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had drawn upon him for twenty pounds, "just £33 to France, with good store of clothes, shirts, &c., and that with economy will serve." Economy he never practised. Whatever pittance he possessed was usually squandered, and when he lived frugally it was because he had exhausted his means. A letter from Leyden to Mr. Contarine, which describes the mishaps that attended his voyage to Holland, whither he went instead of to France, is tinged, like the apologetical epistle to his mother, with palpable romance; and Mr. Forster suggests, we have no doubt truly, that it may perhaps have been dictated by the same motive-a desire to explain away heedless expenditure which might soon compel him to tax anew the purse and patience of his friends. His generous uncle, however, seems shortly afterwards to have sunk into childishness, and his other relatives in Ireland were deaf to his appeals. At Leyden he managed to exist by borrowing and giving lessons in English. He frequented the gaming table, and once brought away a considerable sum, which was lost almost as soon as won. When he took his departure in February 1755, he was obliged to a fellow student for the loan which was to carry him on his way. Immediately afterwards he passed the shop of a florist, saw some costly tulip-roots, which were things prized by Mr. Contarine, and, solely intent upon gratifying his uncle, bought them at once with the borrowed money. It is these benevolent but ill-regulated impulses which have endeared the memory of Goldsmith to the world. In him the extravagance which ministers to gratitude and relieves wretchedness was still stronger than the improvidence which grew from self-indulgence. "He left Leyden next day," says Mr. Forster, with a guinea in his pocket, one shirt to his back, and a flute in his hand."

and board. As no Englishman of his time could have seen so much of the interior life of the lower classes abroad, and been so intimately versed in their manners and feelings, it is surprising that among all his literary taskwork he should never have given a narrative of his continental adventures. It is stated by Mr. Forster, that after he grew into reputation the booksellers for whom he worked were unwilling to have it known that the famous Dr. Goldsmith had been a mendicant wanderer. If this was the cause of his silence, they judged very ill for their own interests and very falsely of public opinion, and the world has lost a more charming book of travels than has ever perhaps been penned.

The pedestrian tour of Goldsmith lasted exactly a year, and in February, 1756, he landed at Dover. He had increased his knowledge of men, manners, and countries, but he had brought back little which could aid him in his profession, except a medical degree that was supposed to have been procured at either Padua or Louvain, where the principal qualification was the payment of the fees. He made his way to London, and his first employment is believed to have been that of an usher in a provincial school. He soon returned to the metropolis, and offered himself to apothecaries to dispense their medicines. He had no other introduction than bis mein and address, and it is not surprising that his ungainly figure, plain face, awkward manners, and shabby clothes should have failed to recommend him. Such was the poverty of his appearance that when he called shortly afterwards in his best suit upon Dr. Sleigh, who had been his fellow-student at Edinburgh, his former associate was unable to recognize him in his pitiful garb. His Irish birth increased the mistrust and stood much in his way. One Jacob, a chemist, who lived near the Monument, at last ventured to try him, and it was while in his service that Oliver renewed his intercourse with Dr. Sleigh. later"When he did recollect me," says Goldsmith, "I found his heart as warm as ever, and he shared his purse and friendship with me dur

He took the course which he afterwards described in "The Traveller," and trudged on foot through parts of Flanders, France, Germany, Switzerland, and Italy. In days he used to tell his friends of the distresses he underwent of his sleeping in barns, of his dependence at one time upon the charity of convents, and of his turning itinerant flute-player* at another to get bed

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* He was an indifferent performer, and, if we were to credit the story related by Sir John Hawkine, he was ignorant of his notes. Roubiliac, so runs the tale, pretending to be charmed with one of Oliver's airs, begged to have it repeated that he might take it down. The sculptor jotted some random dots upon the paper, and showed it to Goldsmith, who, after looking it over with seeming attention, pro-cryphal.

solemn central figure of the group, was especially provoked by the diverting originalities which distinguished Goldsmith from the rest of mankind. The oddity of language to which he alludes in The Bee was his Hibernian dialect, and it was remarked by his friend Mr. Cooke that to the close of his life he was careful to retain it in all its original force. A curious instance of his ignorance of English pronunciation occurs in one of his early reviews, in which he takes a poet to task for making key rhyme with be. He had then no idea that it had any other sound than his native Irish kay.

ing his continuance in London." Through the agency of Sleigh and Jacob he commenced practising in Southwark, and, in the language of Mr. Forster, became "poor physician to the poor." Yet even in this lowly sphere he was mindful of dress, and while with one hand he felt the pulse of his patient, with the other he held his hat upon his breast to conceal a patch upon his coat. Either he failed to get practise, or those who employed him were too needy to pay, and he abandoned physic to become corrector of the press to the famous Samuel Richardson. A printer whom he attended, and who worked for Richardson, is said to have suggested the notion and introduced him to the novelist. This contact with literature did not assist to make apparent the latent qualities of his genius. The author of "Clarissa" was too much taken up with his own importance to have a chance of detecting in his humble assistant the powers which were to produce the "Vicar of Wake-wick he placed it by the remnant of a true field."

