author, by two writers, themselves inferior to none in the republic of letters, we shall close our memoir : Of Goldsmith Dr. Johnson says:- "Whether we take him as a poet, as a comic writer, or as an historian, he stands in the first class." 1 And, in another place, Boswell records that Johnson said:-" "Whatever he (Goldsmith) wrote, he did it better than any other man could do. He deserved a place in Westminster Abbey; and every year he lived, would have deserved it better.' ."2 In his 'Life of Parnell,' the same eminent critic pays Goldsmith the following tribute:"The life of Dr. Parnell is a task which I should very willingly decline, since it has been lately written by Goldsmith—a man of such variety of powers, and such felicity of performance, that he always seemed to do best that which he was doing-a man who had the art of being minute without tediousness, and general without confusion; whose language was copious without exuberance, exact without constraint, and easy without weakness. What such an author "The wreath of Goldsmith," says Sir Walter Scott, "is unsullied; he wrote to exalt virtue and expose vice; and he accomplished his task in a manner which raises him to the highest rank among British authors. We close his volumes with a sigh that such an author should have written so little from the stores of his own genius, and that he should have been so prematurely removed from the sphere of literature which he adorned." H. B.5 994 1 Boswell's Life of Johnson,' vol. iii., p. 280. 2 Ibid., vol. vii., p. 85. 3 Johnson. Lives of the Poets.' The fact that Johnson, notwithstanding his high opinion of Goldsmith, omitted to include him in the 'Lives of the most Eminent English Poets,' has been remarked upon as singular. Malone has accounted for the fact: see the following Appendix, p. 63.-ED. 4 Sir Walter Scott. Memoir of Goldsmith.' 5 This memoir was written in 1848, for Bohn's edition of Goldsmith. It has been corrected and slightly added-to, as regards some matters of fact and reference, for the present edition.-Ed. APPENDIX TO THE LIFE OF GOLDSMITH, GOLDSMITH'S BIRTHPLACE AND EARLY LIFE. (See 'Life,' pp. 2-8.) THE Gentleman's Magazine' for 1820 (Part II. p. 618) reports a meeting held at Ballymahon on the 29th November of that year to celebrate the anniversary of Goldsmith's birth. The business of this meeting was opened by the Rev. Mr. Graham, of Lifford, who said, among other things : "But superadded to his general merit as a poet, a philosopher, and historian, Goldsmith possesses a more endearing claim, if possible, upon the veneration of his country: unlike Swift, Congreve, and others, he never denied his country, or left it a matter of doubt to posterity; on the contrary, we see that, although he had left it early, and poor-though he could boast of having received no more than common civility in it, and but little of that even, from persons on whom he had the strongest claim,the love of Ireland was ever uppermost in his mind wherever he went. Her lovely scenery is immortalized in his poems, and he never gave up his intention of returning to the spot where first he drew his breath, 'till he resigned that breath in the arms of a beloved countryman, who attended his deathbed with the tender solicitude of an affectionate brother.' To his brother, the Rev. Henry Goldsmith, at Lissoy, was his 'Traveller' addressed, and to the post-office of Ballymahon the packet, containing that immortal poem, was directed. That Lissoy is the identical spot from which he drew the enchanting scenery of his 'Deserted Village,' has been demonstrated by the late ingenious Dr. Newell of Cambridge University, who, a few years age, republished his poems, with drawings of the Parsonage-house, the Church, the Mill, and the Hawthorn tree, accompanied by notes, which put the matter beyond all doubt to those acquainted with the local history of the country; and this demonstration, gentlemen, came from the pen of a learned Englishman, notwithstanding a line or two in the poem which would seem to indicate that the description was intended for an English village : "A time there was, ere England's griefs began, 1 The correct date (Nov. 10th) was not then known. See ante, p. 2. -ED. "The scene of his celebrated comedy, 'The Mistakes of a Night,' was laid in the town of Ardagh, in this immediate neighbourhood, as related in Otridge's splendid edition of his works, and confirmed to me by the late Sir Thomas Fetherston, Baronet, a short time before his death. Some friend had given the young poet a present