the Reverend Charles Goldsmith, was a Protestant clergyman with an uncertain stipend, which, with the help of some fields he farmed, and occasional duties performed for the rector of an adjoining parish who was uncle to his wife, averaged forty pounds a year. A new birth was but a new burthen; and little dreamt the humble village preacher, then or ever, that from the date of that tenth of November on which his Oliver was born, his own virtues and very foibles were to be a legacy of pleasure to many generations of men. For they who have loved, laughed, and wept, with the Man in Black of the Citizen of the World, the Preacher of the Deserted Village, and Doctor Primrose in the Vicar of Wakefield, have given laughter, love, and tears, to the Reverend Charles Goldsmith.

The death of the rector of Kilkenny West improved his fortunes. He succeeded in 1730 to this living of his wife's uncle; his income of forty pounds was raised to nearly two hundred; and Oliver had not completed his second year when the family moved from Pallasmore to a respectable house and farm on the verge of the pretty little village of Lissoy, 'in the county of Westmeath, barony of Kilkenny 'West,' some six miles from Pallasmore, and about midway between the towns of Ballymahon and Athlone. The firstborn, Margaret, appears to have died in childhood; and the family, at this time consisting of Catherine, Henry, Jane, and Oliver, born at Pallasmore, was in the next ten years increased by Maurice, Charles, and John, born at

Lissoy. The youngest, as the eldest, died in youth; Charles went in his twentieth year, a friendless adventurer, to Jamaica, and, after long self-exile, died, little more than thirty years since, in a poor lodging of Somers' Town; Maurice was put to the trade of a cabinet maker, kept a meagre shop in Charlestown in the county of Roscommon, and 'departed from a miserable life' in 1792; Henry followed his father's calling, and died as he had lived, a humble village preacher and schoolmaster, in 1768; Catherine married a wealthy husband, Mr. Hodson, Jane a poor one, Mr. Johnston, and both died in Athlone, some years after the death of that celebrated brother to whose Life and Adventures these pages are devoted.

A trusted dependant in Charles Goldsmith's house; a young woman, afterwards known as Elizabeth Delap, and schoolmistress of Lissoy;

'her last breath.' That her success in the task had not been much to boast of, she at other times confessed. Never was 'so dull a boy he seemed impenetrably stupid,' said the

good Elizabeth Delap, when she bored her friends about the celebrated Doctor Goldsmith. He was a plant that 'flowered late,' said Johnson to Boswell: 'there was 'nothing remarkable about him when young.' And this was probably true. It is said that the richer a nature is, the harder and more slow its development is like to be.

At the age of six, Oliver was handed over to the village school, kept by Mr. Thomas Byrne. Looking back from this distance of time, and penetrating through greater obscurity than its own cabin-smoke into that Lissoy academy, it is to be discovered that this excellent Mr. Byrne, retired quarter-master of an Irish regiment that had served in Marlborough's wars, was more given to 'shoulder a crutch and show how fields were won,' and certainly more apt to teach wild legends of an Irish hovel, or tell of Carolan the Blind, James Freeny, Rogues and Rapparrees, than to inculcate what are called the Humanities. He seems to have preferred a Virgil in Irish verse to a Roman Virgil, and to have had more faith in fairies than in fluxions. Little Oliver came away from him much as he went: but for certain wandering unsettled tastes, which his friends thought to have been here implanted in him, and the enduring effects of a terrible disease.

An attack of confluent small-pox which nearly proved mortal, had left deep and indelible traces on his face, for ever settled his small pretension to good looks, and

exposed him to jest and sarcasm. Kind-natured Mr. Byrne might best have reconciled him to it, used to his temper as no doubt he had become; and it was doubly unfortunate to be sent at such a time away from home, to a school among strangers, at once to taste the bitterness of those school experiences which too early and sadly teach the shy, ill-favoured, backward boy, what tyrannies the world has to inflict, and what sufferings to endure. But to the Reverend Mr. Griffin's superior school of Elphin, in Roscommon, it was resolved to send him; and at the house of an uncle John, at Ballyoughter, in the neighbourhood of Elphin, he was lodged and boarded. The knowledge of Ovid and Horace, introduced to him here, was the least and pleasantest, though the most difficult it might be, of what he had now to learn. It was the learning of bitter years: not by the schoolmaster, but by the school-fellows, of this poor little, 'thick,' 'pale'faced,' pock-marked boy, administered. I have often 'conversed with his contemporaries and school-fellows,' said Doctor Strean, who succeeded, on the death of Charles Goldsmith's eldest son, to the Pallasmore pastoral duties and munificent rewards, and they all considered him a 'stupid, heavy blockhead, little better than a fool, whom ' every one made fun of.'

It was early to trample fun out of a child; and he bore marks of it to his dying day. It had not been his least qualification as game for laughter, that all confessed his nature to be kind and affectionate,' and his temper