course could the good bishop have taken with a man who came before him with his awkward bashfulness illustrated in scarlet plush breeches?

He fell now into a long uninterrupted career of mortifications, disgraces, and disasters. He was placed under a private tutor. At the end of eighteen months he was turned out of the house for having accused one of the family of cheating him at cards. Goldsmith was probably right in the charge. He found the world before him where to choose, and he selected the American plantations: he took his passage, but, luckily for us, he was too late for the hour of embarkation, and the vessel sailed without her dilatory passenger. He may have thought of the other Oliver, and, remembering Cromwell, have comforted himself with the reflection that, when fate stood between a man and his intention to cross the Atlantic, it was generally with the view of forcing greatness upon him in his own country. His next resource was the law; but ere he had reached his destined instructor's door he had spent all the money which had been furnished him by the benevolent indulgence of his friends. These, however, were not wearied, and their benevolence maintained him during eighteen months in Edinburgh as a medical student. Here his reputation as a story-teller was at its height, and his waywardness at its culmination: he would sit and spin stories for his fellows, but he refused an invitation to the Duke of Hamilton's, and spurned fortune in a mistaken idea of independence. Goldsmith would have accepted the invitation as a gentleman, but not as a story-teller: the compliment made to his talent to amuse he twisted into an insult. How many have been as foolishly sensitive? For, after all, when Amphitryon has made up a party of very dull people of quality, it is a compliment to be of the selected wits, who are especially invited for their wit, to amuse those who have none.

From Edinburgh to Leyden was the usual change of locality for medical students, and Goldsmith accordingly took his passage to Bordeaux ! It was one of his common mistakes, and by another of them he failed to reach the ship in time for the hour of sailing. The last mistake was no misfortune, for the vessel was lost with every soul on board. Our hero reached Leyden, but he was there as one flung ashore from a wreck. His career of study and life is soon told. He endeavoured to find support by teaching English to the Dutch, without himself knowing a word of the language of those to whom he wished to explain the difficulties of another. It was a touch of his philosophic vagabond. He was steeped in distress, heartily beloved by poor scholars who had nothing better than love to give, and

did not find wealth in his search after it through cards. He left Leyden without a degree; but he took with him one shirt and his flute !

With these advantages he made, on foot, that portion of the grand tour, traces of which are to be met with so eloquently and feelingly described in the "Traveller" and in the immortal "Vicar of Wakefield." It was during this tour that he achieved the cheap honour of M.B.; but it is not clearly ascertained whether he acquired the degree at drowsy Louvain or at learned Padua. We need not describe his journey through Flanders and France, over Switzerland and Germany, into Italy. It is even hardly necessary for us to add that, from the time he left Leyden until he reached the inhospitable threshold of the rude Carinthian boor who is pilloried in the "Traveller,” his almost only bread-winner was his flute: a merry tune played by ear, at evening-time before a peasant's door, purchased for him a rude supper and the luxury of dreaming of future greatness upon some charity-strewn straw. With this he was happier and freer than when, during a brief fragment of his journey, he undertook the old office of bear-leader, and attended a youth with 200,0007. and a munificent spirit that led him to bestow his patronage only upon sights that could be seen gratis. In France, he appears to have contemplated the social and political aspect of things with an eagle and philosophic eye-an eye quick to detect and a mind unerring in foreseeing consequences. He saw the uprooting of monarchy in France as clearly as we who have been witnesses of the catastrophe. In Switzerland, his memories of which are so finely recorded in his "Animated Nature," he came in contact with Voltaire, and Dr. Pangloss talked like Jenkinson, the cosmogonist, to poor Dr. Primrose. We have said that his flute was his breadwinner, but it ceased to be so in Italy. The fellow-countrymen of Palestrina were deaf to "Barbara Allen," pierced, from memory, through the vents of an Irish reed. Goldsmith was ready for the emergency, and therein shewed the heroism which was inseparable from his character. He dropped his flute and assumed philosophy: not as a dignity--he played it as he had done his flute, for bread and a pillow. He knocked at the gate of a college instead of at the door of a cottage, made his bow, gave out his thesis, supported it in a Latin which must have set on edge the teeth of his hearers and, having carried his exhibition to a successful end, was awarded the trifling and customary honorarium, with which he purchased strength for tomorrow: sic solent pauperes.

All this was not bad schooling for a man like Goldsmith. It

was hard coin to him in after life, when he could turn his experience into ducats: for the present, however, it brought him nothing except the bare power to maintain a struggle for life. He returned to England in 1756 with reminiscences and empty pockets.

His way up to London was like a dream: we see him indistinctly: there is a glimpse of him acting in a barn: he flits about in uncertain figures, till at last we have him bodily, and behold him pale and hungry, spreading plaisters behind an apothecary's counter in Fish-street-hill. This was a low occupation; and he scarcely held one more dignified when, in faded wrapper, with an old hat dexterously held to cover a wide rent, he descended to Bankside and practised as physician among a wretched class who never dream of paying for medical advice in any coin but promises. We except the miserable patient who patronised his physician, and who, seeing the latter more wretched than himself, procured him employment as reader and corrector of the press to that printing-author Richardson, the father of a family somewhat tightly laced in buckram, but with merits to boot which render them welcome, even in our own days, to the general reader. The engagement did not endure long-not many months-during which he designed a tragedy; and at the end of which he had assumed the tragical character of usher in Dr. Milner's academy, at Peckham. This was in 1757: it was a heavy year to Goldsmith, but it had its compensations. A chance verse, written when he was a child, saved him, perhaps, from being a carpenter: a chance word, winged with wit, and dropped at Milner's table, fell upon the attentive ear of Griffiths, the publisher. This mercenary and cunning knave took Goldsmith aside and penned him into the recess of a window, from which he only issued as leading writer, engaged for a year certain, upon Griffiths' Whig Monthly Review. At the age of twenty-nine, he found himself the boarded and bedded slave of a man and his wife who not only gave him his task but corrected it when accomplished! His first essay was a critical paper upon Mallet's "Northern Antiquities"-a book which has just been republished by Bohn, and which would have had all the higher claim upon popular favour had this first essay, written by Goldsmith as an author upon compulsion, been appended to it! In a subsequent number, Goldsmith elicited the warm approbation of the other "Irish adventurer," Burke. This was sunlight on a slavery which had its advantages withal, and whose toil formed fine mental discipline for the young writer. It endured, too, but five months: at the end of this period, Griffiths accused Goldsmith (who was chained to his oar and

