THE AUTHOR TO THE READER.

"It seems rational to hope," says Johnson in the Life of Savage, "that minds qualified for great attainments should first "endeavour their own benefit; and that they who are most "able to teach others the way to happiness, should with most "certainty follow it themselves: but this expectation, however "plausible, has been very frequently disappointed." Perhaps not so frequently as the earnest biographer imagined. Much depends on what we look to for our benefit, much on what we follow as the way to happiness. It may not be for the one, and may have led us far out of the way of the other, that we had acted on the world's estimate of wordly success, and to that directed our endeavour. So might we ourselves have blocked up the path, which it was our hope to have pointed out to others; and in the straits of a selfish profit, made wreck of great attainments.

OLIVER GOLDSMITH, whose life and adventures should be known to all who know his writings, must be held to have succeeded in nothing that his friends would have had him succeed in. He was intended for a clergyman, and was rejected when he applied for orders; he practised as a physician, and never made what would have paid for a degree; what he was not asked or expected to do, was to write, but he wrote

B

and paid the penalty. His existence was a continued privation. The days were few, in which he had resources for the night, or dared to look forward to the morrow. There was not any miserable want, in the long and sordid catalogue, which in its turn and in all its bitterness he did not feel. He had shared the experience of those to whom he makes affecting reference in his Animated Nature, "people who die really of hunger, in common language of a broken heart;" and when he succeeded at the last, success was but a feeble sunshine on a rapidly approaching decay, which was to lead him, by its flickering and uncertain light, to an early grave.

Self-benefit seems out of the question here, and the way to happiness is indeed distant from this. But if we look a little closer, we shall see that he has passed through it all with a child-like purity of heart unsullied. Much of the misery vanishes when that is known; and when it is remembered, too, that in spite of it the Vicar of Wakefield was written, nay that without it, in all human probability, a book so delightful and wise could not have been written. Fifty-six years after its author's death, the greatest of Germans recounted to a friend how much he had been indebted to the celebrated Irishman. 'It is not to be described," wrote Goethe to Zelter, in 1830, 'the effect that Goldsmith's Vicar had upon me, just at the "critical moment of mental development. That lofty and "benevolent irony, that fair and indulgent view of all infirmities "and faults, that meekness under all calamities, that equanimity "under all changes and chances, and the whole train of kindred "virtues, whatever names they bear, proved my best education; "and in the end," he added with sound philosophy, "these are "the thoughts and feelings which have reclaimed us from all "the errors of life."

And why were they so enforced in that charming book, but because the writer had undergone them all; because they had reclaimed himself, not from the world's errors only, but also

from its suffering and care; and because his own life and adventures had been the same chequered and beautiful romance of the triumph of good over evil.

Though what is called worldly success, then, was not attained by Goldsmith, it may be that the way to happiness was yet not missed altogether. The sincere and sad biographer of Savage might have profited by the example. His own benefit he had not successfully "endeavoured," when the gloom of his early life embittered life to the last, and the trouble he had endured was made excuse for a sorrowful philosophy, and for manners that were an outrage to the kindness of his heart. What had fallen to Johnson's lot, fell not less heavily to Goldsmith's. Of the calamities to which

the literary life was then exposed,

"Toil, envy, want, the patron, and the gaol,"

none were spared to the subject of these pages. But they found, and left him, gentle and unspoiled: and though the discipline that thus taught him charity entailed some social disadvantage, by unfeigned sincerity and simplicity of heart he diffused every social enjoyment. When his conduct least agreed with his writings, these characteristics did not fail him. What he gained, was gain to others; what he lost, concerned only himself; he suffered pain, but never inflicted it; and it is amazing to think how small an amount of mere insensibility to other people's opinions would have exalted Doctor Goldsmith's position in the literary circles of his day. He lost caste because he could not acquire it, and could as little assume the habit of indifference, as trade upon the gravity of the repute he had won. "Admirers in a room," said Northcote, repeating what had been told him by Reynolds, "whom his entrance had struck with awe, "might be seen riding out upon his back." It was hard, he said himself to Sir Joshua, that fame and its dignities should intercept people's liking and fondness; and for his love of the

latter, no doubt he forfeited not a little of the former. "He is "an inspired idiot," cried Walpole. "He does not know the “difference of a turkey from a goose," said Cumberland. “Sir,” shouted Johnson," he knows nothing, he has made up his mind "about nothing." Few cared to think or speak of him but as little Goldy, honest Goldy; and every one laughed at him for the oddity of his blunders, and the awkwardness of his

manners.

But I invite the reader to his life and adventures, and the times in which they were cast. No uninstructive explanation of all this may possibly await us there, if together we review the scene, and move among its actors as they play their parts.