(_Encyclopaedia Britannica_, February 1856.)
Oliver Goldsmith, {151}one of the most pleasing English writers of the
eighteenth century. He was of a Protestant and Saxon family which had
been long settled in Ireland, and which had, like most other Protestant
and Saxon families, been, in troubled times, harassed and put in fear
by the native population. His father, Charles Goldsmith, studied in the
reign of Queen Anne at the diocesan school of Elphin, became attached to
the daughter of the schoolmaster, married her, took orders, and settled
at a place called Pallas in the county of Longford. There he with
difficulty supported his wife and children on what he could earn, partly
as a curate and partly as a farmer.
At Pallas Oliver Goldsmith was born in November 1728. The spot was then,
for all practical purposes, almost as remote from the busy and splendid
capital in which his later years were passed, as any clearing in Upper
Canada or any sheep-walk in Australasia now is. Even at this day those
enthusiasts who venture to make a pilgrimage to the birthplace of the
poet are forced to perform the latter part of their journey on foot.
The hamlet lies far from any high road, on a dreary plain which, in wet
weather, is often a lake. {152}The lanes would break any jaunting ear to
pieces; and there are ruts and sloughs through which the most strongly
built wheels cannot be dragged.
While Oliver was still a child, his father was presented to a living
worth about 200l. a year, in the county of Westmeath. The family
accordingly quitted their cottage in the wilderness for a spacious
house on a frequented road, near the village of Lissoy. Here the boy was
taught his letters by a maid-servant, and was sent in his seventh
year to a village school kept by an old quartermaster on half-pay, who
professed to teach nothing but reading, writing and arithmetic, but who
had an inexhaustible fund of stories about ghosts, banshees and fairies,
about the great Rapparee chiefs, Baldearg O’Donnell and galloping Hogan,
and about the exploits of Peterborough and Stanhope, the surprise of
Monjuich, and the glorious disaster of Brihuega.
This man must have been of the Protestant religion; but he was of the
aboriginal race, and not only spoke the Irish language, but could pour
forth unpremeditated Irish verses. Oliver early became, and through life
continued to be, a passionate admirer of the Irish music, and especially
of the compositions of Carolan, some of the last notes of whose harp
he heard. It ought to be added that Oliver, though by birth one of the
Englishry, and though connected by numerous ties with the Established
Church, never showed the least sign of that contemptuous antipathy
with which, in his days, the ruling minority in Ireland too generally
regarded the subject majority. So far indeed was he from sharing in
the opinions and feelings of the caste to which he belonged, that he
conceived an aversion to the Glorious and Immortal Memory, and, even
when George the Third was on the throne, maintained {153}that nothing
but the restoration of the banished dynasty could save the country.
From the humble academy kept by the old soldier Goldsmith was removed
in his ninth year. He went to several grammar-schools, and acquired some
knowledge of the ancient languages. His life at this time seems to have
been far from happy. He had, as appears from the admirable portrait of
him at Knowle, features harsh even to ugliness. The small-pox had set
its mark on him with more than usual severity. His stature was small,
and his limbs ill put together. Among boys little tenderness is shown to
personal defects; and the ridicule excited by poor Oliver’s appearance
was heightened by a peculiar simplicity and a disposition to blunder
which he retained to the last. He became the common butt of boys and
masters, was pointed at as a fright in the play-ground, and flogged as
a dunce in the school-room. When he had risen to eminence, those who
had once derided him ransacked their memory for the events of his early
years, and recited repartees and couplets which had dropped from him,
and which, though little noticed at the time, were supposed, a quarter
of a century later, to indicate the powers which produced the “Vicar of
Wakefield” and the “Deserted Village.”
In his seventeenth year Oliver went up to Trinity College, Dublin, as a
sizar. The sizars paid nothing for food and tuition, and very little for
lodging; but they had to perform some menial services from which they
have long been relieved. They swept the court: they carried up the
dinner to the fellows’ table, and changed the plates and poured out the
ale of the rulers of the society. Goldsmith was quartered, not alone, in
a garret, on the window of which {154}his name, scrawled by himself, is
still read with interest. (1) From such garrets many men of less parts
than his have made their way to the wool-sack or to the episcopal bench.
