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Foreign Literature and Science.

LIFE AND CHARACTER OF OLIVER GOLDSMITH.

BY SIR WALTER SCOTT.

[From Ballantyne's Novelist's Library.]

OUR biographical notices of distinguished Novelists must be in some degree proportioned to the space which their labours occupy in the present collection. On that principle, the present subject, so interesting in every other point of view, cannot be permitted long to detain us. The circumstances also of Dr. Goldsmith's life, his early struggles with poverty and distress, the success of his brief and brilliant career after he had become distinguished as an author, are so well known, and have been so well told, that a short outline is all that ought here to be attempted.

Oliver Goldsmith was born on the 29th November, 1728, at Pallas, (or rather Palice) in the parish of Farney and county of Longford, in Ireland, where his father, the Rev. Charles Goldsmith, a minister of the Church of England, at that time resided. This worthy clergyman, whose virtues his celebrated son afterwards rendered immortal, in the character of the Village Preacher, had a family of seven children, for whom he was enabled to provide but very indifferently. He obtained ultimately a benefice in the county of Roscommon, but died early; for the careful researches of the Rev. John Graham of Lifford have found his widow nigra veste senescens, residing with her son Oliver in Ballymahon, so early as 1740. Among the shop accounts of a petty grocer of the place, Mrs. Goldsmith's name occurs frequently as a customer for trifling articles; on which occasions, Master Noll appears to have been his mother's usual emissary. He was recollected, however, in the neighbourhood, by more poetical employments, as that of playing on the flute, and wandering in solitude on the shores, or among the islands of the river Inny, which is remarkably beautiful at Bally

mahon.

Oliver early distinguished himself by the display of lively talents, and of that uncertainty of humour which is so often attached to genius, as the slave in the chariot of the Roman triumph. An uncle by affinity, the Rev. Thomas Contarine, undertook the expense of affording to so promising a youth the advantages of a scholastic education. He was put to school at Edgeworths-town, and, in June, 1744, was sent to Dublin College as a sizer; a situation which subjected him to much discouragement and ill usage, espeVOL. VI. No. 31.-Museum.

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