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was afterwards expanded into the Traveller.

Who can doubt that

it would contain the germ of these exquisite lines ?—

Eternal blessings crown my earliest friend,

And round his dwelling guardian saints attend :
Bless'd be that spot, where cheerful guests retire
To pause from toil, and trim their evening fire;
Bless'd that abode, where want and pain repair
And every stranger finds a ready chair;
Bless'd be those feasts, with simple plenty crown'd,
Where all the ruddy family around

Laugh at the jests or pranks that never fail,
Or sigh with pity at some mournful tale,
Or press the bashful stranger to his food,
And learn the luxury of doing good.

Remembering thus his brother's humble kindly life, he had set in pleasant contrast before him the weak luxuriance of Italy, and the sturdy enjoyment of the rude Swiss home. Observe in this following passage with what an exquisite art of artlessness, if I may so speak, an unstudied character is given to the verses by the recurring sounds in the rhymes; by the turn that is given to particular words and their repetition; and by the personal feeling, the natural human pathos, which invests the lines with a charm so rarely imparted to mere descriptive verse.

My soul, turn from them, turn we to survey
Where rougher climes a nobler race display-
Where the bleak Swiss their stormy mansions tread,
And force a churlish soil for scanty bread.

No product here the barren hills afford,

But man and steel, the soldier and his sword;
No vernal blooms their torpid rocks array,
But winter lingering chills the lap of May;
No zephyr fondly sues the mountain's breast,
But meteors glare, and stormy glooms invest.
Yet still, even here, content can spread a charm,
Redress the clime, and all its rage disarm.

Though poor the peasant's hut, his feasts though small,
He sees his little lot the lot of all;

Sees no contiguous palace rear its head

To shame the meanness of his humble shed;
No costly lord the sumptuous banquet deal
To make him loathe his vegetable meal;
But calm, and bred in ignorance and toil,
Each wish contracting, fits him to the soil.
Cheerful at morn he wakes from short repose,
Breasts the keen air, and carols as he goes;
With patient angle trolls the finny deep;

Or drives his venturous plough-share to the steep;
Or seeks the den where snow-tracks mark the way,
And drags the struggling savage into day.

At night returning, every labour sped,
He sits him down the monarch of a shed;
Smiles by his cheerful fire, and round surveys
His children's looks that brighten at the blaze-
While his loved partner, boastful of her hoard,
Displays her cleanly platter on the board :
And haply too some pilgrim, thither led,
With many a tale repays the nightly bed.

Such was the education of thought and heart now taking the place of a more learned discipline in the truant wanderer; such the wider range of sympathies and enjoyment opening out upon his view; such the larger knowledge that awakened in him, as the subtle perceptions of genius arose. More than ever was he here, in the practical paths of life, a loiterer and laggard; yet as he passed from place to place, finding for his foot no solid restingground, no spot of all the world that he might hope to call his own, there was yet sinking deep into the heart of the homeless vagrant that power and possession to which all else on earth subserves and is obedient, and which out of the very abyss of poverty and want gave him a right and title over all.

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For me your tributary stores combine;

Creation's heir, the world, the world is mine!

Descending into Piedmont he observed the floating bee-houses of which he speaks so pleasantly in the Animated Nature. "As the "bees are continually choosing their flowery pasture along the "banks of the stream, they are furnished with sweets before "unrifled; and thus a single floating bee-house yields the proprietor "" a considerable income. Why a method similar to this has never "been adopted in England, where we have more gentle rivers, and more flowery banks, than any other part of the world, I know "not." After this, proofs of his having seen Florence, Verona, Mantua, and Milan, are apparent; and in Carinthia the incident occurred with which his famous couplet has too hastily reproached a people, when, sinking with fatigue, after a long day's toilsome walk, he was turned from a peasant's hut at which he implored a lodging. At Padua he is supposed to have stayed some six months; and here, it has been asserted, though in this case also the official records are lost, he received his degree. Here, or at Louvain, or at some other of these foreign universities where he always boasted himself hero in the disputations to which his philosophic vagabond refers, there can hardly be a question that the degree, a very simple and accessible matter at any of them, was actually conferred. "Sir," said Boswell to Johnson, "he disputed "his passage through Europe." Of his having also taken a some

what close survey of those countless academic institutions of Italy, in the midst of which Italian learning at this time withered, evidence is not wanting; and he always thoroughly discriminated the character of that country and its people.

But small the bliss that sense alone bestows,
And sensual bliss is all the nation knows;
In florid beauty groves and fields appear-
Man seems the only growth that dwindles here !
Contrasted faults through all his manners reign:
Though poor, luxurious; though submissive, vain;
Though grave, yet trifling; zealous, yet untrue;
And even in penance planning sins anew.

