1746.

years later. But not till a man becomes famous is it Et. 18. to be expected that any wonderful feats of memory should be performed respecting him; and it seems tolerably evident that, with the exception of perhaps Bryanton and Beatty, not one owner of the names recounted put himself in friendly relation with the sizar, to elevate, assist, or cheer him. Richard Malone, afterwards Lord Sunderlin; Barnard and Marlay, afterwards worthy bishops of Killaloe and Waterford; found nothing more pleasant than to talk of "their old fellow-collegian Doctor Goldsmith," in the painting-room of Reynolds: but nothing, I suspect, so difficult, thriving lads as they were in even these earlier days, than to vouchsafe recognition to the unthriving, depressed, insulted Oliver.*

1747.

A year and a half after he had entered college, at the Æt. 19. commencement of 1747, his father suddenly died. The scanty sums required for his support had been often intercepted, but this stopped them altogether. It may have been the least and most trifling loss connected with that sorrow; but "squalid poverty," relieved by occasional gifts, according to his small means, from uncle Contarine, by petty loans from Bryanton or Beatty, or by desperate pawning of his books of study, was Goldsmith's lot thenceforward. Yet even in the depths of that despair, arose the consciousness of faculties reserved for better fortune than continual

"When he had got high in fame," said Johnson to Boswell, "one of his friends "began to recollect something of his being distinguished at college. Goldsmith in "the same manner recollected more of that friend's early years, as he grew a greater “man,” Boswell vi. 310. This, we must admit, is the general rule. Barnard, afterwards Dean of Derry, and ultimately Bishop of Killaloe, from which diocese he was translated to that of Limerick, will frequently appear in these pages. He was upwards of eighty when he died, at Wimbledon, in 1806. Marlay became bishop of Waterford, and is characterised with much truth by Malone as an amiable, benevolent, and ingenious man.

contempt and failure.

He would write street-ballads to 1747.

save himself from actual starving; sell them at the Et.19. Rein-Deer repository in Mountrath-court for five shillings a-piece; and steal out of the college at night to hear them sung.*

Happy night, to him worth all the dreary days! Hidden by some dusky wall, or creeping within darkling shadows of the ill-lighted streets, this poor neglected sizar watched, waited, lingered, listened there, for the only effort of his life which had not wholly failed. Few and dull perhaps the beggar's audience at first, but more thronging, eager, and delighted, as he shouted forth his newly-gotten ware. Cracked enough, I doubt not, were those ballad-singing tones; very harsh, extremely discordant, and passing from loud to low without meaning or melody; but not the less did the sweetest music which this earth affords fall with them on the ear of Goldsmith. Gentle faces pleased, old men stopping by the way, young lads venturing a purchase with their last remaining farthing; why, here was a world in little, with its fame at the sizar's feet! "The greater world will be "listening one day" perhaps he muttered, as he turned with a lighter heart to his dull home.

It is said to have been a rare occurrence when the five shillings of the Rein-deer repository reached home along with him. It was the most likely, when he was at his utmost need, to stop with some beggar on the road who might seem to him even more destitute than himself. Nor this only. The money gone,-often, for the naked shivering wretch, had he slipped off a portion of the scanty clothes he wore, to patch a misery he could not otherwise relieve. To one starving creature with five crying children, he gave at

* Prior, i. 75.

1747.

one time the blankets off his bed, and crept himself into the Et. 19. ticking for shelter from the cold.*

It is not meant to insist on these things as examples of conduct. "Sensibility is not Benevolence;" nor will this kind of agonised sympathy with distress, even when graced by an active self-denial of which there is here no proof, supply the solid duties or satisfactions of life. There are distresses, vast and remote, with which it behoves us still more to sympathise than with those, less really terrible, which only more attract us by intruding on our senses; and the conscience is too apt to discharge itself of the greater duty by instant and easy attention to the less. Let me observe also, that, in the case of a man dependent on others, the title to such enjoyment as such largeness and looseness of sympathy involves, has very obvious and controlling limits. So much it is right to interpose when anecdotes of this description are told. To Goldsmith, all the circumstances considered, they are really very creditable; and it is well to recollect them when the "neglected opportunities" of his

* Mr. Mills, Goldsmith's relative and fellow student, is the authority for this anecdote. He occasionally furnished Oliver, it is said, with small supplies, and gave him a breakfast now and then; for which latter purpose having gone to call him one morning, Goldsmith's voice from within his own room shouted out that he was a prisoner, and they must force the door to help him out. Mills did this, and found him so fastened in the ticking of the bed, into which he had taken shelter from the cold, that he could not escape unassisted. Late on the previous winter night, unable otherwise to relieve a woman and her five children who seemed all perishing with cold, he had brought out his blankets to the college-gate and given them to her. Prior, i. 95, 96.

