Oliver Goldsmith.

Were speculation here admissible, it might be interesting to speculate what would have been the position in literature of Oliver Goldsmith (1728-74) if we had known as little of his life as we are supposed to know of the life of Shakespeare. His position in letters is undoubtedly high. As an essayist, he ranks with the best; as a poet, he produced some of the most enduring work of his generation; he wrote a novel of which the reputation is cosmopolitan; and, of his two plays, one is not only a masterpiece, but a masterpiece which modern managers still find a charm to conjure with. Had we known no more of him than this, we might have invested him with almost any characteristics and qualities. But thanks to the biographies of Sir James Prior (1837), of John Forster (1848), of Washington Irving (1849), and of others, his life and habits have been made as familiar as those of his contemporary, Johnson. He has been exhibited as he was a fallible, fussy, sensitive, vain, strutting little man, fond of fine clothes, not blessed with great advantages either in person or education, but saved from his initial insignificance by his varied experiences, his tender humanity, his lovableness, and his genius. On the whole, what is recorded of his chequered career has rather increased than diminished our interest in his work.

The son of a poor curate of the Established Church in Ireland, Goldsmith was born at Pallas or Pallasmore in the county of Longford, a village not far from Ballymahon. His birthplace was a tumble-down, fairy-haunted farmhouse overlooking the pleasant river Inny, and he was the fifth of seven children, three of whom were girls. About two years after he was born, his father, by the death of an uncle, became rector of Kilkenny West, and transferred his residence to the hamlet of Lissoy in Westmeath, on the right of the road from Ballymahon to Athlone. This was the scene of Oliver's childhood, and of those genial hospitalities which he sketched many years later when describing, in the Citizen of the World, the humours of the 'Man in Black.'

His first preceptress was a relative named Elizabeth Delap, who reported him to be tractable but stupid. From her he passed to the village schoolmaster, Thomas Byrne, an old soldier of Queen Anne, who inflamed his pupil's imagination with stories of Peterborough and legends of banshees and Rapparees, a course of education which was further stimulated by the songs of blind harpers and the ballads of his father's dairymaid, Peggy Golden, who must have been as musical as Walton's Maudlin. From Byrne he passed to school at Elphin, and subsequently to Athlone and Edgeworthstown, at which last place he seems to have encountered, in the Rev. Patrick Hughes, a master who understood his idiosyncrasies. But his schooldays were not brilliant; and, save for

the incident which afterwards formed the germ of his comedy of She Stoops to Conquer, uneventful. Swaggering to school on a borrowed hack, he was led by a wag into mistaking the house of a gentleman at Ardagh for an inn, and by the kindness of the owner, Mr Featherston, was not allowed to discover his mistake until the next morning, thus completely vindicating, by a youthful experience, the probability of an expedient to which some of the critics of his later play objected as far-fetched.

By this time he was fifteen, ungainly, deeply scarred with the smallpox, of uncertain ability, but extremely active and athletic. His elder brother, Henry, had obtained a scholarship at Trinity College, Dublin; and to Trinity College, in June 1744, went Oliver Goldsmith, much against his will, as a 'sizar.' With a schoolfellow named Beatty, he was housed in the garrets of No. 35 in a range of buildings which has long since disappeared. His college career was not very worshipful. His tutor, Theaker Wilder (whose brutality has been perhaps exaggerated), did not understand him; nor did Oliver understand mathematics, which was Wilder's specialty. He lounged (like Johnson at Oxford) about the college-gate; played the flute; got involved in a college row; and finally, devoting the proceeds of a small exhibition to a mixed entertainment in his rooms, was pounced upon by his scandalised tutor, who summarily dispersed the guests, knocking down the host. Thereupon Oliver promptly sold his books and ran away, bound for America, a goal which, like many others, he never reached. After coming perilously close to starvation, he was enticed back to college by his brother Henry. His university life henceforth was barren of incident. There is a pleasant tradition that he wrote songs for the Dublin ballad-singers, and then stole out at night to hear them sung; but beyond this there is little to record. On the 27th of February 1749 he took his B.A. and left the college, in the library of which is still preserved one of the old window panes of No. 35 upon which he had scratched an autograph and a date.

