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1745. he had himself been a sizar, and that it had not availed Et. 17. to withhold from him the friendship of the great and the

good.

His counsel prevailed. The youth went to Dublin, showed by passing the necessary examination that his time at school had not been altogether thrown away, and on the 11th of June 1745 was admitted, last in the list of eight who so presented themselves, a sizar of Trinity College; *-there most speedily to earn that experience, which, on his elder brother afterwards consulting him as to the education of his son, prompted him to answer thus: "If he has ambition, strong "passions, and an exquisite sensibility of contempt, do not send him to your college, unless you have no other trade "for him except your own."t

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Flood, who was then in the college, does not seem to have noticed Goldsmith: but a greater than Flood, though himself little notable at college, said he perfectly recollected his old fellow-student, when they afterwards met at the house of Mr. Reynolds. Not that there was much for an Edmund Burke to recollect of him. Little went well with Goldsmith in his student course. He had a menial position, a savage brute for tutor, and few inclinations to the study exacted. He was not indeed, as perhaps never living creature in this world was, without his consolations; he could sing a song well, and, at a new insult or outrage, could blow off excitement through his flute with a kind of desperate "mechanical vehemence." At the worst he had, as

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*

Percy Memoir, 14, 15. "His being admitted a sizar in Trinity College, Dublin, at that early age, denotes a remarkable proficiency. Sizars there are expected to **come better prepared than other boys, and therefore usually apply for admission "somewhat later in life." A sizarship might in other words be called an inferior scholarship, disposed of in like manner to the best answerer. + See post, Book II. Chap. v.

1746.

he describes it himself, a "knack at hoping;" and at all times, it must with equal certainty be affirmed, a knack at Æt.18. getting into scrapes. Like Samuel Johnson at Oxford, he avoided lectures when he could, and was a lounger at the college gate.* The popular picture of him in these Dublin University days, is little more than of a slow, hesitating, somewhat hollow voice, heard seldom and always to great disadvantage in the class-rooms; and of a low-sized, thick, robust, ungainly figure, lounging about the college courts on the wait for misery and ill-luck.

His Edgeworthstown schoolfellow, Beatty, had entered among the sizars with him, and for a time shared his rooms. They are described as the top-rooms adjoining the library of the building numbered 35, where the name of Oliver Goldsmith may still be seen, scratched by himself upon a window-pane.t Another sizar, Marshall, is said to have been another of his chums. Among his occasional associates, were certainly Edward Mills, his relative; Robert Bryanton, a Ballymahon youth, also his relative, of whom he was fond; Charles and Edward Purdon, whom he lived to befriend; James Willington, whose name he afterwards had permission to use in London, for low literary work he was ashamed to put his own to; Wilson § and Kearney, subsequently doctors and fellows of the college; Wolfen, also well known; and Lauchlan Macleane, whose political pamphlets, unaccepted challenge to Wilkes, and general party exertions, made a noise in the world twenty or thirty

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§ Wilson communicated to Malone the various entries to be found respecting him in the registers of the college.

Wolfen told Dr. Percy that translations from the classics occasionally made by his fellow student at this period were long remembered by his contemporaries with applause. Percy Memoir, 16, 17.

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years later. But not till a man becomes famous is it Et. 18. to be expected that any wonderful feats of memory should be performed respecting him; and it seems tolerably evident that, with the exception of perhaps Bryanton and Beatty, not one owner of the names recounted put himself in friendly relation with the sizar, to elevate, assist, or cheer him. Richard Malone, afterwards Lord Sunderlin; Barnard and Marlay, afterwards worthy bishops of Killaloe and Waterford; found nothing more pleasant than to talk of "their old fellow-collegian Doctor Goldsmith,” in the painting-room of Reynolds: but nothing, I suspect, so difficult, thriving lads as they were in even these earlier days, than to vouchsafe recognition to the unthriving, depressed, insulted Oliver.*

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A year and a half after he had entered college, at the Et. 19. commencement of 1747, his father suddenly died. The scanty sums required for his support had been often intercepted, but this stopped them altogether. It may have been the least and most trifling loss connected with that sorrow; but "squalid poverty," relieved by occasional gifts, according to his small means, from uncle Contarine, by petty loans from Bryanton or Beatty, or by desperate pawning of his books of study, was Goldsmith's lot thenceforward. Yet even in the depths of that despair, arose the consciousness of faculties reserved for better fortune than continual