The tricks which the pupils played off upon Oliver he retaliated on the footman, who was weak in intellect and ludicrously vain. As he prided himself upon his eating and drinking feats, Goldsmith rolled some white cheese into the shape of a candle-end, and inserting a bit of blackened paper for a

he had nearly done, the footman swallowed his own piece of candle at a desperate gulp, and began to triumph over the protracted nausea of his antagonist. "Why truly, William," replied Goldsmith, "my bit of candle was no other than a bit of very nice Cheshire cheese, and therefore, William, I was unwilling to lose the relish of it." After practical jokes like these from a man of twentynine, it was an inevitable consequence that usher Oliver and footman William should be treated by the boys with about equal respect. But the old halo of benevolence which surrounds him everywhere shines out here, and his salary was usually spent, the very day it was paid, in charity to beggars and gifts to the smaller boys. "You had better, Mr. Goldsmith," said Mrs. Milner at last, "let me keep your money for you, as I do for some of the young gentlemen." "In truth, madam," he replied, "there is equal need."

tallow-dip. "You eat that piece of candle," In these several occupations the year was he said to the footman, "and I will eat this." passed. The early part of 1757 found him Goldsmith set the example, and with a wry usher at the Academy of Dr. Milner of Peck-face ate up his cheese by mouthfuls. When ham, whose son was another of the fellowstudents of Goldsmith at Edinburgh. He was now secure from want; but to judge from the descriptions he has left of the calling in his writings, it was of all his shifts the most painful and degrading. "The usher," he wrote in The Bee, "is generally the laughing-stock of the school. Every trick is played upon him; the oddity of his manners, his dress, or his language, is a fund of eternal ridicule; the master himself now and then cannot avoid joining in the laugh, and the poor wretch, eternally resenting this ill usage, lives in a state of war with all the family." Mr. Forster, who quotes this passage, also quotes from the reminiscences of Mr. Cooke, a barrister, who was intimate with Goldsmith during the latter part of his life, the still more significant fact that, though he was accustomed to relate the hardships of his obscurer days, he never alluded to the Peckham Academy. The neglects and insults shown to his poverty were due to his circumstances, but the taunts of his pupils were a deeper wound to his sensitive nature, because they were directed against the man. The sketch of the usher he has drawn in The Bee is a palpable self-portrait, and it is a mark of his simplicity that he has generalised traits which were peculiar to himself. The office was doubtless often treated with disrespect, but the laugh which went round the juvenile circle, and extended itself to the

It was while he was at Peckham that the circumstance occurred which brought him into connection with his real vocation. Dr. Milner was a contributor to the "Monthly Review," and Griffiths, the proprietor, when dining at his table, was so far impressed by the conversation of Goldsmith, that he asked him to furnish a few specimens of criticism. The result was his removal from the estab lishment of Dr. Milner to that of Mr. Griffiths. He was to lodge and board with the bookseller, to receive a small salary, and to labor

every day from nine till two upon the "Monthly Review." He entered upon his new functions at the end of April, 1757, having engaged himself for a twelvemonth, and we are inclined to adopt a more cheering view of the contract than has been taken by Mr. Forster. Goldsmith declared that it was not till a year or two later that he discovered his talents for literature. He had, indeed, sent his brother Henry, in a letter from abroad, the first brief draught of "The Traveller," but it drew forth no praise from the family circle, and did not add to their hopes of the scapegrace Oliver. He had again, in the January of the present year, according to the statement of Dr. Farr, called upon him to read the commencement of a tragedy, upon which he had previously taken the opinion of Richardson, but he appears to have received no encouragement to proceed, nor is there the slightest trace, since he sold ballads when at college for five shillings apiece to the street-singers of Dublin, that in any of his distresses he ever dreamt of eking out his subsistence by his pen. To exchange the mechanical drudgery of hearing the Delectus and correcting the nonsense verses of little boys for the more intellectual drudgery of writing for the press was, we suspect, considered by himself an elevation at the moment. It was not Goldsmith conscious of his genius that had let himself out to Griffiths by the year, but Goldsmith the butt of acquaintances and the laughing-stock of schoolboys. In consequence, however, of the coarse, ungenerous nature of the particular publisher who had secured his services, the engagement proved unpropitious, and at the end of six months was dissolved in anger by mutual consent. The bookseller taxed his scribe with idleness and independence, and Goldsmith complained of the authoritative airs of Griffiths, of the domestic parsimony of his wife, and of the unwarrantable liberties of both in re-touching the articles he composed for the review. These early productions have the graces of his style, though not in the highest degree. The substance is below the form. The criticisms and observations are often commonplace, never novel or profound, and his happiest ideas can scarcely challenge any prouder designation than good common sense. With exquisite taste in his own compositions he never, strange to say, attained to much insight into the merits and defects of the writings of others. When his judgments are not false, they show neither nicety of discrimination nor keenness of relish.

