BOOK THE FIRST.

CHAPTER I.

SCHOOL DAYS AND HOLIDAYS. 1728-1745.

1728.

THE marble in Westminster Abbey is correct in the place, but not in the time, of the birth of OLIVER GOLDSMITH. He was born at a small old parsonage house (supposed afterwards to be haunted by the fairies, or good people of the district, who could not however save it from being levelled to the ground) in a lonely, remote, and almost inaccessible Irish village on the southern banks of the river Inny, called Pallas, or Pallasmore, the property of the Edgeworths of Edgeworthstown, in the county of Longford, on the 10th of November, 1728: a little more than three years earlier than the date upon his epitaph. His father, the reverend Charles Goldsmith, descended from a family which had long been settled in Ireland, and held various offices or dignities in connexion with the established church, was a protestant clergyman with an uncertain stipend, which, with the help of some fields he farmed, and occasional duties performed for the rector of the adjoining parish of Kilkenny West (the reverend Mr. Green) who was uncle to his wife, averaged forty pounds a year. In May, 1718, he had married Anne, the daughter of the reverend Oliver Jones, who was master of the school at Elphin, to which he had gone in boyhood; and before 1728 four children had been the issue of the marriage. A new birth was but a new burthen; and little dreamt the humble village preacher, then or ever, that from the date of that tenth of November on which his Oliver was born, his own virtues and very foibles were to be a legacy of pleasure to many generations of men. For they who have loved, laughed, or wept, with the father of the man in black in the Citizen of the World,

the preacher of the Deserted Village, or the hero of the Vicar of Wakefield, have given laughter, love, and tears, to the reverend Charles Goldsmith.

1730.

Æt. 2.

66

The death of the rector of Kilkenny West improved his fortunes. He succeeded in 1730 to this living of his wife's uncle ; his income of forty pounds was raised to nearly two hundred ; and Oliver had not completed his second year when the family moved from Pallasmore to a respectable house and farm on the verge of the pretty little village of Lissoy, "in the county of Westmeath, barony of Kilkenny West," some six miles from Pallasmore, and about midway between the towns of Ballymahon and Athlone. The first-born, Margaret (22nd August, 1719), appears to have died in childhood; and the family, at this time consisting of Catherine (13th January, 1721), Henry (9th February, 17-), Jane (9th February, 17-), and Oliver, born at Pallasmore, was in the next ten years increased by Maurice (7th July, 1736), Charles (16th August, 1737), and John 23rd 1740), born at Lissoy. The leaf of the family bible recording these dates is unfortunately so torn that the precise year of the births of Henry and Jane, like that of Oliver's birth, is not discernible from it; but it seems quite decisive, from the fact of the same day specified in both cases, coupled with the distinct assurance of Mrs. Hodson that there was a childless interval of seven years before the birth of Oliver, that Henry and Jane were twins, and both born in 1722. The youngest, as the eldest, died in youth; Charles went in his twentieth year, a friendless adventurer, to Jamaica, and after long self-exile died, little less than half a century since (1803—4), in a poor lodging in Somers' Town; Maurice was put to the trade of a cabinet-maker, kept a meagre shop in Charlestown in the county of Roscommon, and "departed "from a miserable life" in 1792; Henry followed his father's calling, and died as he had lived, a humble village preacher and schoolmaster, in 1768; Catherine married a wealthy husband, Mr. Hodson, Jane a poor one, Mr. Johnston, and both died in Athlone, some years after the death of that celebrated brother to whose life and times these pages are devoted.

A trusted dependant in Charles Goldsmith's house, a young woman related to the family, afterwards known as Elizabeth 1731. Delap and schoolmistress of Lissoy, first put a book into Et. 3. Oliver Goldsmith's hands. She taught him his letters; lived till it was matter of pride to remember; often talked of it to Doctor Strean, Henry Goldsmith's successor in the curacy of Kilkenny West; and at the ripe age of ninety, when the great writer had been thirteen years in his grave, boasted of it with her last breath. That her success in the task had not been much to boast of, she at

other times confessed. "Never was so dull a boy: he seemed "impenetrably stupid," said the good Elizabeth Delap, when she bored her friends, or answered curious enquirers, about the celebrated Doctor Goldsmith. "He was a plant that flowered late," said Johnson to Boswell; "there ap

"peared nothing remarkable about him
"when he was young.
This, if true,
would have been only another confir-
mation of the saying that the richer a
nature is, the harder and more slow
its development is like to be; but it
may perhaps be doubted, in the mean-
ing it would ordinarily bear, for all the
charms of Goldsmith's later style are
to be traced in even the letters of his
youth, and his sister expressly tells
us that he not only began to scribble
verses when he could scarcely write,

but otherwise showed a fondness for books and learning, and what she calls "signs of genius."

1734.

Æt. 6.

At the age of six, Oliver was handed over to the village school, kept by Mr. Thomas Byrne. Looking back from this distance of time, and penetrating through greater obscurity than its own cabin-smoke into that Lissoy academy, it is to be discovered that this excellent Mr. Byrne, retired quarter-master of an Irish regiment that had served in Marlborough's Spanish wars, was more given to "shoulder a crutch and show how fields were "won," and certainly more apt to teach wild legends of an Irish hovel, and hold forth about fairies and rapparees, than to inculcate what are called the humanities. Little Oliver came away from him much as he went, in point of learning; but there were certain wandering unsettled tastes, which his friends thought to have been here implanted in him, and which, as well as a taste for song, one of his later essays might seem to connect with the vagrant life of the blind harper Carolan, whose wayside melodies he had been taken to hear. Unhappily something more and other than this also remained, in the effects of a terrible disease which assailed him at the school, and were not likely soon to pass away.

An attack of confluent small-pox which nearly proved mortal left deep and indelible traces on his face, for ever settled his small pretension to good-looks, and exposed him to jest and sarcasm. Kind-natured Mr. Byrne might best have reconciled him to it, used to his temper as no doubt he had become; and it was doubly unfortunate to be sent at such a time away from home, to a school among strangers, at once to taste the bitterness of those