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"of you. Every day do I remember the calm anecdotes

1750.

"of your life, from the fireside to the easy chair: recal Et. 22.

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'the various adventures that first cemented our friend"ship: the school, the college, or the tavern: preside "in fancy over your cards: and am displeased at your bad "play when the rubber goes against you, though not with "all that agony of soul as when I once was your partner." Let the truth then be confessed: and that it was the careless idleness of fire-side and easy chair, that it was the tavern excitement of the game at cards, to which Goldsmith so wistfully looked back from those first hard London struggles.

It is not an example I would wish to inculcate; nor is this narrative written with that purpose. To try any such process for the chance of another Goldsmith would be a somewhat dangerous attempt. The truth is important to be kept in view: that genius, representing as it does the perfect health and victory of the mind, is in no respect allied to these weaknesses, but, when unhappily connected with them, is in itself a means to avert their most evil consequence. Of the associates of Goldsmith in these happy, careless years, perhaps not one emerged to better fortune, and many sank to infinitely worse. "Pray give my love to Bob Bryanton, " and entreat him from me, not to drink," is a passage from one of his later letters to his brother Henry. The habit of drinking he never suffered to overmaster himself;-if the love of gaming to some trifling extent continued, it was at least the origin of many thoughts that may have saved others from like temptation;-and if these irregular early years unsettled him for the pursuits his friends would have had him follow, and sent him wandering, with no pursuit, to mix among the poor and happy of other lands, it is very certain

* See post, Book II. Chap. iii.

+ See post, Book II. Chap. v.

1750. that he brought back some secrets both of poverty and Et. 22. happiness which were worth the finding, and, having paid for his errors by infinite personal privation, turned all the rest to the comfort and instruction of the world. There is a providence that shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we will; and to charming issues did the providence of Goldsmith's genius shape these rough-hewn times. What it received in mortification or grief, it gave back in cheerful humour or whimsical warning. It was not alone that it made him wise enough to know what infirmities he had, but it gave him the rarer wisdom of turning them to entertainment and to profit. Through the pains and obstructions of his childhood, through the uneasy failures of his youth, through the desperate struggles of his manhood, it lighted him to those last uses of experience and suffering which have given him an immortal name.

And let it be observed, that this Ballymahon idleness could lay claim to a certain activity in one respect. It was always cheerful; and this is no unimportant part of education, if heart and head are to go together. It will be well, indeed, when habits of cheerfulness are as much a part of formal instruction as habits of study; and when the foolish argument will be heard no longer, that these things are in nature's charge, and may be left exclusively to her. Nature asks help and culture in all things; and will even yield to their solicitation, what would otherwise lie utterly unknown. It was an acute remark of Goldsmith's, in respect to literary efforts, that the habit of writing will give a man justness of thinking; and that he may get from it a mastery of manner, which holiday writers, though with ten times his genius, will find it difficult to equal.* It is the same in temper as in

* See post, Book II. Chap. iv.

mind: habit comes in aid of all deficiencies.* The reader 1751. will be therefore not unprepared to find, as well in these Et. 23. sunny Irish years, as in other parts of the apparently vagrant and idle career to be now described, some points of even general beneficial example.

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The two years, then, are passed; and Oliver must apply for orders. "For the clerical profession," says Mrs. Hodson, " he had no liking." It is not very wonderful; after having seen, in his father and his brother, how much learning and labour were rewarded in the church by forty pounds a year. But he had yet another, and to him perhaps a stronger motive; though I do not know if it has not been brought against him as an imputation of mere vanity or simplicity, that he once said, "he did not deem himself good enough for it." His friends, however, though not so resolutely as at first, still advised him to this family profession. "Our "friends," says the man in black, "always advise, when they "begin to despise us." He made application to the Bishop of Elphin, and was refused; sent back as he went; in short, plucked; but the story is told in various ways, and it is hard to get at the truth. His sister says that his youth was the objection; while it was a tradition "in the diocese' that either Mr. Theaker Wilder had given the bishop an exaggerated report of his college irregularities, or (which is more likely, and indeed is the only reasonable account of the affair) that he had neglected the preliminary professional studies. Doctor Strean on the other hand fully believed, from rumours he picked up, that "Mr. Noll's" offence was the having presented himself before his right reverence in scarlet breeches; t and certainly if this last reason be the

"Rely upon it, sir, vivacity is much an art, and depends greatly on habit." Johnson to Boswell, Life, vi. 95.