But Goldsmith, while he suffered all the humiliations, threw away all
the advantages, of his situation. He neglected the studies of the place,
stood low at the examinations, was turned down to the bottom of
his class for playing the buffoon in the lecture room, was severely
reprimanded for pumping on a constable, and was caned by a brutal tutor
for giving a ball in the attic story of the college to some gay youths
and damsels from the city.
While Oliver was leading at Dublin a life divided between squalid
distress and squalid dissipation, his father died, leaving a mere
pittance. The youth obtained his bachelor’s degree, and left the
university. During some time the humble dwelling to which his widowed
mother had retired was his home. He was now in his twenty-first year; it
was necessary that he should do something; and his education seemed to
have fitted him to do nothing but to dress himself in gaudy colours, of
which he was as fond as a magpie, to take a hand at cards, to sing Irish
airs, to play the flute, to angle in summer, and to tell ghost stories
by the fire in winter. He tried five or six professions in turn without
success. He applied for ordination; but, as he applied in scarlet
clothes, he was speedily turned out of the episcopal palace. He then
became tutor in an opulent family, but soon quitted his situation in
consequence of a dispute about pay. Then he determined
(1) The glass on which the name is written has, as we are
informed by a writer in _Notes and Queries_ (2nd S. ix. p.
91), been inclosed in a frame and deposited in the
Manuscript Room of the College Library, where it is still to
be seen.
to {155}emigrate to America. His relations, with much satisfaction, saw
him set out for Cork on a good horse, with thirty pounds in his pocket.
But in six weeks he came back on a miserable hack, without a penny, and
informed his mother that the ship in which he had taken his passage,
having got a fair wind while he was at a party of pleasure, had sailed
without him. Then he resolved to study the law. A generous kinsman
advanced fifty pounds. With this sum Goldsmith went to Dublin, was
enticed into a gaming house, and lost every shilling. He then thought
of medicine. A small purse was made up; and in his twenty-fourth year he
was sent to Edinburgh. At Edinburgh he passed eighteen months in nominal
attendance on lectures, and picked up some superficial information
about chemistry and natural history. Thence he went to Leyden, still
pretending to study physic. He left that celebrated university, the
third university at which he had resided, in his twenty-seventh year,
without a degree, with the merest smattering of medical knowledge, and
with no property but his clothes and his flute. His flute, however,
proved a useful friend. He rambled on foot through Flanders, France, and
Switzerland, playing tunes which everywhere set the peasantry dancing,
and which often procured for him a supper and a bed. He wandered as far
as Italy. His musical performances, indeed, were not to the taste of
the Italians; but he contrived to live on the alms whieh he obtained at
the gates of convents. It should, however, be observed that the stories
which he told about this part of his life ought to be received with
great caution; for strict veracity was never one of his virtues; and a
man who is ordinarily inaccurate in narration is likely to be more
than ordinarily inaccurate when he talks about his {156}own travels.
Goldsmith, indeed, was so regardless of truth as to assert in print that
he was present at a most interesting conversation between Voltaire and
Fontenelle, and that this conversation took place at Paris. Now it is
certain that Voltaire never was within a hundred leagues of Paris during
the whole time which Goldsmith passed on the Continent.
In 1756 the wanderer landed at Dover, without a shilling, without a
friend, and without a calling. He had, indeed, if his own unsupported
evidence may be trusted, obtained from the university of Padua a
doctor’s degree; but this dignity proved utterly useless to him. In
England his flute was not in request: there were no convents; and he was
forced to have recourse to a series of desperate expedients. He turned
strolling player; but his face and figure were ill suited to the boards
even of the humblest theatre. He pounded drugs and ran about London with
phials for charitable chemists. He joined a swarm of beggars, which made
its nest in Axe Yard. He was for a time usher of a school, and felt the
miseries and humiliations of this situation so keenly that he thought
it a promotion to be permitted to earn his bread as a bookseller’s hack;
but he soon found the new yoke more galling than the old one, and was
glad to become an usher again. He obtained a medical appointment in
the service of the East India Company; but the appointment was speedily
revoked. Why it was revoked we are not told. The subject was one on
which he never liked to talk. It is probable that he was incompetent to
perform the duties of the place. Then he presented himself at Surgeons’
Hall for examination, as mate to a naval hospital. Even to so humble
a post he was found unequal. By this time the schoolmaster whom he had
served for a morsel {157}of food and the third part of a bed was
no more. Nothing remained but to return to the lowest drudgery of
literature. Goldsmith took a garret in a miserable court, to which
he had to climb from the brink of Fleet Ditch by a dizzy ladder of
flag-stones called Breakneck Steps. The court and the ascent have long
disappeared; but old Londoners will remember both. (1) Here, at thirty,
the unlucky adventurer sat down to toil like a galley slave.
