by gambling and what not, and had to return with real shame and contrition. He was forgiven, again provided with some outfit of money, and again sent off— not, however, this time to London to study law; but to Edinburgh, to qualify himself for the medical profession. And this time Ireland and the circle of Irish relatives did get rid of their troublesome Oliver-rid of him for ever. He was but four-and-twenty years of age, and he lived twenty years longer; but he never again saw Ireland, or the face of any one of his family, save when, some five years afterwards, his younger brother Charles, a lad of twenty, knocked at the door of the wretched London garret in which he then was, and came in ruefully to spend a day or two with him on his way to Jamaica. All through Oliver's future life, however, there was a warm corner in his heart for recollections of his native Ireland, and those he had left there--his mother, his brother Henry, Uncle Contarine, and the rest. He would think of them often till the tears came; he never quite ceased to correspond with them; and he had a cherished dream of revisiting them all some day, and again resting his eyes on dear Lissoy and the green landscape round it, "the most pleasing horizon in Nature." Ere the dream could be accomplished, the mother, Uncle Contarine, and brother Henry were all dead, and it was no longer worth while.

Goldsmith as a medical student in Edinburgh might be a good theme for a little semi-historical novel to any one who chose to write a variation of some of the chapters of Guy Mannering, twining the quaint traditions and queer social habits of the picturesque old Scottish capital, in the middle of the eighteenth century, round the figure of the humorous Irish lad, of subsequent celebrity, who had come into the midst of them. He was there for about eighteen months, or from the autumn of 1752 to the beginning of 1754. He was boarded and lodged, no doubt, high up some stair in one of the unsavoury old courts, going off from the High Street, that still amaze the stranger in Edinburgh. His letters do not tell the exact spot-the address "Student in Physic, in Edinburgh," being enough to ensure that returnletters would reach him at the University; but he gives a satirical description in one of them of his landlady and her economical style of cookery. There were other ¦ Irish students of medicine in the town besides himself; for the Edinburgh School of Medicine was then famous throughout the world and drew students from all countries. Much of this fame depended on the great reputation of Dr. Alexander Monro, Professor of Anatomy-the first of three Alexander Monros (grandfather, father, and son) who held the same Professorship in succession from 1720 to 1846. The other medical Professors were Dr. Charles Alston (Botany and Materia Medica), Robert Whytt (Institutes of Medicine), Dr. John Rutherford (Practice of Physic), Dr. Andrew Plummer (Chemistry), and Dr. Robert Smith (Midwifery). There is proof hat Goldsmith, during the two sessions of his stay in Edinburgh, attended all the medical classes, or all but the last. Of most of the Professors he did not think ighly, but he was enthusiastic in praise of Monro. "This man," he writes, "has rought the science he teaches to as much perfection as it is capable of; 'tis he, I nay venture to say, that draws hither such a number of students from most parts of

the world, even from Russia." That Goldsmith, while thus attending Monro's lectures, really took some interest in medical studies generally, is proved by the fact that he was a member of the "Medical Society"—an association of the young hopes of the profession, for medical debate and dissertation, which still exists in Edinburgh in high repute. His admission into this society is entered in its books under the date Jan. 13, 1753. The future great chemist, Dr. Joseph Black, was one of Goldsmith's fellow-students at Edinburgh, and remembered him well; and other fellow-students with him, afterwards more or less known, were Dr. William Farr, Dr. Joseph Fenn Sleigh, and Lauchlan Macleane, his former co-mate at Trinity College, Dublin, and now also thinking of medicine as a profession. But, as may be supposed, it was not all medical study and preparation for the profession with Goldy in Edinburgh. We hear of him, naturally enough, as gathering the young Irishmen of the University about him, and leading in their suppers and their songs. He must have got somehow also into what was then the more select and stately society of the Scottish metropolis; for there is a letter of his to a friend in Ireland giving an amusing description of the fashionable Edinburgh balls and assemblies-the death like solemnity of the dancers of both sexes, the leanness and high cheek-bones of the men, and the ravishing effect of the Scottish dialect when spoken by a Scottish belle. "For instance, teach one of your young ladies to pronounce 'Whoar wull I gong? with a becoming widening of the mouth, and I'll lay my life she'll wound every hearer." There is something also about some brief and unsuccessful connexion of his, or proposal of connexion, in some capacity, with the household of the Duke of Hamilton; and he had leisure for at least one walking-tour into some part of the Scottish Highlands. Very probably, by some exertions of his own, in teaching or the like, he helped to pay his expenses in Edinburgh, though obliged to draw now and then on Uncle Contarine for 67. or 47. His last draft on the excellent man was late in the winter of 1753. "As I shall not have another opportunity of receiving money from your bounty," he writes to Uncle Contarine about that date, "so I have drawn for the last sum that I hope I shall ever trouble you for; 'tis 207. And now, dear Sir, let me here acknowledge":—what is acknowledged may be easily guessedeternal sense of obligation to the good uncle. The 20l. were wanted, as he explains in the same letter, to carry him to the Continent, for the completion of his medical, education. "I have seen all that this country can exhibit in the medical way, and therefore intend to visit Paris, where the great M. Farhein, Petit, and Du Hammel de Monceau, instruct their pupils in all the branches of medicine.” That the lectures in Paris were in French, which he understood perfectly, and not in Latin, as the lectures at most other foreign Universities were, would, he hinted, be of great advantage to him; and this was the reason for his determining on Paris, rather than on Leyden, which he had also been thinking of on account of its "great professor," Albinus. The fact is, it was restlessness, restlessness. He had always had a desire to travel. and "the great M. Farhein" and "the great Albinus" were convenient as an