of a guinea on his going from his mother's residence, in this town, to a school in Edgeworthstown, where, it appears, he finished his education, of which he received the rudiments from the reverend Mr. Hughes, vicar of this parish. He had diverted himself on the way the whole day, by viewing the gentlemen's seats on the road, until the fall of night, when he found himself a mile or two out of his direct road, in the middle of the street of Ardagh. Here he inquired for the best house in the place, meaning an inn; but being wilfully misunderstood by a wag, a fencing-master, of the name of Kelly, who boasted of having been the instructor of the celebrated Marquis of Granby, he was directed to the large old-fashioned residence of Sir Ralph Fetherston, the landlord of the town, where he was shown into the parlour, where he found the hospitable master of the house sitting by a good fire. His mistake was immediately perceived by Sir Ralph, who being a man of humour, and well acquainted with the poet's family, encouraged him in the deception. Goldsmith ordered a good supper, invited his host and the family to partake of it, treated them with a bottle or two of wine, and at going to bed, ordered a hot cake to be prepared for his breakfast; nor was it till his departure, when he called for the bill, that he discovered that, while he imagined he was at an inn, he had been hospitably entertained in a private family of the first rank in the country. The natal spot of Goldsmith, as well as that of Homer, is in some danger of being disputed by posterity. Such has been the blundering stupidity of several of the early editors of our poet's works, in the biographical scraps which they prefixed to them, that one of them tells us he was born at Elphin, in the county of Roscommon, merely because he had many relations in that neighbourhood, and among them his cousin-german, the grandfather of my venerable friend here, John Goldsmith, of Ballyoughter, Esq.; and in the very same page almost, gives us his epitaph, written by Dr. Johnson, directly contradicting that allegation in these words, which are inscribed on his monument in Westminster Abbey: "Natus in Hibernia Forniæ Longfordiensis In loco cui nomen Pallas.' "Another biographer, worthy to be classed among the early editors of Shakespeare, gives the original words of this epitaph, and translates them thus in a parallel column, transferring the birth-place of the Poet into the county of Wexford, He was born at Fernes, in the province of Leinster, at a place where Pallas had set her name.' An unlucky mistake respecting the natal spot of our poet, occurs also on the books of Trinity College, owing to the residence of his uncle Henry at Lissoy, or the circumstance of his father having resided there; the entry runs thus: 1744, Olivarius Goldsmith, Siz. Filius Caroli Clerici, ann. agens 15, natus in Comitatu Westmeath, educatus sub Ferula M. Hughes -Tutor, M. Wilder.' But, notwithstanding these very contradictory statements, we may give full credit to the united testimony of many respectable persons, including some of the nearest relations of the poet, but lately gone to their graves, that Oliver Goldsmith, who has been, in the same spirit of error, so often denominated a Doctor, was born within a mile and a half of Ballymahon, on the southern bank of the river Inny, at Pallas, in the parish of Cloncalla, commonly called Forney. The walls of the house are yet standing; the roof fell in but two years ago; it is distinctly visible from the canal between this and Tenelick, and in it, perhaps, rather than on any other spot, even his beloved mount before Lissoy gate,' should his monumental pillar be erected. The name of the townland in which this interesting ruin stands is spelled Pallice in our barony books; but those who can feel the charm of classic allusion under such a temptation, will readily pardon the great Antæus of literature, the author of the 'Dictionary of the English Language,' for having once in his lifetime spelled a word erroneously. This evidence, gentlemen, I consider to be conclusive; for Dr. Johnson cannot be supposed to have known that such obscure places as Pallice or Forney existed, except from the lips of the poet himself, who was on the most intimate terms of friendship with him." 6 The same volume of the Gentleman's Magazine' has (vide pp. 444, 448, and 623) further particulars, with poems, &c., on Goldsmith, by the Rev. Mr. Graham. GOLDSMITH'S TUTOR, THE REV. THEAKER WILDER. (See' Life,' p. 5.) A few years ago the late