His father being dead and his eldest sister married, his mother had retired to a little cottage at Ballymahon. She had other children, and it was obviously out of her power to support her erratic son. In this juncture his family, including a benevolent uncle Contarine, who had already befriended him, urged Oliver to take orders, a course which he disliked. He accordingly qualified, as persons generally qualify for things they dislike, by neglecting to qualify at all. He lived pleasantly from house to house, fished and otter-hunted in the Inny, played the flute with his pretty cousin, Jane Contarine, and took the chair (like his own Tony Lumpkin later) at tavern free-and-easys. When, eventually, he presented himself before the Bishop of Elphin for ordination, he is alleged to

have accentuated his incompetence by making his appearance in scarlet breeches. Needless to say, he was rejected. Then his uncle Contarine found him a tutorship. But when, by this, he had accumulated about thirty pounds, he quitted home on a good horse, to return speedily on a bad one, minus his savings, but with a romantic and probably romanced) account of his moving adventures. His long-suffering uncle now resolved to equip him for the law, and despatched him to the Temple. But he got no farther than Dublin, where he played away his means to a sharper, and was obliged to return home once more. After another interval he started for Edinburgh to study medicine, and, strange to say, arrived at his destination. This was in 1752. At Edinburgh there are more records of his fine clothes and convivial talents than of his studies, until, in 1754, he transferred these latter to Leyden, his journey to which place was not without further accidents. A year later, being again penniless, he left Leyden on a walking tour, travelling through France, Germany, Switzerland, and Italy, picking up a precarious existence by disputing at the foreign universities and by playing the flute. In this way he accumulated the impressions de voyage which he afterwards embodied in the Enquiry into Polite Learning, the Traveller, and the Vicar of Wakefield. When, ultimately, in February 1756, he landed at Dover, after a year's desultory wandering, he had nothing but a few halfpence in his pocket.

For the next three years his experiences were equally diversified. There is a legend that he was a strolling player; it is known that he was successively an apothecary's journeyman, a poor physician in the Bankside, Southwark (he had somewhere acquired a mysterious foreign diploma), a corrector of the press to Richardson, a dramatic author (unacted), and an usher in a Peckham academy. Here he fell in with Griffiths the bookseller, the editor and proprietor of the Monthly Review, into whose service, at the sign of the 'Dunciad,' he passed as a writer-of-all-work. Quarrelling shortly afterwards with his employer, he published, under the name of a college friend, James Willington, a translation of a book which had then just appeared at Rotterdam, the Memoirs of a Protestant, condemned to the Galleys of France, for his Religion-the Protestant being one Jean❘ Marteilhe of Bergerac. This appeared in February 1758, after which he seems to have returned to Peckham, pending a fresh attempt to obtain a footing in the medical profession. He was, as a matter of fact, appointed surgeon and physician to a factory at Coromandel. But the appointment came to nothing; and at the close of 1758 he was rejected at Surgeons' Hall as 'not qualified' for a hospital mate. At this time he was living at No. 12 in a tiny square off the Old Bailey known as Green Arbour Court, and now non-existent. Here, early in 1759, he was visited by Dr Percy, who found