"Nay, by making us tremblingly alive to trifling misfortunes, it frequently "precludes it, and induces effeminate and cowardly selfishness. Our own sorrows, "like the princes of hell in Milton's Pandæmonium, sit enthroned bulky and vast: "while the miseries of our fellow-creatures dwindle into pigmy forms, and are "crowded, an innumerable multitude, into some dark corner of the heart. There is "one criterion, by which we may always distinguish benevolence from mere "sensibility. Benevolence impels to action, and is accompanied by self-denial." Southey's Omniana.

youth are spoken of. Doubtless there were better things to 1747. be done, by a man of stronger purpose. But the nature of Et. 19. men is not different from that of other living creatures; it gives the temper and the disposition, but not the nurture or the culture. These Goldsmith never rightly had, except in such sort as he could himself provide; and now, assuredly, he had not found them in his college. "That strong, steady "disposition which alone makes men great," he avowed himself deficient in :* but were other dispositions not worth the caring for? "His imagination might have been too warm to relish the cold logic of Burgersdicius, or the dreary "subtleties of Smiglesius:" but with nothing less cold or dreary might a warm imagination have been cherished? When, at the house of Burke, he talked these matters over in after years with Edmund Malone, he said that, though he made no great figure in mathematics, which was a study in much repute there, he could turn an ode of Horace into English better than any of them. His tutor, Mr. Theaker Wilder, would sooner have set him to turn a lathe.

66

This tutor, this reverend instructor of youth, was the same who, on one occasion in Dublin streets, sprang at a bound from the pavement on a hackney-coach which was passing at its swiftest pace, and felled to the ground the driver, who had accidentally touched his face with the whip. So, mathematics being Mr. Theaker Wilder's intellectual passion, the same strength, agility, and ferocity which drove him into brawls with hackney-coachmen, he carried to

* See post, Book II. Chap. iv. Letter to his brother-in-law Hodson. Such is his remark, with probable reference to himself, on Parnell's want of success at Dublin university. Miscellaneous Works, iii. 358. See also the seventeenth of his Essays (on a Taste for the Belles Lettres), in which he contrasts Swift's failure at college with his success in after-life.

Boswell, ii. 189. Watkins's Anecdotes of Men of Learning and Genius, 513.

1747.

the demonstrations of Euclid; and for this, all his life afterEt. 19. wards, even more than poet Gray,* did poor Goldsmith wage war with mathematics. Never had he stood up in his class that this learned savage did not outrage and insult him. Having the misery to mistake malice for wit, the comic as well as tragic faculty of Mr. Wilder found endless recreation in the awkward, ugly, "ignorant," most sensitive young man.† There was no pause or limit to the strife between them. The tutor's brutality rose even to personal violence; the pupil's shame and suffering hardened into reckless idleness; and the college career of Oliver Goldsmith was proclaimed a wretched failure.

66

Gray, while yet as young as Goldsmith, complained from Cambridge to West in much the same language that Goldsmith might have employed in Dublin, if at this early time of life he had been blessed with such a friend. "I have endured "lectures daily and hourly since I came last, supported by the hopes of being shortly at full liberty to give myself up to my friends and classical companions, who, poor souls! though I see them fallen into great contempt with most people 'here, yet I cannot help sticking to them, and out of a spirit of obstinacy (I think) "love them the better for it; and indeed what can I do else? Must I plunge into "metaphysics? Alas! I cannot see in the dark; nature has not furnished me "with the optics of a cat. Must I pore upon mathematics? Alas! I cannot see in "too much light; I am no eagle. It is very possible that two and two make four, "but I would not give four farthings to demonstrate this ever so clearly; and if "these be the profits of life, give me the amusements of it. The people I behold "all around me, it seems, know all this and more, and yet I do not know one of "them who inspires me with any ambition of being like him." Gray's Works, Ed. Mitford (1835), ii. 7-9. "Gray regretted his want of mathematical knowledge," says Norton Nicholls, "yet he would never allow that it was necessary, in order "to form the mind to a habit of reasoning or attention. Does not Locke require as "much attention as Euclid?" &c. &c. Works, v. 52.

66

+ Percy Memoir, 15. "Theaker Wilder, a man of the most morose and merciless 66 temper, who thenceforth persecuted him with unremitting cruelty, especially at the "quarterly examinations, when he would insult him before his fellow students by "sarcastic taunts and ironical applauses of the severest malignity." "He was a younger son," says Mr. Shaw Mason, "of the family of Castle Wilder, in the "county of Longford." Statistical Account, iii. 357. "I well remember," writes Dr. Wilson to Malone, "for he was in the class below me, that his tutor (Wilder), examining him in the Sen. Soph. Class, commenced his judgments with a Male, "and concluded them with a Valde Bene. 'Twas a mistake that the good Doctor '(the tutor) often fell into, to think he was witty when he was simply malicious." Prior, i. 64.

66