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mind: habit comes in aid of all deficiencies.* The reader 1751. will be therefore not unprepared to find, as well in these Et. 23. sunny Irish years, as in other parts of the apparently vagrant and idle career to be now described, some points of even general beneficial example.

The two years, then, are passed; and Oliver must apply for orders. "For the clerical profession," says Mrs. Hodson,

" he had no liking." It is not very wonderful; after having
seen, in his father and his brother, how much learning
and labour were rewarded in the church by forty pounds a
year. But he had yet another, and to him perhaps a stronger
motive; though I do not know if it has not been brought
against him as an imputation of mere vanity or simplicity,
that he once said, "he did not deem himself good enough
"for it." His friends, however, though not so resolutely as
at first, still advised him to this family profession.
"Our

"friends," says the man in black, "always advise, when they

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begin to despise us." He made application to the Bishop of Elphin, and was refused; sent back as he went; in short, plucked;—but the story is told in various ways, and it is hard to get at the truth. His sister says that his youth was the objection; while it was a tradition "in the diocese" that either Mr. Theaker Wilder had given the bishop an exaggerated report of his college irregularities, or (which is more likely, and indeed is the only reasonable account of the affair) that he had neglected the preliminary professional studies. Doctor Strean on the other hand fully believed, from rumours he picked up, that "Mr. Noll's" offence was the having presented himself before his right reverence in scarlet breeches; t and certainly if this last reason be the

"Rely upon it, sir, vivacity is much an art, and depends greatly on habit." Johnson to Boswell, Life, vi. 95.

+ Mangin's Essay, 150. "To be obliged," says the man in black, "to wear a

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true one, it is our first ominous experience of the misplaced Et. 23. personal finery which will find reiterated mention in this veritable history. In truth, however, the rejection is the only absolute certainty. The man in black, it will be remembered, undergoes something of the same kind, remarking, "my friends were now perfectly satisfied I was undone ; "and yet they thought it a pity, for one that had not the "least harm in him, and was so very goodnatured."

Uncle Contarine, however, was far from thinking this. He found a gentleman of his county, a Mr. Flinn, in want of a tutor, and recommended Oliver. The engagement continued for a year, and ended, as it might have been easy to anticipate, unsatisfactorily. His talent for card-playing, as well as for teaching, is said to have been put in requisition by Mr. Flinn; and the separation took place on Goldsmith's accusing one of the family of unfair play. But when he left this excellent Irish family and returned to Ballymahon, he had thirty pounds in his pocket, it is to be hoped the produce of fairer play; and was undisputed owner of a good plump horse. Within a few days, so furnished and mounted, he again left his mother's house (where, truth to say, things do not by this time seem to have been made very comfortable to him), and started for Cork, with another floating vision of America. He returned in six weeks, with nothing in his pocket, and on a lean beast to which he had given the name of Fiddleback. The nature of his reception at Ballymahon appears from the simple remark he is said to have made to his mother. "And now, my dear mother, after having struggled so hard to

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long wig when I liked a short one, or a black coat when I generally dressed in "brown, I thought was such a restraint upon my liberty that I absolutely rejected "the proposal. . . I rejected a life of luxury, indolence, and ease, from no other "consideration but that boyish one of dress." Citizen of the World, xxvii.

* Mrs. Hodson's narrative in the Percy Memoir, 9. And see Prior, i. 118.

"come home to you, I wonder you are not more rejoiced to 66 see me."

He afterwards addressed a clever though somewhat cavalier letter to her from his brother's house; which is open to the objection that no copy exists in his hand-writing, but which has great internal evidence of his facility, grace, and humour. Nor is there anything more signally worth remark in connection with the vagabond vicissitudes which these pages will have to record, than that, out of all the accidents which befell the man, the poverty he had to undergo, the companions with whom he associated, the sordid necessities which unavoidably conduct so often into miry ways, no single speck or stain ever fell on that enchanting beauty of style. Wherever he might be, or with whatever clowns for playfellows; in the tavern, in the garret, or among citizens in the Sunday gardens; when he took the pen in hand, he was a gentleman. Everything coarse or vulgar dropped from it instinctively. It reflected nothing, even in its descriptions of things vulgar or coarse in themselves, but the elegance and sweetness which, whatever might be the accident or meanness of his external lot, remained pure in the last recesses of his nature.

