'cheerful and agreeable.' But much 'fun' extracted, some change appeared; and 'solemn yet gay, good-natured yet 'irritable, petulant yet appeased by the smallest concession,' were the terms in which people spoke of him then. In those words, as he afterwards appeared to his acquaintances in London,' his elder sister described his school-days to Doctor Percy, Bishop of Dromore, when those great acquaintances were seeking materials for his Life. 'He 'seemed to possess two natures,' was the learned comment, at once upon his childhood and his manhood. And there was sense in it. For struggling ever, though always unavailingly, against feelings which God had given him, were fears he had to thank the World for.

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'Why Noll!' exclaimed a visitor at uncle John's, 'you ' are become a fright! When do you mean to get hand'some again?' Oliver moved in silence to the window. The speaker, a thoughtless and notorious scapegrace of the Goldsmith family, repeated the question with a worse sneer and I mean to get better, sir, when do!' was the boy's retort, which has delighted his biographers for its quickness of repartee. Probably it was something more than smartness. Other like evidences of precocious wit describe the poor lad, while dancing a hornpipe in the house of uncle John, held up to ridicule by the musician of the party as Ugly Æsop, and retorting on his opponent the name of Æsop's Monkey. The couplet was thought

worth preserving, as the first

formal effort of Oliver's

genius, by Percy, Malone, and the rest, who compiled that

biographical preface to the Miscellaneous Works on which the subsequent biographies have been founded.

Our herald hath proclaimed this saying,

See Æsop dancing, and his monkey playing.

But these things may stand for more than quickness of repartee. It is even possible that the secret might be found in them, of much that has been virtuously condemned for vanity in Goldsmith. Vanity it may have been; but it sprang from the opposite source to that in which its ordinary forms have birth. Fielding describes a class of men who feed upon their own hearts: who are egotists, as he says, the wrong way. If Goldsmith was vain, it was the wrong way. It arose, not from overweening self-complacency in supposed advantages, but from what the world had forced him since his earliest youth to feel, intense uneasy consciousness of supposed defects. His resources of boyhood went as manhood There was no longer the cricket-match, the hornpipe, an active descent upon an orchard, or a game of fives or foot-ball, to purge unhealthy humours and 'clear out the mind.' There was no old dairy-maid, no Peggy Golden, to beguile childish sorrows, or, as he mournfully recalls in one of his delightful Essays, to sing him into pleasant tears with Johnny Armstrong's Last Good Night, or the Cruelty of Barbara Allen. It was his ardent wish in later years, the years when those Essays were written, to be on good terms with the society

came.

around him; and, finding it essential first of all to be on good terms with himself, would have restored by fantastic dress and other innocent follies, what the world had all his life done its best to banter him out of. It was to no purpose he made the attempt. It could but assume a greater absurdity with him: so unwitting a contrast to gentleness, to simplicity, to an utter absence of disguise, in his real nature. 'My dear Doctor,' said Johnson, 'how is a man the worse, I wonder, in his health, purse, 'or character, for being called Holofernes?' 'How you 'may relish being called Holofernes,' replied Goldsmith, 'I do not know: but I do not like at least to play Goodman Dull.' It was the part he was, much against his will, set down for from the first.

But was there not still the means, at the fireside of his good-hearted father, of turning these childish rebuffs to something of a wholesome discipline? Alas! little. There was little of worldly wisdom in the home circle of the kind but simple preacher, to make a profit of this worldly experience. My father's education,' says the Man in Black,' was above his fortune, and his generosity greater 'than his education. . . He told the story of the ivy-tree, ' and that was laughed at; he repeated the jest of the two 'scholars and one pair of breeches, and the company 'laughed at that; but the story of Taffy in the Sedan-chair

was sure to set the table in a roar: thus his pleasure in'creased in proportion to the pleasure he gave; he loved 'all the world; and he fancied all the world loved him.

'We were told that universal benevolence was what first 'cemented society; we were taught to consider all the 'wants of mankind as our own; to regard the human face 'divine with affection and esteem: he wound us up to be 'mere machines of pity, and rendered us incapable of with'standing the slightest impulse made either by real or ficti'tious distress: in a word, we were perfectly instructed in 'the art of giving away thousands, before we were taught 'the more necessary qualifications of getting a farthing.'

Acquisitions highly primitive, and supporting what seems to have been the common fame of the Goldsmith race. "The Goldsmiths were always a strange family,' confessed three different branches of them, in as many different quarters of Ireland, when inquiries were made by Mr. Prior, the poet's last and most careful biographer. They rarely acted like other people: their hearts were 'always in the right place, but their heads seemed to be 'doing anything but what they ought.' In opinions or confessions of this kind, however, the heart's right place is not so well discriminated as it might be, or collision with the head would be oftener avoided. Worthy Doctor Strean expressed himself more correctly when Mr. Mangin was making his inquiries twenty-five years ago. 'Several of the family and name,' he said, 'live near Elphin, 'who, as well as the Poet, were, and are, remarkable for their 'worth, but of no cleverness in the affairs of the world.'

If cleverness in the affairs of the world is what the head should be always versed in, to be meditating what

C

it ought, poor Oliver was a grave defaulter. We are all of us, it is said, more or less related to Chaos ; there was much that lay

and with him, to the last, unredeemed from its void.

Sturdy boys, who work a

gallant way through school, and are the lights of their college, and grow up to thriving eminence in their several callings, and found respectable families, are seldom troubled with this relationship till Chaos reclaims them altogether, and they die and are forgotten. All men have their advantages, and that is theirs. But it shows too great a pride in what they have, to think the whole world should be under pains and penalties to possess it too; and to set up so many doleful lamentations over this poor, weak, confused, erratic, Goldsmith nature. Their tone will not be taken here the writer having no pretension to its moral dignity. Consideration will be had for the harsh lessons this boy so early and bitterly encountered; it will not be forgotten that feeling, not always rightly guided or controlled, but sometimes in a large excess, must almost of necessity be his who has it in charge to dispense largely, variously, and freely to others; and in the endeavour to show that the heart of Oliver Goldsmith was indeed rightly placed, it may appear, on the whole, that his head profited by its example.

:

At the age of eleven he was removed from Mr. Griffin's, and put to a school of repute at Athlone, about five miles from his father's house, and kept by a Reverend Mr.