"wouldst thou have, dear Doctor!" said Johnson, laughing at a squib in the St. James's Chronicle which had coupled himself and his friend as the pedant and his flatterer in Love's Labour's Lost, and at which poor Goldsmith was fretting and foaming; "who the 'plague is hurt with all this nonsense? and how is a man the 'worse, I wonder, in his health, purse, or character, for being "called Holofernes?" "How you may relish being called "Holofernes,” replied Goldsmith, "I do not know; but I do not "like at least to play Goodman Dull." Much against his will it was the part he was set down for from the first.

But were there not still the means, at the fire-side of his goodhearted father, of turning these childish rebuffs to something of a wholesome discipline? Alas! little; there was little of worldly wisdom in the home circle of the kind but simple preacher, to make a profit of this worldly experience. My father's education, says the man in black, and no one ever doubted who sat for the portrait, was above his fortune, and his generosity greater than "his education. . . . He told the story of the ivy-tree, and that was "laughed at; he repeated the jest of the two scholars and one "pair of breeches, and the company laughed at that; but the story “of Taffy in the sedan-chair was sure to set the table in a roar : "thus his pleasure increased in proportion to the pleasure he "gave; he loved all the world, and he fancied all the world "loved him. ... We were told that universal benevolence was what first cemented society; we were taught to consider all the "wants of mankind as our own; to regard the human face divine "with affection and esteem; he wound us up to be mere machines "of pity, and rendered us incapable of withstanding the slightest "impulse made either by real or fictitious distress: in a word, we were perfectly instructed in the art of giving away thousands, "before we were taught the more necessary qualifications of getting "a farthing."

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Acquisitions highly primitive, and supporting what seems to have been the common fame of the Goldsmith race. "The Goldsmiths "were always a strange family," confessed three different branches of them, in as many different quarters of Ireland, when inquiries were made by a recent biographer of the poet. "They rarely "acted like other people: their hearts were always in the right "place, but their heads seemed to be doing anything but what

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they ought." In opinions or confessions of this kind, however, the heart's right place is perhaps not so well discriminated as it might be, or collision with the head would be oftener avoided. Worthy Doctor Strean expressed himself more correctly when Mr. Mangin was making his inquiries more than forty years ago. "Several of the family and name," he said, "live near Elphin,

"who, as well as the poet, were, and are, remarkable for their "worth, but of no cleverness in the common affairs of the world." If cleverness in the common affairs of the world is what the head should be always versed in, to be meditating what it ought, poor Oliver was a grave defaulter. We are all of us, it is said, more or less related to chaos; and with him, to the last, there was much that lay unredeemed from its void. Sturdy boys who work a gallant way through school, become the picked men of their colleges, grow up to thriving eminence in their several callings, and found respectable families, are seldom troubled with this relationship till chaos reclaims them altogether, and they die and are forgotten. All men have their advantages, and that is theirs. But it shows too great a pride in what they have, to think the whole world should be under pains and penalties to possess it too; and to set up so many doleful lamentations over this poor, weak, confused, erratic, Goldsmith nature. Their tone will not be taken here, the writer having no pretension to its moral dignity. Consideration will be had for the harsh lessons this boy so early and bitterly encountered; it will not be forgotten that feeling, not always rightly guided or controlled, but sometimes in a large excess, must almost of necessity be his who has it in charge to dispense largely, variously, and freely to others; and in the endeavour to show that the heart of Oliver Goldsmith was indeed rightly placed, it may perhaps appear that his head also profited by so good an example.

1739. Et. 11.

At the age of eleven he was removed from Mr. Griffin's, and put to a school of repute at Athlone, about five miles from his father's house, and kept by a reverend Mr. Campbell. At about the same time his brother Henry went as a pensioner to Dublin University, and it was resolved that in due course Oliver should follow him: a determination, his sister told Dr. Percy, which had replaced that of putting him to a common trade, on those evidences of a certain liveliness of talent which had broken out at uncle John's being discussed among his relatives and friends. He remained at Athlone two years; and, when Mr. Campbell's illhealth obliged him to resign his charge, was removed to the

1741.

school of Edgeworthstown, kept by the reverend Patrick Et. 13. Hughes. Here he stayed more than three years, and was long remembered by the school acquaintance he formed; among whom were Mr. Beatty, Mr. Nugent, Mr. Roach, and 1743. Mr. Daly, to whom we are indebted for some traits of that Et. 15. early time. They recollected Mr. Hughes's special kindness to him, and "thinking well" of him, as matters not then to be accounted for. The good master, it appeared, had been Charles Goldsmith's friend. They dwelt upon his ugliness and awkward

manners; they professed to recount even the studies he liked or disliked (Ovid and Horace were welcome to him, he hated Cicero, Livy was his delight, and Tacitus opened him new sources of pleasure); they described his temper as ultra-sensitive, but added that though quick to take offence, he was more feverishly ready to forgive. They also said, that though at first diffident and backward in the extreme, he mustered sufficient boldness in time to take even a leader's place in the boyish sports, and particularly at fives or ballplaying. Whenever an exploit was proposed or a trick was going forward, "Noll Goldsmith" was certain to be in it; an actor or a victim.

Of his holidays, Ballymahon was the central attraction; and here too recollection was vivid and busy, as soon as his name grew famous. An old man who directed the sports of the place, and kept the ball-court in those days, long subsisted on his stories of "Master Noll." The narrative master-piece of this ancient Jack Fitzsimmons related to the depredation of the orchard of Tirlicken, by the youth and his companions. Fitzsimmons also vouched to the reverend John Graham for the entire truth of the adventure so currently and confidently told by his Irish acquaintance, which offers an agreeable relief to the excess of diffidence heretofore noted in him, and on which, if true, the leading incident of She Stoops to Conquer was founded.