In the autumn of 1757 he was once more

thrown upon the town, sleeping in a garret and dating his letters from the Temple Exchange coffee-house, near Temple Bar. He was tracked to his lodgings by his brother Charles, who, hearing a rumor that Oliver was up in the world, had decamped secretly from Ireland to partake of this unwonted Goldsmith prosperity. The poor author made light of his situation, and said that the Campaign of Addison was written in a garret higher than his own; but Charles saw that he must seek for another patron, and was soon on his way to Jamaica. In a letter which Goldsmith wrote in December to his brother-in-law, Mr. Hodson, he speaks of himself as making shift to live by very little practice as a physician, and very little reputation as a poet. None of the poetry has been recovered, if indeed it ever existed, for his accounts of himself are not to be trusted. The only literary work which has been traced to him at this period is a short article in the "Critical Review" for November, 1757, and a translation from the French, entitled "The Memoirs of a Protestant condemned to the Galleys of France for his Religion,' which was published in February, 1758. Even existence in a garret could not be supported upon the miserable proceeds of authorship, and he was fain to return to the Peckham Academy. He reäppeared in the school under what we should have supposed to have been happier auspices. The health of Dr. Milner was failing, and the head mastership devolved in great part upon the usher. To the increased authority he derived from this circumstance was added the consideration, which in the worst days of literature must always have been something, of having been thought competent to instruct the public through the press. Yet his situation was still uneasy, and the hope which brightened his prospects was the promise of Dr. Milner to procure him a medical appointment in India. He bid a final adieu to the Peckham seminary in August, 1758, and shortly afterwards received the warrant which nominated him physician and surgeon to one of the factories on the coast of Coromandel. The salary was only a hundred ayear, but the private practice of the place, which followed the official station, was an extra thousand. To raise money for the outfit, which he calculated would require 1307, he had for some time been preparing in his leisure hours "An Enquiry into the Present State of Polite Learning in Europe." He wrote to his relatives and old companions in Ireland to ask them to obtain subscriptions

for the work. Two or three of those from whom he expected most took no notice of his application, and verified the playful prediction in one of his letters of this date, which distinctly prefigures Mr. Forster and Mr. Cunningham. "There will come a day, no doubt it will, when the Scaligers and Daciers will vindicate my character, give learned editions of my labors, and bless the times with copious comments on the text. You shall see how they will fish up the heavy scoundrels who disregard me now. How will they bewail the times that suffered so much genius to be neglected!" It is true that the experience which these "heavy scoundrels" had had of the use to which Oliver put pecuniary assistance was by no means encouraging, true that any rumors which reached them of his proceedings abroad could only have exhibited him as a thoughtless idler or a mendicant vagrant, true that any tidings of his London vicissitudes must have surrounded him with the suspicion which always attends upon a man who is everything by turns and nothing long; but they also knew that he was as generous as he was improvident; that, if the situations had been reversed, they would not in vain have asked for themselves what they denied to him; that he had supported himself now for four years "without one word of encouragement, or one act of assistance;" and what was most of all to the purpose, to invite subscriptions to a book was to give a practical proof that he was turning his talents

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before the examiners at Surgeon's Hall, to qualify for the office of an hospital mate. A single unlucky candidate of all who applied that day was too ignorant of the rudiments of surgical science to pass, and that one was Oliver Goldsmith, Bachelor of Medicine, and late practitioner of physic in Bankside, Southwark. Who is to tell, after this, what rare qualities of mind may coexist with stammering ignorance and a plebeian exterior?

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His examination at Surgeons' Hall soon involved him in an additional misery. He had no clothes in which he could venture to appear before a tribunal composed of the grandees of the profession. He opened a negotiation with his old master, Griffiths, who, in return for four articles contributed to the "Monthly Review" of December, became security to a tailor for the requisite suit, which was to be paid for, or returned, on a stated day. The stated day came, and found the clothes in pawn, and the four books which Griffiths had sent him to review in pledge to a friend. The occasion which reduced him to this breach of his work was the arrest of the landlord of his wretched lodging, to whom he was in arrear. The bookseller sent to demand the goods or their value, and, as Goldsmith could return neither, Griffiths wrote him word that he was a sharper and a villain." In an answer full of woe the miserable debtor begs to be consigned to a gaol. "I have seen it," he says, "inevitable these three or four weeks, and, by heavens! request it as a favor,-as a favor that may prevent somewhat more fatal." He denies the villany, but owns that he has been guilty of imprudence, and of "the meannesses which poverty unavoidably brings with it." The wrath of Griffiths was appeased by Goldsmith undertaking to furnish a "Life of Voltaire" for twenty pounds, from which the debt was to be subtracted. The memoir, which was finished in a month, he himself called "a catchpenny," and it is certainly unworthy both of the author and the subject. Here closed for ever his illstarred alliance with the bookseller, who was the first to start him in his literary career, and the first to make him feel the bitter bondage of the calling. Griffiths, Mr. Forster relates, retired from his business three or four years later, and ended by keeping two carriages, and attending regularly at the meeting-house. So prosperous and pious a gentleman little dreamt that he was to be known to posterity by his griping insolence to his pauper scribe.

