Æt. 8.

school experiences which too early and sadly teach the shy, illfavoured, backward boy, what tyrannies in the large as in 1736. that little world the strong have to inflict, and what sufferings the weak must be prepared to endure. But to the reverend Mr. Griffin's superior school of Elphin, in Roscommon, it was resolved to send him; and at the house of an uncle John, at Ballyoughter in the neighbourhood of Elphin, he was lodged and boarded. The knowledge of Ovid and Horace, introduced to him here, was the pleasantest as well as the least important, though it might be by far the most difficult, of what he had now to learn. It was the learning of bitter years, and not taught by the schoolmaster, but by the school-fellows, of this poor little, thick, palefaced, pock-marked boy. "He was considered by his contempo"raries and school-fellows, with whom I have often conversed on "the subject,” said Doctor Strean, who succeeded, on the death of Charles Goldsmith's curate and eldest son, to his pastoral duty and its munificent rewards, " as a stupid, heavy blockhead, little better “than a fool, whom every one made fun of.”

It was early to trample fun out of a child; and he bore marks of it to his dying day. It had not been his least qualification as game for laughter, that all confessed his nature to be kind and affectionate, and knew his temper to be cheerful and agreeable ; but feeling, as well as fun, he could hardly be expected to supply without intermission, and, precisely as in after years it was said of him that he had the most unaccountable alternations of gaiety and

Æt. 9.

gloom, and was subject to the most particular humours, 1737. even so his elder sister described his school-days to Doctor Percy, bishop of Dromore, when that divine and his friends were gathering materials for his biography. That he seemed to possess two natures, was the learned comment at once upon his childhood and his manhood. And there was sense in it; in so far as it represented that continued struggle, happily always unavailing, carried on against feelings which God had given him, by fears and misgivings he had to thank the world for.

"Why Noll!" exlaimed a visitor at uncle John's, you are "become a fright! When do you mean to get handsome "again?" Oliver moved in silence to the window. The speaker,

a thoughtless and notorious scapegrace of the Goldsmith family, repeated the question with a worse sneer: and "I mean to get better, sir, when you do!" was the boy's retort, which has delighted his biographers for its quickness of repartee. It was probably something more than smartness. Another example of precocious wit occurred also at uncle John's, when his nephew was still a mere child. There was company, one day, to a little dance; and the fiddler who happened to be engaged on the occa

sion, being a fiddler who reckoned himself a wit, received suddenly an Oliver for his Rowland which he had not come prepared for. During a pause between two country dances, the party had been greatly surprised by little Noll quickly jumping up and dancing a pas seul impromptu about the room, whereupon, seizing the opportunity of the lad's ungainly look and grotesque figure, the jocose fiddler promptly exclaimed Æsop! A burst of laughter rewarded him, which however was rapidly turned the other way by Noll stopping his hornpipe, looking round at his assailant, and giving forth, in audible voice and without hesitation, the couplet which was thought worth preserving as the first formal effort of his genius by Percy, Malone, Campbell, and the rest who compiled that biographical preface to the Miscellaneous Works on which the subsequent biographies have been founded, but who nevertheless appear to have missed the correct version of what they thought so clever.

Heralds, proclaim aloud! all saying,

See Esop dancing, and his Monkey playing.

1738.

Et. 10.

Yet these things may stand for more than quickness of repartee; for it is even possible that the secret might be found in them, of much that has been too harshly condemned for egregious vanity. Such a failing in Goldsmith, at any rate, had a source very different from that in which the ordinary forms of vanity have birth. Fielding describes a class of men who feed upon their own hearts; who are egotists, as he says, the wrong way; and if Goldsmith was vain, it was the wrong way. It arose, not from over-weening self-complacency in supposed advantages, but from what the world had forced him since his earliest youth to feel, intense uneasy consciousness of supposed defects. His resources of boyhood went as manhood came. There was no longer the cricket-match, the hornpipe, an active descent upon an orchard, or a game of fives or foot-ball, to purge unhealthy humours and "clear out the mind." There was no old dairy-maid, no Peggy Golden, to beguile childish sorrows, or, as he mournfully recalls in one of his delightful essays, to sing him into pleasant tears with Johnny Armstrong's Last Good Night, or the Cruelty of Barbara Allen. It was his ardent wish, as he grew to manhood, to be on good terms with the society around him; and, finding it essential first of all to be on good terms with himself, he would have restored by fantastic dress and other innocent follies what his friends till then had done their best to banter him out of. It was to no purpose he made the attempt. So unwitting a contrast to gentleness, to simplicity, to an utter absence of disguise, in his real nature, could but make an absurdity the more. Why, what

"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 66 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.

66

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 66 '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."

66

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 66 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.

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 Et. 11. 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 school of Edgeworthstown, kept by the reverend Patrick Æt. 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 Mr. Daly, to whom we are indebted for some traits of that 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

1741.

1743.

Æt. 15.

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.

Et. 16.

At the close of his last holidays, then a lad of nearly seventeen, he left home for Edgeworthstown, mounted on a borrowed 1744. 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