While there, he narrated to a young clergyman attached to the cathedral, an incident of his life, one of the most touching and pathetic in all biography. He recalled how in the closing years of his father's life, more than fifty years before, he had been guilty of a single act of disobedience, refusing on a particular occasion through pride to attend him at one of his petty sales of his stock at Uttoxeter market. His father went alone, but long after he was dead, Johnson often accompanied him there in imagination. At last, a few years before his death, desiring to atone for his fault, he resolved upon an extraordinary act of humiliation. He went to the very spot where his father had been accustomed to keep his stand in the market-place at Ut. toxeter, and stood there a considerable time bare-headed in the rain. "In contrition," he said, "I stood, and I hope the penance was expiatory."

After this, there remains for us but to state the departure of this pious penitent. His health was gradually failing him. In the summer of 1784, having previously suffered from an attack of paralysis from which he had recovered, he felt. his feebleness in creasing, and had some thought of escaping the severities of the coming winter by a visit to Italy, which was aban

doned for lack of means. His mental strength remained, meanwhile, unimpaired. While in the country, in October, he translated an ode of Horace, in which the poet moralizes on the lessons of mortality in the changing seasons:

"Who knows if Jove, who counts our score, Will toss us in a morning more ?"

But few were now left. Returning to London in the middle of November he became more seriously ill, his thoughts reverting to his departed friends and solaced with the comforts of religion, while the cheerful activity of his mind was shown during his sleepless nights in translating the Greek epigrams of the Anthologia into When the last hour Latin verse.

came he met it with thorough equanimity, fully conscious of the event, counting the thin falling sands of life. His last words to the daughter of a friend who came to visit him were, "God bless you, my dear." And so in his old home in Bolt Court, within the sound of his beloved Fleet Street, on the thirteenth of December, 1784, Johnson expired. On the twentieth his remains were laid in Westminster Abbey by the side of his friend Garrick. Their pilgrimage to London was ended.

T

HE family of Goldsmith, of Eng. | drawn by his son in the sketch of the lish origin and on the Protestant father of the "Man in Black,” in the side, had been long settled in Ireland Citizen of the World. and furnished various clergymen in different offices to its established church, when Oliver, the subject of this notice, was born at Pallas, in the County of Longford, on the 10th of November, 1728. His father, the Rev. Charles Goldsmith, was rector of the parish, married to the daughter of the headmaster of the diocesan school at Elphin, which he had attended, and at the time of Oliver's birth was the parent of three children, struggling to maintain a decent position in the world on an income, all told, of forty pounds a year-an average sum in the remuneration of poor curates which has passed from the poet's verse into a species of proverb. The picture of the clergyman drawn by Goldsmith in the "Deserted Village" has been generally supposed to refer to his father, and it exhibits in enduring colors the simple virtues of the man and the home into which the poet was born. Many traits of Charles Goldsmith's amiable disposition are again reflected in the "Vicar" of Wakefield, and his portrait was also

Oliver's first instructor, the village schoolmistress, dame Delap,who taught him his letters, reported him the dullest of boys and "impenetrably stupid;" and when, at the age of six, he fell into the hands of a male preceptor, Thomas Byrne, a somewhat vagrant character, he acquired more of his unsettled humors and fondness for music than of any book learning he may have pos sessed. It is said that at this time his mind became well stored with the ballad lore and superstitions of the peasantry-incentives to his imagination and lessons in story-telling. The family were now at Lissoy, not far from Pallas, in considerably improved circumstances, the poor pastor having succeeded to a better living at that place. While at school there, Oliver was visited by a severe attack of smallpox, which left, its marks permanently on his countenance, adding to the embarrassment of a somewhat heavily built, ungainly figure. From the academy at Lissoy he was sent to a superior school kept by the Rev. Mr.

have been nothing without its adventure; and of all places in the world for an adventure, Ireland, with its rollicking ways of life, was, in his days, the readiest to furnish one. Setting out from Ballymahon, where his friends had provided him with a horse and a guinea, on his way to Edgeworthstown, he found himself at night half-way on his journey, in the town of Ardagh. Falling in with a notorious wag, one Kelly, and conscious of the unaccustomed presence of the guinea in his pocket, with something of an air of importance, we may suppose, enquiring for an inn, he was directed to the house of a gentleman of the place, named Featherstone. Mistaken by the servants for an expected guest, his horse was taken care of according to his di

Griffin, at Elphin, where one of his uncles resided. There, amidst the jeers of his companions at his clumsiness and stupidity, he made some acquaintance with Ovid and Horace, and was thus led into that pathway of the muses, which, spite of all prognostications, no one of his generation was to pursue to greater advantage. There was time enough before him yet, for he was now only in his ninth year, and there were soon indications that he was to be something more than the butt of his ill-mannered associates. One day at his uncle's at Elphin there was a little dance, when Oliver, in the gayety of his spirits ventured a pas seul on the floor. "Ah!" says the fiddler, "Esop!" upon which the boy, stopping in his hornpipe, turned the laugh upon his assailant in his first recorded coup-rection by the servants, and, entering

let:

"Heralds! proclaim aloud! all saying,

See Æsop dancing, and his monkey playing." Thus, this first trifling display of his poetic talent recalls the last brilliant effort of his muse published after his death, "Retaliation." From the cradle to the grave, it was the fortune of the good-humored Goldsmith to be constantly thrown upon the defensive. After a year or two with Mr. Griffin, Goldsmith passed to the hands of another clerical instructor, Mr. Campbell, at Athlone; thence, in his thirteenth year, to another reverend gentleman, Mr. Hughes, at Edgeworthstown, with whom, at the age of sixteen, he concluded his school studies. On leaving home at the close of his last holiday, he met with an adventure of an amus. ing character. A month in the life of Goldsmith, it may be remarked, would

the mansion, he stoutly called upon the proprietor for a liberal supper, ordering wine and magnanimously inviting the wife and daughter of his landlord to join him. Mr. Featherstone saw the mistake and humored it, enjoying the style of the young student with whose father he had been acquainted at college. Parting with his guest at bed-time he received an order for a hot cake in the morning, and it was not till breakfast was over that Goldsmith was allowed to appreciate the jest which had been played upon him. In this case, however, he had been no loser; nor has the world been since, for the joke furnished him with the main incident in his comedy, "She Stoops to Conquer," over which to this day many thousands of persons are every season enjoying their hearty laugh.