In the succeeding six years he sent to the press some things which have
survived and many which have perished. He produced articles for reviews,
magazines, and newspapers: children’s books which, bound in gilt paper
and adorned with hideous woodcuts, appeared in the window of the once
far-famed shop at the corner of St. Paul’s Churchyard; “An Inquiry into
the State of Polite Learning in Europe,” which, though of little or no
value, is still reprinted among his works; a “Life of Beau Nash,” which
is not reprinted, though it well deserves to be so; (2) a superficial
and incorrect, but very readable, “History of England,” in a series of
letters purporting to be addressed by a nobleman to his son; and some
very lively and amusing “Sketches of London Society,” in a series
of letters purporting to be addressed by a Chinese traveller to his
friends. All these works were anonymous; but some of them were
(1) A gentleman, who states that he has known the
neighbourhood for thirty years, corrects this account, and
informs the present publisher that the Breakneck Steps,
thirty-two in number, divided into two flights, are still in
existence, and that, according to tradition, Goldsmith’s
house was not on the steps, but was the first house at the
head of the court, on the left hand, going from the Old
Bailey. See _Notes and Queries_ (2nd S. ix. 280).
(2) Mr. Black has pointed out that this is inaccurate: the
life of Nash has been twice reprinted; once in Mr. Prior’s
edition (vol. iii. p. 249), and once in Mr. Cunningham’s
edition (vol. iv. p. 351.
well {158}known to be Goldsmith’s: and he gradually rose in the
estimation of the booksellers for whom he drudged. He was, indeed,
emphatically a popular writer. For accurate research or grave
disquisition he was not well qualified by nature or by education, he
knew nothing accurately: his reading had been desultory; nor had he
meditated deeply on what he had read. He had seen much of the world; but
he had noticed and retained little more of what he had seen than some
grotesque incidents and characters which had happened to strike his
fancy. But, though his mind was very scantily stored with materials,
he used what materials he had in such a way as to produce a wonderful
effect. There have been many greater writers; but perhaps no writer was
ever more uniformly agreeable. His style was always pure and easy, and,
on proper occasions, pointed and energetic. His narratives were always
amusing, his descriptions always picturesque, his humour rich and
joyous, yet not without an occasional tinge of amiable sadness. About
everything that he wrote, serious or sportive, there was a certain
natural grace and decorum, hardly to be expected from a man a great part
of whose life had been passed among thieves and beggars, street-walkers
and merry andrews, in those squalid dens which are the reproach of great
capitals.
As his name gradually became known, the circle of his acquaintance
widened. He was introduced to Johnson, who was then considered as the
first of living English writers; to Reynolds, the first of English
painters; and to Burke, who had not yet entered parliament, but had
distinguished himself greatly by his writings and by the eloquence of
his conversation. With these eminent men Goldsmith became intimate. In
1763 he was {159}one of the nine original members of that celebrated
fraternity which has sometimes been called the Literary Club, but which
has always disclaimed that epithet, and still glories in the simple name
of The Club.
By this time Goldsmith had quitted his miserable dwelling at the top of
Breakneck Steps, and had taken chambers in the more civilised region of
the Inns of Court. But he was still often reduced to pitiable shifts.
Towards the close of 1764 his rent was so long in arrear that his
landlady one morning called in the help of a sheriff’s officer. The
debtor, in great perplexity, despatched a messenger to Johnson; and
Johnson, always friendly, though often surly, sent back the messenger
with a guinea, and promised to follow speedily. He came, and found that
Goldsmith had changed the guinea, and was railing at the landlady over
a bottle of Madeira. Johnson put the cork into the bottle, and entreated
his friend to consider calmly how money was to be procured. Goldsmith
said that he had a novel ready for the press. Johnson glanced at
the manuscript, saw that there were good things in it, took it to a
bookseller, sold it for 60l, and soon returned with the money. The rent
was paid; and the sheriff’s officer withdrew. According to one story,
Goldsmith gave his landlady a sharp reprimand for her treatment of him;
according to another, he insisted on her joining him in a bowl of punch.