+ Mangin's Essay, 150. "To be obliged," says the man in black, "to wear a

1751.

true one, it is our first ominous experience of the misplaced Et. 23. personal finery which will find reiterated mention in this veritable history. In truth, however, the rejection is the only absolute certainty. The man in black, it will be remembered, undergoes something of the same kind, remarking, "my friends were now perfectly satisfied I was undone; "and yet they thought it a pity, for one that had not the "least harm in him, and was so very goodnatured."

Uncle Contarine, however, was far from thinking this. He found a gentleman of his county, a Mr. Flinn, in want of a tutor, and recommended Oliver. The engagement continued for a year, and ended, as it might have been easy to anticipate, unsatisfactorily. His talent for card-playing, as well as for teaching, is said to have been put in requisition by Mr. Flinn; and the separation took place on Goldsmith's accusing one of the family of unfair play.* But when he left this excellent Irish family and returned to Ballymahon, he had thirty pounds in his pocket, it is to be hoped the produce of fairer play; and was undisputed owner of a good plump horse. Within a few days, so furnished and mounted, he again left his mother's house (where, truth to say, things do not by this time seem to have been made very comfortable to him), and started for Cork, with another floating vision of America. He returned in six weeks, with nothing in his pocket, and on a lean beast to which he had given the name of Fiddleback. The nature of his reception at Ballymahon appears from the simple remark he is said to have made to his mother. "And "now, my dear mother, after having struggled so hard to

"long wig when I liked a short one, or a black coat when I generally dressed in
"brown, I thought was such a restraint upon my liberty that I absolutely rejected
"the proposal... I rejected a life of luxury, indolence, and ease, from no other
"consideration but that boyish one of dress." Citizen of the World, xxvii.
* Mrs. Hodson's narrative in the Percy Memoir, 9. And see Prior, i. 118.

"come home to

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you,

I wonder you are not more rejoiced to

1751.

He afterwards addressed a clever though somewhat cavalier letter to her from his brother's house; which is open to the objection that no copy exists in his hand-writing, but which has great internal evidence of his facility, grace, and humour. Nor is there anything more signally worth remark in connection with the vagabond vicissitudes which these pages will have to record, than that, out of all the accidents which befell the man, the poverty he had to undergo, the companions with whom he associated, the sordid necessities which unavoidably conduct so often into miry ways, no single speck or stain ever fell on that enchanting beauty of style. Wherever he might be, or with whatever clowns for playfellows; in the tavern, in the garret, or among citizens in the Sunday gardens; when he took the pen in hand, he was a gentleman. Everything coarse or vulgar dropped from it instinctively. It reflected nothing, even in its descriptions of things vulgar or coarse in themselves, but the elegance and sweetness which, whatever might be the accident or meanness of his external lot, remained pure in the last recesses of his nature.

In substance this letter to his mother confessed that his intention was to have sailed for America: that he had gone to Cork for that purpose; converted the horse which his mother prized so much higher than Fiddleback into cash; paid for his passage in an American ship; and, the wind threatening to detain them some days, had taken a little country excursion in the neighbourhood of the city but that, the wind suddenly serving in his absence, his friend

* "His mother," says Mrs. Hodson, "as might be expected, was highly "offended, but his brothers and sisters had contrived to meet him there, and at "length effected a reconciliation." Percy Memoir, 9.

Æt. 23.

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