Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 10.djvu/788

764 unmixed with contempt. In truth, there was in his character much to love, but very little to respect. His heart was soft even to weakness: he was so generous that he quite forgot to be just ; he forgave injuries so readily that he might be said to invite them, and was so liberal to beggars that he had nothing left for his tailor and his butcher. He was vain, sensual, frivolous, profuse, impro- vident. One vice of a darker shade was imputed to him, envy. But there is not the least reason to believe that this bad passion, though it sometimes made him wince and utter fretful exclamations, ever impelled him to injure by wicked arts the reputation of any of his rivals. The truth pro- bably is that he was not more envious, but merely less prudent, than his neighbours. His heart was on his lips. All those small jealousies, which are but too common among men of letters, but which a man of letters who is also a man of the world does his best to conceal, Goldsmith avowed with the simplicity of a child. “him he was envious, instead of affecting indifference, instead of damn- ing with faint praise, instead of doing injuries slily and in the dark, he told everybody that he was envious. “ Do not, pray, do not, talk of Johnson in such terms,” he said to Boswell ; “ you harrow up my very soul.” George Steevens and Cumberland were men far too cunning to say such a thing. They would have echoed the praises of the man whom they envied, and then have sent to the news- papers anonymous hbels upon him. Both what was good and what was bad in Goldsmith’s character was to his associates a perfect security that he would never commit such villainy. He was neither ill-natured enough, nor long- headed enough, to be guilty of any malicious act which re- quired contrivance and disguise. Goldsmith has sometimes been represented as a man of genius, cruelly treated by the world, and doomed to struggle with difﬁculties, which at last broke his heart. But no representation can be more remote from the truth. He did, indeed, go through much sharp misery before he had done anything considerable in literature. But after his name had appeared on the title-page of the Traveller, he had none but himself to blame for his distresses. His average income, during the last seven years of his life, cer- tainly exceeded £400 a year, and £400 a year ranked, among the incomes of that day, at least as high as £800 a year would rank at present. A single man living in the Temple, with £400 a year, might then be called opulent. Not one in ten of the young gentlemen of good families who were studying the law there had so much. But all the wealth which Lord Clive had brought from Bengal, and Sir Lawrence Dundas from Germany, joined together, would not have sufﬁced for Goldsmith. He spent twice as much as he had. He wore ﬁne clothes, gave dinners of several courses, paid court to venal beauties. He had also, it should be remembered, to the honour of his heart, though not of his head, a guinea, or ﬁve, or ten, according to the state of his purse, ready for any tale of distress, true or false. But it was not in dress or feasting, in promiscuous amours or promiscuous charities, that his chief expense lay. He had been from boyhood a gambler, and at once the most sanguine and the most unskilful of gamblers. For a time he put off the day of inevitable ruin by temporary expe- dients. He obtained advances from booksellers, by pro- mising to execute works which he never began. But at length this source of supply failed. He owed more than £2000; and he saw no hope of extrication from his em- barrassments. His spirits and health gave way. He was attacked by a nervous fever, which he thought himself eom- petent to treat. It would have been happy for him if his medical skill had been appreciated as justly by himself as by others. Nothwithstanding the degree which he pre- tended to have received at Padua, he could procure no patients. “I do not practise,” he once said; “ I make it a rule to prescribe only for my friends.” “Pray, dear Doctor,” said Beauclerk, “alter your rule; and prescribe only for your enemies.” Goldsmith now, in spite of this excellent advice, prescribed for himself. The remedy aggravated the malady. The sick man was induced to call in real physicians; and they at one time imagined that they had cured the disease. Still his weakness and restlessness continued. He could get no sleep. He could take no food. “ You are worse,” said one of his medical attendants, “ than you should be from the degree of fever which you have. Is your mind at ease?” “ No; it is not,” were the last recorded words of Oliver Goldsmith. He died on the 3d of April 1774, in his forty-sixth year. He was laid in the churchyard of the Temple; but the Spot was not marked by any inscription, and is now forgotten. The coﬂin was followed by Burke and Reynolds. loth these great men were sincere mourners. Burke, when he heard of Gold— smith’s death, had burst into a ﬂood of tears. Reynolds had been so much moved by the news that he had flung aside his brush and palette for the day. A short time after Goldsmith’s death, a little poem ap- peared, which will, as long as our language lasts, associate the names of his two illustrious friends with his own. It has already been mentioned that he sometimes felt keenly the sarcasm which his wild blundering talk brought upon him. He was, not long before his last illness, provoked into retaliating. He wisely betook himself to his pen ; and at that weapon he proved himself a match for all his assailants together. Within a small compass he drew with a singularly easy and vigorous pencil the characters of nine or ten of his intimate associates. Though this little Work did not receive his last touches, it must always be regarded as a masterpiece. It is impossible, however, not to wish that four or ﬁve likenesses which have no interest for pos— terity were wanting to that noble gallery, and that their places were supplied by sketches of Johnson and Gibbon, as happy and vivid as the sketches of Burke and Garrick. Some of Goldsmith’s friends and admirers honoured him with a cenotaph in Westminster Abbey. N ollekens was the sculptor, and Johnson wrote the inscription. It is much to be lamented that Johnson did not leave to p0s- terity a more durable and a more valuable memorial of his friend. A life of Goldsmith would have been an inesti- mable addition to the Lives of the Poets. No man appreciated Goldsmith’s writings more justly than Johnson ; no man was better acquainted with Goldsmith’s character and habits; and no man was more competent to delineate with truth and spirit the peculiarities of a mind in which great powers were found in company with great weak- nesses. ’xut the list of poets to whose works Johnson was requested by the booksellers to furnish prefaees ended with Lyttelton, who died in 1773. The line seems to have been drawn expressly for the purpose of excluding the person whose portrait would have most ﬁtly closed the series. Goldsmith, however, has been fortunate in his biographcrs. “'ithin a few years his life was written by Mr Prior (1830), by Mr Washington Irving (1849), and by Mr Forster (1848; 2d ed., 1854). The diligence of Mr l’rior deserves great praise ; the style of Mr Washington Irving is always pleasing; but the highest place must, in justice, be assigned to the eminently interesting work of Mr Forster.  GOLDSTÜCKER, (1821–1872), an eminent Sanskrit scholar, was born of Jewish parents at Ktinigsberg on the 18th of January 1821, and, after passing through a prolonged course of study at the gymnasium, entered the university in 1836, where he attended the lectures of Lobcck, Rosenkranz, and Von Bohlen, under the last of whom he began the study of Sanskrit. In 1838 he removed to Bonn, where he heard W. von Schlegel, Lassen, and