Both stories are probably true. The novel which was thus ushered into
the world was the “Vicar of Wakefield.”
But, before the “Vicar of Wakefield” appeared in print, came the
great crisis of Goldsmith’s literary life. In Christmas week, 1764, he
published a poem, entitled the “Traveller.” It was the first work to
which he had {160}put, his name; and it at once raised him to the rank
of a legitimate English classic. The opinion of the most skilful critics
was, that nothing finer had appeared in verse since the fourth book of
the “Dunciad.”
In one respect the “Traveller” differs from all Goldsmith’s other
writings. In general his designs were bad, and his execution good. In
the “Traveller,” the execution, though deserving of much praise, is far
inferior to the design. No philosophical poem, ancient or modern, has
a plan so noble, and at the same time so simple. An English, wanderer,
seated on a crag among the Alps, near the point where three great
countries meet, looks down on the boundless prospect, reviews his long
pilgrimage, recalls the varieties of scenery, of climate, of government,
of religion, of national character, which he has observed, and comes
to the conclusion, just or unjust, that our happiness depends little on
political institutions, and much on the temper and regulation of our own
minds.
While the fourth edition of the “Traveller” was on the counters of the
booksellers, the “Vicar of Wakefield” appeared, and rapidly obtained a
popularity which has lasted down to our own time, and which is likely to
last as long as our language. The fable is indeed one of the worst that
ever was constructed. It wants, not merely that probability which ought
to be found in a tale of common English life, but that consistency which
ought to be found even in the wildest fiction about witches, giants,
and fairies. But the earlier chapters have all the Sweetness of
pastoral poetry, together with all the vivacity of comedy. Moses and his
spectacles, the vicar and his monogamy, the sharper and his cosmogony,
the squire proving from Aristotle that relatives are related, Olivia
preparing {161}herself for the arduous task of converting a rakish lover
by studying the controversy between Robinson Crusoe and Friday, the
great ladies with their scandal about Sir Tomkyn’s amours and Dr.
Burdock’s verses, and Mr. Burchell with his “Fudge,” have caused as much
harmless mirth as has ever been caused by matter packed into so small
a number of pages. The latter part of the tale is unworthy of the
beginning. As we approach the catastrophe, the absurdities lie thicker
and thicker; and the gleams of pleasantry become rarer and rarer.
The success which had attended Goldsmith as a novelist emboldened him to
try his fortune as a dramatist. He wrote the “Goodnatured Man,” a piece
which had a worse fate than it deserved. Garrick refused to produce it
at Drury Lane. It was acted at Covent Garden in 1768, but was coldly
received. The author, however, cleared by his benefit nights, and by the
sale of the copyright, no less than 500l., five times as much as he had
made by the “Traveller” and the “Vicar of Wakefield” together. The plot
of the “Good-natured Man” is, like almost all Goldsmith’s plots, very
ill constructed. But some passages are exquisitely ludicrous; much more
ludicrous, indeed, than suited the taste of the town at that time. A
canting, mawkish play, entitled “False Delicacy,” had just had an
immense run. Sentimentality was all the mode. During some years, more
tears were shed at comedies than at tragedies; and a pleasantry which
moved the audience to anything more than a grave smile was reprobated
as low. It is not strange, therefore, that the very best scene in the
“Goodnatured Man,” that in which Miss Richland finds her lover attended
by the bailiff and the bailiff’s follower in full court dresses, should
{162}have been mercilessly hissed, and should have been omitted after
the first night.
