Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 10.djvu/784

760 him, and he tried to do so ; he made, however, a mistake in his choice, and began with a tragedy, Anuzlusunla, which was represented at Milan and proved a failure. In 1734 he wrote another tragedy, Brlisario, which though not much better, chanced nevertheless to please the public. This ﬁrst success encouraged him to write other tragedies, some of which were well received; but the author himself saw clearly that he had not yet found his proper sphere, and that a radical dramatic reform was absolutely neces- sary for the stage. IIe wished to create a characteristic comedy in Italy, to follow the example of Moliere, and to delineate the realities of social life in as natural a manner as possible. His ﬁrst essay of this kind was Jlomolo Cor- tescm (Momolo the Courtier), written in the Venetian dialect, and based on his own experience. Other plays followed— some interesting from their subject, others from the char- acters; the best of that period are—Le Irenladue Dis- grazie d'Arlecchino, La Nelle critica, La Bancarolla, La Donna di Garbo. Having, while consul of Genoa at Venice, been cheated by a captain of Ragusa, he founded on this his play L’Impostore. At Leghorn he made the acquaint- ance of the comedian Medebac, and followed him to Venice, with his company, for which he began to write his best plays. Once he promised to write sixteen comedies in a year, and kept his word ; among the sixteen are some of his very best, such as 11 Cafe, [1 Bugiardo, La Pamela. When he left the company of Medebae, he passed over to that nnintained by the patrician Vendramin, continuing to write with the greatest facility. In 1761 he was called 'to Paris, and before leaving Venice he wrote Una delle nltime Sere di Carnevale (One of the Last Nights of Car- nival), an allegorical comedy in which he said good-bye to his country. At the end of the representation of this play, the theatre resounded with applause, and with shouts expressive of good wishes. Goldoni, at this proof of public sympathy, wept as a child. At Paris, during two years, he wrote comedies for the Italian actors; then he taught Italian to the royal princesses; and for the wedding of Louis XVI. and of Marie Antoinette he wrote in French one of his best comedies, Le Bourru Bienfaisant, which was a great success. When he retired from Paris to Versailles, the king made him a gift of 6000 francs, and ﬁxed on him an annual pension of 1200 francs. It was at Ver- sailles he wrote his JIemoirs, which occupied him till he reached his eightieth year. The Revolution deprived him all at once of his modest pension, and reduced him to extreme misery; be dragged on his unfortunate existence till 1793, and died on the 6th of February. The day after, on the proposal of Andre Chenier, the Convention agreed to give the pension back to the poet; and as he had already died, a reduced allowance was granted to his widow.

1em  GOLDSCHMIDT, (1802–1866), a German painter and astronomer, was the son of a Jewish merchant, and was born at Frankfort on the 17th June 1802. He for ten years assisted his father in his business; but, his love of art having been awakened while journeying in Holland, he in 1832 began the study of painting at Munich under Cornelius and Schnorr, and in 1836 established himself at Paris, where he painted a number of pictures of more than average merit, among which may be mentioned the Cnmzean Sibyl, 1844 ; an Offering to Venus, 1845 3 a View of Rome, 1849 ; the Death of Romeo and Juliet, 18:37 ; and several Alpine landscapes. In 1847 he began to devote his atten- tion to astronomy ; and from 1852 to 1861 he discovered fourteen asteroids between Mars and Jupiter, on which account he received the grand astronomical prize from the Academy of Sciences. llis observations of the protuberanccs on the sun, made during the total eclipse on the 10th July 1860, are included in the work of M'zidler on the eclipse, published in 1861. Goldschmidt died at Fontainebleau, 26th August 1866.  GOLDSMITH, (1728–1774), one of the most pleasing English writers of the 18th century. He was of a Protestant and Saxon family which had been long settled in Ireland, and which had, like most other Protestant and Saxon families, been, in troubled times, harassed and put in fear by the native population. His father, Charles Goldsmith, studied in the reign of Queen Anne at the diocesan school of Elphin, became attached to the daughter of the schoolmaster, married her, took orders, and settled at a place called Pallas, in the county of Longford. There he with diﬂiculty supported his wife and children on what he could earn, partly as a curate and partly as a farmer. At Pallas Oliver Goldsmith was born in November 1728. That spot was then, for all practical purposes, almost as remote from the busy and splendid capital in which his later years were passed as any clearing in Upper Canada or any sheep walk in Australasia now is. Even at this day those enthusiasts who venture to make a pilgrimage to the birthplace of the poet are forced to perform the latter part of their journey on foot. The hamlet lies far from any high road, on a dreary plain which, in wet weather, is often a lake. The lanes would break any jaunting car to pieces; and there are ruts and sloughs through which the most strongly built wheels cannot be dragged. \Vhile Oliver was still a child his father was presented to a living worth about £200 a year, in the county of West Meath. The family accordingly quitted their cottage in the wilderness for a spacious house on a frequented road, near the village of Lissoy. Here the boy was taught his letters by a maid—servant, and was sent in his seventh year to a village school kept by an old quartermaster on half-pay, who professed to teach nothing but reading, writing, and arithmetic, but who had an inexhaustible fund of stories about ghosts, banshees, and fairies, about the great Rap- paree chiefs, Baldearg O’Donnell and galloping Hogan, and about the exploits of Peterborough and Stanhope, the sur— prise of Monjuich, and the glorious disaster of Brihuega. This man must have been of the Protestant religion ; but he was of the aboriginal race, and not only spoke the Irish language, but could pour forth unpremeditated Irish verses. Oliver early became, and through life continued to be, a passionate admirer of the Irish music, and especially of the compositions of Carolan, some of the last notes of whose harp he heard. It ought to be added that Oliver, though by birth one of the Englishry, and though connected by numerous ties with the Established Church, never showed the least sign of that contemptuous antipathy with which, in his days, the ruling minority in Ireland too generally regarded the subject majOrity. So far indeed was he from sharing in the opinions and feelings of the caste to which he belonged that be conceived an aversion to the Glorious and Immortal Memory, and, even when George III. was on the throne, maintained that nothing but the restoration of the banished dynasty could save the Country. From the humble academy kept by the old soldier Gold- smith was removed in his ninth year. He went to several grammar-schools, and acquired some knowledge of the ancient languages. His life at this time seems to have been far from happy. He had, as appears from the admirable portrait of him at Knowle, features harsh even to ugliness. The small-pox had set its mark on him with more than usual severity. His stature was small, and his limbs ill