excuse.

Of course, as it was Paris that Goldsmith wanted to go to, it was at Leyden that

The arrived. He explains, rather confusedly, how this occurred, in a letter to his uncle from Leyden, in April or May 1754, in which he draws a humorous contrast between the Hollanders he was now among and the Scotch he had just left. "Scotland and this country bear the highest contrast.

There hills and rocks

There you might see a

ntercept every prospect; here 'tis all a continued plain. well-dressed duchess issuing from a dirty close, and here a dirty Dutchman nhabiting a palace." The "great Albinus," it would appear, had dwindled in Goldsmith's view on nearer inspection; for he goes on to say, "Physic is by no (means taught so well here as in Edinburgh; and in Leyden there are but four British students, owing to all necessaries being so extremely dear, and the professors so very lazy, the chemical professor excepted." With this chemical professor, named Gaubius, he formed some real acquaintance. But, though he remained about en months in Leyden, and learnt something there, it was only to set out from that own on a strange roving tour through the Continent. The notion of the possibility of such a tour to one without finances appears to have been put into his head by accident. Just before his arrival in Leyden there had died in that town the famous Danish humorist and miscellaneous author, Baron Holberg (1684-1754), and there seems to have been much talk in Leyden circles about this remarkable man, he reputed creator of modern Danish literature, and especially about the hardships and adventures of his early life. A Norwegian by birth, he had come, after a boyhood of great privation, to Copenhagen, and had struggled on there in singular vays. "But his ambition," as Goldsmith himself tells us, was not to be restrained, -r his thirst of knowledge satisfied, till he had seen the world. Without money, ecommendations, or friends, he undertook to set out upon his travels and make the our of Europe on foot. A good voice and a trifling skill in music were the only nances he had to support an undertaking so extensive; so he travelled by day, nd at night sang at the doors of peasants' houses, to get himself a lodging." With reat admiration Goldsmith goes on to tell what countries young Holberg travelled rough, and how at length, returning to Copenhagen, he became popular as an thor, was honoured with a title and enriched by the king, "so that a life begun contempt and penury ended in opulence and esteem." What Holberg had done oldsmith resolved to do; and the description he gives of Holberg's tour and his eans of subsistence during it is almost an exact description of his own tour and its ifts. Leaving Leyden in February 1755, he contrived, we cannot tell how, to sit Louvain, Antwerp, Brussels, and Maestricht, and other towns of Flanders, maining some little while in each. Then, passing into France, he seems to have ted his way through the provincial villages of that country, much as Holberg had ne, greatly charmed with the gay and simple sociability of the poor French peasants, d making himself at home among them with Irish ease. Reaching Paris, he mained there some time, attending the chemical lectures of M. Rouelle, and had e honour of seeing Voltaire, and listening to a splendid conversation in which the eat Frenchman, then past his sixtieth year, took the chief part. It was an argunt about England and the English, in which Voltaire, after being long silent,

