I hope you will do me the honour to let me know if you receivd. these
by directing to me at Charles Town near Elphin Ireland.
There is nothing to show that anything definite followed this appeal
for money: and perhaps on that account, Maurice next addressed himself
to Dr. Johnson, to whom he wrote at Bolt Court an undated letter
bearing the Elphin post-mark as under:
“To Doctor Johnson at his house in Bolt Court Fleet Street London.
“I lately had the Honour to receive a letter from my good Friend the
Revd. Docr. Percy, who from som Papers I had sent him did intend
writing the life of the Late Docr. Goldsmith: he tells me that from
the esteem you have had for the poor Docr. you have determind to
take the work under your protection and that you had also promised
to use your interest with the booksellers to let one impression be
printed of all his poetical writings.... Your taking the trouble to
write and set of(f) the life of the Docr. by your able judicious and
highly esteemed pen will be a lasting honour to his memory and to his
Family.”
In a note to the print of Oliver’s letter to Maurice of “January 1770,”
Percy gives the following further information about Maurice (p. 86).
“Having been bred to no business, he upon some occasion complained
to our bard, that he found it difficult to live like a gentleman, on
which Oliver begged he would, without delay, quit so unprofitable a
trade and betake himself to some handycraft employment. Maurice wisely
took the hint, and bound himself apprentice to a cabinet maker. He
had a shop in Dublin, when the Duke of Rutland was Lord Lieutenant:
who at the instance of Mr. Orde, then principal secretary of state
(now Lord Bolton) out of regard to his brother’s memory, made him
an inspector of the licences in that city. He was also appointed
mace-bearer on the erection of the Royal Irish Academy: both of them
places very compatible with his business. In the former he gave proof
of great integrity by detecting a fraud committed on the revenue in his
department, by which probably he might himself have profited, if he had
not been a man of principle. He died without issue, about seven years
ago.”
As a matter of fact, Maurice died early in the winter of 1792-3,
as appears from a letter written by Dr. Thomas Campbell, who first
attempted Oliver’s biography, to the Bishop of Dromore--then in
London--on 12 June, 1793 (Nichols’ _Literary Illustrations_, VII, 790).
Campbell says: “Alas! poor Maurice, He is to receive no comfort from
your Lordship’s labours in his behalf. He departed from a miserable
life early last winter, and luckily has left no children: but he has
left a widow, and faith a very nice one, who called on me one of the
few days I spent in Dublin after Christmas, so that you will not want
claimants.”
The numerous letters from Maurice to the Bishop which have been
preserved appear to show that he had really made sustained efforts to
collect in Ireland such of the original letters written by Oliver to
his relatives as were procurable. One such letter, and that of the
greatest interest, viz.: the letter written to Uncle Contarine from
Leyden in 1754 was not retrieved until nine years after the letter of
15 July, 1776, already quoted, for Maurice writes to the Bishop on 9
June, 1785, “I send your Lordship a letter from my brother to his
Uncle Contarine dated from Lydon.”
Vol. VIII of Nichols’ _Literary Illustrations_ (published in 1858)
contains at pp. 236-240, extracts from correspondence between the
Bishop and Edmund Malone from which it appears that on 16 June, 1785,
Percy was urging that the Members of the Club (of which Oliver was
an original Member) should show “our regard for the departed Bard by
relieving his only brother, and so far as I hear, the only one of his
family that wants relief.” (This was by no means the case, as Percy was
afterwards to learn by bitter experience.) He wrote again to Malone
on 17 October, 1786, “I must entreat you to exert all your influence
among the gentlemen of The Club, and particularly urge it on Sir Joshua
Reynolds, to procure subscriptions for the relief of poor Maurice
Goldsmith, who is suffering great penury and distress being not only
poor but very unhealthy.... A guinea a piece from the members of the
Club would be a great relief to him.”
Maurice’s subsequent appointment in 1787 as the Mace-bearer to the
Royal Irish Academy and his place in the Licence Office appears to have
eased somewhat the final years of his chequered life, but when he died
in 1792, a new appeal for the Bishop’s help came from his widow, Esther
Goldsmith.
11_a_. ESTHER GOLDSMITH, WIDOW OF MAURICE.
All that is known about her is that she is described in a Petition to
the Lord Lieutenant (the draft of which in Percy’s writing was left
amongst his papers) as “the daughter of a respectable clergyman,”
and as “left wholly destitute” by the death of her husband Maurice
Goldsmith. She got various grants from a fund in the gift of the Lord
Lieutenant known as the Concordatum, and on the last page of Prior’s
_Life_ (Vol. II, 576) is a letter from her dated Rushport, Elphin, 19
June, 1793, to Mr. J. C. Walker asking his influence in favour of her
appointment as housekeeper to the Royal Irish Academy.
There are two unpublished later letters (1794) from Rushport to Bishop
Percy, in one of which Esther wants to know about the subscription to
the _Memoir_, and in the other she thanks the Bishop for £15 which
she had received from the Concordatum Fund. A later letter dated 17
October, 1801, from Catherine, daughter of the Revd. Henry Goldsmith,
to the Bishop seems to show that Esther had remarried. “She thinks she
is as well entitled to the money arising from the publication of my
Uncle’s works as I am, but there I must beg leave to differ in opinion
with her.” Catherine gives some more particulars which she thinks the
Bishop ought to know, but “if Mrs. Goldsmith knew the information came
to your Lordship through me, ’twou’d bring her tongue upon me, which
she can use well.”