Professor De Morgan wrote (Notes and Queries, Sept. 15, 1860) in mitigation of the general censure heaped upon this gentleman as follows:-"There is an instance of the frequent manner in which Goldsmith managed to be more sensible in his writings than in his life or his conversation which, I think, deserves a note. His tutor, it is stated, was a Mr. Wilder. This must have been the Rev. Theaker Wilder (afterwards D.D.), who was a Senior Fellow of Trinity College, Dublin, in 1769, when he published an edition of Newton's 'Universal Arithmetic.' His predecessor in teaching mathematics in the College was, as he informs us, a Mr. Maguire; but the tradition is that Wilder was the teacher of Goldsmith, who was at college from 1744 to 1749. Goldsmith, as we know, threw snatches of his own life into the mouths of any of his characters whom he put forward as narrators of their own youthful career. One marked instance is the Vicar of Wakefield's son; another is the over-benevolent man who relates his own history in Letter XXVII. of the 'Citizen of the World.' This narrator, whose earlier life is Goldsmith's in most of the facts, mentioning his father's disappointment at his college failures, speaks as follows: "His disappointment might be partly ascribed to his having overrated my talents, and partly to my dislike of mathematical reasonings at a time when my imagination and memory, yet unsatisfied, were more eager after new objects, than desirous of reasoning upon those I knew.' "Here is the plain and discriminating account of a man who in after life came to understand the causes of his own earlier likes and dislikes and the account, short as it is, contains useful matter for thought. Í believe it may be added that fond as Goldsmith is of making his young characters repeat his own life, he does not in any one case make them give any account of unkind usage received from college tutors. If there were anything of the sort which dwelt on his mind, it is most probable that his writings contain allusions to it." Professor De Morgan concluded by asking if there were any such allusions; and to his query there was no response whatever.-ED. THE PORTRAITS OF GOLDSMITH. (See 'Life,' p. 42.) Of Oliver Goldsmith we may be said to have two portraits, viz., that by Sir Joshua Reynolds-the well-known wig-less profile portrait which has been engraved times out of number-and the sketch portrait by Henry Bunbury (Geoffrey Gambado). Reynolds's portrait was painted about 1768-70, and it, no doubt, was the work from which the "mezzotinto prints" were taken of which Goldsmith himself speaks in his letter to his brother Maurice, Jan., 1770: see the Letters at the end of this volume. The original is in the Knole Park collection (the Earl of Amherst's). A copy was made by Sir Joshua for Mr. Thrale's famous library adornments at Streatham; and when that collection was sold by auction the copy was bought for £133 by the Duke of Bedford (though the original had been painted by Sir Joshua for thirty-six guineas in 1770-or at least that was his price for such portraits at that time: vide W. Cotton), and went to enrich the Woburn collection. Another copy, it would seem, was also made by Sir Joshua; for the Rev. R. H. Newell, when he waited on Mr. Oliver Goldsmith Hodson, of St. John's, Roscommon, the grand-nephew of Goldsmith, was told by that gentleman that he possessed "the original portrait by Reynolds" (vide Newell's Remarks on the Actual Scene of the Deserted Village,' &c., 1811). The picture in the National Portrait Gallery is another copy of the Reynolds portrait, "by," as Mr. Scharf tells us, a pupil of Sir Joshua Reynolds." This portrait formerly belonged to Goldsmith himself. It was purchased from Mr. R. H. Boyce in 1861. The most notable engravings of the Reynolds portrait are, according to Mr. W. Cotton (Catalogue of Sir Joshua Reynolds's Portraits, 1857), that by G. Marchi (the Italian pupil of Sir Joshua, who engraved the first mezzotint, and who, probably, was the "pupil" who painted the National Portrait Gallery copy), and S. W. Reynolds, the master of Cousins. Reynolds's portrait is considered good, but rather flattering. Bunbury's, which was engraved (by Bretherton) for and published with the first edition of the Haunch of Venison,' 1776, is considered a better likeness, though the features are somewhat caricatured. Bunbury was the husband of "Little Comedy" (Miss Catherine Horneck): see p. 32, antè, vol. ii., pp. 94, 106, &c. A third portrait has lately been discovered, but this must at present 6 |