him in a bare-walled room correcting the proofs of a fresh literary effort, a high-titled Enquiry into the Present State of Polite Learning in Europe. This was put forth anonymously in April, and was fairly well received. What was better, it brought its author other work. Before the close of the year he had commenced and concluded a volume of miscellaneous essays and verses entitled The Bee, and he was contributing to the Busy Body and the Lady's Magazine. These efforts attracted the attention of Newbery the bookseller and Smollett, both of whom invoked his assistance. He began contributing to Smollett's British Magazine, one of his earliest essays being the admirable 'Reverie at the Boar's Head Tavern in East Cheap;' while for Newbery's paper, the Public Ledger, on 24th January 1760 he wrote the first of the series of imaginary Chinese Letters afterwards collected under the general title of The Citizen of the World. For these last he had the precedent of Montesquieu's Lettres Persanes (1721); but it is not improbable that his immediate suggestion was derived from Horace Walpole's Letter from Xo Ho, a Chinese Philosopher at London, to his friend Lien Chi, at Peking (1757)-Lien Chi Altangi being one of Goldsmith's correspondents.

About the middle of 1760 his improved circumstances justified his moving into better quarters at 6 Wine Office Court, Fleet Street, where, in the following year, he was visited by Johnson. His story henceforth is mainly a record of hurried hack-work relieved by masterpieces. He edited the Lady's Magazine; he wrote Memoirs of Voltaire (1761), a History of Mecklenburgh (1762), a Life of Richard Nash (1762), a History of England (in letters-1764), and so forth. Among this heterogeneous mass come some of those efforts by which he retains his position in English Literature. His Citizen of the World appeared in 1762; and two years later, in December 1764, he published his first long poem, The Traveller; or, a Prospect of Society, a fragment of which he had forwarded to his brother Henry during his Continental exile. Six months later he issued a selection of his Essays (June 1765); and in March (1766) appeared the famous Vicar of Wakefield. How Johnson was summoned to the author, held in durance of his landlady for rent-how the manuscript of the novel was produced, and sold by the Doctor for sixty pounds-has often been told, and retold. Unluckily, considerable confusion has been imported into this picturesque and time-honoured incident by the discovery, in recent years, that Goldsmith had disposed of a third share in this very book, as early as October 1762, to Benjamin Collins, the Salisbury printer, who subsequently printed it. How this inconvenient fact is to be reconciled with the canonical tradition is not clear; at all events an explanation is not at present forthcoming. Another discovery, of equally recent date, is that this popular book,

at the outset, was by no means the success it has since proved to be. The fourth edition of 1770 started with a loss, and it took nine years more to reach a sixth edition. Such were the beginnings of a classic which, even now, in one form or another is reprinted annually.

With the publication of the Vicar of Wakefield Goldsmith's position as a writer was established. He had already won his reputation as an essayist. The Traveller was recognised as a memorable poem; and in

a

the days of Fielding, Smollett, Richardson, and Sterne, he had now succeeded in producing a novel which resembled the work of none of them except in the creation of permanent types. His name made him desirable as an editor, his charm of style attractive as compiler; and to obtain work was no longer difficult. Johnson had introduced him to his circle; he belonged to the Literary Club; and he was the friend of Reynolds and Burke. One branch of literature only he had left untried -the Stage-in which success, as now, meant for

early in 1770, he published his second didactic poem, The Deserted Village, in which, with greater finish and beauty of cadence, he repeated the triumph of the Traveller.

His remaining years-and they were not many -may be rapidly chronicled. Besides the compilations above mentioned, he prepared Lives of Parnell the poet and Bolingbroke. After these, in March 1773, was produced at Covent Garden his comedy of She Stoops to Conquer. More skil

tune; and fortune both his tastes and his habits rendered indispensable. In 1768, after considerable difficulty, he succeeded in producing at Covent Garden the comedy of The Good-Natur'd Man. It was a good, though not a very good, comedy. But it was a welcome change from the sentimental drama of the Kellys and Cumberlands of the period; and even its partial success brought him £400, independent of its sale in book form. It likewise justified his perseverance as a dramatic author. What it did not so manifestly justify was his immediate removal to chambers in the Temple, which he furnished elaborately with the money. The disappearance in this way of his funds threw him back upon the old book building;' and agreements for histories of Animated Nature, of England, of Rome, followed rapidly and significantly. Then,

