BOOK THE FIRST. CHAPTER I. SCHOOL DAYS AND HOLIDAYS. 1728-1745. THE marble in Westminster Abbey is correct in the place, 1728. but not in the time, of the birth of OLIVER GOLDSMITH. Нe was born at a small old parsonage house (supposed afterwards to be haunted by the fairies, or good people of the district, who could not however save it from being levelled to the ground) in a lonely, remote, and almost inaccessible Irish village on the southern banks of the river Inny, called Pallas,* or Pallasmore, the property of the Edgeworths of Edgeworthstown, in the county of Longford, on the 10th of November, 1728: a little more than three years earlier than the date upon his epitaph. His father, the reverend Pallas is often written Pallice, or Pallis, and seems to have been so written bý Goldsmith's father. The rev. Mr. Mangin believed the latter to be the proper name, having seen in it Charles Goldsmith's handwriting. (Parlour Window, 4.) So did the rev. Mr. Graham, who supposed indeed that Dr. Johnson, in writing it Pallas, had simply laid a trap for the luckless and too classical biographer who afterwards translated the line of his epitaph, "in loco cui nomen Pallas,” “at a place where Pallas had set her name !" Gent. Mag. xc. 620. + The year of his birth was first correctly given in the Percy Memoir (1 and 116), and in Mr. Shaw Mason's Statistical Account or Parochial Survey of Ireland, iii. 357; but Mr. Prior settled the date of the month by reference to the fly-leaf 1728. Charles Goldsmith, descended from a family which had long been settled in Ireland, and held various offices or dignities in connexion with the established church, 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 the adjoining parish of Kilkenny West (the reverend Mr. Green) who was uncle to his wife, averaged forty pounds a year. In May, 1718, he had married Anne, the daughter of the reverend Oliver Jones, who was master of the school at Elphin, to which he had gone in boyhood; and before 1728 four children had been the issue of the marriage. 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, or wept, with the father of the man in black in the Citizen of the World, the preacher of the Deserted Village, or the hero of the Vicar of Wakefield, have given laughter, love, and tears, to the reverend Charles Goldsmith. 1730. Æt. 2. 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 of Charles Goldsmith's family Bible, still preserved by one of his descendants in Athlone, Life, i. 14. The leaf is unfortunately torn, and the exact year does not now appear upon it, but it is certain that Mr. Mason states it correctly. * Many particulars of them will be found in Mr. Shaw Mason's volume quoted above, and which is stated to have been "drawn up from the communications of "the clergy." + Percy Memoir, 2. "West," some six miles from Pallasmore, and about midway between the towns of Ballymahon and Athlone.* The firstborn, Margaret (22nd August, 1719), appears to have died in childhood; and the family, at this time consisting of Catherine (13th January, 1721), Henry (9th February, 17—†), Jane (9th February, 17-), and Oliver, born at Pallasmore, was in the next ten years increased by Maurice (7th July, 1736), Charles (16th August, 1737), and John (23rd ——, 1740), 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 less than half a century since, in a poor lodging in Somers' Town; Maurice was put to the trade of a cabinetmaker, 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 times these pages are devoted. A trusted dependant in Charles Goldsmith's house, a young woman related to the family, afterwards known as Elizabeth Delap and schoolmistress of Lissoy, first put a Here Charles Goldsmith seems to have procured a lease of about 70 acres at an eight shillings rent, renewable for ever on the payment of half a year's rent for every new life, the first lives being those of himself, his eldest son Henry, and his daughter Catherine; a property which remained in the family till sold in 1802 by Henry Goldsmith's son, then a settler in America. Prior, i. 16, 17. + The leaf of the family bible is unfortunately so torn that the precise year of the births of Henry and Jane, like that of Oliver's birth, is not discernible from it; but it seems to me quite decisive, from the fact of the same day specified in both cases, coupled with the distinct assurance of Mrs. Hodson that there was a childless interval of seven years before the birth of Oliver, that Henry and Jane were twins, and both born in 1722. The month of John's birth is also erased. +1853. 1730. Et. 2. 1731. book into Oliver Goldsmith's hands. She taught him his Et. 3. letters; lived till it was matter of pride to remember; often talked of it to Doctor Strean, Henry Goldsmith's successor in the curacy of Kilkenny West; and at the ripe age of ninety, when the great writer had been thirteen years in his grave, boasted of it with 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, or answered curious enquirers, about the celebrated Doctor Goldsmith. "He was a plant that flowered late," said Johnson to Boswell; "there appeared nothing remarkable about him "when he was young." This, if true, would have been only another confirmation of the saying that the richer a nature is, the harder and more slow its development is like to be; but it may perhaps be doubted, in the meaning it would ordinarily bear, for all the charms of Goldsmith's later style are to be traced in even the letters of his youth, and his sister expressly tells us that he not only began to scribble verses when he could scarcely write, but otherwise showed a fondness for books and learning, and what she calls "signs of "genius." 1734. At the age of six, Oliver was handed over to the village Æt. 6. 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 Spanish wars, was more given to "shoulder "a crutch and show how fields were won," and certainly *The rev. Edward Mangin's Essay on Light Reading (1808), 144. And see Prior, i. 22. + Boswell's Life (Ed. 1839), vi. 309. + Percy Memoir, 4. |