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While his loved partner, boastful of her hoard,
Displays her cleanly platter on the board:
And haply too some pilgrim, thither led,
With many a tale repays the nightly bed.
Thus every good his native wilds impart,
Imprints the patriot passion on his heart;

And e'en those hills, that round his mansion rise,
Enhance the bliss his scanty fund supplies :
Dear is that shed to which his soul conforms,
And dear that hill which lifts him to the storms;
And as a child, when scaring sounds molest,
Clings close and closer to the mother's breast-
So the loud torrent, and the whirlwind's roar,
But bind him to his native mountains more.

Such was the education of thought and heart now taking the place of a more learned discipline in the truant wanderer; such the wider range of sympathies and enjoyment opening out upon his view; such the larger knowledge that awakened in him, as the subtle perceptions of genius arose. More than ever was he here, in the practical paths of life, a loiterer and laggard; yet as he passed from place to place, finding for his foot no solid resting-ground, no spot of all the world that he might hope to call his own, there was yet sinking deep into the heart of the homeless vagrant that power and possession to which all else on earth subserves and is obedient, and which out of the very abyss of poverty and want gave him a right and title over all.

For me your tributary stores combine;

Creation's heir, the world, the world is mine!

Descending into Piedmont he observed the floating beehouses of which he speaks so pleasantly in the Animated Nature.* "As the bees are continually choosing their

* vi. 109.

1755.

Et. 27.

1755.

Æt. 27.

"flowery pasture along the banks of the stream, they are "furnished with sweets before unrifled; and thus a single

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floating bee-house yields the proprietor a considerable
"income. Why a method similar to this has never been
'adopted in England, where we have more gentle rivers,
" and more flowery banks, than any other part of the world,
"I know not." After this, proofs of his having seen Florence,.
Verona, Mantua, and Milan, are apparent; and in Carinthia
the incident occurred with which his famous couplet
has too hastily reproached a people, when, sinking with
fatigue, after a long day's toilsome walk, he was turned from
a peasant's hut at which he implored a lodging. At Padua
he is supposed to have stayed some little time; and here, it
has been asserted, though in this case also the official
records are lost, he received his degree. Here, or at Louvain,
or at some other of these foreign universities where he always
boasted himself hero in the disputations to which his philo-
sophic vagabond refers, there can hardly be a question that
the degree, a very simple and accessible matter at any of
them, was actually conferred. "Sir," said Boswell to
Johnson, "he disputed his passage through Europe."*
his having also taken a somewhat close survey of those count-
less academic institutions of Italy, in the midst of which
Italian learning at this time withered, evidence is not
wanting; and he always thoroughly discriminated the
character of that country and its people.

But small the bliss that sense alone bestows,
And sensual bliss is all the nation knows;
In florid beauty groves and fields appear-
Man seems the only growth that dwindles here!

* Life, ii. 189.

Of

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Contrasted faults through all his manners reign :
Though poor, luxurious; though submissive, vain ;
Though grave, yet trifling; zealous, yet untrue-
And even in penance planning sins anew.

1755.

Æt. 27.

It is a hard struggle to return to England; but his steps are now bent that way. "My skill in music," says the philosophic vagabond, whose account there will be little danger in accepting as at least some certain reflection of the truth, "could avail me nothing in Italy, where every peasant was a better musician than I: but by this time I had "acquired another talent which answered my purpose as well, and this was a skill in disputation. In all the foreign "universities and convents there are, upon certain days, "philosophical theses maintained against every adventitious disputant; for which, if the champion opposes with any dexterity, he can claim a gratuity in money, a dinner, and "a bed for one night. In this manner, then, I fought my

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way towards England; walked along from city to city; "examined mankind more nearly; and, if I may so express "it, saw both sides of the picture."

CHAPTER VI.

1756.

PECKHAM SCHOOL AND GRUB STREET.

1756-1757.

It was on the 1st of February, 1756, that Oliver Goldsmith Et. 28. stepped upon the shore at Dover, and stood again among his

countrymen.

Stern o'er each bosom reason holds her state,

With daring aims irregularly great.

Pride in their port, defiance in their eye,

I see the lords of human kind pass by,
Intent on high designs. . .

The comfort of seeing it must have been about all the comfort to him. At this moment, there is little doubt, he had not a single farthing in his pocket; and from the lords of human kind, intent on looking in any direction but his, it was much more difficult to get one than from the careless goodhumoured peasants of France or Flanders. In the struggle of ten days or a fortnight which it took him to get to London, there is reason to suspect that he attempted a "low comedy" performance in a country barn; and, at one of the towns he passed, had implored to be hired in an apothecary's shop. In the middle of February he was wandering without

*

In one of the newspaper notices which appeared after his death, the writer stated that he had once set up as an apothecary in a country town. This was immediately denied, on the assumption that Ireland was referred to; whereupon

1756.

friend or acquaintance, without the knowledge or comfort of even one kind face, in the lonely, terrible, LONDON Et. 28.

streets.

He thought he might find employment as an usher; and there is a dark uncertain kind of story, of his getting a bare subsistence in this way for some few months, under a feigned name: which had involved him in a worse distress but for the judicious silence of the Dublin Doctor (Radcliff), fellow of the college and joint-tutor with Wilder, to whom he had been suddenly required to apply for a character, and whose good-humoured acquiescence in his private appeal saved him from suspicion of imposture. Goldsmith showed his gratitude by a long, and, it is said, a most delightful letter to Radcliff, descriptive of his travels; now unhappily destroyed.* He also wrote again to his more familiar Irish

the writer rejoined (St. James' Chronicle, April 12, 14, 1774), "We never said "that he set up in Ireland. The country town alluded to is an English town, the 66 name of which is forgotten. But the writer of this and the former paragraph 66 'assures the public that he had the anecdote from the Doctor's own mouth." Mr. Prior has quoted this, i. 201.

* Percy's friend, Campbell (in his Survey of the South of Ireland, 286-9), gives an account of this incident from the recollections of Radcliff's widow, but in antedating it before his foreign travel makes an evident mistake, which is silently corrected in the Percy Memoir, 37, where reference is made to Campbell's book. I now quote the latter: "Upon his first going to England, he was in such distress, "that he would gladly have become an usher to a country school; but so destitute 86 was he of friends to recommend him, that he could not without difficulty obtain "even this low department. The master of the school scrupled to employ him "without some testimonial of his past life. Goldsmith referred him to his tutor "at college for a character; but all this while he went under a feigned name. "From this resource, therefore, one would think that little in his favour could be ever hoped for; but he only wanted to serve a present exigency; an ushership was not his object. In this strait, he wrote a letter to Dr. Radcliff, imploring "him, as he tendered the welfare of an old pupil, not to answer a letter which he "would probably receive, the same post with his own, from the schoolmaster. He "added that he had good reasons for concealing both from him and the rest of the "world his name, and the real state of the case; every circumstance of which he "promised to communicate on some future occasion. His tutor, embarrassed "enough to know what answer he should give, resolved at last to give none. And "thus was poor Goldsmith snatched from between the horns of his present

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