ful in construction than its predecessor, happier in its contrasts of character, and bubbling over with kindly humour, it was a brilliant success. A year later, on Monday the 4th of April 1774, its author died at his chambers

in Brick Court, Middle Temple, of a nervous fever brought on by overwork and worry, and aggravated by his obstinate reliance on a popular nostrum. He was in his forty-sixth year, and buried on the 9th April in the burialground of the Temple Church, the triforium of which contains a modern tablet to his memory. In

was

1776 a monument, with a medallion by Nollekens and an epitaph by Johnson, which contains the famous 'Nullum quod tetigit non ornavit' (an echo, says Croker, of Fénelon on Cicero), was erected in the south transept of Westminster Abbey. A few days after his death was issued his unfinished poem of Retaliation, a sequence of epitaph-epigrams upon several of his friends; and two years later, with some minor pieces, followed The Haunch of Venison, a 'Poetical Epistle' to his friend and countryman Lord Clare, which is one of the brightest of his lighter efforts. In 1801 his Miscellaneous Works were collected in four volumes, and prefixed to these was an 'Introductory Memoir' by Bishop Percy and others, which constitutes the first source for his biography.

'Let not his frailties be remembered,' wrote Johnson to Langton; he was a very great man.'

Of this there can be no question. But in the 'fierce light' which his different biographers have turned upon the incidents of his career, his weaknesses have been thrown into undue prominence. It cannot be denied that he was self-important and consequential, little gifted with physical attractions, morbidly anxious to disguise his personal shortcomings. Improvident by temperament, and poor in his youth, when money came to him in middle life he was careless and extravagant. As a talker he did not shine, and it was his ill-fortune to be thrown into the company of those who excelled in conversation. But it is admitted

that he had 'swallow flights' of wit, which were the more admirable from their rarity. He was generous; he was sympathetic; he had the kindest heart in the world. And in all stories to his disadvantage, it is only fair to scrutinise the authority with attention. His success, coupled with his peculiarities, made him many enemies, and much of what tells to his discredit originated with those who either disliked or envied him.

In regard to his work, he undoubtedly-to use another phrase of Johnson-'flowered late.' He was past thirty before he had printed a line worth reading; and he lived but fifteen years longer. In those fifteen years, however, he was drawing freely upon the experiences he had obtained in the earlier period-those intellectual wanderjahre in which he had served and supplemented an undesigned apprenticeship to Letters. 'No man,' says John Forster truly, 'ever put so much of himself into his books as Goldsmith.' His recollections colour the Traveller and the

Deserted Village; they are scattered through the Essays and the Citizen of the World; they reappear dispersedly in the Vicar of Wakefield; they make the pretext of She Stoops to Conquer. He had employed his past so much, indeed, that it may be doubted whether he could have used it more.

The play that was to follow She Stoops was never written; the novel begun after the Vicar, if it ever existed, is said to have been unhopeful. But his positive legacy is of rare value. Two excellent didactic and descriptive poems, some admirable occasional verse, many essays of signal merit, a novel that is still praised, and a comedy that is still acted-these are no inconsiderable offering to that 'Mr Posterity' to whom he once tendered mocking dedication. And they are all animated by the same characteristics they reveal the same gentle and affectionate nature; display the same kindly humour, the same compassionate indulgence for poor humanity; and they are written in the same clear, graceful, and unaffected style.

The Traveller; or, a Prospect of Society.
Remote, unfriended, melancholy, slow,
Or by the lazy Scheldt or wandering Po;
Or onward, where the rude Carinthian boor
Against the houseless stranger shuts the door;

Or where Campania's plain forsaken lies,
A weary waste expanding to the skies;
Where'er I roam, whatever realms to see,
My heart untravelled fondly turns to thee;
Still to my brother turns, with ceaseless pain,
And drags at each remove a length'ning chain.
Eternal blessings crown my earliest friend,
And round his dwelling guardian saints attend;
Blest be that spot, where cheerful guests retire
To pause from toil, and trim their evening fire:
Blest that abode, where want and pain repair,
And every stranger finds a ready chair:
Blest be those feasts with simple plenty crowned,
Where all the ruddy family around
Laugh at the jest or pranks that never fail,
Or sigh with pity at some mournful tale :
Or press the bashful stranger to his food,
And learn the luxury of doing good..

