was subject to the most particular humours, even so his elder sister described his school-days to Doctor Percy, bishop of Dromore, when that divine and his friends were gathering materials for his biography. That he seemed to possess two natures, was the learned comment at once upon his childhood and his manhood.* And there was sense in it; in so far as it represented that continued struggle, happily always unavailing, carried on against feelings which God had given him, by fears and misgivings he had to thank the world for.

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Why Noll!" exclaimed a visitor at uncle John's, “you are become a fright! When do you mean to get hand"some again?" Oliver moved in silence to the window. The speaker, a thoughtless and notorious scapegrace of the Goldsmith family, repeated the question with a worse sneer: and "I mean to get better, sir, when you do!"† was the boy's retort, which has delighted his biographers for its quickness of repartee, though it was probably something more than smartness. Another example of precocious wit occurred also at uncle John's, when his nephew was still a mere child. There was company one day, to a little dance; and the fiddler who happened to be engaged on the occasion, being a fiddler who reckoned himself a wit, received suddenly an Oliver for his Rowland that he had not come prepared for. During a pause between two country dances, the party had been greatly surprised by little Noll quickly jumping up

*

"Oliver was from his earliest infancy," writes his sister to Dr. Percy, "very "different from other children, subject to particular humours, for the most part "uncommonly serious and reserved, but when in gay spirits none ever so agreeable "as he." Percy Memoir, 4. "He was such a compound of absurdity, envy, "and malice, contrasted with the opposite virtues of kindness, generosity, and "benevolence," says Mr. Thomas Davies (who, bad actor as he was, seems to have been a still worse philosopher), "that he might be said to consist of two distinct "souls, and influenced by the agency of a good and bad spirit." Life of Garrick, ii. 147-8. + Prior, i. 29, 30.

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Æt. 9.

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and dancing a pas seul impromptu about the room, whereEt. 9. upon, seizing the opportunity of the lad's ungainly look and

grotesque figure, the jocose fiddler promptly exclaimed Esop! A burst of laughter rewarded him, which however was rapidly turned the other way by Noll stopping his hornpipe, looking round at his assailant, and giving forth, in audible voice and without hesitation, the couplet which was thought worth preserving as the first formal effort of his genius, by Percy, Malone, Campbell, and the rest, who com. piled that biographical preface to the Miscellaneous Works on which the subsequent biographies have been founded, but who nevertheless appear to have missed the correct version of the lines they thought so clever.

*

Heralds proclaim aloud! all saying,

See Æsop dancing, and his Monkey playing.+

Yet these things may stand for more than quickness of

The biographical preface, or Memoir, for which the materials had been collected by Percy, Malone, and other friends, was drawn up in the first instance by Percy's friend, Dr. Campbell; it then received ample correction from Percy, whose remarks and interlineations were engrafted into the text; but circumstances led to a very angry dispute on its being handed to the publishers of the Miscellaneous Works. Other causes of disagreement afterwards sprang up with Mr. Rose (Cowper's friend), employed as their editor, and Percy ultimately declined to sanction the publication. His correspondence with Steevens, Malone, and other friends, shows ample traces of this quarrel, and of his dissatisfaction with Mr. Rose, whom he accuses of impertinently tampering with the Memoir. "I never," writes Malone to Percy, in corroboration of such complaints, "observed any of those grimaces or fooleries that the "interpolator talks of !" "In going over Goldsmith's life," writes Dr. Anderson to Percy, "I will thank you to point out the particular passages which were thrust "into your narrative." Nichols's Illustrations, vii. 213. Substantially, however, the narrative no doubt remained in its leading details what it is stated to be in the advertisement, "composed from the information of persons who were intimate with "the poet at an early period, and who were honoured with a continuance of his "friendship till the time" of his death. For proof of Percy's unceasing reference to the Memoir as the authentic account of Goldsmith, even after its interpolation by Rose, see Nichols's Illustrations, vii. 102, where he recommends it to Dr. Anderson's

+ I quote the couplet (of which the first line is tamely given in the Percy Memoir, 5, "Our herald hath proclaimed this saying ") from Mr. Shaw Mason's Statistical Account, iii. 359.

