THE AUTHOR TO THE READER OF THIS BIOGRAPHY. "It seems rational to hope," says Johnson in the Life of Savage, "that minds qualified for great attainments should first "endeavour their own benefit; and that they who are most able "to teach others the way to happiness, should with most cer"tainty follow it themselves: but this expectation, however plausible, has been very frequently disappointed." Perhaps not so frequently as the earnest biographer imagined. Much depends on what we look to for our benefit, much on what we follow as the way to happiness. It may not be for the one, and may have led us far out of the way of the other, that we had acted on the world's estimate of worldly success, and to that directed our endeavour. So might we ourselves have blocked up the path, which it was our hope to have pointed out to others; and, in the straits of a selfish profit, made wreck of great attainments. OLIVER GOLDSMITH, whose life and adventures should be known to all who know his writings, must be held to have succeeded in nothing that his friends would have had him succeed in. He was intended for a clergyman, and was rejected when he B applied for orders; he practised as a physician, and never made what would have paid for a degree; what he was not asked or expected to do, was to write, but he wrote and paid the penalty. His existence was a continued privation. The days were few, in which he had resources for the night, or dared to look forward to the morrow. There was not any miserable want, in the long and sordid catalogue, which in its turn and in all its bitterness he did not feel. He had shared the experience of those to whom he makes affecting reference in his Animated Nature, "people who "die really of hunger, in common language of a broken heart;" and when he succeeded at the last, success was but a feeble sunshine on a rapidly approaching decay, which was to lead him, by its flickering and uncertain light, to an early grave. Self-benefit seems out of the question here, and the way to happiness is indeed distant from this. But if we look a little closer, we shall see that he has passed through it all with a childlike purity of heart unsullied. Much of the misery vanishes when that is known; and when it is remembered, too, that in spite of it the Vicar of Wakefield was written, nay, that without it, in all human probability, a book so delightful and wise could not have been written. Fifty-six years after its author's death, the greatest of Germans recounted to a friend how much he had been indebted to the celebrated Irishman. "It is not to be described," wrote Goethe to Zelter, in 1830, "the effect that "Goldsmith's Vicar had upon me, just at the critical moment of "mental development. That lofty and benevolent irony, that "fair and indulgent view of all infirmities and faults, that meek ness under all calamities, that equanimity under all changes "and chances, and the whole train of kindred virtues, whatever names they bear, proved my best education; and in the end," |