Page images
PDF
EPUB

consequence, he bethought him of a college acquaintance on the road, to whose house he went. With exquisite humour he describes this most miserly acquaintance, who, to allay his desperate hunger, dilated on the advantages of a diet of slops, and set him down to a porringer of sour milk and a heel of musty cheese; and, being asked for the loan of a guinea, earnestly recommended the sale of Fiddleback, producing what he called a much better nag to ride upon, which would cost neither price nor provender, in the shape of a stout oaken cudgel. His adventures ended a little more agreeably at last, however, in a more genial abode, where an acquaintance of the miser entertained him. He had "two sweet girls to "his daughters, who played enchantingly on the harpsichord; and 66 yet it was but a melancholy pleasure I felt the first time I heard "them; for, that being the first time also that either of them had "touched the instrument since their mother's death, I saw the "tears in silence trickle down their father's cheeks."

1752. Æt. 24.

Law was the next thing thought of, and the good Mr. Contarine came forward with fifty pounds. It seems a small sum wherewith to travel to Dublin and London, to defray expenses of entrance at inns of court, and to live upon till a necessary number of terms are eaten. But with fifty pounds young Oliver started; on a luckless journey. A Roscommon friend laid hold of him in Dublin, seduced him to play, and the fifty pounds he would have raised to a hundred, he reduced to fifty pence. In bitter shame, after great physical suffering, he wrote to his uncle, confessed, and was forgiven.

On return to Ballymahon, it is probable that his mother objected to receive him; since after this date we find him living wholly with his brother. It was but for a short time, however; disagreement followed there too; and we see him next by Mr. Contarine's fireside, again talking literature to his good-natured uncle, writing new verses to please him (alleged copies of which are not sufficiently authentic to be believed in), and joining his flute to Miss Contarine's harpsichord.

CHAPTER IV.

1752.

PREPARING FOR A MEDICAL DEGREE. 1752-1755.

THE years of idleness must nevertheless come to a close. To do nothing, no matter how melodiously accompanied by flute. and harpsichord, is not what a man is born into this world to do; and it required but a casual word from a not very genial visitor, to close for ever Goldsmith's happy nights at uncle

Æt. 24.

Contarine's. There was a sort of cold grandee of the family, Dean Goldsmith of Cloyne, who did not think it unbecoming his dignity to visit the good clergyman's parsonage now and then; and Oliver having made a remark which showed him no fool, the dean gave it as his opinion to Mr. Contarine that his young relative would make an exellent medical man. The hint seemed a good one, and was the dean's contribution to his young relative's fortune. The small purse was contributed by Mr. Contarine; and in the autumn of 1752, Oliver Goldsmith started for Edinburgh, medical student.

Anecdotes of amusing simplicity and forgetfulness in this new character are, as usual, more rife than notices of his course of study; but such records as have been preserved of the period rest upon authority too obviously doubtful to require other than a very cursory mention here. On the day of his arrival he is reported to have set forth for a ramble round the streets, after leaving his luggage at hired lodgings where he had forgotten to inquire the name either of the street or the landlady, and to which he only found his way back by the accident of meeting the porter who had carried his trunk from the coach. He is also said to have obtained, in this temporary abode, a knowledge of the wondrous culinary expedients with which three medical students might be supported for a whole week on a single loin of mutton, by a brandered chop served up one day, a fried steak another, chops with onion sauce a third, and so on till the fleshy parts should be quite consumed, when finally, on the seventh day, a dish of broth manufactured from the bones would appear, and the ingenious landlady rested from her labours. It is moreover recorded, in proof of his careless habits in respect to money, that being in company with several fellow-students on the first night of a new play, he suddenly proposed to draw lots with any one present which of the two should treat the whole party to the theatre; when the real fact was, as he afterwards confessed in speaking of the secret joy with which he heard them all decline the challenge, that had it been accepted, and had he proved the loser, he must have pledged a part of his wardrobe in order to raise the money. This last anecdote, if true, reveals to us at any rate that he had a wardrobe to pledge. Such resource in the matter of dress is one of his peculiarities found generally peeping out in some form or other and, unable to confirm any other fact in these recollections, I can at least establish that.

But first let me remark that no traditions remain of the character or extent of his studies. It seems tolerably certain that any learned celebrity he may have got in the schools, paled an ineffectual fire before his amazing social repute, as inimitable teller of a humorous story and capital singer of Irish songs. He became a

member of the Medical Society, and on his admission appears to have been exempted from the usual condition of reading a paper on a medical subject. But he was really fond of chemistry, and was remembered favourably by the celebrated Black; other wellknown fellow-students, as William Farr, and his whilome college acquaintance, Lauchlan Macleane, conceived a regard for him, which somewhat later Farr seems to have had the opportunity of showing; certainly of kind quaker Sleigh, afterwards known as the eminent physician of that name, as painter Barry's first patron, Burke's friend, and one of the many victims of Foote's witty malice, so much may without contradiction be affirmed; and it is therefore to be supposed that his eighteen months' residence in Edinburgh was, on the whole, not unprofitable. for all his life had these. "An ugly and a poor man is society only "for himself; and such society the world lets me enjoy in great "abundance :" 66 nor do I envy my dear Bob his blessings, while "I may sit down and laugh at the world; and at myself, the "most ridiculous object in it :" are among his expressions of half bitter, half good-natured candour, in a letter to his cousin Bryanton.