1744. Æt. 16.

At the close of his last holidays, then a lad of nearly seventeen, he left home for Edgeworthstown, mounted on a borrowed hack which a friend was to restore to Lissoy, and with store of unaccustomed wealth, a guinea, in his pocket. The delicious taste of independence beguiled him to a loitering, lingering, pleasant enjoyment of the journey; and, instead of finding himself under Mr. Hughes's roof at nightfall, night fell upon him some two or three miles out of the direct road, in the middle of the streets of Ardagh. But nothing could disconcert the owner of the guinea, who, with a lofty, confident air, inquired of a person passing the way to the town's best house of entertainment. The man addressed was the wag of Ardagh, a humorous fencingmaster, Mr. Cornelius Kelly, and the schoolboy swagger was irresistible provocation to a jest. Submissively he turned back with horse and rider till they came within a pace or two of the great Squire Featherston's, to which he respectfully pointed as the "best house" of Ardagh. Oliver rang at the gate, gave his beast in charge with authoritative rigour, and was shown, as a supposed expected guest, into the comfortable parlour of the squire. Those were days when Irish inn-keepers and Irish squires more nearly approximated than now; and Mr. Featherston, unlike the excellent but explosive Mr. Hardcastle, is said to

Oliver had a supper

have seen the mistake and humoured it. which gave him so much satisfaction, that, he ordered a bottle of wine to follow; and the attentive landlord was not only forced to drink with him, but, with a like familiar condescension, the wife and pretty daughter were invited to the supper-room. Going to bed, he stopped to give special instructions for a hot cake to breakfast; and it was not till he had dispatched this latter meal, and was looking at his guinea with pathetic aspect of farewell, that the truth was told him by the good-natured squire. The late Sir Thomas Featherston, grandson to the supposed inn-keeper, had faith in the adventure; and told Mr. Graham that as his grandfather and Charles Goldsmith had been college acquaintance, it might the better be accounted for.

It is certainly, if true, the earliest known instance of the disposition to swagger with a grand air which afterwards displayed itself in other forms, and strutted about in clothes rather noted for fineness than fitness.

1745.

BUT the school-days of Oliver Goldsmith are now to close. Within the last year there had been some changes at Lissoy, which not a little affected the family fortunes. Catherine, the elder Et. 17. sister, had privately married a Mr. Daniel Hodson, “the

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son of a gentleman of good property, residing at St. John's, near "Athlone." The young man was at the time availing himself of Henry Goldsmith's services as private tutor; Henry having obtained a scholarship two years before, and now assisting the family resources with such employment of his college distinction. good Charles Goldsmith was greatly indignant at the marriage, and on reproaches from the elder Hodson "made a sacrifice detrimental "to the interests of his family." He entered into a legal engagement, still registered in the Dublin Four Courts, and bearing date the 7th of September, 1744, "to pay to Daniel Hodson, Esq., "of St. John's, Roscommon, £400 as the marriage portion of his daughter Catherine, then the wife of the said Daniel Hodson." But it could not be effected without sacrifice of his tithes and rented land; and it was a sacrifice, as it seems to me, made in a spirit of very simple and very false pride. The writer who discovered this marriage settlement attributes it to "the highest sense

"of honour;" but it must surely be doubted if an act which, to elevate the pretensions of one child, and adapt them to those of the man she had married, inflicted beggary on the rest, should be so referred to. Oliver was the first to taste its bitterness. It was announced to him that he could not go to college as Henry had gone, a pensioner; but must consent to enter it, a sizar.

The first thing exacted of a sizar, in those days, was to give proof of classical attainments. He was to show himself, to a certain reasonable extent, a good scholar; in return for which, being clad in a black gown of coarse stuff without sleeves, he was marked with the servant's badge of a red cap, and put to the servant's offices of sweeping courts in the morning, carrying up dishes from the kitchen to the fellows' dining-table in the afternoon, and waiting in the hall till the fellows had dined. This, for which commons, teaching, and chambers, were on the other hand greatly reduced, is called by one of Goldsmith's biographers "one of "those judicious and considerate arrangements of the founders of "such institutions, that gives to the less opulent the opportunity of "cultivating learning at a trifling expense;" but it is called by Goldsmith himself, in his Enquiry into the Present State of Polite Learning (and Johnson himself condemns the practice not less severely, though as pompously Sir John Hawkins supports it), a "contradiction" suggested by motives of pride, and a passion which he thinks absurd, "that men should be at once "learning the liberal arts, and at the same time treated as slaves; "at once studying freedom and practising servitude."

To this contradiction-he is now himself doomed ; and that which to a stronger judgment and more resolute purpose might have prompted only the struggle that triumphs over the meanest circumstance, to him proved the hardest lesson yet in his life's hard school. He resisted with all his strength; little less than a whole year, it is said, obstinately resisted, the new contempts and loss of worldly consideration thus bitterly set before him. He would rather have gone to the trade chalked out for him as his rough alternative,-when uncle Contarine interfered.

This was an excellent man; and with some means, though very far from considerable, to do justice to his kindly impulses. In youth he had been the college companion of Bishop Berkeley, and was worthy to have had so divine a friend. He too was a clergyman, and held the living of Kilmore near Carrick-on-Shannon, which he afterwards changed to that of Oran near Roscommon; where he built the house of Emblemore, changed to that of Tempe by its subsequent possessor, Mr. Edward Mills, Goldsmith's relative and contemporary. Mr. Contarine had married Charles Goldsmith's sister (who died at about this date, leaving one child),