In 1770 appeared the “Deserted Village.” In mere diction and
versification this celebrated poem is fully equal, perhaps superior,
to the “Traveller;” and it is generally preferred to the “Traveller” by
that large class of readers who think, with Bayes in the “Rehearsal,”
that the only use of a plan is to bring in fine things. More discerning
judges, however, while they admire the beauty of the details, are
shocked by one unpardonable fault which pervades the whole. The fault we
mean is not that theory about wealth and luxury which has so often been
censured by political economists. The theory is indeed false: but the
poem, considered merely as a poem, is not necessarily the worse on
that account. The finest poem in the Latin language, indeed the finest
didactic poem in any language, was written in defence of the silliest
and meanest of all systems of natural and moral philosophy. A poet may
easily be pardoned for reasoning ill; but he cannot be pardoned for
describing ill, for observing the world in which he lives so carelessly
that his portraits bear no resemblance to the originals, for exhibiting
as copies from real life monstrous combinations of things which never
were and never could be found together. What would be thought of a
painter who should mix August and January in one landscape, who should
introduce a frozen river into a harvest scene? Would it be a sufficient
defence of such a picture to say that every part was exquisitely
coloured, that the green hedges, the apple-trees loaded with fruit, the
waggons reeling under the yellow sheaves, and the sun-burned reapers
wiping their foreheads, were very fine, and that the ice and the boys
sliding were also very {163}fine? To such a picture the “Deserted
Village” bears a great resemblance. It is made up of incongruous parts.
The village in its happy days is a true English village. The village
in its decay is an Irish village. The felicity and the misery which
Goldsmith has brought close together belong to two different countries,
and to two different stages in the progress of society. He had assuredly
never seen in his native island such a rural paradise, such a seat of
plenty, content, and tranquillity, as his “Auburn.” He had assuredly
never seen in England all the inhabitants of such a paradise turned out
of their homes in one day and forced to emigrate in a body to America.
The hamlet he had probably seen in Kent; the ejectment he had probably
seen in Minister: but, by joining the two, he has produced something
which never was and never will be seen in any part of the world.
In 1773 Goldsmith tried his chance at Covent Garden with a second play,
“She Stoops to Conquer.” The manager was not without great difficulty
induced to bring this piece out. The sentimental comedy still reigned:
and Goldsmith’s comedies were not sentimental. The “Goodnatured Man” had
been too funny to succeed; yet the mirth of the “Goodnatured? Man” was
sober when compared with the rich drollery of “She Stoops to Conquer,”
which is, in truth, an incomparable farce in five acts. On this
occasion, however, genius triumphed. Pit, boxes, and galleries, were
in a constant roar of laughter. If any bigoted admirer of Kelly and
Cumberland ventured to hiss or groan, he was speedily silenced by a
general cry of “turn him out,” or “throw him over.” Two generations have
since confirmed the verdict which was pronounced on that night.
While {164}Goldsmith was writing the “Deserted Village” and “She Stoops
to Conquer,” he was employed on works of a very different kind, works
from which he derived little reputation but much profit, he compiled
for the use of schools a “History of Rome,” by which he made 300l., a
“History of England,” by which he made 500l., a “History of Greece,”
for which he received 250l., a “Natural History,” for which the
booksellers covenanted to pay him 800 guineas. These works he produced
without any elaborate research, by merely selecting, abridging, and
translating into his own clear, pure, and flowing language what he found
in books well known to the world, but too bulky or too dry for boys
and girls. He committed some strange blunders; for he knew nothing with
accuracy. Thus in his “History of England” he tells us that Naseby is in
Yorkshire; nor did he correct this mistake when the book was reprinted.
He was very nearly hoaxed into putting into the “History of Greece” an
account of a battle between Alexander the Great and Montezuma. In his
“Animated Nature” he relates, with faith and with perfect gravity,
all the most absurd lies which he could find in books of travels about
gigantic Patagonians, monkeys that preach sermons, nightingales that
repeat long conversations. “If he can tell a horse from a cow,” said
Johnson, “that is the extent of his knowledge of zoology.” How little
Goldsmith was qualified to write about the physical sciences is
sufficiently proved by two anecdotes. He on one occasion denied that the
sun is longer in the northern than in the southern skies. It was vain to
cite the authority of Maupertuis. “Maupertuis!” he cried, “I understand
those matters better than Maupertuis.” On another occasion he, {165}in
defiance of the evidence of his own senses, maintained obstinately, and
even angrily, that he chewed his dinner by moving his upper jaw.
Yet, ignorant as Goldsmith was, few writers have done more to make the
first steps in the laborious road to knowledge easy and pleasant. His
compilations are widely distinguished from the compilations of ordinary
book-makers. He was a great, perhaps an unequalled, master of the arts
of selection and condensation. In these respects his histories of Rome
and of England, and still more his own abridgments of these histories,
well deserve to be studied. In general nothing is less attractive than
an epitome: but the epitomes of Goldsmith, even when most concise, are
always amusing; and to read them is considered by intelligent children,
not as a task, but as a pleasure.