Goldsmith said of himself that he had "a

He

crity, and he was driven to be either a literary genius or nothing. He was never any judge of his own qualifications. volunteered to take a journey to copy the inscriptions on the Written Mountains, which had baffled every traveller, though he was not acquainted with a single letter of any oriental language living or dead; and he memorialized Lord Bute to send him out to investigate the arts and sciences of the East, for the purpose of importing the improvements into England, though Dr. Johnson exclaimed that he was utterly ignorant of the subject, and would have brought home "a grinding barrow that was to be seen in all the streets of London, and fancy he had furnished a wonderful improvement."

knack of hoping," but the multiplied disas- | Thus in common things he was below medioters which followed close upon one another had nearly reduced him to despair. "I have been for some years," he said, in the affecting letter to Griffiths, of January, 1759, "struggling with a wretched being, with all that contempt which indigence brings with it, and with all those strong passions which make contempt insupportable. What then has a gaol that is formidable? I shall at least have the society of wretches, and such is to me true society." "You scarcely can conceive," he wrote to his brother in the February following, "how much eight years of disappointment, anguish, and study have worn me down. I can now neither partake of the pleasure of a revel, nor contribute to raise its jollity. I can neither laugh nor drink; have contracted a hesitating, disagreeable manner of speaking, and a visage that looks ill-nature itself. In short, I have thought myself into a settled melancholy, and an utter disgust of all that life brings with it." It was through the very excess of the darkness which had gathered around him that he worked his way into day. He ceased to indulge in the tantalizing expectations which had balked him so often, and, without further distractions, sullenly resigned himself to the only business for which he was fitted. If he had succeeded in entering the Church, he would soon have sunk in the eyes of the parishioners to the level of his clerk. If he had satisfied the examiners at Surgeons' Hall that he could set a bone, he would still, we may be sure, have been a bungling operator, and the tormentor of his patients. He once threatened, when Mrs. Sidebotham rejected his advice, and adopted that of her apothecary, to leave off prescribing for his friends. "Do so, my dear Doctor," replied Beauclerk; "whenever you undertake to kill, let it be only your enemies." This was one of the true words which are spoken in jest. Johnson summed up the case when he said that his genius was great, but his knowledge was small. "No man," he remarked again, was wiser when he had a pen in his hand, or more foolish when he had not." He had never been a student, and he had not that aptitude for facts, and that tenacity of memory, which enables many desultory readers to furnish their minds without steady toil. The materials for this charming compilations were hastily gathered for the occasion, and, being merely transplanted, as Johnson said, from one place to another without settling in his mind, he was ignorant of the contents of his own books.

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Just before his discomfiture in Surgeons' Hall he had removed to a lodging in a pentup little square, now levelled with the ground, which, embosomed in a mass of buildings between Fleet Street and the Old Bailey, seemed named in mockery "Green Arbor Court," and which was approached by a steep flight of stone stairs called "Break-neck Steps." The houses were tall and tumbling, the inhabitants poor and filthy, the children over-many and over-noisy-in Mr. Forster's phrase, “a squalid and squalling colony." In this retreat he was visited by Percy, the well known editor of the " Reliques," and afterwards Bishop of Dromore. Goldsmith had been introduced to him at the Temple Exchange Coffee-house, by Dr. Grainger, the author of the Sugar cane," and one of the contributors to Mr. Griffiths' "Monthly Review," and Percy had detected sufficient merit beneath the unpromising appearance of his new-made acquaintance to think him worth a call. He found him, at the beginning of March, 1759, engaged upon his "Enquiry," in a dirty room, with only a single chair, which he gave up to his visitor, while he sat himself in the window. As the conversation was proceeding, a ragged little girl appeared at the door, and, dropping a curtsy to Goldsmith, said, "My mamma sends her compliments, and begs the favor of you to lend her a chamber pot full of coals." A volume of description would not convey a more vivid impression of the society of Green Arbor Court" than this single trait; and ludicrous as is the incident, the respectful address of the messenger is yet a pleasing proof of the homage which was paid him by the ordinary inhabitants of the square. The most complete picture which, perhaps, we possess of Grub-street life has come

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