But me, not destined such delights to share,
My prime of life in wandering spent and care,
Impelled, with steps unceasing, to pursue
Some fleeting good, that mocks me with the view;
That, like the circle bounding earth and skies,
Allures from far, yet, as I follow, flies;
My fortune leads to traverse realms alone,
And find no spot of all the world my own.

Even now, where Alpine solitudes ascend,
I sit me down a pensive hour to spend :
And placed on high above the storm's career,
Look downward where an hundred realms appear;
Lakes, forests, cities, plains, extending wide,
The pomp of kings, the shepherd's humbler pride.
When thus Creation's charms around combine,
Amidst the store should thankless pride repine?
Say, should the philosophic mind disdain
That good, which makes each humbler bosom vain?
Let school-taught pride dissemble all it can,
These little things are great to little man ;
And wiser he, whose sympathetic mind
Exults in all the good of all mankind.

Ye glittering towns, with wealth and splendour crowned,
Ye fields, where summer spreads profusion round ;
Ye lakes, whose vessels catch the busy gale;
Ye bending swains, that dress the flowery vale;
For me your tributary stores combine;
Creation's heir, the world, the world is mine!
As some lone miser, visiting his store,
Bends at his treasure, counts, recounts it o'er,
Hoards after hoards his rising raptures fill,
Yet still he sighs, for hoards are wanting still:
Thus to my breast alternate passions rise,
Pleased with each good that heaven to man supplies:
Yet oft a sigh prevails, and sorrows fall,
To see the hoard of human bliss so small;
And oft I wish amidst the scene, to find
Some spot to real happiness consigned,
Where my worn soul, each wandering hope at rest,
May gather bliss to see my fellows blest.

But where to find that happiest spot below,
Who can direct, when all pretend to know?
The shuddering tenant of the frigid zone
Boldly proclaims that happiest spot his own,
Extols the treasures of his stormy seas,
And his long nights of revelry and ease;
The naked negro, panting at the line,
Boasts of his golden sands and palmy wine,

Basks in the glare, or stems the tepid wave,
And thanks his Gods for all the good they gave.
Such is the patriot's boast, where'er we roam,
His first, best country ever is at home.
And yet, perhaps, if countries we compare,
And estimate the blessings which they share,
Though patriots flatter, still shall wisdom find
An equal portion dealt to all mankind,
As different good, by art or nature given,
To different nations makes their blessings even.
Nature, a mother kind alike to all,
Still grants her bliss at Labour's earnest call;
With food as well the peasant is supplied
On Idra's cliffs as Arno's shelvy side;
And though the rocky-crested summits frown,
These rocks, by custom, turn to beds of down.
From Art more various are the blessings sent;
Wealth, commerce, honour, liberty, content.
Yet these each other's power so strong contest,
That either seems destructive of the rest.
Where wealth and freedom reign contentment fails,
And honour sinks where commerce long prevails.
Hence every state to one loved blessing prone,
Conforms and models life to that alone.
Each to the favourite happiness attends,
And spurns the plan that aims at other ends;
Till carried to excess in each domain,
This favourite good begets peculiar pain.

But let us try these truths with closer eyes,
And trace them through the prospect as it lies:
Here for a while my proper cares resigned,
Here let me sit in sorrow for mankind;
Like yon neglected shrub at random cast,
That shades the steep, and sighs at every blast.
Far to the right where Apennine ascends,
Bright as the summer, Italy extends;
Its uplands sloping deck the mountain's side,
Woods over woods in gay theatric pride;

While oft some temple's mouldering tops between,
With venerable grandeur mark the scene.