Goldsmith might now be considered as a prosperous man. He had the means
of living in comfort, and even in what to one who had so often slept
in barns and on bulks must have been luxury. His fame was great and
was constantly rising. He lived in what was intellectually far the
best society of the kingdom, in a society in which no talent or
accomplishment was wanting, and in which the art of conversation was
cultivated with splendid success. There probably were never four talkers
more admirable in four different ways than Johnson, Burke, Beauclerk,
and Garrick; and Goldsmith was on terms of intimacy with all the four.
He aspired to share in their colloquial renown; but never was ambition
more unfortunate. It may seem strange that a man who wrote with so much
perspicuity, vivacity, and grace, should have been, whenever he took a
part in conversation, an empty, noisy, blundering rattle. But on this
point the evidence is overwhelming. {166}So extraordinary was the
contrast between Goldsmith’s published works and the silly things
which he said, that Horace Walpole described him as an inspired idiot.
“Noll,” said Garrick, “wrote like an angel, and talked like poor Pol.”
Charnier declared that it was a hard exercise of faith to believe that
so foolish a chatterer could have really written the “Traveller.” Even
Boswell could say, with contemptuous compassion, that he liked very
well to hear honest Goldsmith run on. “Yes, sir,” said Johnson; “but he
should not like to hear himself.” Minds differ as rivers differ. There
are transparent and sparkling rivers from which it is delightful to
drink as they flow; to such rivers the minds of such men as Burke and
Johnson may be compared. But there are rivers of which the water when
first drawn is turbid and noisome, but becomes pellucid as crystal, and
delicious to the taste, if it be suffered to stand till it has deposited
a sediment; and such a river is a type of the mind of Goldsmith. His
first thoughts on every subject were confused even to absurdity; but
they required only a little time to work themselves clear. When he wrote
they had that time; and therefore his readers pronounced him a man of
genius: but when he talked he talked nonsense, and made himself
the laughing-stock of his hearers. He was painfully sensible of his
inferiority in conversation; he felt every failure keenly: yet he had
not sufficient judgment and self-command to hold his tongue. His animal
spirits and vanity were always impelling him to try to do the one thing
whieh he could not do. After every attempt he felt that he had exposed
himself, and writhed with shame and vexation; yet the next moment he
began again.
His {167}associates seem to have regarded him with kindness, which,
in spite of their admiration of his writings, was not unmixed with
contempt. In truth, there was in his character much to love, but very
little to respect. His heart was soft even to weakness: he was so
generous that he quite forgot to be just; he forgave injuries so readily
that he might be said to invite them; and was so liberal to beggars
that he had nothing left for his tailor and his butcher. He was vain,
sensual, frivolous, profuse, improvident. One vice of a darker shade was
imputed to him, envy. But there is not the least reason to believe that
this bad passion, though it sometimes made him wince and utter fretful
exclamations, ever impelled him to injure by wicked arts the reputation
of any of his rivals. The truth probably is, that he was not more
envious, but merely less prudent, than his neighbours. His heart was on
his lips. All those small jealousies, which are but too common among men
of letters, but which a man of letters who is also a man of the world
does his best to conceal, Goldsmith avowed with the simplicity of a
child. When he was envious, instead of affecting indifference, instead
of damning with faint praise, instead of doing injuries slily and in the
dark, he told every body that he was envious. “Do not, pray, do not talk
of Johnson in such terms,” he said to Boswell; “you harrow up my very
soul.” George Steevens and Cumberland were men far too cunning to say
such a thing. They would have echoed the praises of the man whom they
envied, and then have sent to the newspapers anonymous libels upon him.
Both what was good and what was bad in Goldsmith’s character was to his
associates a perfect security that he would never commit such villany.
He was neither ill-natured enough, nor longheaded {168}enough, to be
guilty of any malicious act which required contrivance and disguise.
