entertainment and to profit. Through the pains and obstructions of his childhood, through the uneasy failures of his youth, through the desperate struggles of his manhood, it lighted him to those last uses of experience and suffering which have given him an immortal name.

And let it be observed, that this Ballymahon idleness could lay claim to a certain activity in one respect. It was always cheerful: no unimportant part of education, if heart and head are to go together. It will be well, indeed, when habits of cheerfulness are as much a part of formal instruction as habits of study, and when the foolish argument will be heard no longer, that these things are in Nature's charge. Nature asks help and culture in all things will even yield to their solicitation, what would otherwise lie unknown. It was an acute remark of Goldsmith, in respect to literary efforts, that the habit of writing will give a man justness of thinking; and that he may get from it a mastery of manner, which holiday writers, though with ten times his genius, will find it difficult to equal. It is the same in temper as in mind. Habit comes in aid of all deficiencies. The reader will be therefore not unprepared to find, as well in these 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 seems little wonderful: having

seen, in his father and his brother, how much learning and labour were rewarded in the church by forty pounds a year. 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.' But his friends, though not so resolute as at first, still advised him to this family profession. 'Our 'friends,' says the Man in Black, 'always advise, when they 'begin to despise us.' He made application to the Bishop of Elphin, and was refused: plucked: sent back as he went. 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; it was a tradition in the diocese' that Mr. Theaker Wilder had told the Bishop of his college irregularities; Doctor Strean fully believes, from rumours he picked up, that 'Mr. Noll's' offence was the having presented himself before his right reverence in scarlet breeches. The rejection is the only certainty. The Man in Black, it will be remembered, undergoes something of the same kind, remarking: 'My friends were now per'fectly 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 was easy to antici

pate, unsatisfactorily. His talent for card-playing as well as 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

I struggled so hard to come home to you, I wonder you ' are not more rejoiced to 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 handwriting, but has great internal evidence of his facility, grace, and humour. In substance it 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 the captain never inquired after him, setting sail with as much indifference as if he had been on board. 'You know, 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 fifteen, and with five shillings in his pocket turned homewards. Then came 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 thanked him for his bounty. Penniless in consequence, he bethought him of a college. acquaintance on the road, to whose house he went. exquisite humour he describes this most miserly acquaintance, who, to allay his desperate hunger, dilated on the

With

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, at 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.'

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 likely that his mother objected to receive him; since after this date we find