CY. From Lien Chi Altangi to Fum Hoam, A SELECT COLLECTION OF ESSAYS ON THE MOST

P. 440 Another intended Epilogue to She Stoops to

Conquer." To be spoken by Mrs.

MEMOIR OF GOLDSMITH.

THE Life of Oliver Goldsmith by Mr. (now Sir James) Prior, published in 1837, in two volumes 8vo, was the first really careful biography of a writer who had already for seventy years been among the most popular and fascinating of our English classics. To the results of Mr. Prior's researches it can hardly be said that there has been any material addition. Mr. John Forster's well known Life and Adventures of Oliver Goldsmith, published in 1848, superseded, however, for most purposes, the work of Mr. Prior, and, from its greater vivacity and its abundant deliciousness of literary anecdote, will probably remain the standard biography of Goldsmith to all time coming. Washington Irving's Oliver Goldsmith: A Biography, published in 1849, was avowedly a compilation from Prior and Forster, but has an independent interest, as the work of one who delighted, all his life, in acknowledging Goldsmith as his literary master, and has been named, in consequence, "The American Goldsmith." Of smaller Memoirs of Goldsmith the number is past counting. Perhaps, therefore, no better reason can be given for here adding one more than that it will be convenient for possessors of this edition of Goldsmith's Works to have some account of the Author bound up with it.

Oliver Goldsmith was born, on the 10th of November, 1728, at the obscure, and then almost inaccessible, village of Pallas, or Pallasmore, in the county of Longford, in the very midmost solitude of Ireland. His father, the Rev. Charles Goldsmith, was the poor Protestant clergyman of that Irish parish. He was one of a family of Goldsmiths, noted for worth and goodness of heart rather than worldly prudence, who were originally from the South of England, and in whom, since their first coming to Ireland, the clerical profession, in its Protestant form, had been almost hereditary. Goldsmith's mother, Ann Jones, was also of a clerical and Protestant family that had been naturalized in Ireland. She was one of the daughters of the Rev. Oliver Jones, master of the diocesan school of Elphin in Roscommon. From this maternal grandfather young Oliver derived his Christian name. He used afterwards to maintain, however, that it had come into the line of his maternal ancestry through some connexion with Oliver Cromwell.

Four children, three of them daughters, and one a son, named Henry, had been born to the clergyman of Pallasmore and his wife before the appearance of the

a*

"Oliver" that was to make them famous; and the family was ultimately completed by the birth of three sons younger than Oliver, named Maurice, Charles, and John. The eldest of this family of eight (a daughter), and this last-named John, died in childhood. Effectively, therefore, Oliver grew up as one of a family of six, three of whom were older, and two younger, than himself.

A native of the rural heart of Ireland, Goldsmith, till his seventeenth year, received his entire education, whether of scenery and circumstance, or of more formal schooling, within the limits of that little-visited region. Not, however, without some changes of spot and society within those limits. In 1730, while he was yet but an infant, his father, after having been about twelve years minister of Pallas, removed to the better living of Kilkenny West, a parish some miles south of Pallas, and situated not in the county of Longford, but in the adjacent county of West Meath. Thenceforward, accordingly, the head-quarters of the family were no longer at Pallas, but at Lissoy, a quaint Irish village within the bounds of the new parish. Here, in a pretty and rather commodious parsonage-house, on the verge of the village, and on the road between Athlone and Ballymahon, the good clergyman set himself to bring up his children on his paltry clerical income, eked out by the farming of some seventy acres of land. He was himself a mild eccentric of the Dr. Primrose type, kindly to all about him, and of pious, confused ways. But the immortal oddity of Lissoy, and the incarnation of all that had been peculiar for some generations in the race of the Goldsmiths, was the parson's young son, Oliver. In book-learning, for one thing, he was, from the first, a little blockhead. "Never was so dull a boy" was the report of a kinswoman, who, having lived in the Lissoy household, had been the first to try to teach him his letters, and who afterwards, under her married name of Elizabeth Delap, kept a small school at Lissoy, and survived to be proud of her pupil, and to talk of him in her extreme old age, after he was dead. Hardly different seems to have been the report of the Lissoy schoolmaster, Thomas Byrne, more familiarly known as "Paddy Byrne,"-a veteran who had returned to his original vocation of teaching after having served in the wars under Marlborough and risen to the rank of quartermaster to a regiment in Spain. And yet of this "Paddy Byrne" Goldsmith seems to have retained to the last an affectionate recollection:

A man severe he was, and stern to view;
I knew him well, and every truant knew.
Well had the boding tremblers learnt to trace
The day's disasters in his morning face:
Full well they laughed with counterfeited glee
At all his jokes, for many a joke had he;
Full well the busy whisper, circling round,
Conveyed the dismal tidings when he frowned.
Yet he was kind, or, if severe in aught,
The love he bore to learning was in fault:
The village all declared how much he knew;

'Twas certain he could write, and cypher too:
Lands he could measure, terms and tides presage:
And even the story ran that he could gauge.

Better than all, he had a stock of tales, not only of his own campaigning adventures, but also from old Irish ballads, chap-books, and fairy lore, and a knack of versifying, which he was fond of exercising in the form of extempore Irish translations from Virgil. From this "Paddy Byrne," in short, if from any one, Goldsmith caught his first notions, of literary invention and rhyming. But the poor little fellow was always unfortunate. Hardly had he become aware of the wealth that was in Paddy Byrne, and hardly had Paddy Byrne had time to discern the park of genius that lay somewhere in his awkward little pupil, when the two were separated. The boy was not more than nine years of age when an attack of confluent small-pox stopped his attendance, at Lissoy school; and, when he recovered, it was with his naturally plain face disfigured into such a grotesque of ugliness that it was difficult to look at him without laughing. Whether to get him out of sight for a time, or because better instruction than Paddy Byrne's was now thought necessary for him, he was sent away from Lissoy to Elphin, a distance of about thirty miles. The purpose was that he should attend the school at Elphin which had formerly been taught by his grandfather, the Rev. Oliver Jones, but was now under the care of a Rev. Mr. Griffin. For about two years, accordingly, he did attend this school, boarding all the while with his uncle, Mr. John Goldsmith of Ballyoughter, who lived near Elphin. But in 1739, when he was eleven years old, he was brought back to a school of some reputation nearer home-one which had been set up in Athlone, about five miles from Lissoy, by a Rev. Mr. Campbell. Two years here, and four years more at the school of a Rev. Patrick Hughes at Edgeworthstown, county Longford, some seventeen miles from Lissoy, completed his school education and brought him to his seventeenth year.

The accounts of young Goldsmith during this time when he was tossed about from >chool to school in his native part of Ireland, generally coming home to Lissoy and lits

neighbourhood for the holidays, correspond singularly with what he was all through life. At every school we hear of him as a shy, thick, awkward boy, the constant butt of his companions because of his comically ugly face, and thought by most of them to be "little better than a fool." And yet everywhere there seems to have been a liking for him as an innocent simple-hearted fellow, who, though sensitive to the jokes made at his expense, and liable to fits of the sulks on account of them, would be all right again on the least beckoning of kindliness, and capital company in the playground at fives or ball with those who had been his tormentors. Of his success in school-work we hear little. We are to suppose him gradually getting on in Latin and other things in preparation for the University; and something is said as to his fondness for Ovid and Horace, his peculiar delight in Livy, his liking for Tacitus after a while, and his little care for Cicero. There are hints also to the effect that he excelled in the style of his translations, and that he had more credit for talent with the masters than among the boys. On the whole, Johnson's often-quoted saying about Goldsmith, "He was a plant that flowered late: there was nothing remarkable about him when young," seems true only in a very obvious and rough sense. The flower" of Goldsmith was the