Goldsmith has sometimes been represented as a man of genius, cruelly
treated by the world, and doomed to struggle with difficulties which at
last broke his heart. But no representation can be more remote from the
truth. He did, indeed, go through much sharp misery before he had done
anything considerable in literature. But, after his name had appeared on
the title-page of the “Traveller,” he had none but himself to blame for
his distresses. His average income, during the last seven years of his
life, certainly exceeded 400l. a year; and 400l. a year ranked, among
the incomes of that day, at least as high as 800l. a year would rank at
present. A single man living in the Temple with 400l. a year might
then be called opulent. Not one in ten of the young gentlemen of good
families who were studying the law there had so much. But all the wealth
which Lord Clive had brought from Bengal, and Sir Lawrence Dundas from
Germany, joined together, would not have sufficed for Goldsmith. He
spent twice as much as he had. He wore fine clothes, gave dinners of
several courses, paid court to venal beauties. He had also, it should
be remembered, to the honour of his heart, though not of his head, a
guinea, or five, or ten, according to the state of his purse, ready
for any tale of distress, true or false. But it was not in dress or
feasting, in promiscuous amours or promiscuous charities, that his chief
expense lay. He had been from boyhood a gambler, and at once the most
sanguine and the most unskilful of gamblers. For a time he put off the
day of inevitable ruin by temporary expedients. He obtained advances
from booksellers, by promising to execute works {169}which he never
began. But at length this source of supply failed. He owed more than
2000l. and he saw no hope of extrication from his embarrassments. His
spirits and health gave way. He was attacked by a nervous fever, which
he thought himself competent to treat, It would have been happy for him
if his medical skill had been appreciated as justly by himself as by
others. Notwithstanding the degree which he pretended to have received
at Padua, he could procure no patients. “I do not practise,” he once
said; “I make it a rule to prescribe only for my friends.”
“Pray, dear Doctor,” said Beauclerk, “alter your rule; and prescribe
only for your enemies.” Goldsmith now, in spite of this excellent
advice, prescribed for himself. The remedy aggravated the malady. The
sick man was induced to call in real physicians; and they at one
time imagined that they had cured the disease. Still his weakness and
restlessness continued. He could get no sleep. He could take no food.
“You are worse,” said one of his medical attendants, “than you should be
from the degree of fever which you have. Is your mind at ease?” “No, it
is not,” were the last recorded words of Oliver Goldsmith. He died on
the third of April 1774, in his forty-sixth year. He was laid in
the churchyard of the Temple; but the spot was not marked by any
inscription, and is now forgotten. The coffin was followed by Burke and
Reynolds. Both these great men were sincere mourners. Burke, when he
heard of Goldsmith’s death, had burst into a flood of tears. Reynolds
had been so much moved by the news that he had flung aside his brush and
palette for the day.
A short time after Goldsmith’s death, a little poem appeared, {170}which
will, as long as our language lasts, associate the names of his two
illustrious friends with his own. It has already been mentioned that he
sometimes felt keenly the sarcasm which his wild blundering talk brought
upon him. He was, not long before his last illness, provoked into
retaliating. He wisely betook himself to his pen; and at that weapon he
proved himself a match for all his assailants together. Within a
small compass he drew with a singularly easy and vigorous pencil the
characters of nine or ten of his intimate associates. Though this little
work did not receive his last touches, it must always be regarded as a
masterpiece. It is impossible, however, not to wish that four or five
likenesses which have no interest for posterity were wanting to that
noble gallery, and that their places were supplied by sketches of
Johnson and Gibbon, as happy and vivid as the sketches of Burke and
Garrick.
Some of Goldsmith’s friends and admirers honoured him with a cenotaph
in Westminster Abbey. Nollekens was the sculptor; and Johnson wrote the
inscription. It is much to be lamented that Johnson did not leave to
posterity a more durable and a more valuable memorial of his friend. A
life of Goldsmith would have been an inestimable addition to the Lives
of the Poets. No man appreciated Goldsmith’s writings more justly than
Johnson: no man was better acquainted with Goldsmith’s character and
habits; and no man was more competent to delineate with truth and spirit
the peculiarities of a mind in which great powers were found in company
with great weaknesses. But the list of poets to whose works Johnson was
requested by the booksellers to furnish prefaces ended with Lyttleton,
who died in 1773. The line seems to have {171}been drawn expressly for
the purpose of excluding the person whose portrait would have most
fitly closed the series. Goldsmith, however, has been fortunate in his
biographers. Within a few years his life has been written by Mr. Prior,
by Mr. Washington Irving, and by Mr. Forster. The diligence of Mr. Prior
deserves great praise: the style of Mr. Washington Irving is always
pleasing; but the highest place must, in justice, be assigned to the
eminently interesting work of Mr. Forster.