Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 10.djvu/785

Rh GOLDSMITH put together. Among boys little tenderness is shown to personal defects ; and the ridicule excited by poor Oliver’s appearance was heightened by a peculiar simplicity and a disposition to blunder which he retained to the last. He became the common butt of boys and masters, was pointed at as a fright. in the play-ground, and ﬂogged as a dunce in the school-room. When he had risen to eminence, those who had once derided him ransacked their memory for the events of his early years, and recited repartees and couplets which had dropped from him, and which, though little noticed at the time, were supposed, a quarter of a century later, to indicate the powers which produced the Vicar o_f lllzl-cg/ielcl and the Deserted Village. In his seventeenth year Oliver went up to Trinity Col- lege, Dublin, as a sizar. The sizars paid nothing for food and tuition, and very little for lodging; but they had to perform some menial services from which they have long been relieved. They swept the court, they carried up the dinner to the fellows’ table, and changed the plates and poured out the ale of the rulers of the society. Goldsmith was quartered, not alone, in a garret, on the window of which his name, scrawled by himself, is still read with interest. From such garrets many men of less parts than his have made their way to the woolsack or to the episcopal bench. But Goldsmith, while he suffered all the humili- ations, threw away all the advantages of his situation. He neglected the studies of the place, stood low at the examin- ations, was turned down to the bottom of his class for playing the buffoon in the lecture-room, was severely repri- manded for pumping on a constable, and was caned by a brutal tutor for giving a ball in the attic story of the cillege to some gay youths and damsels from the city. lVhile Oliver was leading at Dublin a life divided between squalid distress and squalid dissipation, his father died, leaving a mere pittance. The youth obtained his bachelor's degree, and left the university. During some time the humble dwelling to which his widowed mother had retired was his home. He was now in his twenty-ﬁrst year; it was necessary that he should do something; and his education seemed to have ﬁtted him to do nothing but t) dress himself in gaudy colours, of which he was as fond as a magpie, to take a hand at cards, to sing Irish airs, to play the ﬂute, to angle in summer, and to tell ghost stories by the ﬁre in winter. He tried ﬁve or six professions in turn without success. He applied for ordination; but, as he applied in scarlet clothes, he was speedily turned out of the episcopal palace. He then became tutor in an opulent family, but soon quitted his situation in consequence of a dispute about play. Then he determined to emigrate to America. His relations, with much satisfaction, saw him set out for Cork on a good horse, with £30 in his pocket. But in six weeks he came back on a miserable back, with- out a penny, and informed his mother that the ship in which he had taken his passage, having got a fair wind while he was at a party of pleasure, had sailed without him. Then he resolved to study the law. A generous kinsman advanced £50. With this sum Goldsmith went to Dublin, was enticed into a gaming house, and lost every shilling. Ile then thought of medicine. A small p11rse was n1ade up; and in his twenty-fourth year he was sent to Edin- burgh. At Edinburgh he passed eighteen months in nominal attendance on lectures, and picked up some super- ficial information about chemistry and natural history. Thence he went to Leyden, still pretending to study physic. He left that celebrated university, the third university at which he had resided, in his twenty-seventh year, without .a degree, with the merest smattering of medical knowledge, and with no property but his clothes and his ﬂute. His tlute, however, proved a useful friend. He rambled on foot through Flanders, France, and Switzerland, playing tunes 761 which everywhere set the peasantry dancing, and which often procured for him a supper and a bed. He wandered as far as Italy. His musical performances, indeed, were not to the taste of the Italians ; but he contrived to live on the alms which he obtained at the gates of convents. It should, however, be observed that the stories which he told about this part of his life ought to be received with great caution; for strict veracity was never one of his virtues; and a man who is ordinarily inaccurate in nar- ration is likely to be more than ordinarily inaccurate when he talks about his own travels. Goldsmith indeed was so regardless of truth as to assert in print that he was present at a most interesting conversation between Voltaire and Fontenelle, and that this conversation took place at Paris. Now it is certain that Voltaire never was within a hundred leagues of Paris during the whole time which Goldsmith passed on the Continent. In 1756 the wanderer landed at Dover, without a shilling, without a friend, and without a calling. He had indeed, if his own unsupported evidence may be trusted, obtained from the university of Padua a doctor's degree; but this dignity proved utterly useless to him. In England his ﬂute was not in request; there were no convents ; and he was forced to have recourse to a series of desperate expedi- ents. He turned strolling player; but his face and figure were ill suited to the boards even of the humblest theatre. He pounded drugs and ran about London with phials for charitable chemists. He joined a swarm of beggars, which made its nest in Axe Yard. He was for a time usher of a school, and felt the miseries and humiliations of this situ- ation so keenly that he thought it a promotion to be permitted to earn his bread as a bookseller’s hack ; but he soon found the new yoke more galling than the old one, and was glad to become an usher again. He obtained a medical appointment in the service of the East India Com- pany; but the appointment was speedily revoked. Why it was revoked we are not told. The subject was one on which he never liked to talk. It is probable that he was incompetent to perform the duties of the place. Then he presented himself at Surgeon’s Hall for examination, as mate to a naval hospital. Even to so humble a post he was found unequal. By this time the schoolmaster whom he had served for a morsel of food and the third part of a bed was no more. Nothing remained but to return to the lowest drudgery of literature. Goldsmith took a garret in a miserable court, to which he had to climb from the brink of Fleet Ditch by a dizzy ladder of ﬂagstones called Breakneck Steps. The court and the ascent have long dis- appeared, but old Londoners well remember both. Here, at thirty, the unlucky adventurer sat down to toil like a galley slave. In the succeeding six years he sent to the press some things which have survived, and many which have perished. He produced articles for reviews, magazines, and newspapers; children’s books, which, bound in gilt paper and adorned with hideous woodcuts, appeared in the window of the once far-famed shop at the corner of Saint Paul’s Churchyard; An Inquiry into the State of Polite Lea;-m'ng in Europe, which, though of little or no value, is still reprinted among his works; a Life of Beau Nash, which is not reprinted, though it well deserves to be so; a superﬁcial and incorrect, but very readable, Ilistory of En_r/land, in a series of letters purporting to be addressed by a nobleman to his son ; and some very lively and amus- ing ;S'l‘ctc/aes of London Society, in aseries of letters purport- ing to be addressed by a Chinese traveller to his friends. All these works were anonymous; but some of them were well known to be Golds1nith’s; and he gradually rose in the estimation of the booksellers for whom he drudged. He was, indeed, emphatically a popular writer. For X. —— 96