In substance this letter to his mother confessed that his intention was to have sailed for America: that he had gone to Cork for that purpose; converted the horse which his mother prized so much higher than Fiddleback into cash; paid for his passage in an American ship; and, the wind threatening to detain them some days, had taken a little country excursion in the neighbourhood of the city: but that, the wind suddenly serving in his absence, his friend

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*

"His mother," says Mrs. Hodson, "as might be expected, was highly offended, but his brothers and sisters had contrived to meet him there, and at "length effected a reconciliation." Percy Memoir, 9.

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Æt. 23.

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the captain never inquired after him, setting sail with as Et. 23. much indifference as if he had been on board. "You know,

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mother," he remarks, "that no one can starve while he has money in his pocket: "and, being reduced by the practice of this apophthegm to his last two guineas, he bought the generous beast, Fiddleback, for one pound seventeen, and with five shillings in his pocket turned homewards. Then had come one of those sudden appeals to a sharp and painful susceptibility, when, as he afterwards described them to his brother, charitable to excess, he forgot the rules of justice, and placed himself in the situation of the wretch who was thanking him for his bounty. Penniless in consequence, he bethought him of a college acquaintance on the road, to whose house he went. With exquisite humour he describes this most miserly acquaintance, who, to allay his desperate hunger, dilated on the advantages of a diet of slops, and set him down to a porringer of sour milk and a heel of musty cheese; and, being asked for the loan of a guinea, earnestly recommended the sale of Fiddleback, producing what he called a much better nag to ride upon which would cost neither price nor provender, in the shape of a stout oaken cudgel. His adventures ended a little more agreeably at last however, in a more genial abode, where an acquaintance of the miser entertained him. He had "two sweet girls to "his daughters, who played enchantingly on the harpsichord ; "and yet it was but a melancholy pleasure I felt the first "time I heard them; for, that being the first time also that "either of them had, touched the instrument since their "mother's death, I saw the tears in silence trickle down "their father's cheeks."*

*The letter descriptive of this adventure, as printed in various editions of Goldsmith's works, is in all respects confirmatory of the narrative as given by

Law was the next thing thought of, and the good Mr. Contarine came forward with fifty pounds. It seems a small sum wherewith to travel to Dublin and London, to defray expenses of entrance at inns of court, and to live upon till a necessary number of terms are eaten. But with fifty pounds young Oliver started; on a luckless journey. A Roscommon friend laid hold of him in Dublin, seduced him to play, and the fifty pounds he would have raised to a hundred, he reduced to fifty pence. In bitter shame, after great physical suffering, he wrote to his uncle, confessed, and was forgiven.

On return to Ballymahon, it is probable that his mother objected to receive him ; * since after this date we find him living wholly with his brother. It was but for a short time, however; disagreement followed there too; and we see him next by Mr. Contarine's fireside, again talking literature to his good-natured uncle, writing new verses to please him (alleged copies of which are not sufficiently authentic to be quoted), and joining his flute to Miss Contarine's harpsichord.

Mrs. Hodson; and it is only for the reason mentioned in the text that I do not quote it in detail. I have thought it right, however, to include it in the Appendix (B) to the present volume.

* Mrs. Hodson's narrative, from which these facts are derived, after remarking that "his own distress and disgrace may readily be conceived," adds, "to make "short of the story, he was again forgiven;" but Mr. Prior states the tradition of the neighbourhood to be, that though forgiven by his uncle he was less readily forgiven by his mother, so that he ceased to live with her, and went to his brother Henry, until a quarrel, arising from some trifling cause, for a time terminated all intercourse between the brothers. i. 129.

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Æt. 24.

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