It had its mortifications, of course

There is another confession in a later letter to his uncle, which touches him in a nearer point, and suggests perhaps more than it reveals. It would seem as though, to eke out his resources, he had for some part of his time accepted employment in a great man's house probably as tutor. "I have spent," he says, 66 more "than a fortnight every second day at the Duke of Hamilton's; "but it seems they like me more as a jester than as a companion ; so I disdained so servile an employment." To those with whom, on equal terms, he could be both jester and companion, Bryanton was charged with every kind of remembrance. "You cannot send

66

66

me much news from Ballymahon, but such as it is, send it all; "everything you send will be agreeable to me. Has George "Conway put up a sign yet? or John Binely left off drinking "drams? or Tom Allen got a new wig?" To the pleasant and whimsical satire of the Scotch he at the same time sent to Bryanton, I need scarcely have referred, because in all the editions of his works, except the Scotch, it is commonly printed: but in merely alluding to these various letters it will be well to reserve any special belief in the accuracy of all their statements. As a generally humorous picture drawn from various sources, rather than a strictly veracious record of his own experience, it will be safest to regard them; but this remark applies less strongly to those two of the three letters to his uncle Contarine, the earliest in date and least important in contents, which have been recently discovered.

In the first, dated May, 1753, and in which he alludes to a de

scription of himself by his uncle, as "the philosopher who 1753. "carries all his goods about him," he describes Munro as the Æt. 25. one great professor, and the rest of the doctor-teachers as

only less afflicting to their students than they must be to their patients. He makes whimsical mention of a trip to the Highlands, for which he had hired a horse about the size of a ram, who "walked away (trot he could not) as pensive as his master." Other passages have a tendency to show within what really narrow limits he had brought his wants; with how little he was prepared to be cheerfully content; and that, for whatever advances were sent him, though certainly it might have been desirable that he should have turned them to more practical use, he at least overflowed with gratitude,

There has been occasionally a harsh judgment of Goldsmith for this money so wasted on abortive professional undertakings: but the sacrifices cannot fairly be called very great. Burke had an allowance of 2001. a-year for leisure to follow studies to which he never paid the least attention; and when his father anxiously expected to hear of his call to the bar, he might have heard, instead, of a distress which forced him to sell his books: yet no one thinks, and rightly, of exacting penalties from Burke on this ground. Poor Goldsmith's supplies were on the other hand small, irregular, uncertain, and, in some two years at the furthest, exhausted altogether.

Here, in this letter to his uncle, he says that he has drawn for six pounds, and that his next draft, five months after this date, will be for but four pounds; pleading in extenuation of these light demands, that he has been obliged to buy everything since he came to Scotland, "shirts not even excepted:" while in another letter at the close of the same year he accounts for money spent, by the remark that he has "good store of clothes to accompany him on

دو

his travels. Yet there was decided moderation even in the direction sartorial; nor does the wardrobe, to which allusion was made a few pages back, appear to have been by any means extensive in the proportion of the gaiety of its colours. Upon the latter point our evidence is not to be gainsayed. What will have to be remarked of Goldsmith in this respect at Mr. Boswell's or Sir Joshua's, is already to be said of him in the lodging-house and lecture-room at Edinburgh; and on the same proof of old tailor's bills, the very ghosts of which continue to flutter about and plague his memory.

The leaf of an Edinburgh ledger of 1753 has fallen into my hands, from which it would appear that one of his fellow students, Mr. Honner, had introduced him at the beginning of that year to

D

a merchant tailor with whom he dealt for sundry items of hose, hats, silver lace, satin, allapeen, fustian, durant, shalloon, cloth, and velvet; which materials of adornment are charged to him, from the January to the December of the year, in the not very immoderate sum of 9l. 11s. 24d., the first entries of which, to the amount of 31. 15s. 93d. were in November duly paid in full, and what remained at the year's end carried to a folio in the same ledger, unluckily destroyed before it was discovered to whom the page related. I owe this curious little document to the kindness of Mr. David Laing, of the Signet Library in Edinburgh, who remarks in sending it, that unfortunately the folio 424, to which reference is made at its close, had been torn up before the earlier leaf was discovered. Neither was there any indication

of the name of the merchant tailor.

P. 383.

MR, OLIVER GOLDSMITH, Student, pr. MR. HONNER.

[merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][ocr errors][merged small][merged small][ocr errors][merged small][merged small][ocr errors][merged small][merged small]
[ocr errors]
[ocr errors]
[ocr errors]

To yds. fine Sky-Blew Shalloon, 1s. 9d.
Feby 23. To 2 yds. fine Priest's Grey cloth, 10s. 6d.
To 2 yds. Black shalloon, 1s. 6d.
To a pair fine 3-thd Black worsed Hose
Toyds. rich Ditto Genoa velvett, 228.

Nov. 23. By Cash in full

[ocr errors]
[merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][ocr errors][merged small][merged small]
[ocr errors][merged small][ocr errors][ocr errors][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][ocr errors][ocr errors][merged small][ocr errors][merged small][merged small][merged small][ocr errors][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small][merged small]

Such is the old leaf, exactly copied; and radiant as it is, through all its age and dinginess, with a name bright and familiar since to many generations of boys and men in the good merchanttailor's city, is it not also still sparkling in every part with its rich sky-blue satin, its fine sky-blue shalloon, its superfine silverlaced small hat, its rich black Genoa velvet, and its best superfine

« PreviousContinue »