OLIVER GOLDSMITH.

(1728-1774.)

Of all English writers Oliver Goldsmith is the best beloved. That reckless, thriftless, blundering, smiling, loving Irishman has won his way into the hearts of men, as no other author that I know of has ever done. The impression he made upon his contemporaries he has made upon posterity, and wherever his name is known it is the synonym of purity, goodness, kindliness, humor, and human sympathy. As Thackeray

says:

You come hot and tired from the day's battle, and this sweet minstrel sings to you. Who could harm the kind vagrant harper? Whom did he ever hurt? He carries no weapon save the harp on which he plays to you, and with which he delights great and humble, young and old, the captains in the tent, or the soldiers around the fire, or the women and children in the villages at whose porches he stops and sings his simple songs of love and beauty.

Sir Walter Scott said of him:

He was a friend to virtue, and in his most playful pages

never forgets what is due to it. A gentleness, delicacy and purity of feeling distinguishes whatever he wrote, and bears a correspondence to the generosity of a disposition which knew no bounds but his last guinea.

So far as I can recall, Goldsmith was the only man that Dr. Johnson ever apologized to for his rudeness. On one occasion at a dinner where they were guests, in the course of the conversation Goldsmith had somewhat petulantly interrupted Johnson, and the latter called him impertinent. At the club that night Goldsmith sat silently brooding over Johnson's reprimand, which Johnson perceiving, said: "I'll make Goldsmith forgive me," and then called to him in a loud voice: "Dr. Goldsmith-something passed today where you and I dined; I ask your pardon." Goldsmith answered: "It must be much from you, sir, that I take ill," and the difference was over and they were on as easy terms as ever.

It was Goldsmith's mission to purify literature and thus to purify manners and character. He lived in an age essentially coarse, when the works of Richardson, Fielding, Sterne, and Smollett were on every center table and universally read. The "Traveler" and "The Vicar of Wakefield" were published almost contemporaneously with "Tristram Shandy," but London society

did not go wild over Goldsmith and invite him to dinners and receptions, as it did Sterne.

But Goldsmith's idyllic tale survived to be the delight of every generation since, while the clergyman's novel is relegated to corners and the privacy of the study.

Goldsmith gave sweetness, purity, and graciousness to English letters never again to be lost therefrom.

And curiously enough was he equipped for such an undertaking. Everybody knows that simple story, for it has been told and retold so many times, and by such admirable writers. Sir Walter Scott, Prior, Washington Irving, John Forster, Macaulay, Thackeray, and Austin Dobson have all written appreciatively and sympathetically about him, and he occupies a considerable space in Boswell's Johnson, but we never seem to tire of it.

He was born in 1728 at a place called Pallas, in Ireland, his father being a clergyman of the Anglican Church. Everybody knows this kindly shepherd, for he has been immortalized as Dr. Primrose.

When Oliver was still a child he was attacked by the smallpox, which disfigured him for life, and this with his natural awkwardness and apti

tude for blundering, sorely tried him as long as he lived, for he was naturally vain. It was his desire to shine in company that sometimes made him "talk like poor Poll." But he did not always talk that way, and Boswell, who was jealous of him, is forced to record many a witticism and epigram spoken by Goldsmith well worthy of remembrance.

Needless here to repeat the story of his youth and of his varions attempts to enter one of the learned professions. First it was the church, for which he had no qualifications whatever; then the law, which also was a stumbling-block, and finally medicine, in which he is supposed to have obtained some sort of a degree without much knowledge.

The adventures related by George Primrose in "The Vicar of Wakefield " are based upon his own experiences, and with a flute in his pocket he made the grand tour. After a scrambling and wandering life he finally found his way to London. He was twenty-eight years of age, without much learning in his profession, without friends, and without money.

He tried his profession and failed; he tried school teaching and failed, and then became a bookseller's hack. He tried his hand at all kinds

of writing and led a struggling, bohemian, improvident life, sometimes on the borders of starvation and always in debt. And yet by sheer force of his genius he slowly gained recognition. "Goldsmith," said Johnson afterward, "was a plant that flowered late. There appeared nothing remarkable about him when he was young." He became the friend and companion of Johnson, Burke, and Reynolds and was one of the original nine members that formed "The Club," immortalized in the pages of Boswell.

His struggle for existence, for the mere right to live, was hard and bitter, though it never embittered him. He died April 4, 1774, worn out with anxiety and debt.

Dr. Johnson writing to Boswell said: "Of poor, dear Dr. Goldsmith there is little to be told, more than the papers have made public. He died of a fever, made, I am afraid, more violent by uneasiness of mind. His debts began to be heavy, and all his resources were exhausted. Sir Joshua is of opinion that he owed not less than two thousand pounds. Was ever poet so trusted before?"

"Whether, indeed, we take him as a poet, as a comic writer, or as a historian," said Dr. Johnson, "he stands in the first class." And again in