he could qualify for orders in the church. He had few wants, and gayly shared the little family's small stock of provision and joint labors, teaching in the village school, fishing, strolling, flute-playing, and dancing. They were two years that made his Irish home always green in his memory, a spot almost dazzling for brightness when he looked back on it from the hardships of his London life. When the two years were passed, he applied to the Bishop for orders, but was rejected for various reasons according to various authorities, but the most sufficient one in any case was his own unwillingness to take the step urged upon him by friends. He was sent by his uncle to begin the study of law, but the fifty pounds with which he was furnished were lost at play, and the vagabond returned forgiven to his uncle's house. He had visions of coming to America which fortunately never

passed into waking resolution, for it is to be feared there would have been small likelihood of his blossoming into literature on this side of the water in the days of anteRevolutionary flatness.

Medicine was the next resort, and Goldsmith was sent by his uncle to Edinburgh. Although the title of doctor has become familiarly connected with his name, it is very certain that he did not acquire the degree in Edinburgh, but afterward in a foreign university upon one of his wanderings. Few traditions remain of his life at Edinburgh; three or four amusing letters were written thence, but the impression made by them and by such gossip as survives is that he was an inimitable teller of humorous stories and a capital singer of Irish songs. His profession of medicine, however, gave a show of consistency to his purpose of travel on the Continent, where he persuaded himself and his friends that he should qualify himself for his professional degree. In point of fact he spent his time in a happy-golucky fashion, wandering from place to place, and singing a song for a sixpence.

He returned to England in 1756, after two years of desultory life on the Continent, and landed, we are told, without a farthing in his pockets. He lived by hook and by crook, serving in an apothecary's shop in a humble capacity, acting as tutor, it is said, under a feigned name, and living the while, as he afterward declared, among beggars. Then, falling in with an old friend, and getting some little assistance, for Goldsmith seemed always one of the openhanded, ready to receive and ready to bestow, he became a physician in a humble way, struggling for a living in doctoring those only one degree richer than himself. By a curious coincidence, one of his patients was a printer working under Samuel Richardson, printer, and, what is more, author of Clarissa. From a hint given by this man, Goldsmith applied to Richardson and was given occupation as a proof-reader. Then, falling in with an old schoolfel

low whose father kept a school in Peckham, Goldsmith be came an usher, and a miserable time he had of it. Griffiths, the bookseller, dined one day at the school where Goldsmith was usher. The conversation turned upon the Monthly Review, owned and conducted by Griffiths. Something said by Goldsmith led to further consideration, and the usher left the school to board and lodge with the bookseller, to have a small regular salary, and to devote himself to the Monthly Review.

The history of literature at this time in England gives much space necessarily to the bookseller. In the transition period of authorship, this middleman occupied a position of power and authority not since accorded to him; it was a singular relation which the drudging author held to his employer, and Goldsmith from this time forward was scarcely ever free from a dependence upon the autocrats of the book trade. He entered the profession of literature as upon something which was a little more profitable and certainly more agreeable than the occupation of an usher in a boarding-school, or the profession of a doctor without paying clients. A profession which now dignifies its members was then without respect socially, and attended by all the meanness which springs from a false position. The rich and powerful in government looked upon it as appointed only to serve the ends of the ambitious, and the poor author had to struggle to maintain his independence of nature. The men who could sell their talents and their self-respect for gold and place jostled roughly their nobler comrades who served literature faithfully in poverty, and it was only now and then that the fickle breath of popular favor wafted some author's book into warmer waters. So crowding was this Grub Street life that Goldsmith sought release from it in a vain attempt after a government appointment as medical officer at Coromandel. He was driven back into the galleys from which he was striving to escape, yet out of this life there began to issue the true products of his

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