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.

CHAPTER II.

COLLEGE. 1745-1749.

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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1745.

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. The 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.

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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."

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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),

and was the only member of the Goldsmith family of whom we have solid evidence that he at any time took pains with Oliver, or felt anything like a real pride in him. He bore the greater part of his school expenses; and was wont to receive him with delight in holidays, as the playfellow of his daughter Jane, a year or two older than Oliver, and some seven years after this married to a Mr. Lawder. How little the most charitable of men will make allowance for differences of temper and disposition in the education of youth, is too well known: Mr. Contarine told Oliver that he had himself been a sizar, and that it had not availed to withhold from him the friendship of the great and the good.

His counsel prevailed. The youth went to Dublin, showed by passing the necessary examination that his time at school had not been altogether thrown away, and on the 11th of June 1745 was admitted, last in the list of eight who so presented themselves, a sizar of Trinity College ;-there most speedily to earn that experience, which, on his elder brother afterwards consulting him as to the education of his son, prompted him to answer thus: "If he “has ambition, strong passions, and an exquisite sensibility of con"tempt, do not send him to your college, unless you have no other "trade for him except your own."

Flood was then in the college, but being some years younger than Goldsmith, and a fellow commoner, it is not surprising that they should have held no intercourse; but a greater than Flood, though himself little notable at college, said he perfectly recollected his old fellow-student, when they afterwards met at the house of Mr. Reynolds. Not that there was much for an Edmund Burke to recollect of him. Little went well with Goldsmith in his student course. He had a menial position, a savage brute for tutor, and few inclinations to the study exacted. He was not, indeed, as perhaps never living creature in this world was, without his consolations; he could sing a song well, and, at a new insult or outrage, could blow off excitement through his flute with a kind of desperate "mechanical vehemence." At the worst he had, as he describes it himself, a “knack at hoping ;" and at all times, it must with equal certainty be affirmed, a knack at getting into scrapes. Like Samuel Johnson at Oxford, he avoided lectures when he could, and was a lounger at the college gate. The popular picture of him in these Dublin University days, is little more than of a slow, hesitating, somewhat hollow voice, heard seldom and always to great disadvantage in the class-rooms; and of a low-sized, thick, robust, ungainly figure, lounging about the college courts on the wait for misery and ill-luck.

1746.

Æt. 18.

His Edgeworthstown schoolfellow, Beatty, had entered among

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the sizars with him, and for a time shared his rooms. They are described as the top-rooms adjoining the library of the building numbered 35, where the name of Oliver Goldsmith may still be seen, scratched by himself upon a window-pane. Another sizar, Marshall, is said to have been another of his chums. Among his occasional associates, were certainly Edward Mills, his relative ; Robert Bryanton, a Ballymahon youth, also his relative, of whom he was fond; Charles and Edward Purdon, whom he lived to befriend; James Willington, whose name he afterwards had permission to use in London, for low literary work he was ashamed to put his own to; Wilson and Kearney, subsequently doctors and fellows of the college; Wolfen, also well known; and Lauchlan Macleane, whose political pamphlets, unaccepted challenge to Wilkes, and general party exertions, made a noise in the world twenty or thirty years later. But not till a man becomes famous is it to be expected that any wonderful feats of memory should be performed respecting him; and it seems tolerably evident that, with the exception of perhaps Bryanton and Beatty, not one owner of the names recounted put himself in friendly relation with the sizar, to elevate, assist, or cheer him. Richard Malone, afterwards Lord Sunderlin; Barnard and Marlay, afterwards worthy bishops of Killaloe and Waterford; found nothing more pleasant than to talk of "their old fellow-collegian Doctor Goldsmith," in the painting-room of Reynolds: but nothing, I suspect, so difficult, thriving lads as they were in even these earlier days, than to vouchsafe recognition to the unthriving, depressed, insulted Oliver.

A year and a half after he had entered college, at the commencement of 1747, his father suddenly died. The scanty 1747. sums required for his support had been often intercepted, Et. 19. but this stopped them altogether. It may have been the

least and most trifling loss connected with that sorrow; but 66 squalid poverty," relieved by occasional gifts, according to his small means, from uncle Contarine, by petty loans from Bryanton or Beatty, or by desperate pawning of his books of study, was Goldsmith's lot thenceforward. Yet even in the depths of that despair, arose the consciousness of faculties reserved for better fortune than continual contempt and failure. He would write street-ballads to save himself from actual starving; sell them at the Rein-deer repository in Mountrath-court for five shillings a-piece; and steal out of the college at night to hear them sung.

Happy night, to him worth all the dreary days! Hidden by some dusky wall, or creeping within darkling shadows of the illlighted streets, this poor neglected sizar watched, waited, lingered, listened there, for the only effort of his life which had not wholly

failed. Few and dull perhaps the beggar's audience at first, but more thronging, eager, and delighted, as he shouted forth his newly-gotten ware. Cracked enough, I doubt not, were those ballad-singing tones; very harsh, extremely discordant, and passing from loud to low without meaning or melody; but not

the less did the sweetest music which this earth affords fall with them on the ear of Goldsmith. Gentle faces pleased, old men stopping by the way, young lads venturing a purchase with their last remaining farthing; why, here was a world in little with its fame at the sizar's feet! "The greater world will be listening one day," perhaps he muttered, as he turned with a lighter heart to his dull home.

It is said to have been a rare occurrence when the five shillings of the Rein-deer repository reached home along with him. It was more likely, when he was at his utmost need, to stop with some beggar on the road who had seemed to him even more destitute than himself. Nor this only. The money gone,-often, for the naked shivering wretch, had he slipped off a portion of the scanty clothes he wore, to patch a misery he could not otherwise relieve. To one starving creature with five crying children, he gave at one time the blankets off his bed, and crept himself into the ticking