(February 1856.)
Oliver Goldsmith, one of the most pleasing English writers of the eighteenth 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 difficulty 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.
While Oliver was still a child, his father was presented to a living worth about 200 pounds a year, in the county of Westmeath.
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 Rapparee chiefs, Baldearg O'Donnell and galloping Hogan, and about the exploits of Peterborough and Stanhope, the surprise 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 he conceived an aversion to the Glorious and Immortal Memory, and, even when George the Third 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 Goldsmith 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 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 of Wakefield" and the "Deserted Village."In his seventeenth year Oliver went up to Trinity College, 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.(The glass on which the name is written has, as we are informed by a writer in "Notes and Queries" (2d.S.ix.p.91), been inclosed in a frame and deposited in the Manuscript Room of the College Library, where it is still to be seen.) 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 humiliations, threw away all the advantages, of his situation.He neglected the studies of the place, stood low at the examinations, was turned down to the bottom of his class for playing the buffoon in the lecture-room, was severely reprimanded for pumping on a constable, and was caned by a brutal tutor for giving a ball in the attic story of the college to some gay youths and damsels from the city.