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repartee; for it is even possible that the secret might be found in them, of much that has been too harshly condemned Et. 10. for egregious vanity in Goldsmith. It may have been so; but it sprang from the opposite source to that in which the ordinary forms of vanity have birth. Fielding describes a class of men who feed upon their own hearts; who are egotists, as he says, the wrong way; and if Goldsmith was vain, it was the wrong way. It arose, not from overweening self-complacency in supposed advantages, but from what the world had forced him since his earliest youth to feel, intense uneasy consciousness of supposed defects. His resources of boyhood went as manhood came. There was no longer the cricketmatch, the hornpipe, an active descent upon an orchard, or a game of fives or foot-ball, to purge unhealthy humours and clear out the mind." There was no old dairy-maid, no Peggy Golden, to beguile childish sorrows, or, as he mournfully recalls in one of his delightful essays, to sing him into pleasant tears with Johnny Armstrong's Last Good Night, or the Cruelty of Barbara Allen. It was his ardent wish, as he grew to manhood, to be on good terms with the society around him; and, finding it essential first of all to be on good terms with himself, he would have restored by fantastic

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notice. In a letter to Mr. Nichols (Illustrations, vi. 584), Percy also expressly describes it as compiled under his direction. I refer to this compilation throughout my volume, therefore, as the Percy Memoir; and in an Appendix to the second volume of this biography ("WHAT WAS PROPOSED AND WHAT WAS DONE FOR THE RELATIVES OF GOLDSMITH"), I have entered more largely into the delays and disputes connected with its composition. It should be added that many of the materials for a life which Percy had obtained from Goldsmith himself, were lost by being intrusted to Johnson, when the latter proposed to be his friend's biographer; and some were lost by Percy himself. But the failure of Johnson's design arose less from his own dilatoriness than from a difficulty started by Francis Newbery's surviving partner (Carnan, the elder Newbery's son-in-law), who held the copyright of She Stoops to Conquer, and who refused to join the other possessors of Goldsmith's writings in the "Edition and Memoir" which Johnson had undertaken. "I know he intended to write Goldsmith's Life," says Malone, "for I collected some materials for it by his "desire."

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Et. 10.

dress and other innocent follies what his friends till then had done their best to banter him out of. It was to no purpose he made the attempt. So unwitting a contrast to gentleness, to simplicity, to an utter absence of disguise, in his real nature, could but make an absurdity the more. “Why, "what wouldst thou have, dear Doctor!" said Johnson, laughing at a squib in the St. James's Chronicle which had coupled himself and his friend as the pedant and his flatterer in Love's Labour Lost, and at which poor Goldsmith was fretting and foaming; "who the plague is hurt with all this "nonsense? and how is a man the worse, I wonder, in his "health, purse, or character, for being called Holofernes ?" "How you may relish being called Holofernes," replied Goldsmith, "I do not know; but I do not like at least to play Goodman Dull."* Much against his will it was the part he was set down for from the first.

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But were there not still the means, at the fireside of his good-hearted father, of turning these childish rebuffs to something of a wholesome discipline? Alas! little; there was little of worldly wisdom in the home circle of the kind but simple preacher, to make a profit of this worldly experience. My father's education, says the man in black, and no one ever doubted who sat for the portrait, "was above his fortune, and his generosity greater than "his education. He told the story of the ivy-tree, and "that was laughed at; he repeated the jest of the two "scholars and one pair of breeches, and the company "laughed at that; but the story of Taffy in the sedan-chair

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.

was sure to set the table in a roar: thus his pleasure in"creased in proportion to the pleasure he gave; he loved "all the world, and he fancied all the world loved him.

* Mrs. Piozzi's Anecdotes (1786), 180, 181.

"As his fortune was but small, he lived up to the very

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"extent of it: he had no intentions of leaving his children Et. 10.

money, for that was dross; he was resolved they should

"have learning, for learning, he used to observe, was better

66

66

than silver or gold. For this purpose, he undertook to "instruct us himself; and took as much pains to form our "morals as to improve our understanding. We were told, "that universal benevolence was what first cemented society; we were taught to consider all the wants of mankind as our own; to regard the human face divine with affection "and esteem; he wound us up to be mere machines of pity, "and rendered us incapable of withstanding the slightest impulse made either by real or fictitious distress in a word, we were perfectly instructed in the art of giving away thousands, before we were taught the more necessary qualifications of getting a farthing.'

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Acquisitions highly primitive, and supporting what seems to have been the common fame of the Goldsmith race. "The Goldsmiths were always a strange family," confessed three different branches of them, in as many different quarters of Ireland, when inquiries were made by a recent biographer of the poet. "They rarely acted "like other people: their hearts were always in the right place, but their heads seemed to be doing anything but "what they ought." In opinions or confessions of this kind, however, the heart's right place is perhaps not so well discriminated as it might be, or collision with the head would be oftener avoided. Worthy Doctor Strean expressed himself more correctly when Mr. Mangin was making his inquiries more than forty years ago. "Several

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*Citizen of the World, xxvii.

+ Prior, i. 101.

C