* "When he had got high in fame," said Johnson to Boswell, "one of his friends "began to recollect something of his being distinguished at college. Goldsmith in "the same manner recollected more of that friend's early years, as he grew a greater "man," Bosvell vi. 310. This, we must admit, is the general rule. Barnard, afterwards Dean of Derry, and ultimately Bishop of Killaloe, from which diocese he was translated to that of Limerick, will frequently appear in these pages. He was upwards of eighty when he died, at Wimbledon, in 1806. Marlay became bishop of Waterford, and is characterised with much truth by Malone as an amiable, benevolent, and ingenious man.

contempt and failure.
save himself from actual starving; sell them at the
Rein-Deer repository in Mountrath-court for five shillings
a-piece; and steal out of the college at night to hear them
sung.*

He would write street-ballads to

Happy night, to him worth all the dreary days! Hidden by some dusky wall, or creeping within darkling shadows of the ill-lighted streets, this poor neglected sizar watched, waited, lingered, listened there, for the only effort of his life which had not wholly failed. Few and dull perhaps the beggar's audience at first, but more thronging, eager, and delighted, as he shouted forth his newly-gotten ware. Cracked enough, I doubt not, were those ballad-singing tones; very harsh, extremely discordant, and passing from loud to low without meaning or melody; but not the less did the sweetest music which this earth affords fall with them on the ear of Goldsmith. Gentle faces pleased, old men stopping by the way, young lads venturing a purchase with their last remaining farthing; why, here was a world in little, with its fame at the sizar's feet! "The greater world will be "listening one day " perhaps he muttered, as he turned with a lighter heart to his dull home.

Nor

It is said to have been a rare occurrence when the five shillings of the Rein-deer repository reached home along with him. It was the most likely, when he was at his utmost need, to stop with some beggar on the road who might seem to him even more destitute than himself. this only. The money gone,-often, for the naked shivering wretch, had he slipped off a portion of the scanty clothes he wore, to patch a misery he could not otherwise relieve. To one starving creature with five crying children, he gave at

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1747.

Et. 19.

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one time the blankets off his bed, and crept himself into the Et. 19. ticking for shelter from the cold.*

It is not meant to insist on these things as examples of conduct. "Sensibility is not Benevolence; "t nor will this kind of agonised sympathy with distress, even when graced by an active self-denial of which there is here no proof, supply the solid duties or satisfactions of life. There are distresses, vast and remote, with which it behoves us still more to sympathise than with those, less really terrible, which only more attract us by intruding on our senses; and the conscience is too apt to discharge itself of the greater duty by instant and easy attention to the less. Let me observe also, that, in the case of a man dependent on others, the title to such enjoyment as such largeness and looseness of sympathy involves, has very obvious and controlling limits. So much it is right to interpose when anecdotes of this description are told. To Goldsmith, all the circumstances considered, they are really very creditable; and it is well to recollect them when the "neglected opportunities" of his

* Mr. Mills, Goldsmith's relative and fellow student, is the authority for this anecdote. He occasionally furnished Oliver, it is said, with small supplies, and gave him a breakfast now and then; for which latter purpose having gone to call him one morning, Goldsmith's voice from within his own room shouted out that he was a prisoner, and they must force the door to help him out. Mills did this, and found him so fastened in the ticking of the bed, into which he had taken shelter from the cold, that he could not escape unassisted. Late on the previous winter night, unable otherwise to relieve a woman and her five children who seemed all perishing with cold, he had brought out his blankets to the college-gate and given them to her. Prior, i. 95, 96.

"Nay, by making us tremblingly alive to trifling misfortunes, it frequently "precludes it, and induces effeminate and cowardly selfishness. Our own sorrows, "like the princes of hell in Milton's Pandæmonium, sit enthroned bulky and vast: "while the miseries of our fellow-creatures dwindle into pigmy forms, and are "crowded, an innumerable multitude, into some dark corner of the heart. There is "one criterion, by which we may always distinguish benevolence from mere "sensibility. Benevolence impels to action, and is accompanied by self-denial.” Southey's Omniana.

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