for shelter from the cold. For this latter anecdote, Mr. Mills, Goldsmith's relative and fellow student, is the authority. He occasionally furnished him, when in college, with small supplies, and gave him a breakfast now and then; for which latter purpose having gone to call him one morning, Goldsmith's voice from within his own room proclaimed himself a prisoner, and that they must force the door to help him out. Mills did this, and found him so fastened in the ticking of the bed, into which he had taken refuge from the cold, that he could not escape unassisted. Late on the previous winter night, unable otherwise to relieve a woman and her five children who seemed all perishing for want of warmth, he had brought out his blankets to the college-gate and given them to her.

It is not meant to insist on these things as examples of conduct. "Sensibility is not Benevolence; nor will this kind of agonised sympathy with distress, even when graced by that active self-denial of which there is here little proof, supply the solid duties or satisfactions of life. There are distresses, vast and remote, with which it behoves us still more to sympathise than with those, less really terrible, which only more attract us by intruding on our senses ; and the conscience is too apt to discharge itself of the greater duty by instant and easy attention to the less. Let me observe also, that, in the case of a man dependent on others, the title to such enjoyment as such largeness and looseness of sympathy involves, has very obvious and controlling limits. So much it is right to interpose when anecdotes of this description are told; but to Goldsmith, all the circumstances considered, they are really very creditable; and it is well to recollect them when the " neglected opportunities " of his youth are spoken of. Doubtless there were better things to be done, by a man of stronger purpose. But the nature of men is not different from that of other living creatures ; it gives the temper and the disposition, but not the nurture or the culture. These Goldsmith never rightly had, except in such sort as he could himself provide; and now, assuredly, he had not found them in his college. "That strong, steady disposition which "alone makes men great," he avowed himself deficient in: but were other dispositions not worth the caring for? "His imagination" (as, with obvious allusion to his own case, he says of Parnell's) "might have been too warm to relish the cold logic of "Burgersdicius, or the dreary subtleties of Smiglesius: " but with nothing less cold or dreary might a warm imagination have been cherished? When, at the house of Burke, he talked these matters over in after years with Edmond Malone, he said that, though he made no great figure in mathematics, which was a study in much repute there, he could turn an ode of Horace into English better

than any of them.

His tutor, Mr. Theaker Wilder, would sooner

have set him to turn a lathe.

This tutor, this reverend instructor of youth, was the same who, on one occasion in Dublin streets, sprang at a bound from the pavement on a hackney-coach which was passing at its swiftest pace, and felled to the ground the driver, who had accidentally touched his face with the whip. So, mathematics being Mr. Theaker Wilder's intellectual passion, the same strength, agility, and ferocity which drove him into brawls with hackney-coachmen, he carried to the demonstrations of Euclid; and for this, all his life afterwards, even more than poet Gray, did poor Goldsmith wage war with mathematics. Never had he stood up in his class that this learned savage did not outrage and insult him. Having the misery to mistake malice for wit, the comic as well as tragic faculty of Mr. Wilder found endless recreation in the awkward, ugly, 'ignorant," most sensitive young man. There was no pause or limit to the strife between them. The tutor's brutality rose even to personal violence; the pupil's shame and suffering hardened into reckless idleness; and the college career of Oliver Goldsmith was proclaimed a wretched failure.

66

Let us be thankful that it was no worse, and that participitation in a college riot was after all the highest of his college crimes. Twice indeed he was cautioned for neglecting even his Greek lecture; but he was also thrice commended for diligence in attending it; and Doctor Kearney said he once got a prize at a Christmas examination in classics. The latter seems doubtful ; but at any rate the college riot was the worst to allege against him, and in this there was no very active sin. A scholar had been arrested, though the precincts of the university had always been held privileged from the intrusion of bailiffs, and the students resolved to take rough revenge. It was in the summer of 1747. They explored every bailiff's den in Dublin, found the offender by whom the arrest was made, brought him naked to the college pump, washed his delinquency thoroughly out of him; and were so elated with the triumph, and everything that bore affinity to law, restraint, or authority, looked so ludicrous in the person of this drenched bailiff's-runner, their miserable representative, that it was on the spot proposed to crown and consummate success by breaking open Newgate, and making a general jail delivery. The Black Dog, as the prison was called, stood on the feeblest of legs, and with one small piece of artillery must have gone down for ever; but the cannon was with the constable, the assailants were repulsed, and some townsmen attracted by the fray unhappily lost their lives. Five of the ringleaders were discovered and expelled the college; and among five lesser offenders who

were publicly admonished for being present, "aiding and abetting" (Quod seditioni favisset et tumultuantibus opem tulisset), the name of Oliver Goldsmith occurs.

More galled by formal University admonition than by Wilder's insults, and anxious to wipe out a disgrace that seemed not so undeserved, Goldsmith tried in the next month for a scholarship. He lost the scholarship, but got an exhibition: a very small exhibition truly, worth some thirty shillings, of which there were nineteen in number, and his was seventeenth in the list. In the way of honour or glory this was trifling enough; but, little used to anything in the shape of even such a success, he let loose his unaccustomed joy in a small dancing party at his rooms, of humblest sort.