1756.

It is a hard struggle to return to England; but his steps are now bent that way. "My skill in music," says the philosophic vagabond, whose account there will be little danger in Et. 28. accepting as at least some certain reflection of the truth, "could avail me nothing in Italy, where every peasant was a "better musician than I: but by this time I had acquired another "talent which answered my purpose as well, and this was a skill in disputation. In all the foreign universities and convents there 'are, upon certain days, philosophical theses maintained against every adventitious disputant; for which, if the champion opposes "with any dexterity, he can claim a gratuity in money, a dinner, "and a bed for one night. In this manner, then, I fought my way towards England; walked along from city to city; examined "mankind more nearly; and, if I may so express it, saw both "sides of the picture."

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CHAPTER VI.

PECKHAM SCHOOL AND GRUB-STREET. 1756-1757.

Ir was on the 1st of February, 1756, that Oliver Goldsmith stepped upon the shore at Dover, and stood again among

his countrymen.

Stern o'er each bosom reason holds her state,
With daring aims irregularly great.

Pride in their port, defiance in their eye,

I see the lords of human kind pass by,
Intent on high designs.

...

1756.

Æt. 28.

The comfort of seeing it must have been about all the comfort to At this moment, there is little doubt, he had not a single

him.

farthing in his pocket; and from the lords of human kind, intent on looking in any direction but his, it was much more difficult to get one than from the careless good-humoured peasants of France or Flanders. In the struggle of ten days or a fortnight which it took him to get to London, there is reason to suspect that he attempted a "low comedy" performance in a country barn; and, at one of the towns he passed, had implored to be hired in an apothecary's shop. In the middle of February he was wandering without friend or acquaintance, without the knowledge or comfort of even one kind face, in the lonely, terrible, LONDON streets.

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He thought he might find employment as an usher: and there is a dark uncertain kind of story, of his getting a bare subsistence in this way for some few months, under a feigned name; which must have involved him in a worse distress but for the judicious silence of the Dublin Doctor (Radcliff), fellow of the college and jointtutor with Wilder, to whom he had been suddenly required to apply for a character, and whose good-humoured acquiescence in his private appeal saved him from suspicion of imposture. Goldsmith showed his gratitude by a long, and, it is said, a most delightful letter to Radcliff, descriptive of his travels; now unhappily destroyed. He also wrote again to his more familiar Irish

He went among

friends, but his letters were again unanswered. the London apothecaries, and asked them to let him spread plasters for them, pound in their mortars, run with their medicines: but they, too, asked him for a character, and he had none to give. At last a chemist of the name of Jacob took compassion upon him, and the late Conversation Sharp used to point out a shop at the corner of Monument-yard on Fish-street-hill, shown to him in his youth as this benevolent Mr. Jacob's. Some dozen years later, Goldsmith startled a brilliant circle at Bennet Langton's with an anecdote of "When I lived

among the "beggars in Axe-lane," just as Napoleon, fifty years later, appalled the party of crowned heads at Dresden with his story of "When "I was lieutenant in the regiment of La Fère." The experience with the beggars will of course date before that social elevation of mixing and selling drugs on Fish-street-hill. For doubtless the latter brought him into the comfort and good society on which he afterwards dwelt with such unction, in describing the elegant little lodging at three shillings a week, with its lukewarm dinner served up between two pewter plates from a cook's shop.

1757.

Thus employed among the drugs, he heard one day that Sleigh, an old fellow-student of the Edinburgh time, was lodging not far off, and he resolved to visit him. He had to wait, t. 29. of course, for his only holiday; "but notwithstanding it was Sunday," he said, afterwards relating the anecdote, "and it is "to be supposed I was in my best clothes, Sleigh did not know "me. Such is the tax the unfortunate pay to poverty." He did not fail to leave to the unfortunate the lessons they should be taught by it. Doctor Sleigh (Foote's Doctor Sligo, honourably named in an earlier page of this narrative) recollected at last his friend of two years gone; and when he did so, added Goldsmith, "I found his heart as warm as ever, and he shared his purse and 'friendship with me during his continuance in London." With the help of this warm heart and friendly purse, seconded also by the good apothecary Jacob ("who," says Cooke, "saw in Goldsmith "talents above his condition"), he now "rose from the apothecary's "drudge to be a physician in a humble way," in Bankside, Southwark. It was not a thriving business: poor physician to the poor : but it seemed a change for the better, and hope was strong in him.

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An old Irish acquaintance and school-fellow (Beatty) met him at this time in the streets. He was in a suit of green and gold, miserably old and tarnished; his shirt and neckcloth appeared to have been worn at least a fortnight; but he said he was practising physic, and doing very well! It is hard to confess failure to one's school-fellow.

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