1730. Æt. 2. 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. 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 of Charles Goldsmith's family Bible, still preserved by one of his descendants in Athlone, Life, i. 14. The leaf is unfortunately torn, and the exact year does not now appear upon it, but it is certain that Mr. Mason states it correctly. *Many particulars of them will be found in Mr. Shaw Mason's volume quoted above, and which is stated to have been "drawn up from the communications of "the clergy." + Percy Memoir, 2. , West," some six miles from Pallasmore, and about midway between the towns of Ballymahon and Athlone.* The firstborn, 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 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, in a poor lodging in Somers' Town; Maurice was put to the trade of a cabinetmaker, 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 Delap and schoolmistress of Lissoy, first put a Here Charles Goldsmith seems to have procured a lease of about 70 acres at an eight shillings rent, renewable for ever on the payment of half a year's rent for every new life, the first lives being those of himself, his eldest son Henry, and his daughter Catherine; a property which remained in the family till sold in 1802 by Henry Goldsmith's son, then a settler in America. Prior, i. 16, 17. The leaf of the family bible 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 to me 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 month of John's birth is also erased. # 1853. 1730. Æt. 2. 1731. book into Oliver Goldsmith's hands. She taught him his Æt. 3. 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 appeared nothing remarkable about him "when he was young." This, if true, would have been only another confirmation 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 meaning 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. At the age of six, Oliver was handed over to the village Et. 6. 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 The rev. Edward Mangin's Essay on Light Reading (1808), 144. And see Prior, i. 22. + Boswell's Life (Ed. 1839), vi. 309. Percy Memoir, 4. Et. 6. more apt to teach wild legends of an Irish hovel, and hold 1734. 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, had 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 school experiences which too early and sadly teach the shy, illfavoured, backward boy what tyrannies, in the large as in that little world, the strong have to inflict, and what sufferings the * See his sister Mrs. Hodson's narrative contributed to the Percy Memoir, 3, 4. She does not give the name of the schoolmaster, but this was supplied by Dr. Strean. Mangin's Essay, 142. + Essay xx. Thorlogh O'Carolan, who was born at Nobber in 1670, and brought up at Carrick O'Shannon, where Oliver's uncle Contarine first settled, died in 1738 at Roscommon, to which Contarine had removed. To his patroness, in whose house he died, the wife of the MacDermott of Aldersford, he owed the "horse, harp, and gossoon," with which, renewed as his needs dictated, he had meanwhile wandered about for half a century from house to house, a guest always welcome, improvising music and songs. The harp had been his amusement up to the age of manhood, when, being struck with blindness, he thus made it his profession. For curious anecdotes of Carolan, and other Irish poets, see Nichols's Illustrations of Lit. Hist. of XVIII. Century, vii. 688. 1736. Et. 8. 1736. weak must be prepared to endure. But to the reverend Mr. Æt. 8. Griffin's superior school of Elphin, in Roscommon, it was resolved to send him; and at the house of an uncle John,* at Ballyoughter in the neighbourhood of Elphin, he was lodged and boarded. The knowledge of Ovid and Horace, introduced to him here, was the pleasantest as well as the least important, though it might be by far the most difficult, of what he had now to learn. It was the learning of bitter years, and not taught by the schoolmaster, but by the school-fellows, of this poor little, thick, pale-faced, pockmarked boy. "He was considered by his contemporaries and "school-fellows, with whom I have often conversed on the "subject," said Doctor Strean, ‡ who succeeded, on the death of Charles Goldsmith's curate and eldest son, to his pastoral duty and its munificent rewards," as a stupid, heavy blockhead, "little better than a fool, whom every one made fun of." § It was early to trample fun out of a child; and he bore marks of it to his dying day. It had not been his least qualification as game for laughter, that all confessed his nature to be kind and affectionate, and knew his temper to be cheerful and agreeable; but feeling as well as fun he could hardly be expected to supply without intermission, and, precisely as in after years it was said of him that he had the most unaccountable alternations of gaiety and gloom, and * His father's brother, "who, with his family," Mrs. Hodson tells us, con"sidered him as a prodigy for his age." Percy Memoir, 5. "At the age of seven or eight," says Mrs. Hodson, "he discovered a natural "turn for rhyming, and often amused his father and his friends with early poetical 66 attempts. When he could scarcely write legibly, he was always scribbling verses "which he burnt as he wrote them. Observing his fondness for books and learning, "his mother, with whom he was always a favourite, pleaded with his father to "give him a liberal education: but his own narrow income, the expense attending "the educating of his eldest son, and his numerous family, were strong objections." Percy Memoir, 4, 5. + See Appendix (A. "DR. STREAN AND THE REV. EDWARD MANGIN") at the close of this volume. § Mangin's Essay, 149. |