Wilder heard of the affront to discipline, suddenly showed himself in the middle of the festivity, and knocked down the poor triumphant exhibitioner. It seemed an irretrievable disgrace.

Goldsmith sold his books next day, got together a small sum, ran away from college, lingered fearfully about Dublin till his money was spent, and then, with a shilling in his pocket, set out for Cork. He did not know where he would have gone, he said, but he thought of America. For three days he lived upon the shilling;

1748.

parted by degrees with nearly all his clothes, to save himself from famine; and long afterwards told Reynolds what his sister relates in her narrative, that of all the exquisite meals he had ever tasted, the most delicious was a handful of grey peas given him by a girl at a wake after twenty-four hours' fasting. The vision of America sank before this reality, and he turned his feeble steps to Lissoy. His brother had private intimation of his state, went to him, clothed him, and carried him back to college. 'Something of a "reconciliation," says Mrs. Hodson, was effected with the tutor. Probably the tutor made so much concession as to promise not to strike him to the ground again; for certainly no other improvement is on record. An anecdote, "often told in con- Æt. 20. "versation to Bishop Percy," exhibits the sizar at his usual disadvantage. Wilder called on Goldsmith, at a lecture, to explain the centre of gravity, which, on getting no answer, he proceeded himself to explain: calling out harshly to Oliver at the close, "Now, "blockhead, where is your centre of gravity?" The answer, which was delivered in a slow, hollow, stammering voice, and began "Why, Doctor, by your definition, I think it must be"-disturbed every one's centre of gravity in the lecture room; and, turning the laugh against Wilder, turned down poor Oliver. And so the insults, the merciless jests, the "Oliver Goldsmith turned down," appear to have continued as before. We still trace him less by his fame in the class-room than by his fines in the buttery-books. The only change is in that greater submission of the victim which marks unsuccessful rebellion. He offers no resistance; makes no effort of any kind; sits, for the most part, indulging day-dreams. A Greek Scapula

has been identified which he used at this time, scrawled over with

وو

his writing. "Free. Oliver Goldsmith; "I promise to pay, " &c. Oliver Goldsmith;" are among the autograph's musing shapes. Perhaps one half the day he was with Steele or Addison in parliament; perhaps the other half in prison with Collins or with Fielding. We should be thankful, as I have said, that a time so dreary and dark bore no worse fruit than that. The shadow cast over his spirit, the uneasy sense of disadvantage which obscured his manners in later years, affected himself singly; but how many they are whom such suffering, and such idleness, would have wholly and for ever corrupted. The spirit hardly less generous, cheerful, or self-supported than Goldsmith's, has been broken by them utterly.

1749.

He took his degree of bachelor of arts on the 27th February, 1749; and as his name stood lowest in the list of sizars with whom he was originally admitted, so it stands also Æt. 21. lowest in a list still existing of the graduates who passed on the same day, and thus became entitled to use the college library.

But it would be needless to recount the names that appear above his; for the public merits of their owners ended with their college course, and oblivion has received them. Nor indeed does that position of his name necessarily indicate his place in the examination; it being then the usage to regulate the mere college standing of a student through the whole of his course, by his position obtained at starting. But be this as it might, Mr. Wilder and his pupil now parted for ever and when the friend of Burke, of Johnson, and of Reynolds, next heard the name of his college tyrant, a violent death had overtaken him in a dissolute brawl.

CHAPTER III.

THREE YEARS OF IDLENESS. 1749-1752.

GOLDSMITH returned to his mother's house. changes. She had removed, in her

1749.

There were great straitened circumEt. 21. stances, to a cottage at Ballymahon, "situated on the "entrance to Ballymahon from the Edgeworthstown-road 66 on the left-hand side." His brother Henry had gone back to his father's little parsonage house at Pallas; and, with his father's old pittance of forty pounds a year, was serving as curate to the living of Kilkenny West, and was master of the village school, which after shifting about not a little had become ultimately fixed at Lissoy. His eldest sister, Mrs. Hodson, for whom the sacrifice was made that impoverished the family resources, was mistress of the old and better Lissoy parsonage house, in which his father had lived his latter life. All entreated Oliver to qualify himself for orders; and when they joined uncle Contarine's request, his own objection was withdrawn. But he is only twenty-one; he must wait two years; and they are passed at Ballymahon.

It is the sunny time between two dismal periods of his life. He has escaped one scene of misery; another is awaiting him; and what possibilities of happiness lie in the interval, it is his nature to seize and make the most of. He assists his brother Henry in the school; runs household errands for his mother, as if he were still what the village gossips called him, "Master Noll," and brings her green tea by the ounce, the half ounce, and the quarter ounce, for which the charges respectively are sevenpence, threepence halfpenny, and twopence; he writes scraps of verse to please his uncle Contarine; and, to please himself, gets cousin Bryanton and Tony Lumpkins of the district, with wandering bear-leaders of