burst into a magnificent defence of them against Diderot and Fontenelle, "his meagre face" gathering beauty as he spoke, "his eye beaming with unusual brightness," and "strokes of the finest raillery falling from him thick and fast." S Goldsmith afterwards described the interview, the scene of which he certainly make to have been Paris, though Mr. Forster thinks this a mistake, and that it must have been in Switzerland. Through Switzerland, at all events, with a touch of Germany on the way, Goldsmith did go, visiting Geneva, Basle, and Berne, and making footexcursions among the hills and valleys. Then, crossing the Alps, he descende into Italy by Piedmont and went to Florence, Verona, Mantua, Milan, Venice, and Padua; at which last city, on account of the reputation of its medical school, h remained some time. In Italy, he gives us incidentally to understand, his fluteplaying stood him in less stead than in France, every peasant in Italy being a better. musician than himself; but he had another resource in the old custom of phile. sophical disputations at universities and convents, followed by dinner, a night, lodging, and a small gratuity to the successful disputant. But, indeed, the mode Goldsmith's existence during his extraordinary tour is a mystery. Letters he ha sent to Ireland once or twice for remittances appear to have brought no reply. borrowings from Irish friends, met casually in Paris or elsewhere, may have helped; gambling, in which Goldsmith always did a little, is mentioned as probably helping too; and once or twice he seems to have hooked himself on to somebody, travelling like himself, who did not object to a companion. There is a dim tradition that be had committed to him in Switzerland the charge of a young gentleman, the son of: wealthy London pawnbroker, who had been sent abroad for mental improvement. and that the young gentleman, preferring cash to the mental improvement he was getting, cut the connexion rather suddenly. Back through France, at any rate.' Goldy seems to have made his return journey quite alone, fluting gaily as he ha come. On the 1st of February, 1756, he landed at Dover, after an absence of nearl two years in all. Having, it is believed, not a farthing in his pockets, it took him about a fortnight, and some comic singing in country barns, to pull himself on t London. He was twenty-seven years and three months old when he first set his foot in the London streets, and he was to be a Londoner and nothing else al the rest of his life.

Ah! London, London! thou breaker of hearts from of old, thou wrecker o generations of lives, thou insatiable maw of the bones and brains of men, vas over thy flat acres, then as now, spread thy fabric of brick and stone, of squares and alleys and streets, with rising steeples among them and iron-railed churchyards-divided, then as now, by the flowing and ebbing river, and on eithe side the river the same roar of traffic and wheels, and the same rush and skur of myriads, all competing for existence, and some for its prizes and sweets Didst thou note, thou half-brutal London of that day, a certain few of thos myriads, on either bank of the river, whose occupation seemed to be the mos foolish and peculiar of any—a constant coming down to the river with lighted matches, papers, tapers, torches, oil-pots, and all sorts of combustibles, in their

hands, and trying to set the moving tide on fire? Not one of them succeeded; and the Thames flows yet an unburnt, and apparently unburnable, river, hissing at the biggest torch that can be flung into it. But the attempt to set it on fire has been a traditional employment from time immemorial, and so fascinating that Englishmen born far away from London, and even Scotchmen and Irishmen, have left their own native, and probably more combustible, streams, and set themselves down, each with his new trick for inflaming water, on the banks of this large one. Poor fellows! it does the Thames no harm, and it amuses them! Strange, however, that it is precisely those Londoners, native or naturalized, who have been engaged in this hopeless occupation, that the world cares to remember afterwards! All their contemporary myriads, otherwise occupied, are forgotten; and the very history of London is a record of the successive groups of men that have laboured at setting fire to the Thames. Well, thou big halfbrutal London of February 1756, here is another young fellow, footsore from Dover, on his return from a wild continental tour, who enters thee on thy south side, and is staring about him confusedly. He has himself no notion in the world what he is to do; but, from his looks, one may prophesy that he will have to attach himself to your existing group of Thames-kindlers. He seems fit for nothing else. True, he has a diploma of M.B. from some foreign University (whether Leyden, Louvain, or Padua, no one knows), and may practise medicine, and even call himself, by courtesy, "Dr." Goldsmith. But who would trust such a short, mean-visaged, odd-looking fellow, to bleed him or prescribe for him? Clearly, whatever he may try, he can be nothing else eventually than one of the lucifer-match brigade. Meanwhile receive him as gently as you can! He is one of the best-hearted creatures that ever came out of Ireland, without a bit of harm in him, and indeed a great deal wiser and cleverer than he looks.

A little information will be more welcome than farther exclamation or the overworking of a hackneyed image.-Well, the population of London in 1756 was about 700,000. The reign of George II., which had already extended over nearly thirty years, was approaching its close. In home-politics what was chiefly interesting was the persistence in office of the Duke of Newcastle's unpopular ministry-opposed, however, by Pitt (afterwards Lord Chatham), and soon to give way before the genius of that statesman, and to be succeeded by that blaze of Pitt's ascendancy which makes the last years of George II. so brilliant a period in British annals. For Britain and Frederick the Great of Prussia were already on an understanding with each other, and the Seven Years' War was beginning. Not till 1757, indeed, when Pitt became Prime Minister, did the alliance begin to promise its splendid results-Clive's conquests in India, Wolfe's in America, &c. Just at present, while Newcastle was in power, things had a blacker look. Byng's blundering at Minorca, the all but certain loss of Hanover, and the like-these were the topics for the 700,000 Londoners; unless they chose to talk rather of such matters nearer home, as the building of the new chapel for Whitefield in Tottenham Court Road, or the opening of the Foundling Hospital, or the proposed taking down of the old