Could Nature's bounty satisfy the breast,
The sons of Italy were surely blest.
Whatever fruits in different climes were found,
That proudly rise, or humbly court the ground;
Whatever blooms in torrid tracts appear,
Whose bright succession decks the varied year;
Whatever sweets salute the northern sky
With vernal lives that blossom but to die;
These here disporting own the kindred soil,
Nor ask luxuriance from the planter's toil;
While sea-born gales their gelid wings expand,
To winnow fragrance round the smiling land.
But small the bliss that sense alone bestows,
And sensual bliss is all the nation knows.
In florid beauty groves and fields appear,
Man seems the only growth that dwindles here.
Contrasted faults through all his manners reign:
Though poor, luxurious, though submissive, vain,
Though grave, yet trifling, zealous, yet untrue;
And even in penance planning sins anew.
All evils here contaminate the mind,
That opulence departed leaves behind;
For wealth was theirs, not far removed the date,
When commerce proudly flourished through the state;
At her command the palace learned to rise,
Again the long-fallen column sought the skies;

The canvas glowed beyond e'en Nature warm,
The pregnant quarry teemed with human form;
Till, more unsteady than the southern gale,
Commerce on other shores displayed her sail;
While nought remained of all that riches gave,
But towns unmanned, and lords without a slave;
And late the nation found with fruitless skill,
Its former strength was but plethoric ill.

Yet, still the loss of wealth is here supplied
By arts, the splendid wrecks of former pride;
From these the feeble heart and long-fallen mind
An easy compensation seem to find.
Here may be seen, in bloodless pomp arrayed,
The paste-board triumph and the cavalcade ;
Processions formed for piety and love,

A mistress or a saint in every grove.

By sports like these are all their cares beguiled,
The sports of children satisfy the child;
Each nobler aim, repressed by long control,
Now sinks at last, or feebly mans the soul;
While low delights, succeeding fast behind,
In happier meanness occupy the mind:

As in those domes where Cæsars once bore sway,
Defaced by time and tottering in decay,
There in the ruin, heedless of the dead,
The shelter-seeking peasant builds his shed;
And, wondering man could want the larger pile,
Exults, and owns his cottage with a smile.

My soul, turn from them; turn we to survey
Where rougher climes a nobler race display,
Where the bleak Swiss their stormy mansion tread,
And force a churlish soil for scanty bread;
No product here the barren hills afford,
But man and steel, the soldier and his sword;
No vernal blooms their torpid rocks array,
But winter lingering chills the lap of May;
No Zephyr fondly sues the mountain's breast,
But meteors glare, and stormy glooms invest.

Yet still, even here, content can spread a charm,
Redress the clime, and all its rage disarm.
Though poor the peasant's hut, his feasts though small,
He sees his little lot the lot of all;

Sees no contiguous palace rear its head
To shame the meanness of his humble shed;
No costly lord the sumptuous banquet deal,
To make him loathe his vegetable meal;
But calm, and bred in ignorance and toil,
Each wish contracting, fits him to the soil.
Cheerful at morn he wakes from short repose,
Breasts the keen air, and carols as he goes;
With patient angle trolls the finny deep,
Or drives his venturous ploughshare to the steep;
Or seeks the den where snow-tracks mark the way,
And drags the struggling savage into day.
At night returning, every labour sped,
He sits him down, the monarch of a shed;
Smiles by his cheerful fire, and round surveys
His children's looks, that brighten at the blaze;
While his loved partner, boastful of her hoard,
Displays her cleanly platter on the board:
And haply, too, some pilgrim, thither led,
With many a tale repays the nightly bed.

Thus every good his native wilds impart,
Imprints the patriot passion on his heart;
And e'en those ills that round his mansion rise,
Enhance the bliss his scanty fund supplies.