VOL. XXIV.-G

who was only in safety as long as he pulled) of being lazy! Goldsmith retorted by averring that the publisher was an impertinent fellow, and that his wife endeavoured to starve him. They parted with ill will on one side, and indignation on the other.

Among the works reviewed by Goldsmith during this engagement with Griffiths was one by the celebrated Jonas Hanway:

"This was the Jonas of whom Dr. Johnson affirmed that he acquired some reputation by travelling abroad, and lost it all by travelling at home: not a witticism, but a sober truth. His book about Persia was excellent-his book about Portsmouth indifferent; but though an eccentric, he was a very benevolent and earnest man. He made the common mistake of thinking himself even more wise than he was good; but he had too much reason to complain, which he was always doing, of a general want of earnestness and seriousness in his age. His larger schemes of benevolence have connected his name with the Marine Society and the Magdalene, both of which he originated; as well as with the Foundling, which he was active in improving; and to his courage and perseverance in smaller fields of usefulness (his determined contention with extravagant vails to servants not the least), the men of Goldsmith's day were indebted for the liberty to use an umbrella. Gay's pleasant poem of Trivia' commemorates its earlier use by poor women, by tuck'd up sempstresses,' and walking 'maids; but with even this class it was a winter privilege, and woe to the woman of a better sort, and to the man, whether rich or poor, who dared at any time so to invade the rights of coachmen and chairmen ! But Jonas steadily underwent the staring, laughing, jeering, hooting, and bullying; and having punished some insolent knaves who struck him with their whips as well as tongues, he finally established a privilege, which, when the Journal des Débats gravely assured its readers that the king of the barricades was to be seen walking the streets of Paris with an umbrella under his arm, had reached its culminating point and played a part in state affairs. Excellent Mr. Hanway, having settled the use of the unbrella, made a less successful move when he would have written down the use of tea."

These are incidental circumstances worth retaining in our memory to them may be added the following, which is narrated in connection with another work which passed under Goldsmith's critical examination :

in this number there was also a clever notice, from the same hand, of Dobson's translation of the first book of Cardinal de Polignac's Latin poem of Anti-Lucretius-the poem whose ill success stopped Gray in what he playfully called his Tommy Lucretius' (De Principiis Cogitandi '). The cardinal's work I may mention as a large monument of vanity-the talk of the world in those days now forgotten. It was the work of a life; could boast of having been corrected by Boileau and altered by Louis XIV.; and was kept in manu

script so long, and so often, with inordinate self-complacency, publicly recited from by the author in kind earnest of what the world was to expect, that some listeners with good memories (Le Clerc among them) stole its best passages, and published them for the world's earlier benefit as their own. This drove the poor cardinal to premature delivery, and an instalment of thirteen thousand lines appeared, of which perhaps one line (Eripuitque Jovi fulmen, Phœboque sagittas'), having since suggested Franklin's epitaph ( Eripuit Cœlo fulmen, sceptrumque tyrannis), has a chance to live."

The plagiarisms committed upon the poor cardinal remind us of those endured by Beckford. The travels of his youthful prime, which that painful Sybarite published in his declining age, were frequently read aloud by him to a circle of literary friends. When they were given to the world, it was discovered that the poetical thieves of the circle had stolen all the similes : there was not one which the world did not recognize as an old acquaintance! But it is time to return to Goldsmith.

Oliver was again destitute-resigned once more to starve. where Butler and Otway had starved before him. For months after he quitted Griffiths, his life was spent in lurking about unclean courts, and in performing small literary jobs for minute pay. In the midst of accumulated miseries his brother Charles startled him with his presence, and with his expressed hopes that he would help him on to fortune. Oliver had himself ceased to apply to his Irish kinsmen for aid in his distress, and his refraining from importunity was rashly construed into his having achieved fortune. He who himself starved was little likely to be able to help a starving brother. The latter passed on his way alone to fight with famine: the struggle dragged him into America and back to England; and, some thirty years since, the dead body of an extremely aged man, found in a miserable room in a low house of Camden Town, told how the struggle had ended, and how death had stepped in and withdrawn the old man from the fearful odds he had to encounter.

The simple and cheap luxuries indulged in by Goldsmith at this period were his memories of early days: he fed upon reminiscences: he was not altogether uncheered by hope, but the future was dimmed by uncertainty; and, of the few bright spots in the past, they were those which lit up the scenes of his youth ere he yet had buckled on his armour to win existence. Of these fate could not rob him, and his letters are eloquent and touching with the memories of those days. Among the weary labours of this period is a work entitled, " Memoirs of a Protestant condemned to the Galleys:" it bore the description and name